Bela Bajaria is out at Netflix.
The news comes only 24 hours after the streamer underwent a massive cull, laying off around 1,000 employees.
Bajaria joined the company, initially running its unscripted TV slate, in 2016 and was named Chief Content Officer in January 2023.
There have been rumors about her being axed by the company for the last couple of weeks, all denied by Netflix. Former Disney exec Peter Rice has replaced her.
It comes amid slowing growth for the streamer. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said recently at the Bloomberg Screentime event, “At the time we said that, I think we were pretty unsophisticated about how we talked about engagement. Meaning, in that world, all the revenue is equal, a profit is equal, all engagement is equal, and all engagement is not equal. We are growing engagement, on 200 billion hours of watching, we grew 2% in our last announcement.”
Netflix has been struggling with ratings for second seasons for many of its shows including Beef and The Four Seasons. On its last earnings video, Sarandos claimed that it has actually improved this problem this year and said it was “very common” in the industry. Such issues, however, can’t have helped Bajaria’s cause.
“I want to thank Bela for a decade of dedication, innovation, creativity and leadership,” said Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix. “She led enormous changes at Netflix. She helped broaden our content offering to include the large-scale expansion of unscripted programming and the launches of live events and sports, in addition to crafting and running a world class, global slate of films and series. I’m incredibly grateful for everything she’s done to help Netflix entertain the world.”
Internal Email from Ted Sarandos
Hi everyone,
I have an important update to share about our Content leadership.
After a phenomenal decade at Netflix, Bela is leaving the company. It’s hard to overstate the impact Bela has had during her time here. From expanding our content offering to include the large-scale expansion of unscripted programming and the launches of live events and sports to helping shape the broadening of our content offering around the world. So much of what you see on Netflix today can be traced back to a Bela initiative: Insatiable, Queer Eye, Lupin, You, The Diplomat, WWE, YuYu Hakusho, The Night Agent, Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar, Squid Game, Tyson vs Paul, Cien años de soledad, the NFL. She also helped reshape our strategy to focus on fewer, bigger, better movies, championing films like KPop Demon Hunters, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, and Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, as well as bringing award winning films like La Bola Negra and Possible Love to Netflix.
A tremendous and diverse range of content (and that’s just a snapshot), bringing joy to our members across so many genres.
Bela has built and shaped a truly global Content organization, hiring brilliant people and empowering them to make good decisions. I am incredibly grateful to her for everything she’s done.
I know this is a big change in a year that has already had its share. But I also see an opportunity to take our slate to the next level, especially in UCAN where we have an outsize impact in creating big, buzzy hits that our members love and drive conversation around the world.
To help us seize on this moment, I’m excited to share that we’ve hired a new leader. Peter Rice is joining Netflix as our new Chief Content Officer beginning next week. Peter is one of the most effective at-scale operators in the entertainment industry. His business acumen is sharp, his talent relationships are exceptionally strong, and his experience across both TV and film is deep and broad. On the film side, running Fox Searchlight, he helped bring beloved fan favorite films like Slumdog Millionaire, Little Miss Sunshine, Sideways and Juno to screens. And more recently, as Chairman of Walt Disney Television, he led one of the most successful television divisions in the world, where he was responsible for a massive breadth and scale of shows ranging from The Simpsons, American Idol ,and Modern Family, to The Bear, and Abbott Elementary, along with ABC News programming and major sporting events such as the Super Bowl, NBA Finals and FIFA World Cup Finals. He’s one of the few people in our industry who has ever operated at the quality and scale that we do at Netflix every day. In the last few years, he has turned his attention to creating and has produced films with Alex Garland, Danny Boyle, Chris Rock, Jason Reitman and Aaron Sorkin at Sony and A24.
I’ve gotten to know Peter personally over the years, and I’ve always been impressed by his straightforward approach, the depth of his relationships and his exceptional creative and business instincts. Talent should have the best experiences of their life here, and Peter and I both believe that Netflix can and should be the home of the best storytellers in the world.
It’s been an eventful series of days here, and I realize we’ve asked you to absorb a lot of news and a lot of information. But we all know change is what we do at Netflix. Greg and I will host a companywide town hall on Wednesday, October 21. I want everyone to hear how we’re thinking about the strategy and our execution amid this week’s changes, and to have a chance to ask questions. It will be informal and mostly Q&A, so please bring your questions about this week’s changes and anything else on your mind.
