The Press Box - 25 for 25: The Future of Physical Media With Sean Fennessey

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Hello, media consumers! Bryan is joined by Sean Fennessey to discuss the future of owning physical media! (3:30) Magazines(17:55) Blu-Rays and DVDs(25:32) Books(34:47) Newspapers(50:11) CDs and vinyl Host: Bryan CurtisGuest: Sean FennesseyProducer: Kyle Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're a fan of the inner workings of Hollywood, then check out my podcast, The Town, on the Ringer Podcast Network. My name's Matt Bellany. I'm founding partner at Puck and the writer of the What I'm Hearing newsletter. And with my show, The Town, I bring you the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week, we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood insiders to tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show was canceled overnight. Which streamer is on the brink of collapse?

And which executive is on the hot seat? Disney, Netflix, who's up, down, and who will never eat lunch in this town again? Follow the town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox and welcome to the latest installment in our 25 for 25 series. You got Brian Curtis here. You got producer Kyle Kreidon and you got the man to my right. He is one of my favorite people.

And for our purposes here today, he is one of my favorite pack rats. Sean Fennacy, welcome back to the press box. Thanks for having me. Not a pack rat, just a rat. I don't pack these things away. I just keep them in open view. We'll talk about all them. So in our 25 or 25 series,

we've been looking at the future of various corners of the media world. And today we have a subject very near and dear to your heart. The future of physical media. Let's talk about it. You're into physical media, aren't you, Sean?

I love it. It is a very precious thing to me. I thought we'd start with a blanket apology here. This is usually when people talk about stolen land, but I would like to apologize to your wife. I mean, to my wife, Christine, to all of our kids and loved ones. Yes.

Because we've collected too much. We have stolen land from our spouses. Yeah. We've stolen real estate that belongs to them and placed plastic and books on top of it. Just to find things to talk about today, I cannot tell you what my office looks like because it was just all kind of hidden away. Describe the room. What is it? Is it bookshelves?

Is there a desk in the room? Are things stacked on top of each other? What does it look like? Yeah. So it's long, long bookshelves that contain everything from books, first and foremost, but also newspapers, magazines, every just kind of junk you could think of and stuff that I just cannot bear to throw away. Do you keep like knickknacks? Will you keep an action figure sent to you? Will you hang on to a bobblehead? Is that the sort of, or is it strictly just, you know, the informational media that matters to you? This is not a setup, but I did dig through some old Star Wars figures still in their original.

cards to find something to bring to you through. Very happy to see them. Just like to say that. All right. So we're going to talk about four categories today of physical media. We are going to talk about magazines, talk about Blu-Rays and DVDs. We're going to talk about books. And we are finally going to talk about newspapers. We're going to talk a little bit about whether there is a case going forward for these to exist, what they might look like in the next five to ten years. And then, apologies to Pablo Torre. I'm going to unbox a few things to show you. Pablo did not invent unboxing. He didn't.

All my beautiful toy buyers in like 1999 who were showing us photos of things, you know, baseball card packaging, you know, he has only modernized it for storytelling purposes. This is the real unboxing with shit inside to take out. I just don't want to mess up the detente here. I got you. There's been a carefully negotiated truce. I disagree. Let's keep fighting. All right, magazines.

What was the allure of magazines for young Sean? Definitely. There was a physical aspect to it. it for sure, the idea of holding something in your hand that felt very designed and constructed. But part of the construction to me was about the taste that was being communicated in the magazine. And so that is something that particularly with these objects, I have not missed having them in my life. I have not missed holding a magazine. And I think part of it is because I know I can never get back to the feeling because of where my life has taken me professionally

of what it was like to hold spin in 1997. When I was holding spin in 1997, I felt like there was a world of discovery ahead of me. Part of it was stuff I'd never heard of, and part of it was context for stuff I liked, but didn't know how to talk about. Now, weather-beaten old bastard that I am, when I look at a magazine,

all I can see is the decisions that are being made. I can see why the front of book works the way that it works, why the photographers who were chosen exist, why that writer got assigned to a story, why the back page looks like the back page, what the thickness is based on the number of ads that were sold. Like having worked in magazines, it's just like whenever you hear a beat writer talk about

how they can't really root for a team anymore. I just learned a little bit too much about how magazines are made. So holding them and looking at them now, there's no wonder left. It doesn't mean I can't have that experience of wonder reading a story. I still really like to read a really good story. But the actual physical experience of a magazine has been rendering,

moot. And so maybe it's appropriate that at this stage in history, like, they are moot. We don't really need them. I don't know if you disagree with that. This x-ray vision you're talking about, this is for magazines of your, this is for a magazine that you would read today that just came out. Like a magazine that came out today, I would be able to understand in a way that I couldn't when I was 15. And so because of that, it doesn't feel as valuable to me. Now, I wonder if I went back and looked at those spins, many of which I still own, would I still have that same sense of wonder. You know, when I worked at Vibe Magazine in the 2000s and I had the same relationship to Vibe. And I would spend time when I was working at Vibe just in the archives room

looking back at old magazines and looking at the decisions that were made and things that I didn't clock when I didn't have any professional context and was still kind of moved by it. But that also was like coming up on 20 years ago now. So I think I'm just a little bit more, maybe not cynical, but just I know a little bit too much about how it works. I think there's an argument that a magazine is in a way a young person's medium. I mean, if you just think about all the big ones for us,

you mentioned, Spend, Sports Illustrated, right? I'm going to teach you how to be a sports fan and a thinker about sports. EW., which is so big in the 90s. I'm going to teach you how to be a pop culture junkie.

The men's magazines. I'm going to teach you the most screwed up possible way to be a man by the way we write about the starlets in this magazine. I worked at one, yeah.

