TriColoredPastas wrote:
Can someone give me a plausible explanation as to how the idea of mac actually committing suicide by social media benefits him in any way
I'd guess the theory goes that Mac was getting close to the Retirement Figure—the total amount of money he feels he needs to stash away to care for his son for the rest of his life—anyway and he realized that Entercom might be willing to settle his paper for an amount that would get him to the Retirement Figure, but still be less than the total value of his new deal, and close enough to the amount they would spend on lawyers defending against paying out on the rest of his deal should he say something to get himself fired. For Entercom the bonus would be that they get to take Dan's contract off of their already-on-fire financial books for a percentage of the total value of the deal; For Dan the bonus would be he gets close enough to the total amount of money he came back to the business for in the first place and gets to check out early and spend the rest of his days fishing in Manitoba; And the mutual benefit is that neither party has to spend money and time litigating the issue.
As for WHY Dan might entertain such a scheme: Maybe he fell out of love with talking about sports, social issues, or sports AND social issues, maybe he fell out of love with talking for a living in general, maybe he took a look in the mirror and didn't like what he and his content had become over the last 6-12 months without sports to yak about as he let his younger, more liberal and Always Online partner steer their show to places he may not have liked (sound familiar?). It's also possible that he really, REALLY hated being like Terry sitting in his basement yelling at his ottoman to collect a paycheck, and he realized that it wasn't the talking sports that made him feel fulfilled, or even banking money to care for his son, but the process of going to the studio everyday and interacting with people in what limited ways a person in radio interacts with people; the
feeling of doing work and being useful, regardless of whether the work was dumb sports and Rolling Stones takes transmitted over the air.
Anyway, that's just the theory as I would imagine it, but I don't put much stock into it: Dan's tweet wasn't toxic and crude enough to be from someone trying to get fired, and if it was really constructed with an eye towards getting himself canned, Dan McNeil is Machiavelli reincarnate, and I don't think he's that kind of manipulator.