Please join me in thanking Bela, and welcoming Peter to the team.
Ted

Longtime Monday Night Football announcer Troy Aikman said he is looking for his “next landing spot” with ⁠his ESPN contract set to expire after February’s Super Bowl.
“I’ll broadcast through this season, and I’ll be ⁠a free agent ⁠at ​the end of the year and kind of see what happens,” Aikman said in a radio interview ⁠with KTCK of Dallas on Thursday morning.
Aikman, a Hall of Fame quarterback who won three Super Bowls with ⁠the Dallas Cowboys, is in the final year of a five-year deal ​with ESPN that pays him $18m ‌annually.
Joe Buck, Aikman’s ‌broadcast partner for the past 25 years, recently finalized a six-year extension ‌with ESPN that is worth more than $100m, according to the Athletic. Buck’s deal runs through the network’s next Super Bowl broadcast in 2031.
In Thursday’s radio interview, Aikman appeared to confirm earlier reports from Front Office Sports that there was tension between ‌him and Buck over their contract situations. The pair reportedly had an argument before Monday’s game between the ​Buffalo Bills and Los Angeles Rams.
“There’s probably a time and a place for all that to be discussed,” Aikman said. “I don’t know if now ⁠is the time. I don’t know that it’s hard ​to figure out kind ​of what’s happened.“
If Aikman does leave ESPN, he could explore his options ​at other ‌networks or streaming services ​or perhaps ​pursue a front-office role with an NFL team.
“I’m looking forward to whatever the rest of this season does hold, with the Super Bowl and all that, and where my next landing spot might be,” Aikman said.

MLB’s reigning back-to-back champs are on the ropes. The Dodgers are down 3-0 against the Brewers in the 2026 NLCS, staring at a potential sweep and their first playoff series loss since the 2023 NLDS. The Brewers, meanwhile, are one win away from just their second-ever appearance in the World Series — and their first National League pennant. Milwaukee won the American League pennant in 1982 before losing in the Fall Classic.
The Brewers’ 3-0 NLCS lead is no fluke. Milwaukee, baseball’s best team in the regular season, has been better than L.A. in every area of this series. So can the Brewers close it out on Thursday night in Game 4 at Dodger Stadium? Or can the Dodgers rally and live to fight another day — and to get the ball back to Tarik Skubal in Game 5?
Here’s what our CBS Sports experts expect on Thursday.
Dodgers vs. Brewers: Game 4 predictions
Axisa: Dodgers 4, Brewers 3. Maybe this is a hope more than a prediction. As a baseball fan, I want the Dodgers to extend the series just so there’s more baseball. The Dodgers so look old and broken, but that’s really nothing new. They looked like this after getting beat down in Game 5 of the World Series last year, to fall behind in the series 3-2. I think the Dodgers will find a way to win Game 4 and extend the series, though it won’t be a convincing win. They’ll fight like crazy to scratch across just a few runs, then Edwin Díaz will leave the bases loaded in the ninth inning. Something like that.
Feldman: Brewers 3, Dodgers 1. I’m a firm believer in the mental aspect of the sport, maybe even too much so, but the Dodgers just look broken. This is not an offense on the verge of a breakout. Dave Roberts is managing like he’s in a movie rather than trying to reach the World Series. And the Brewers are doing everything right. The NLCS ends Thursday.
Perry: Brewers 4, Dodgers 3. While the Brewers’ pitching plan for Game 4 is a bit uncertain and bullpen-heavy and the Dodgers have the ace-ish Tyler Glasnow going, I think Milwaukee will close it out. The Dodgers’ power has just been thoroughly lacking, and I’m not sure that changes. I’m not a big believer in momentum in a sport like baseball, but his situation — a 3-0 lead in a best-of-seven — is perhaps an exception. Teams up 3-0 historically in MLB are 32-10 in Game 4, so I’ll say the Brewers continue that trend.