I did a year at Stuff magazine. I was like a GQ and SQU at SQU at. I mean, I worked at GQ at. as well. We're going to the Ladd Mag. Yeah, I went to, I worked at a lad mag for one year. It was a fascinating experience. It didn't really work on too much of the laddish side of things, but yeah, everything you're saying is true. Yeah. And for me, it's not the X-ray vision so much. It's just when you look at it, like front matter in almost every physical magazine ever made,

it was fine. You know, there was some of it that was really good, but I'll look back and be like, was it really, you know, November 2002 when you needed to tell us how to mix the perfect mojito or scramble eggs for the person you wake up in bed next to the next morning. I mean, it just felt so interchangeable. Like the people who were reciting and writing it really didn't even have their hearts into it. Yeah, I mean,

what you're describing is lifestyle content, and that's just been completely replaced by Instagram Reels. You know what I mean? There's something that exists now that communicates all the things that are on those pages. And those pages existed in the first place because they were single page stories that could be, that could have ads opposite them. So in a magazine, when you open it up, you'll find that before you get to the quote unquote feature well,

the middle of the book, there were all of these one-pagers. And sometimes in a men's magazine, it was a picture of a beautiful girl in the bikini. Sometimes it was a picture of a mojito. Sometimes it was a picture of the leather bag you need to own or the way to tie your tie in 2025. But we don't need that level of handholding in our culture

because we have all these new individuated ways to get it. So that stuff has just been obviated in a way. The spin magazine thing or EW or even Sports Illustrated to me is oddly a little bit. more justifiable, even though those magazines are almost completely gone because there's still portals of discovery and taste. They're still like, here's a band

you have to care about. We still need that and where we get it still sort of resembles what the magazines are. You know, there are still like tent pole media companies that tell you, here's a good band. You know, pitchfork media still exists. It just changed the way that it delivered the information.

Yeah, I agree with that. And now that's what's going to ask you about too, because if we're talking about the sensibility of a magazine, it's sold separate from its actual pages. We both participated in various experiments where you take the soul out of the physical magazine and put it into a website. How easy or hard was that to do? Well, you had to unlearn, I think, a lot of what you were doing. I mean, my career specifically as an editor falls right in the middle ground of this transition happening. And the first 10 years I spent as an editor were on physical magazines and then ever since has been strictly digital. And I also got to work as like a

bridge person at GQ running their website right at the time when Condé Nast started having a lot of anxiety about not having good websites. And part of the reason why I mean, not well, obviously. I mean, I think that they've like made some improvements over time, but it's taken a really long time considering how they commanded media culture. I think that we just did a lot of stuff in magazines that people didn't actually want. And we did it for financial purposes was my understanding. I was never at a super senior level at any, you know, Titanic magazine.

seen before. But, you know, those like perfect mojito pages that you're describing, those were done for largely advertiser purposes. I think you could shape the philosophy of the book around some of that stuff, but that isn't actually what people want. And the minute we started getting chartbeat and could see specifically what people wanted, I think it was pretty easy to become super cynical about what you made every day because it was like, yeah, people do want the girl in the bikini. They don't necessarily want the perfect recipe for how a man drinks, you know, Gramarnier in 2025. And that's, I think that's actually okay.

It's okay to understand the human impulse in that way. I did like the idea of the ivory tower once a month comes out and you're like, and we're like, this is what it is to be alive today. But you never got any feedback. Maybe you got a letter to the editor. And they were so terrible in magazines. No. And they all felt fake.

They all felt like written by the editor-in-chief or something where they're like, what a wonderful piece. Your profile of Hugh Jackman really spoke to me as a person living in Australia. I used to have a rule about that. Like the better, the sort of nastier magazine's letters to the editor were, or at least the ones I printed, the better the magazine was. Yes. Yes. I agree with that. I agree with that.

I just, I have said I felt like the first 15 or 20 years of my career just felt like I was working into a very public anonymity. Like I was not really getting any feedback on anything I was doing ever. And then was on one podcast one time. And the guy had like 14 emails that were like, you're fucking. idiot or thank you so much for saying everything that you said, it changed my life. And I don't know how that gap just closed so quickly. And magazines couldn't really provide that. They couldn't provide that level of personal connection. They could provide a kind of advisory connection. They could tell you what was going to matter, but what was coming to you didn't feel like it was coming from a person,

felt like it was coming from an institution. And that's obviously been broken down pretty significantly. Right. That's a lot of big things. So let's talk about collecting. Are magazines collectible? I have collected them, but I don't think that they're terribly collectible. They're quite bulky. They degrade very quickly over time. I don't like the idea of individually sealing and protecting them the way one might a comic book.

And it's impossible to tell someone why a magazine mattered. Like I'm trying to imagine a world where I tell my daughter 15 years from now why the January 1998 spin magazine year end issue changed my life. She's going to be like, dad, fucking buzz off. Like, you're such a loser. But when that issue came out, I was blown away by the scope of taste

that it communicated about music. And I could just be like, Biggie's on the cover. Biggie had died eight months prior. There's a piece by Charles Aaron about Biggie's life and his impact and his album, Life After Death, and why it was the most important album of the year. year. But then the other album of the year that was being recognized was

Corner Shops Born for the Seventh Time, which was an example of like something that music media could do, which is they could just like pluck a semi-obscure band from London and tell you this matters just as much as Biggie and as Aerosmith. And we don't have that as much anymore. And so like that issue is very, I will never give it up. Like it matters to me personally. But I don't think it has the same kind of value and return to ability that a book or a Blu-ray or something like that does where it's like it is an object that doesn't need to be consumed over and over again the way a movie might or a book might. Totally agree. Two other problems. They're impossible to display in your house. Books are great vanity things to put in

your living room. Look how smart I am. Magazines. I remember I had Amanda Dobbins and Zach Barrono for brunch several months ago. And I laid out some old vanity fairs on the coffee table. Like, well, if they think this is really cool.

It was like the only time that ever works. Yeah, you need to befriend more magazine historians in order for that to have that parlor trick to work on anybody.

Yes. Other thing about magazines, they're heavy. They make your shelves sag. Yes. It is really, really hard to have any amount of them without just like destroying

whatever you've erected to hold them. All the magazines I've saved from my entire life are in storage. None of them are in my home, which should tell you everything you need to know about how I actually feel about them. I'm going to start unboxing here, but let's talk about, are magazine going to be a thing in five to ten years or what kinds of things do you think will be in printed matter that people will actually want to read? Well, I still think that there is like a kind of boutique marketplace for the smaller magazine, that kind of

individuated experience of, I know you wanted to ask about the Metrograph magazine. Yeah, I have it right here, actually. Which is a really like a beautiful thing that they release. Issue number one. This is a theater in Lori's side of New York. Yep. They came out with a magazine. It has a full interview with Clint Eastwood in it.

