On today's Bachelor Party, I am joined by one of my rare teammates, someone who's new to

Bachelor Nation, someone who is seeing it all with fresh eyes, giving a perspective that I'm

certainly out of touch with. And it's pretty fun. Hey, it's Van Leathen. Let's batch.

Give us a shout at crackin.com forward slash support proof, not investment advice. Crypto

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Welcome to Bachelor Party. I'm Julie Outletman. I got a special guest today. He's new to Bachelor Nation.

He calls himself a batchy. His name is Van Leathen. Hi Van Leathen. Hello. I'm excited to be here.

I'm excited to be a part of this community and I thank you guys for welcoming me.

Oh my god, we're so happy to have you. So you started watching because you co-host

higher learning on the Ringer Podcast Network with our friend Rachel Lindsay. And

it's just hilarious. Now you're like watching the Bachelor because you're supporting your co-host.

Kind of. I got to get Rachel creative for this because Rachel said, after Rachel and I got to

know each other a little bit, Rachel goes, Hey, you know what Van, you'd really love the Bachelor.

You dig it the most. And I was like, there's a Bachelor and I was like, No, it's not for me.

And then I watched it. And what a magical realm of television that it exists in. It's a magical

mystical realm. Okay, I'm glad you break that up and you call it around because I actually was

doing a call earlier with my friend Mallory Rubin, who's in the midst of doing a binge mode marbles

season, MCU. And I was saying like over the years, Bachelor has evolved into being like the MCU.

It's the bachelor cinematic universe. It's like, it's its whole world, like its own rules,

fixed number of people, like different phases. It's very similar. And what a wild ride this week.

I did my first episode of this week with Mina Kimes of ESPN. And we did a real sort of like breakdown,

a lot of football overtones as Mina works in the football space. And like, I just thought there's

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