Apple announced the fourth-generation Apple TV 4K earlier this week, introducing the A19 chip, built-in microphones for hands-free Siri, four-speaker HomePod surround sound, and an updated ‌Siri‌ Remote. It replaces the third-generation model introduced in 2022, bringing a number of internal changes while retaining the same basic design and most of the same entertainment features.
The new model costs $299 and comes with 128GB of storage. ‌Siri‌ AI is also coming to the third-generation model, and the new remote can be purchased separately for existing devices. Apple says the assistant will be available in beta with tvOS 27.2 on second-generation and later ‌Apple TV‌ 4K models, including conversational entertainment searches, follow-up questions, and personal context through a compatible paired device.
The new model’s distinctive hardware benefit is direct voice input through the box’s microphones; access to the voice assistant itself is shared. Whether you should upgrade therefore comes down to which hardware changes you will actually use.
Configurations, Connectivity, and Price
The differences in configurations, connectivity, and pricing between the third- and fourth-generation ‌Apple TV‌ 4K are as follows:
‌Apple TV‌ 4K (3rd Generation) ‌Apple TV‌ 4K (4th Generation) 64GB model: Wi-Fi only
128GB model: Wi-Fi and Ethernet Single 128GB configuration with Wi-Fi and Ethernet Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) Bluetooth 5.0 Bluetooth 6 Gigabit Ethernet on the 128GB model only Gigabit Ethernet as standard Thread networking on the 128GB model only Thread networking as standard Original U.S. launch prices: $129 for 64GB; $149 for 128GB U.S. launch price: $299 for 128GB Final prices before replacement: $199 for 64GB; $249 for 128GB $299 for 128GB Now discontinued Available to pre-order Released November 4, 2022 Available November 13, 2026
Apple raised the older model’s prices in June 2026, so comparing the new model exclusively with its predecessor’s original launch pricing misses an intervening increase. Against the final price of the equivalent 128GB model, the new ‌Apple TV‌ costs $50 more. Against the previous entry-level configuration, it costs $100 more and includes twice the storage, Ethernet, and Thread connectivity.
A15 Bionic vs. A19
The A19 chip brings a substantially newer chip architecture to the ‌Apple TV‌. Apple says the fourth-generation ‌Apple TV‌ 4K delivers the following improvements over the third-generation model:
Up to 50% faster CPU performance.
Up to twice the GPU performance.
The table below lists capabilities of two chip architectures.
A15 Bionic Chip A19 Chip Made with TSMC’s 5nm (N5P) process Made with TSMC’s third-generation 3nm (N3P) process Dynamic Caching Software-based ray tracing Hardware-accelerated ray tracing Mesh shading without the newer dedicated hardware acceleration Hardware-accelerated mesh shading Dedicated Neural Accelerators in each GPU core 16-core Neural Engine Updated 16-core Neural Engine architecture Display engine and image signal processor Updated display engine and image signal processor Dedicated AV1 hardware decoder Up to 4x multisample anti-aliasing Up to 8x multisample anti-aliasing Maximum 1D, 2D, and cube-map texture dimensions of 16,384 pixels Maximum 1D, 2D, and cube-map texture dimensions of 32,768 pixels Universal texture compression MetalFX denoised upscaling capability Depth bounds testing
The A19 chip has a substantially better GPU than the A15 Bionic. Dynamic Caching manages fast on-chip GPU memory according to the workload. Hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading provide more advanced graphics-processing capabilities, while GPU Neural Accelerators supply dedicated hardware for machine learning calculations.
While GPU improvements will be particularly useful for gaming, it is unclear just how much the full breadth of the chip architecture improvements will make a meaningful difference to the ‌Apple TV‌.
Hands-Free Siri and HomePod Audio
The new microphones and expanded ‌HomePod‌ support provide some of the clearest functional differences between the two devices:
‌Apple TV‌ 4K (3rd Generation) ‌Apple TV‌ 4K (4th Generation) No built-in microphone array in the box; microphone only in the ‌Siri‌ Remote Three built-in far-field microphones with voice isolation, alongside the microphone in the ‌Siri‌ Remote ‌Siri‌ voice input through the remote or another compatible device Direct hands-free activation using “‌Siri‌” or “Hey ‌Siri‌,” with echo cancellation while audio is playing ‌HomePod‌ TV audio through a single speaker or stereo pair Four-speaker ‌HomePod‌ surround sound using matching front and rear pairs Automatic positioning, timing, and level calibration for the four-speaker setup Whole Room Audio mode distributes sound across four ‌HomePod‌ speakers
The four-speaker configuration requires HomePod mini 2 or second-generation full-sized ‌HomePod‌ speakers. You can use four matching speakers or combine two matching front speakers with a different matching rear pair. For example, two full-sized HomePods can serve as the front speakers and two ‌HomePod mini 2‌ units as the rear speakers.