Not an aggregated interview with Clint Eastwood as we heard the news the other day. Yep. And then they did this awesome thing where they like got famous directors to write about Quentin Terrantor, excuse me, to write about Eastwood's movies. Quentin Tarantino on a fistful of dollars, John Safty on play Misty for me. Yeah. Like this feels like a cool thing to have and put on that coffee table. Yes.

but that is incredibly boutique, hard to pull off, and needs to be funded basically by willing billionaires who like vanity projects. You know, it's just not a money-making business. So they're less common. I mean, that's a nice collectible item that you can put on your shelf, but does the physical version of Time magazine

makes sense in 2025? I don't really think so. I don't think so. That has chugged along quite well with people answering phone calls to do cover story interviews for time. I'll show you a few things I found here. By the way, the Curtis archives are deaccessioning,

so I'm hoping you just take all these away. Here we go. National Lampoon, 1980, December 1980. This contains the original John Hughes story that became National Lampoon's Christmas vacation. This is in nice shape. That was in eBay.

I was going to say, how did you acquire this? Someone was really taking good care of this at home. Some other signs of my absolute sickness. I acquired two magazines with Jack Nicholson on the cover accidentally. I didn't want them. I'm not just walking the bookstores. December 8th, 1975 issue of people.

Okay. Which is when one flew over the coupons. That's his cover story there. Okay. And I don't have the peg for you here, but Vanity Fair, 1992, Jack's baby love with Jack Nicholson

photographed by any Leibovitz with three infants. Um, what, uh, hmm. I'm trying to figure out what. The movie guy is Flummox.

What's the angle here? Uh, Jack likes kids. Okay. Well, Jack, you're dad you'll have to open it up to find out jack has a son named ray nicholson who's an actor who's a pretty good actor actually and uh i don't think any of these people are ray nicholson so who are these kids this one's uh even more boring to look at uh on the cover here's an issue of life magazine as a kid you've just been like i'm running in the other direction as abraham lincoln

on the cover from 1991 this was horrible right well i ordered this recently sean on ebay because has a piece about mill gibson playing hamlet oh yeah i'm actually going to give this to you because it's actually a fantastic piece of this. Please take this away. Thank you very much. My wife thanks you. Can I just read the cover lines from this Vanity Fair issue for you? I would love it. This is what it was like working in magazines.

So you've got this good... This is the magic of podcasting, by the way. We're reading cover lines from an ancient issue of Vanity Fair. Please continue. Well, so it's got this goofy cover of Jack Nicholson. You're walking past the newsstand in April of 1992 and thinking of yourself, God, I love Jack Nicholson. In 1992, you know, he's

coming off of... This must be in the run-up to a few good men. Sounds about right. Maybe right in the aftermath of a few good men. And the cover lines attendant to it, aside from Nancy Collins

talks to Cool Daddy Nicholson, are breaking the bank, Marie Brenner, on the unraveling of BCCI. What's BCCI? I'm going to look that up while you can do you do. I don't know what that is. Next one,

Women Who Shock by Annie Leavitts. Okay. And then the top story is Hitler's doomed angel by Ron Rosenbaum. Sounds awesome. Now, if that isn't magazines in the 1990s, I don't know what is. I'm getting the Board of Control for Cricket in India, which I think is probably not what Marie Brenner was writing about.

That would be quite a way for Tina Brown to have assigned Marie Brenner. This was the mix in the old days of the magazine. That was the mix. Okay, thank you for these. Category number two, Blu-rays and DVDs. Sure, now we're talking. Here we go. What is the case for buying a disc, Sean, when I can stream the movie and probably harvest most of the features from YouTube?

Well, one, can you stream the movie? Is the movie that we're talking about actually available? And if it is available, is it available on a service that you subscribe to? That's the first question you have to ask yourself. You have to look up, what's a movie you love? Just the other day, I was watching Preetzzi's Honor. I'd never seen Preetzs-Sah. I think I did the Google.

How do you watch Preetzies Honor? So this is a great example. Two things about Pritzis' Honor. One, we just talked about After Hours on the Rwatchables this week. Prince Zonner was nominated for Best Picture the year that After Hours was released, 1985. It is, I believe, John Houston's second to last movie, stars Jack Nicholson, and is extremely hard to stream. Now, I don't know if it has been made available somewhere recently. Historically, not easy to find.

Secondarily, this is a movie that is actually quite hard to find on physical media. It's a kind of movie that if you walked into a blockbuster in 1989, it would be incredibly easy to find it on the shelves. Everybody who would have a copy of that. But that's not exactly how things work now, and we don't have that kind of selectability when we go shopping for new things to watch. So Princey's Honor is a movie I don't own,

in part because it's very hard to find. The Blu-ray is fairly rare and would be quite expensive on eBay. And the picture version that you're likely getting on a streaming service is terribly compressed, grainy, probably converted from a shitty VHS of some kind, not the pristine 35 millimeter print version that you would like to see from some sort of restoration. That's a movie that's probably overdue for a 4K restoration, but in most cases, a movie like that that is more or less lost to time

is always going to look like shit on streaming. And so if you want it to look good, if you're able to find it, finding the best possible physical media release is the best way to do so. 10 or 15 years ago, this you would hear this rationale from people like me about why this matters and it was defensible but not entirely true we're in an era now where a lot of movies are being upgraded to 4K and 4K there is no denying looks way better much more clear the colors are deeper and sharper the artist's vision for the movie just looks closer to what they aspire to now sometimes you have some directors who mess with their original image. You know, James Cameron's been criticized for using AI to upgrade the images in some of his

movies and they look a little bit odd. But for the most part, when you have a good studio that has a good restoration team that is committed to making these movies look good, they look even better maybe than when you saw it on a big screen depending on the print that you were able to see it. So that's a very obvious case. If you have something that you love and you want to see the best possible version of it, and this extends to watching movies that you watch in your dorm room, the big, to watching The Godfather to watching a movie to watching sinners, which comes out on Blu-ray in a week.

