Can we enjoy anything anymore?

A couple of Sundays ago, I joined millions of people around the world to watch Team USA face

off against Team Canada for the gold medal in Men's Hockey.

Not gonna lie, I wanted Team Canada to win, and as you surely have heard by now, they

didn't, so rough day for me, but a great day for so many friends of mine.

One of them, my pal, Katrina texted our group Sunday night.

You should have seen me weeping tears of joy this morning.

I texted back, I wept the other kind.

But over the course of the following few days, Katrina had buyers remorse.

The joy faded and was replaced by a different feeling altogether.

On Tuesday night, she texted again.

Sean, if it makes you feel any better, basically every single last drop of joy that I received

from the men winning the gold has pretty much been eradicated.

On today's explain from Vox, can we enjoy anything anymore?

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Let's start with the hockey of it all.

Here's Sean McIndo. He's a hockey guy at The athletic.

The joke in hockey is that there is no no sports fan has hockey as their second favorite sport.

There are the die-hards, and then there are the people who don't pay any attention.

They don't care, they don't get it, and that has always been a problem for the sport.

How do we get more eyes on this product?

How do we break out of just being a product that is loved by the die-hard fans

and sort of break into the mainstream, into the pop culture world and what have you?

And that's why the Olympics is such a great opportunity because

when the Winter Olympics comes along, everybody's watching.

Every sports fan, even people who don't watch sports,

get involved in the Olympics, and hockey is one of, if not the marquee events of that.

And on top of that, you look at what's happening in the culture with the

heated rivalry, this show that comes out of nowhere about hockey, among other things.

What are you doing? You think you know?

Becomes this popular pop culture phenomenon, and so if you can get

especially Canada versus USA in a gold medal game, this classic rivalry, what a wonderful

opportunity, everything is suddenly set up perfectly for hockey to have its breakthrough moment

that it's been chasing for decades.

And as spoiler, if you haven't gotten to your pre-recorded Olympic highlights yet or whatever,

but they did it.

They did it. It was nearly perfect.

We all want to see Canada versus the USA in the gold medal game.

And not only do we get the gold medal game, but we get three skaters aside in overtime,

sudden death, sudden death over time.

And we get Jack Hughes, a former first overall pick who had been high-sticked in the face late

in the third period. He's missing team. There is blood dripping from his mouth and he scores.

This immortal goal that he immediately goes to the top of great American hockey moments,

great American sports moments. And he's smiling and he's got the flag wrapped around his

shoulders with the missing teeth in this great photo. I mean, you couldn't script it any better

to be a feel-good moment for the American sports fan.

And how quickly do things get weird? I'd say you got about five minutes.

You enjoy the whole thing. Maybe a bit more. I mean, I would say everything is great.

Right up until the point where Team USA leaves the ice.

And then like any sports team that has just won a huge game, they get into the locker room

and that's when the party starts and that's when from at least some perspectives,

everything starts to go wrong. The coaches are there and the people who work with the team

trainers of what have you. But usually that's it. Sometimes you might have family members in there,

but even that is a little bit dicey. In this case, you head the players and the officials and the

trainers and then you also had cash Patel, the FBI director. And hockey enthusiasts. And a

parent hockey enthusiast. Now, why was he there at the Olympics? I'm sure there's political

statesmanship reasons. Why maybe that made sense. Why is he at the hockey game? I guess he's a hockey

fan. Why is he in the locker room celebrating? I mean, I double checked. He was not on the team.

He did not play a single shift in that gold medal game. So why he is there. And when I say he's

there in the locker room, he's not just there to, you know, pop in and say, hey, good job boy,

shake a couple of hands and get out. He is, he is chugging beers. He is, he is wearing somebody's

gold, somebody has put their gold medal around his neck and he is wearing it.

For the very concerned media, yes, I love America and was extremely humbled when my friends,

the newly minted gold medal winners on team USA invited me into the locker room to celebrate

this historic moment with the boys, greatest country on earth and greatest sport on earth,

fist punch emoji, hockey emoji, American flag emoji. Right, it's very unusual to see the director

of the FBI celebrating a gold medal win in another country during the Olympics. And I guess also

trying to prove that he likes beer more than Brett Kavanaugh. We drank beer. I liked beer.