First-generation full-sized HomePods and original ‌HomePod‌ mini speakers are excluded from this new four-speaker configuration. Existing owners should account for any speaker replacements or additions when considering the cost of upgrading.
Whole Room Audio serves a different purpose from directional home theater sound, distributing audio more evenly around the room for music, sports, and more.
Hands-free ‌Siri‌ support also has its own language requirements. Apple lists Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, and Swedish, subject to regional availability.
Siri Remote Differences
The fourth-generation ‌Siri‌ Remote retains the familiar design and controls while making a misplaced remote easier to find:
‌Siri‌ Remote (3rd Generation) ‌Siri‌ Remote (4th Generation) Bluetooth 5.0 Bluetooth 6 Nearby finding through iPhone, with proximity guidance Find My with Precision Finding on a compatible iPhone Bluetooth Channel Sounding for precise location tracking Built-in speaker for playing a sound to locate the remote 66 grams 69.6 grams
The older remote already supported nearby finding with an iPhone. The new remote’s additional benefits are precise location guidance and an audible alert. Precision Finding uses Bluetooth Channel Sounding, providing precise tracking without requiring a UWB chip.
Precision Finding requires an iPhone 17 or later, excluding the iPhone 17e, or an iPhone Air or iPhone Duo running the latest software. You can also ask ‌Siri‌ to find the remote through the ‌Apple TV‌’s built-in microphones and have the remote play a sound.
The new ‌Siri‌ Remote is available separately for $59 and works with the third-generation ‌Apple TV‌ 4K, every earlier ‌Apple TV‌ 4K, and even the ‌Apple TV‌ HD.
Design, Dimensions, and Weight
Both generations retain the compact black enclosure and Apple logo. The principal visible changes are the microphone hardware and the repositioned front light.
‌Apple TV‌ 4K (3rd Generation) ‌Apple TV‌ 4K (4th Generation) Width 93 mm 93.24 mm Depth 93 mm 93.24 mm Weight Wi-Fi: 208g
Wi-Fi + Ethernet: 214g 217g Status light Positioned toward the right Positioned in the center Packaging At least 90% fiber-based packaging 100% fiber-based packaging
The new box weighs three grams more than the previous Ethernet model and nine grams more than the Wi-Fi-only model. The centered front light also indicates when the built-in microphones are listening for commands.
Should You Upgrade From the Third-Generation Apple TV 4K?
Most third-generation ‌Apple TV‌ 4K owners should keep their existing device. For ordinary streaming through television speakers, a soundbar, or an AV receiver, the new model does not add new capabilities. The maximum viewing resolution and HDR support remains the same. ‌Siri‌ AI’s availability on the older hardware further reduces the need to replace a working device.
The strongest reason to upgrade is a planned four-speaker ‌HomePod‌ system. If you already own two second-generation full-sized HomePods and want dedicated rear speakers, the new ‌Apple TV‌ enables a specific setup your existing model cannot provide. Include the cost of additional or replacement speakers when judging the upgrade.
Hands-free control is another practical reason if you regularly use ‌Siri‌ and want to speak directly to the device. It is likely to be more useful when the ‌Apple TV‌ is directly in the viewing room than when it is installed in a separate equipment cupboard or rack.
AV1 hardware decoding may justify the upgrade for a particular media library or playback workflow. Gaming enthusiasts may also value the newer GPU architecture, but the benefit depends on the games available for tvOS and how developers use the hardware.
If locating the remote is a source of frustration, buying the $59 ‌Siri‌ Remote separately costs $240 less than replacing the entire ‌Apple TV‌. That purchase supplies the new remote features while retaining your existing device.