You know what I mean? Like it speaks to kind of like every era of movie history and increasingly every great movie is getting upgraded to this format. So to me that's the biggest reason for it. And then accessibility I think really matters because over time it's we're learning that like the lie of the everything store is, is it's never going to happen. Like there's not there's no reason for Paramount to put every single film that they've ever released onto their streaming service actually like taking things off and creating this sense of desire is like all part of their business. So it doesn't behoove them to do the Disney model. Disney's the only studio that says here's everything we ever did. And that's one of the reasons why they're one of the best streaming services if you care about movie history. But it's also one of the reasons why they don't see their streaming service as a true profit center. Whereas all these other companies are like, we got to make money. I can't give you Chinatown. 12 months a year every year. I got to take it off, put it back on, license it to Netflix,

license it to Amazon. I got to make as much money from this IP that I have. So owning a movie, you can forget about all that. You don't have to worry about where it is, when it's available, when it's not. You have it forever. How many DVDs and BlueRace do you own? I think it's probably north of 5,000 at this point. 5,000? Yeah. Oh, wow. That's a lot more than even I thought you owned. Yeah. It's getting bad. Are they displayable? I remember your old living room had DVDs where books usually go in someone's house. Yeah, so it's gotten way worse

since you've been to that house. We're in a double-stack phase. So I had shelving units built in my garage to store and display every spine. Is it a climate-controlled garage? It is. Okay. Just want to make sure.

And you got to keep them cool and no exposure to the sun, right? And now we're double-stacking on those shelves because we've run out of room. And so now I'm like, do I need to move to a new house just for the Blu-Race? Which is a sick thing that has happened. My wife's been very understanding.

I've been able to make it part of my public-facing persona. So I guess that's good. Yeah, it's a problem. When I see those Instagram posts, I think a lot of people look at those and go, Sean's a huge movie, Beau, he's a film fan. I see those as a cry for help. Yeah. I really do.

You're not wrong. I have one small unboxing here. I wouldn't even do DVDs because you have the great. collection of all time. But I don't know if you remember early 90s, you could go to McDonald's and buy what was described to McDonald's as a large sandwich.

Okay. And if you did this, you had your choice of movies for $5.99. Wow. I don't remember this. And the movies were the land before time.

I do remember this. An American tale, Fival Goes West. Yes. Back to the future and Field of Dreams. And Sean, two of those were pretty obvious cross-offs

for Brian at that stage. Okay. I'm not just talking about, you know. Five-o goes west. is a quality film. But I believe I have found in that office the VHS of Field of Dreams that I bought at McDonald's in the early night.

Where's the sleeve? I left it home. Jesus Christ, this is dangerous. Even leave this out like this. You've got to protect this thing. Is this place climate control? Is it going to be okay? Do you have a VHS player at home?

I don't. So I don't know what to do. I have all these VHS that I had as a kid and they have a lot of sentimental value to me like a toy. Pink Panther movies and all this stuff. I don't know what to do with these. I owned dozens and dozens of VHSs and I replaced them over time with DVDs and then ultimately Bluaries. But like our friend Chase Serrano has a vintage VHS collection that he often prominently displays.

And this, these are kind of back in vogue. And the sort of like the muddiness, the grainyness of the VHS. Yeah. The ugliness, honestly, of the conversion onto VHS is something that people enjoy. They especially like it, I think, for like shitty slasher movies and stuff like that. It kind of takes them back to a youth. I would never watch Field of Dreams on VHS now. I've seen Field of Dreams in 4K recently,

and it's such a beautiful movie. It is. But that's kind of cool that McDonald's was supporting video. Yeah, and they were right there on the counter. The commercials watchable on YouTube, usually where you'd see the hot apple pies. Yeah, that's not, you don't want to store the VHS right next to the hot apple pie. That's not really, we're kind of going against that in terms of keeping the room cool, but nevertheless.

All right. Category number three is books. if you and I were having this conversation 20 years ago would we have thought that books physical books would be as vibrant a category as they are today? No, I would not. Not even close. And I have some theories.

I feel like you know maybe more about this world than I do, but I suspect a lot of it comes down to just the pure financials of the relative cheapness to contract and produce a book and that compared to all other kinds of physical media, which requires significantly more? Is that, I mean, is that really that they can hold on to the model of like one hit sustains 50 misses? I think so because you walk into an indie bookstore and you look at the front tables and it kind of in a weird way reminds me of Hollywood 30 or 40 years ago. Yeah. We were like, somebody had an idea. This idea seems not commercial at all. And it's a book.

They were allowed to spend two years and maybe it was a really, really modest advance but they were able to spend two years and make this into a book. And you look at it and you're like, why in this world that we live in that goes by metrics are they not just trying to recreate books that are already successful?

And I'm so glad, let me quickly add before you talk about. I'm just so glad they're not. But it's weird. And it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful, strange little corner of our physical media world. A good friend of mine, Jason Green, who was a music critic and published a memoir some years ago, just published his first novel. It's called Unworld. It's an amazing book about loss and AI and the kind of, a lot of themes that I really caught into in movies and the idea of sort of like, can technology replace human feeling in some ways?

and he just poured his heart and soul into this book and then just put it out and you just have to hope and I do hope people will read it but you just have to hope people will read this book which feels like a huge ask in 2025 for a lot of people and yet I do walk into a Barnes & Oval

or I walk into a Romans in Pasadena and I'm like someone's buying these books like this store is not open for no reason so something is it's still working in some way yeah I think it's hard to get it out there And of course there's like book talk and all these little digital ways to get it out there. Do a leapas podcast. There you go.

If you can get there, the Reese Witherspoon Book Club, that's the place to be. Kyah Gerber, I've been told, a daughter of Cindy Crawford is a book influencer. Okay. Yeah. She should have her on this pod. Get Alan Siegel to. Give her a ring. But there's this idea.

Yeah. It's just a very, very happy world. Do you find yourself reading a physical book differently than you read a book on your phone or on a Kindle? I don't read on a phone or a Kindle. I don't read on a phone or a Kindle ever. I read physical books, but usually almost always for work at this point, unless it's a friend's book. And I find those books very easy to read. I just write a book about Martin Scorsese last week to prepare for that after hours podcast.