Still like beer. It's less unusual for the president of the United States or any country,

really, to congratulate gold winning athletes. But even the president's call to these,

to these hockey players in the locker room gets a little funky, yeah?

And that is always going to set a certain percentage of the audience on edge. What is this guy

going to say? How is this all going to be perceived? But as part of offering his congratulations

to team USA, he makes a comment about inviting them to the White House, which again is fairly

standard and then says something along the lines of, we're going to have to break the woman's

seat if you do not have to. And this has been referred to in a few places as a case of him making

a joke. It's certainly a joke shaped statement. But a lot of people, for obvious reasons,

perceive that to be a dig at the American women's team or at least at the suggestion that they

are somehow lesser than the men. It was a laugh heard around the world. Social media ignited

women expressing why they felt a sting and the team's decision to chuckle rather than push back.

For the record, the US Women's Olympic teams have brought home three gold medals since the

sport was introduced to 1998. The men, on the other hand, just won their first gold in 46 years,

46 years. Okay, so just to speed us along, what happens next is that the men from team USA go and

visit the White House a couple of days later, which is not super weird, then they attend the state

of the Union, which is a little more weird, but then something very weird and very of this

particularly cursed moment happens. What happens is they take a clip of a player named Brady

Couture, who is a player on team USA. He's a good player, one of one of their better ones. When

Brady Couture is not playing for two in USA, his day job is he is the captain in the NHL of the

Ottawa Senators. And if you check your maps, Ottawa is not in the United States, Ottawa is in Canada.

And that introduces this whole other element where up here in Canada, I will put it mildly to say

Donald Trump is an extraordinarily unpopular figure. Just to give you a sense of how this plays up

here, what they had put out there was this video in which they had taken footage of Brady Couture

in the aftermath with his gold medal and looking happy and excited and had digitally altered it

to make it appear that he was saying a very insulting things about Canada. Canada, we own you,

Lilbro. We don't want Canada as our 51st state until they learn how to play hockey.

This is something that the White House has done repeatedly to people who have been arrested

by various federal law enforcement, civilians, but here they are doing it to a team USA

gold medal athlete. Now, he seemed annoyed that the video had been put out. He didn't, you know,

completely disown it or attack it. He sort of tried to thread that needle in that hockey player way

of wanting this issue to go away. It's crazy when things got social media how fast they go and

just of course I would never say anything like that. But again, there were a lot of folks who would

say, okay, Brady, you didn't say any of that. You didn't deserve to have the White House do that

to you. But this is the risk that you run when you allow yourself to become part of this political

story when you allow yourself to become, you know, as some people would describe it, a political

prop. Do you think some of the goodwill that hockey had gained at the Olympics was squandered

by all of this political stuff that happened in the days after? Absolutely.

I mean, this is hockey's breakthrough moment as far as pop culture in the United States. And yet

it just kind of all had this shadow over it. Now, players who typically don't get asked about

politics have to be asked questions. And you had Jack Hughes, again, this is the guy with the

missing to you to score the winning goal. And instead of being asked, you know, how did it feel

in that great moment of your life? He's being asked that. And also, they got busy schedules too.

I mean, we, I know we're getting like, everyone's given us backlash for all the social media stuff.

Questions like that, a lot of hockey players aren't comfortable with. And whatever answer you give

is going to look bad to somebody. And so it just kind of becomes this mess. And again, it's that

feeling of in today's political climate, certainly, we just can't have nice things.

Maybe not, Sean. But maybe check out the PWHL if you're looking for a nice hockey thing.

When we're back on today, explained, is everything politics now?

Hey, everybody. A stephernton here. I wanted to let you know that Vox Media is returning

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Join us for March 13th through March 15th for live tapings of Pivot, Taffy Talks,

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on your South by Southwest innovation badge. That's voxmedia.com slash South by Southwest. Hope to see you there.

This week on version history, our chat show about the most interesting and important products

in the history of technology. We're talking about the hottest toy from 1998. That's right, of course,

I mean the Furby. The little thing that sat on your desk and didn't have an off button

and didn't speak English and annoyed everyone you knew, but you loved it to pieces anyway.