Should You Buy the Third- or Fourth-Generation Model?
For a new purchase, the fourth-generation ‌Apple TV‌ 4K is the stronger choice when the price difference is modest or you intend to use its exclusive features. Compared with the older 128GB model’s final $249 Apple price, the $50 premium is easier to justify than the much larger difference suggested by comparing original launch prices.
That being said, a discounted third-generation model remains a sensible purchase. The older model is particularly appealing when the saving is substantial and you are not interested in a four-speaker ‌HomePod‌ sound system.
If you need Ethernet or want the ‌Apple TV‌ itself to provide Thread networking, choose the third-generation 128GB model or the fourth-generation model. A sufficiently large saving on the older 128GB configuration can outweigh improvements with the latest model that you would rarely use.
Related Roundup: Apple TV

Who would have thought a battle between a pop star/talk show host and a Brooklyn magic shop would dominate the cultural conversation online?
Indeed, Kelly Clarkson and her Very Online beef with Art of Play over a $15,000 (or is that $15,000,000?) bird automaton has been the story that everyone was talking about this week. But it was Pablo Torre, the host of Pablo Torre Finds Out, who actually advanced it by obtaining the security camera footage of Clarkson’s visit to the store, letting viewers see the interaction in question for themselves.
Torre, of course, is the journalist who broke the Los Angeles Clippers-Kawhi Leonard salary cap scandal, an investigation that resulted in the team and owner Steve Ballmer facing steep penalties and a possible criminal investigation. He was also on The Hollywood Reporter’s New York power list earlier this year thanks to his work breaking that story. Oh year, he won a Pulitzer for it too.
THR caught up with Torre to find out why, exactly, he wanted to look into the Clarkson spat, what goes into producing his show, and sitting at the intersection of the worlds of journalism and the creator economy. (The interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
First of all, why did you even decide to look into this?
On my show, we do have a tendency to take stupid things seriously, and also sometimes serious things stupidly. But this is a story that I became obsessed with because I live here in New York City. I had been to that shop before. I am actually a big on-the-record Kelly Clarkson fan, and this had the making of a modern morality play, in which everyone was trying to figure out what’s true. My show does, I would say, investigations into culture in every investigation that we do into sports, and this felt like something that I think we could contribute to.
I was gonna say one of the things that I love about the show is that you will take months on a really serious deep-dive investigation, but if something’s happening in pop culture, you are not afraid to dive in and explore that. How do you balance those? I have to assume you have a lot of investigations happening at any given time, but sometimes stuff happens. What does it take to reach the level where you feel like, okay, I think we can contribute something to this?
Torre: We are learning that in real time. This is all feeling to me as we make the show, like an experiment, and the returns on our many month investigations, our deepest dives, have yielded a level of result that is beyond our imagination.
But the thing we’re also doing as people who exist on the internet and in the real world is always trying to figure out: Is this thing that’s breaking right now something that we can we can illuminate? And in that way, I don’t think there is anything resembling a rule or a standard for when we blow up a given week that we had planned very carefully for months because a fucking bird automaton became the center of a national controversy.
That is a sentence that, if you were to tell that to me a week ago, I would have felt like I was on acid. But maybe there’s a breaking news story that makes you feel like you’re on drugs, and the only way to sober up is journalism. I’m sort of workshopping this with you now on the phone. Maybe that’s the standard for us, but I don’t know. And that’s kind of the joy is that the unpredictability of what our show ends up being is a mystery box sometimes even to ourselves.
It’s interesting because, when you have a real investigation that I’m sure you work on for a long time, it can lead the news cycle. But you’re right; sometimes following something that’s happening, following the news cycle, if you have a way to contribute, is a way to break through in a way that stands out. We certainly see that. We are just as guilty as everyone else of following the Kelly Clarkson magic shop story.
Well, it’s interesting because something I’ve discovered about my show is that we will do the very deep dives that take sometimes a year, and once they get published and they make an impact on the news cycle, we have seen that the news cycle itself become the best method of our distribution.
We are truly organically benefiting from the fact that we have made news, and I mean that in the sense of the conversation and the coverage, which is organic and not something we can ever control, but then I also mean it in terms of the fact that things happen in real time in response to the story, and also in the unfolding series of events that we’re covering. So it becomes a series, and we never know how many parts.