And I kind of like flew through it in a day. But I'd read that book before. Most of the time when it's a new book, it's an audio book for me. And that's a relatively new conversion. It's only happened in the last maybe three or four years. But I can treat it the way that I treat a podcast, which is like, I've, I've I got 48 minutes in the car. I'm driving to a movie screening.

I'm going to knock out three chapters of this Allman biography. Optimize your time. That is how I see it. Yeah. But I have a young child and I have a dead brain because I spend all my time prepping for podcasts. So I just don't have the same relationship to book reading that I once did. It'll come back. I hope so.

My kids are a little older than yours. And so like what happens is eventually you're like, oh, it's nighttime. I've done my work. And I'm not completely exhausted. Yes. I have like three neurons left. And here we go. I'm going to open the book and read it.

It's going to be fun. The timing is so fresh on this because we had had a pretty sustained stretch of like our child sleeps till goes to bed at 7.30 and sleeps till 7 a.m. And I was like, wow, we've, we have unlocked the final stage of life. Like, we did it. And then just this morning, 445 wide awake. And the rest of my week is now ruined because of that. So I will not be opening a book tonight under any circumstance.

That will not be. I'm not going to read a difficult novel tonight. No, I won't be. I would say of all the physical media books are by far my favorite possessions and the ones that mean the most to me. Would you say you're addicted? Yes.

To buying them? Yes. I've gotten better in recent years because it's just too many. Because your version of the Blu-ray stack on Instagram was always used bookstores. You have a used bookstore kink. Yeah.

A kink is a good word for it. But I bet I could look at all the books in my else and with probably 10 exceptions tell you where they came. Interesting. And these are from my entire life. I could tell you where I bought it. I could tell you what I did. There's a few probably a Libre's things that I were that I would mix up the services or

whatever. But I can look at it, but I know where that was. I know where I got that. I know where I read that. What percentage of those books get read? So I would say, that's a good question. Half? I was going to say 50%.

Maybe less. I had this great thing when I was a lot. kid. So you and I are both public school boys. Yeah. There was a snooty private school in Fort Worth, Texas. I had one too. And the snooty private school had a yearly sale where the snooty parents would bring in all the old stuff in order to fundraise for the school. Wow. And my mom would go to the sale alone and books were five cents, 10 cents, maybe 25 cents for a really nice one. She would come home and she would give me, on average, 125 new books.

Always over 100. I would count these. You just located the origins of your pathology. That's incredible. Yes. So to me, the right number of books was always too many books. Okay. And then I read.

And of course, some of those would be like, Mom, you got me like triples of this Encyclopedia Brown volume. Thanks a lot. I loved Encyclopedia Brown. I'm really on the right podcast right now. I feel very safe with you.

I'm glad. Our kinks are the same, Sean. There's no kink shaming on this podcast. But I just like, to me, that's being surrounded by them. Yeah. Even if you don't read them all. And I also have books to me have a kind of mysticism. And I don't feel mystical about many things this world.

But I feel that oftentimes I will buy a book. I'll put it on my shelf. I will mostly forget about it. And then the world will align. And I'll be like, yes, now is the time that I want to read this thing that I bought, not knowing that this would be the time. But what you just located is how I feel about movies. Not just because of what I do now with the big picture or whatever,

but because I like the comfort of feeling like if something calls to me that the movie will be at my fingertips if I need it. And like invariably, I do need it. They do come up, you know? Like I bang the drums slowly on Blu-ray a couple of months ago. And I really, really wanted to own it. and I didn't know why. And then now I'm doing a podcast about the,

that's going to talk about the filmmaker, John D. Hancock, who had a relatively, like, unknown career. And I'm so glad I spent $39.99 on that exorbitant edition of bang the drum slowly. So, you know, I totally relate to what you're saying. One unboxing here. Yeah. I'm going to take you back to the winter Christmas, actually, of 2008.

Okay. I and a bunch of editors had just helped found the Daily Beast, which I've been online for about a little over two months. You know that founding a website is just one of the hardest things you could ever possibly do in this business. It sucks so much. Usually when we talk about drill and say, well, it's not a coal mine. It's kind of like a coal mine. The beginning of a website sucks.

No question. It was really hard. Daily business must have been hard too. That was a big site. It was a big site. And for whatever reason, I had the thing where I had to wake up every morning at three or four o'clock in the morning to supervise a thing. And I had to do that seven days a week for a couple of months. Yeah.

So Christmas 2008, I'm, dude, I am just done. I am completely done. And two magical things happen. One is that Tina Brown, who was the editor, gave me a Christmas bonus, which is never before or after happened in my entire journalistic career. Okay. Hint, hint, hint. And number two. All right, Clark Griswold.

I thought we'd get some business transaction here on the press box. I'll call Daniel Eck. Number two, she gave me a first edition of Evil and Law's scoop. Wow. The Daily Beast comes from Scoop. This is the fictional newspaper in it. I'll just have you open the front leaf there. Okay.

And you can see that she signed it to Brian, the original Beastie Boy. If I had to pick one book as I was fleeing my house to save, that would probably be it. Let's not forget the thanks for all your talent and dedication, which is a critical part of the inscription. Yeah. This is wonderful. Are you implying that I need to buy you a first edition of the film that represents or a book that represents your soul? ringer and sign it to me. Maybe someday.

Maybe I can get Johnny Knoxville to come through for it. All right. Last category here. Newspapers. Yeah. Do you still subscribe to a physical newspaper? I do not. First time in my life, probably three years ago,

I no longer received even the Sunday edition of the New York Times to my home. And was that an information thing? Everything I need is digital? Was that just a parent time thing? Like, these are going to stack up and I'm not going to read these. Probably a bit of column A and column B. I just didn't find myself even needing. to open it. I'm usually looking at the times right when I wake up, and that's even before I would be

able to have a cup of coffee and go grab the paper and start reading it. And I also don't read it the same way that I used to. I used to have a kind of your classical liberal New Yorker kind of reading cover to cover. And I just don't have the time nor the inclination for that. I think I'm also pretty burnt on the news and have been burnt on the news for a while. And so it's easier for me to pick and choose. I don't have the same desire to pour over op-eds like I once did. And so, like, there are certain sections that are still meaningful to me. The culture pages of the New York Times are always going to be interesting and relevant to me, but I didn't feel like I needed it in the same way. And so I kind of just cycled out. And I, you know, I know you're an LA Times subscriber

and I've never been a physical subscriber to the LA Times. I just never started. So I've always had a digital relationship to that newspaper. And to me, it's just on weekends now for the LA Times. Really? New York Times seven days a week, but the LA Times just on weekends. Well, you know, in the physical edition of the New York Times every day is expensive. $480 a year. That's a lot of money. Yeah. I mean, that's.