It turns out there is a fascinating technology and even AI story behind what happened with Furby

and why it took off. That's the story this week on version history wherever you get podcasts.

Our Democrats, their own biggest problem. You know, a party becomes defined by who their central

figure, who their quarterback, becomes Democrats haven't really anointed a effective quarterback

since Barack Obama pretty much. In this week, the Atlantic staff writer Mark Levyvich

joins me to discuss the state of the Democratic Party and which race is to keep an eye out for

this midterm election. The episode is out now. Search and follow, stay tuned with pre wherever you

get your podcasts. Today's plane is back. I am Sean Ramasfer and is it just me or is everything

politics now? Here's a list off the top of my head. People were looking at who Olympic athletes

followed on Instagram to figure out if they voted for Kamala or for Trump. Bad Bunny tried to

unify not just the country, not just the continent, but the hemisphere with this halftime show.

But of course, there need to be another one for, I don't know, people who still like Kid Rock.

The Kennedy Center, a place for liberals and conservatives and young and old to celebrate

the arts to see movies to watch operas, is supposedly going to shut down for two years for what?

For politics. And we're going to make it unbelievable far better than it ever was.

Actors at the Berlin Film Festival who want to talk about their movies were instead

constantly being asked about politics. And so as artists, I'm always interested in doing things

that are apolitical. Well, I don't think I am in the position to really talk about the political

situation in the US. Beyonce posts a photo on Instagram with the Puerto Rican flag. And people

get mad because she hasn't spoken up about politics, about Palestine. The drummer for my favorite

new band Geese wins a Brit Award last weekend and makes no such mistake. Instead, he gives a very

brief acceptance speech where it seems like he checks off the boxes. Free Palestine, fuck eyes,

RIP Manning, let's go Geese. Thank you.

Megan Garber, you write about the intersection of culture and politics for the Atlantic.

Does everything feel political to you too? It does. It really does. And just listening to that list,

I found myself getting stressed out. I felt my heartbeat raising. It really does. I, you know,

I don't think this is new. Politics and culture have always been intertwined with each other,

have always been kind of muddled and tangled, you know, in ways that kind of belive the

it politics here or culture there, kind of framing that we usually have. But I think things have

become so much more extreme in recent years. And it is hard to think of anything really in pop

culture that doesn't somehow also become political in the end. And is it fair to just blame Donald

Trump because he seems to just want to be everywhere and have a take on everything and call out

everyone? I think to some extent, yes. And I think definitely with hockey gate, if we can call it

that, that was definitely, I think, caused by Trump himself in the sense of he is someone who

does not recognize the traditional division between culture and politics. You're going to win

bigger than ever and to prove that point. To prove that point here with us tonight is a group

of winners who just made the entire nation proud. And he's someone who has a very specific idea

of what it means to be presidential, which is very different from what previous presidents

often had. And I think also, yes, he likes to be the center of attention and likes to start a

scandal even in situations where one probably did not need to be started. So it is it is Trump,

but it is more than Trump. I think also a lot of the trends that we're seeing right now have to do

with basic changes and huge changes in technology. Oh, we can blame Donald Trump and technology.

Tell me more. You know, when you were listing all of these cultural and political events,

I was thinking of Marshall McCluen, the Canadian scholar. Do you know him? Have you, you know,

I grew up in Canada. So they like, they beat Marshall into our heads at a young age.

Love it. Love it. That is a great education. Yeah. So Marshall McCluen, the scholar who is, I think,

most famous for the aphorism, the medium is the message. The telephone as a service is a huge

environment. And that is the medium and the environment affects everybody. What you say on the telephone

affects very few, which basically means that, you know, the technologies we use to communicate,

the mediums we use to communicate like TV and newspapers and magazines and radio and the like,

they're much more than technologies alone. They're much more than machines. They're much more

than things we use. They are also things that shape the way we see the world, that shape our

information implicitly. What you print is nothing compared to the effect of the printed word.