Obviously, with the Clippers story, we’re at part 16. In this case, I have no idea if we’re ever going to do a sequel on Kelly Clarkson bird stories, but I’m open to it if it’s the right approach. But it has all felt like we’re stumbling into a pseudo-psychedelic true crime series that we’re reporting in real time.
I mean, to be honest, I feel like this is one of those stories that a month from now, 99.9 percent of people will have forgotten about, but in the moment, everyone’s obsessed with it, and that’s fine. That’s part of culture.
So to me, the thing that I grapple with to your very fair point is how do you make disposable things last? And for us, we’re always prioritizing stories with durability that have depth and substance. I should point out that the real tipping point for why we wanted to cover this story, in terms of how we did it in our full episode, was we did recognize that there was a depth of conversation around the power of celebrity and how that power can perhaps be abused when it comes to the audience, and that conversation is not just about Kelly Clarkson. That’s about Taylor Swift and Beyoncé and Donald Trump and BTS and any super famous person who exists in public for whom their fandom is their business, and what happens when they direct it without explicitly saying the thing, but implicitly it seems like there’s a call to action.
At any given moment, how many stories would you say you’re in the process of kind of reporting out?
Torre: Oh gosh, our docket is comical. I mean, we have currently right now — I’m looking at our Google Calendar — we have a dozen things in various stages of production. It’s hard for me to say because the way that our show works is we are always on some sort of a runway, and we’re always unfortunately notifying the people who’ve been passed with, “Hey, can you focus on this story?” “Can you fit inside of this plane?” “We’re gonna get ready for you guys to take off on Tuesday.” Sometimes you end up waiting on the tarmac, and so there are some planes — and I’m not kidding — there are two planes right now that I think are A-plus stories that just have zero news peg, and so we’ve been having these poor people wait on the tarmac for a year, and I so look forward to getting to tell people those stories.
But stuff like this keeps on happening, whether it’s the bird automaton or the next huge Ballmer lawsuit or the next sports gambling development in the Eastern District of New York, it’s all quite a lot.
To what extent would you say your investigations play out in public versus working behind the scenes? With the Clippers investigation, as you said, it’s kind of ongoing. There’s installments that have come up after those first couple episodes, but then you talked earlier this week about Fanatics and LeBron James and that relationship.
That’s a public conversation that maybe turns into something down the line. Is there a benefit to speaking about this stuff publicly? or is it easier to operate privately and then show it when you think it’s ready?
It’s a great question, and we talk about this specific question a lot. In general, I would say that we are always doing more than we can share in public, and that’s the nature of research. That’s the nature of — we’re going to make so many calls and follow so many trails into so many weird rabbit holes — and some of those are dead ends.
But sometimes those end up being the signposts that we follow to the actual truth, and so there is a great inefficiency here, just in terms of man, we are that duck that is paddling furiously under the surface. Even as you can see us flapping our wings wildly, you know we’re still doing a lot more than I think people can ever see. And I don’t mean that to dramatize ourselves. I don’t mean that to say that’s how neurotic we tend to be, but there are also points in any given story when it’s time to show your work, and what we show is what we have deemed to be publishable, what’s deemed fair for publication, and once that’s out there, yeah, we we pride ourselves on telling you this is why we’re doing this. This is how we arrived at this. These are the questions that we still have.
And when we pose a question, sometimes we have a sense of what the answer might be, but sometimes we just don’t know, and so it brings me into, for instance — I’ll just refer to the Clippers thing because it’s the most common frame of reference — It’ll lead me into debate with Mark Cuban, in which I think I knew more than Mark at the various points that we were debating. There were things that I had not published that I did have a pretty strong sense of, that informed my confidence and my convictions, but I wasn’t ready to report that, and I wasn’t ready to say that, and so I didn’t say it. And when I was ready to report, that’s when the public got it.
One of the things that I appreciate is that you sit at this intersection of journalism and the creator economy, and as someone who is a journalist but follows the creator world pretty closely, it’s fascinating to me because there are a lot of journalists at traditional news outlets that have the luxury of spending a lot of time to develop an investigation and publish or release the segment when it’s ready.