And that's like the starter rate, you know, when then you forget what you're paying and, you know, you look at the bill and somebody's like, hey, can we call them and get a better deal in this? I mean, how much of the newspaper are you getting through on a daily basis? It's a great question. It varies wildly from day to day, depending on how much I have to do. There's been a lot of news lately. And I'll tell you what the one thing I like about physical newspapers. The best thing about the media today is that it panders to you. How do you mean?

It knows what you want to read and it gives it to you. Right. You know, I'm going through social media or going through Facebook and it's like, oh, look, here's a little nugget about old Star Wars. I'm like, how did you know that this is exactly what I wanted? Is that the best thing or the worst thing? So it's the best thing because it's crack and it tastes like candy, but it's also the worst thing. because I feel like at some point you sort of give up

being a well-rounded person or just letting things come into your life that you wouldn't normally find. So here I get this, New York Times, literally on the front lawn, rescuing it from the sprinkler all the time,

on a daily basis. And immediately, this thing is incapable of pandering to me. It just can't because it doesn't know what I want to read. Can we explore this line of thought a little bit more deeply? because I have felt what you're describing very deeply

because of my movie obsession and kind of like plunging myself deeper into it because of the power of the tools, the algorithm that you're describing, I can spend all day only consuming the things that are served to me that it knows I like. And then that will ultimately make me a less, quote,

well-rounded person. At the risk of getting into true human psychology, is that a bad thing? Now, obviously it puts distance between people because then you don't have shared interests, but is that ultimately not good to not know about what? What's something you read in the newspaper today

that you didn't otherwise know about that you feel is valuable? I mean, pretty much every international article that's not about Iran, Israel, Russia, or Ukraine, let's say. Okay, so what's cooking in Paris right now? Yeah, like, right. What's going on? Tell me.

That sounds like a great podcast. That kind of stuff. There's stuff in the arts because I don't follow it as closely as you do. So it's just a lot of stuff I don't know. There's a lot of for me like, oh, this movie came out today. Yeah. That's helpful.

But it's a great question because, look, in our jobs, we're not going to be punished that much for it, honestly. Right? It's good to be a well-rounded human. It's good to be a well-rounded human to host a movie podcast. For me, it's good to be a well-rounded human to host a movie podcast. But we really need to know a lot about what we do. Yes. We need to know an intense amount of-

We talk about it for hours a week in public. We will be rewarded for that. In a way we will not be rewarded for having a classical, you know, round the globe kind of briefing everything. But I just feel as a human, I don't want to give that up yet. I'm not ready to give that up. Yeah. And I don't.

That isn't what I envision. Again, you and I grew up reading newspapers and magazines that were for general readers in a lot of cases. So partly it's a vestige of childhood, but I don't want to give that up. Yeah. I think about this even in the context of raising a child and thinking about, is it better to be that? There was like an old canard in the 2000s about journalists. Was it better to be a specialist or a generalist?

Was it better to be somebody who could write about anything or is it better to be the best person on one thing? I think that that debate has still not been settled, but I think about that even as a young person in the world, is it better to be deeply obsessed with your primary passion? Or is it better to experience a lot of different things? Is it better to let a young kid reject something that you think that they could like over time

or to just let them walk away from it right away? The same is true for your grown-up, media diet. Like, you may not want to read about a crisis in Luxembourg, but maybe it would be beneficial to better understanding another aspect of your life. It's just hard to know when to make that decision for when is the right time to say, I am going to turn myself over to the 6,000-word essay in The New Yorker about a vague idea that is explored in depth as it relates to a nonfiction book that was just released. I used to love those pieces, the sort of like the opening gambit in the book review section of the New Yorker that often would lead to, you know, an exegesis on

the history of the baguette. But I don't read- Adam Doptic wrote that one. I mean, and he is the master of that form. But I don't read those pieces anymore. I don't, maybe it's because I'm older. Maybe it's because I have more on my plate than I used to. Maybe it's because I'm looking at more, you know, Instagram, TikTok, bullshit. Like, it's possible. But that stuff is kind of off my plate. And so I've lost something. but was it valuable? I'm kind of evaluating that at the stage of my life, whether those things that I was spending my time with

were as valuable as I thought they were back then. So I have two answers to that question. One is the newspaper helps you cheat. The articles are not, 6,000 words long. True. And there's lots of headlines. So you can learn lots. A lot of times I make it three paragraphs into an article.

We talk about reading the New York Times. I don't read every article in New York Times. I don't. I'll look at them. Yep. But there's a lot of them that's like, I already know that. You're not going to teach me. Headline, deck, not graph.

And there's some as I already know that, but I want to read it again because I want to make sure I know about it. Sure. The second thing is, I think one theme here is we're talking about a lot of technologies that we've had our entire lives, or especially had when we were kids. There's a certain amount of letting go in all of that. But there's a larger thing of letting go here too. I'm not going to read every novel, every written. I'm not going to read every great novel ever written, right? Getting older is like kind of coming to grips with that in a way.

And I think the media diet thing you're talking about is just is a subset of that idea in a way, right? Like, am I just, what kind of person am I going to be? You know, what kind of, what do I want to learn when I have time to learn things? Yeah. You know, very, very limited time. I have to learn things even under the best circumstances. No, you're 100% right. And I think about this too.

And I don't think it's just a product of this time in the media. I think I have often wondered why people as they get older get more closed-minded and more disinterested in not just the world at large, but other people. But then you do get older and you do start to understand why. that it's just like there is a kind of trudging quality to get through certain stages of your life that you're just doing the best you can to stay on both feet and that you're spending less time being curious about things.