However much we talk about technology as things that serve us and tools we use when it comes to

the communications technologies. They're on some level using us too and, you know, just informing

the way that we see the world and thereby shaping the world as they go along. Okay, so the medium

has changed dramatically in the past few decades. Marshall McCluen didn't get to see how much it would

change with the advent of the internet. But how is that shaped the message? Yes. So McCluen was

writing in the 1960s. So his reference points were television especially, but then also newspapers,

magazines, radio, that kind of thing. I think why he is so relevant right now is that so many of

his insights apply to the internet. One of the effects of TV is to shorten the amount of time

that people can pay attention to anything. There's a new kind of humor that exists in America

called the one liner. We used to have jokes, stories, but no more, only one liner is now.

You know, I think of something like social media, for example, and the medium there is a flow

of information. One kind of news feed that puts everything together. That is how most consumers get

their news on social media, just that one kind of flow made of infinite scroll and

information that could be personal and about the news of the day and about, you know, your puppy

that you just got and, you know, so many different things combining into one feed and that is the

medium. But the message is everything is one, right? Like the divisions that used to exist on,

say, newspapers on TV, you know, where you had kind of news versus opinion as very separate ideas

and you had arts over here and sports over there and international news over there and everything

kind of in its place. We no longer have those divisions. We no longer have those categories

on social media on the internet in general. They really do converge and collapse into each other.

And I think that does explain a lot about why culture and politics are themselves collapsing

and blending together because that is that is the medium kind of having its way with us.

But as I think you said, culture has always been political. I remember in the

Nazis, people were mad at Britney Spears for supporting George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

Honestly, I think we should just trust our president and never decision that he makes and we

should just support that. What feels like it's changed since then? Is it just that instead of

saying, I don't like Britney Spears anymore, I'm going to change the station when she comes

on the radio, you can just go to her Instagram and call her out to the barrister maybe in front

of all of her legions of fans? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And one thing about social media

is it turns people into content consumers but also content producers. And so, you know, there's

this sort of obligation or implied obligation at least not everyone has to do it, but this obligation

to share your opinion and to have a take and to always be sort of adding your own content to

things and having your own opinion about things. And that I think is one of the core features of

social media that sort of interplay between we are like passive consumers of events, of scandals,

culture, of politics, whatever it might be. But we are also active creators of that in some ways

and at least creators of responses to what's happening. So, there's always this back and forth

between taking it in and putting something out there for other people to consume.

You know, just to bring this back to where we started on the Saturday, Megan, with my friend

Katrina trying to feel proud to be an American, trying to embrace team USA and feel great

about their gold and then immediately having that feeling corrupted by politics.

Are we going to get back to a place where we can just share in those big cultural moments and feel

unadulterated joy? Oh, I hope so. I want to say yes. I mean, I don't see us going back to the

situation that was. I don't see us going back to a place where, you know, culture and politics

were relatively distinct propositions. But, but, but I also don't think we have to just

give into the trends that exist, right? And, you know, assume that the way things are right now

are the way things are going to be. To go back to the technology of it all,

historically, when big new mediums have been introduced, people have had to kind of navigate

their way through them and around them and sort of to figure out new boundaries and expectations

when it comes to how those mediums will live in the culture and in their lives. And I think

that fact alone is very positive. And it's an opportunity for us to do that navigation. And I

think, especially with social media, we, you know, we are producers as well as consumers. So,

we do have a lot of say in, you know, what those standards will be and how we can find joy

together. That was Megan Garber. She's got a book called Screen People, how we entertained

ourselves into a state of emergency. Check it out if you've been feeling like you're in a state

of emergency lately. Miles Bryan made the show. I'm going to al-Sadi edited Andrea Lopez-Crusado

fact check David Tattashoor and Patrick Boyd mixed. I'm Sean Ramos for him. Everyone else is

Danielle Hewitt, Hadi Mahwagdi, Kelly Wessinger, Peter Balanon Rosen, Ariana Aspuro, Dustin

DeSoto, Jolly Myers, Abishai Artsy, Estad Herndon, our executive producer Miranda Kennedy and our

King Noel. We use music by break master cylinder. Today explained it's distributed by WNYC,

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