But if you’re a creator, you do have to have a regular cadence of stuff. How did you figure out how to do that? I know you have the partnership with The Athletic, which is obviously very helpful, but how do you make sure that you can feed the beast? Whether it’s pure journalism or something like when you had [art critic] Jerry Saltz review sports trophies, how do you make sure you feed that while also doing the journalism that I think you’ve built a reputation for?
So it’s a reverse engineering problem, and so very specifically as a person who has looked into the eyes and I’ve gotten to meet — I guess they’re my fellow creators? Although I don’t think I’m necessarily quite doing what they do. But I, like you, I’m fascinated by them because I didn’t grow up that way, and I also now have a job that requires three episodes a week.
And so, in that reverse engineering of okay, you have three episodes a week, but your goals are different. Your goals are journalistic, they are along the lines of both following your curiosity and making impact. So within that framework, what do you do? I remember meeting MrBeast recently. He was on Morning Joe, and I was co-hosting the show that day. He’s prolific, but also so tired.
Yeah.
Like, they’re all burnt out. I think some of them are superhuman, but a lot of them are just tired. And so, really, the reverse engineering problem is: I have myself, and I think I’ve been privileged to prioritize what I find energizing. At the same time, when I start to create a docket, what I reverse engineer is “Okay, what is the most important stuff that we want to do? What is the shorthand here? What is the Aspiration-level investigation?” Because we’re going to work around that, and so once we sort of place that along our calendar, then we start to backfill, and we’re like, okay, so that’s going to take the most time, the most resources. What’s going to take the second most?
There’s a version of our show where we come out six times a year, and we just do like the deepest dives … But then there’s stuff happening every week, and then you look at the news cycle, and then you figure out, okay, wait a minute, Jerry Saltz. We’re fans of him. We love that guy. We’re trying to always figure out ways to do sport differently. What if we have him review statues? What if we have a butter sculpture of myself made? Did that feel like a parody of my ego, or also a way to make fun of it? So I think it’s sort of how do we plot in things that are different in concept but aren’t as heavy a lift? And once you’re along that path, which is like a different genre of show, you have a lot of fun. And that’s how we have this whole cast of characters who get pulled in to do weird shit. And it’s a bit of a palate cleanser for me, and probably I hope for the audience.
To bring it back to Kelly Clarkson: You did end up buying an automaton for a good cause. It’s a silly story, but you were able to squeeze in something that I think would actually bring some good to the world. Can you explain why you decided to do that when you when you chose to cover the story?
So, among the levels of why that story passed the bar for us, I should point out, is the fact that as soon as I saw that there was this other preferred automaton that Kelly Clarkson had no interest in, and she had so little interest in it, as evidenced by the tape we obtained of the security cameras, that she didn’t even stick around to hear how much it costs, which was $2,000, which is a lot of money.
That occurred to me … Is that too much money for us? Like, if we were to go and buy that other bird, what would we do with it? In that we are I thinking in the spirit of a show like John Oliver’s, frankly, where there’s a third act, and we’ve done our own iterations of that.
In the Aspiration Part One episode, we had a guy dressed as Iron Man plant a tree, a sad little apple tree, a sapling, in front of the Intuit Dome. That was our climactic sort of reveal at the very end of that one. This was another little version of that that we’ve been inspired to do because, in this case, we actually got to bring attention to a real life tragedy. David Samson, who is on these Aspiration episodes with us, who’s a friend of the show and is frequently contributing to the show, his daughter Kyra died over the summer, and I had gotten to know her, I’ve gotten to know David’s family, David’s now one of my closest friends, and his response to that was the most superhuman thing I’ve experienced. Which is that he decided to create the Kyra Fund, fighting glioblastoma, searching for a cure, and he proceeded to go back to work. And so, in honor of that, in honor of having a charity and a cause close to home, I thought, what better way to harness the attention to something that feels profoundly stupid, like a truly petty grievance that had saturated all of our brains. How could we turn all of that attention to something positive?
And so we put it up for auction. And my hope is that some incredibly fiscally irresponsible person can realize that they can own a piece of pop culture history and find a cure for one of the worst forms of brain cancer that exists. So, yeah, I hope people take that part seriously as well.