And I don't want to be that way, but I think I have more empathy for people who I observed who were that way, who stopped reading the newspaper, who only listened to the newspaper that spoke to how they thought already. Like that increasing lack of curiosity is like a little bit dangerous. But I was raised in the school of Robert. McChesney and the idea that like all corporate media is essentially like a tool to hypnotize people like and I work inside of it and like it I mean I really work inside I really do like it though I think it's okay to acknowledge that that can be the case and so it's like you know the New York Times is inherently a business sure it's not sure it is it is a very successful it's not a nonprofit to educate and make people more well-rounded it's it is another form of information national distraction.

And I'm not saying that you should go out and find the real truth to power. I'm just saying like as long as you're comfortable with that fact, then to me I haven't had as hard of a time personally exchanging my beautiful restoration of bang the drum slowly in exchange for five articles about what's happening in Brazil right now. Like I think I have a personal acceptance around that idea. Everybody is different. I may be a little bit less fun at a dinner party because I have a little bit less access to the world.

but I'm I'm kind of sorting through this at this stage of my life right now. I'm thinking about like, how do I actually want to spend my free time? And increasingly it's what the stuff I care about and not the stuff I'm trying to pretend to indicate to people that I did care about, which doesn't matter to me as much anymore. I love the dinner party analogy because I remember just hearing that so much as a young person in the business.

I think it's late. We even had a thing called cocktail party chatter. You go to a cocktail party. You need to know these things. I never went to a dinner party or cocktail party where this stuff came up. It's very true. I was talking about this stuff at a cocktail party. They were saying, did you see Lost?

That's what they're talking about. Did you, yeah. Did you see the show? Did you see the movie? How about that game last night? Wow, the Yankees are in a funk. Wow. Like, that's, that's, and I'm up on all that stuff.

I'm not, that stuff's going away from me. You got that. It's fine. That's the other thing to do is I'm like, I made my friends. I'm married. I have my, like, for my personal life, the way that it is set up. I don't have to know certain things. It might be helpful to know them, but, and I'm not trying to discourage anybody from consuming

any kind of media. It's just my own personal decision at this stage of my life. It has reflected the fact that I don't have any physical magazine subscriptions anymore. I don't have any physical newspaper subscriptions. And so because those things are not presented to me in person, they're not on my coffee table where I felt this crushing guilt about not having gotten to them. If they're not there, then I don't need to worry about it. And if somebody sends me a link and says, this New Yorker story is incredible or did you see the L.A. Times today, of course, I will click on the link and read it. it, but removing that physical object, which is the subject of what we're talking about,

has kind of alleviated me of a lot of guilt around how not informed I am. Yeah, we just throw the newspapers away. You just got to throw them away. I know. I just toss them. And I actually, I felt the guilt for a while. And it was like, I actually didn't care. Well, they really degrade.

Even beyond the way that they're disgusting. No, it's a stupid idea. By the way. That's how you know you're in the house of a crazy person if they have a lot of newspapers save. That's like you got to get out. That is hoarding. Yeah, that is a different level from that.

They're not like us. I do want to come back to one thing you said, which is about the war between the generalist and the specialist. I'm sorry, I thought that war was over. Is it? Really? What's the case that generalists are still hanging on by their fingernails? Well, I think the absolute upper rung of success in media. Michael Lewis, like that guy?

I mean like Joe Rogan. Okay. These are two different media figures. But I know everything about everything. There's not a subject I can't do a podcast about. In fact, let me make all of this interesting to you. I'm interested in combat sports and drugs and American electoral politics and comedy. Lawrence Wright's latest book.

Yes, it's all on the table. Anybody can show up in my world. That is Howard Stern. That is the top tier, the highest earning potential in culture, Oprah Winfrey. That is still the mountain top. So the true generalist, the person who is interested in everything, sure, they have their own particular spin on those things. But the absolute top of the market is still like aspirational towards I'm comfortable with anything in American life. Everybody else is a specialist.

Everybody else is subject to the whims of their own little defined universe, which I think is not necessarily been a bad thing. I think it's actually helped some people, especially in the kind of substack independent creator era, helped people find a niche, find their smaller communities, and find a way to make a living doing some of those things. It's really been a real stress and strain on the media institutions. That's really what it has kind of dissected and in some cases torn apart. Yes. And that was a real skill when you and I were coming up, that you can write a piece about anything. Yeah. You would have certain things you knew a lot about, but that you could just go in and write a piece, especially in magazine world.

to write a piece about anything, that was in a way of the ultimate skill. I know. I mean, I personally feel like I got lucky because I had a very defined handful of things that I felt very strongly about

and was able to plug into and help build a world where those things were at the center of it. And so I'm very grateful for that. Like, I was cared about the NBA and baseball and football and music and movies and TV. Those were my biggest passions.

And look at what we're doing now. I have one final unboxing here. Okay. I can find it. Sean, I've already Oh, now here it is. I thought I'd already lost something. Oh, it's one newspaper.

Okay. This is very degraded. This, Sean, New York Post. Okay. Back in the news. What with this mayoral election? They've had a moment. October 11, 2004.

Cindy Adams. Okay. Her gossip column. I was assigned a New York Magazine to write a story about the reopening of the classic nightclub Nells. Sure, yeah. I think of a type of it was. Speaking of generalism being absolutely defeated on the battleground, I couldn't do it and actually did not do it.

But for whatever reason. For the record, you're not the guy I would have gone to for the nightclub story. No, no. Ryan was not prowling the night in New York. But somehow, it says the opening of Noel Ashman's new joint on the site of the old Nells on 14th Street, including Cindy Adams here, drew the usual late-nighter, one-nameers, Lizzie, Ivanka, Rashida Fabio New York magazine's

Brian Curtis my name misspelled was savvy enough to rescue Owen Wilson who'd been directed to the stand in line by a bruiser bouncer that's the last item there

and you'll note my name is actually in bold that's a newspaper treasure from the Curtis archives tell me more about this Owen Wilson experience I honestly have no memory of that you rescued Owen Wilson

I think he I guess he was you know know, in the line of like, you know, general public. And I was like, actually, this is Owen Wilson. He needs to come in. But were you already inside? Yeah, I was inside because I would have media. You know, I was media.

I was in. This is a Brian Curtis. I'm not familiar. Yeah, it's really not. I mean, perhaps this misspelling is a different man altogether, B, R-I-A-N? I'm not so sure I buy this. This sounds like a Jordan Peel of Brian Curtis. He was coming out at night.

We're mostly done here. Though I did want to ask, do you want to add something about music, about CDs, or vinyl. If you were a music guy, I know you had a gigantic collection. Yeah, I have so many CDs. I was a very, a modest vinyl collector. I don't have a huge collection of vinyl. I have a lot of friends who've collected a lot of vinyl over the years. Much like magazines and newspapers, they tend to take up a lot of space and are quite heavy. I had a mission to own a CD copy of every what would be considered relevant or major hip-hop or lease in the history of music from whatever, 1979, roughly the beginning of that art form

all the way through. It was probably about 2010 when I stopped. And I got pretty close. I would say I'm kind of in the 90% range of owning everything that quote unquote matters that is in the historical canon. This is even outside the canon, but I could make a case for. And then I got near the end of that process. And I definitely had a little bit of a crisis of like, why did I do this. And I immediately hopscatched to getting obsessed with DVDs and Blu-rays.

And I know deep down that I obviously have not just a collector's mentality, but an obsessive mentality that was living inside of music and then shifted over to movies and then they obviously poured it over. They kind of map neatly onto the arc of my career too.

And I'm just somebody who likes to kind of dive in and like hold tightly to the thing that I care about. and the CDs represented that time in my life and I can't remember the last time I bought a new CD it's got to be well over 10 years maybe maybe 15 years when I actually went into a store and bought a CD but I haven't given up the CDs that I collected

and there's a part of me that thinks I may need them again someday I don't know what for they don't put CD players in cars anymore and I don't I no longer own a compact disc player in my home so I don't know what I'm doing with them, but I do have them in case somebody needs me to write about Little Wayne again. Like I did it a lot in the 2000s. I'll do it again if I have to.

Where could somebody find music in convenient form these days? Yeah, well, that obviously is what happened. I was working, so I worked at, I got laid off from Vibe in 2008, 2009, and I went to go work at a company for a short period of time called e-music. And e-music was an early competitor of Spotify. They sold MP3s. And they were competing obviously with iTunes as well.

And I was in merchandising, which was essentially like an editorial role. I was writing reviews and helping people find music that they might want to buy. And when I was working there, the company was terrified of this looming specter in the music industry called Spotify. And Spotify was available in Europe and not in the United States. And there was this sense that like maybe the record labels would not allow them to come to the United States. or that the government would not allow them, but they are coming. And when they come,

basically we need to get sold to a bigger company or we're in a lot of trouble. And I left the company to go work at GQ before that ever got sorted out. And that is around the time when I stopped collecting CDs. And now I work at Spotify. So I don't know what that says

about like the arc of my addiction to media, but... It says something. It says something about the way I keep putting myself in a position. And maybe there'll be a version of that for movies sometime soon, too. We talked about the future magazines looking very boutique. Future of books, maybe more like books now or books 20 years ago than we would have previously thought. Yeah, it seems to be going well.

I thought the rip from the headline book would go away, but we just spent a month talking about a book about Joe Biden. Yeah, but did anybody read that book? It's number one on the other times best sell list. But did they read the book? Like, they bought the book, and then they read the articles, and then they listened to the podcast of people fighting about what was in the book. book, but did they read the book? My old boss, Michael Kansley wants, when there was a book that was a best-selling book in Washington,

he went to the bookstore and put his business card in page 300. Do you know the story? You told me this story. If you, yeah, if you find this, call me and I'll give you $5 and no one called. So you never know. That's my point. That's a book that people buy and then they think they're going to read and then they don't read. They'll keep making Blu-Rays?

Yeah. I mean, I think that the Blu-Rae. I know sinners will get a Blu-ray, but will lesser movies, art films, will they get nice Blu-ray. I think they're more likely to get a nice Blu-ray than your mid-tier studio release because of that niche market and the fact that they can kind of upsell you on special features and steel books and all of these like elaborate features that come with a lot of the boutique companies. The boutique companies right now are amazing. I mean, if there's, I don't know if there's an equivalent for this in the book publishing world, but if you want to get a beautiful

edition of a semi-obscure movie, it's now better than it ever. was in the history of movie ownership. Books can only get so interesting. They can only get so deep. They can only have so many tacked on features to it. With movies, it's like, it's endless. If you've got somebody who really cares about a movie and they want to build a whole world around it, like I was asked to appear on a special feature for the new Sorcerer Criterion Collection,

4K Restoration, Sorcerer, a movie I love. And they asked me, do I want to talk to the director James Gray about the movie? And James is somebody I've become front. with over the years. And so we just sat in a room and talked for an hour of a Red Sourcer. They just put that on the disc. And I've got like dozens of people that are just tweeting at me and emailing me and being like, this was fucking awesome, dude. I just watched you talk to this guy after I watched a movie. People want this. They like actually want all this stuff. So the fact that that sort of thing is working and that sort of shoulder content is achievable

on Blu-rays means that there's like no end in sight as far as I can tell when it comes to that market. I agree. And that kind of interview or just the DVD commentary doesn't even have to be Ben Affleck on Armageddon. It's awesome. It's truly an awesome thing. And if you want it, great. And if you don't want it, you still have the movie. Future newspapers feels like an increasingly boutique product.

When I look at like the LA Times has a, you know, an afternoon deadlines with the sports scores, the Dodgers score and game story is not even in the paper the next day if it's a night game. Crazy. Just absolutely crazy. So I feel like some of them are just increasingly even if you want to be that well-rounded, well-read person, pretty useless to you.

Yeah. And they'll be like a New York Times and maybe one or maybe a Wall Street Journal, maybe a Washington Post that will just even be useful as print products at all. Even whatever you care about having a tactile thing, a non-pandering, you know, item in your house. I just don't think the others will be terribly useful because the economics are so bad. It's hard to imagine that 25 years ago that we would ever get to that place. because even with the onset of the internet,

it just was an essential part of every person's life. There was a newspaper on every doorstep in America for decades. And now I don't think any of my neighbors get the newspaper. That's just so wild. Yeah. Sean Fentasy, thank you so much for sharing my kinks and for coming on my podcast. No shame here, Brian. To talk about physical media.

This was great. My pleasure. All right, that is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. By nice of magic by Kyle Crichton. We're back Thursday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then. Thank you.