The Press Box - Elon Musk Versus Critics, Watching an Awesome World Cup Final, and a New Doc About Robert Caro

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Bryan and David start off the pod by discussing a documentary revolving around the relationship of writer Robert Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb called ‘Turn Every Page’ (00:58). Then, they address all the drama with Elon Musk and Twitter and examine how the press should cover this story (13:25). Later, they give their match report from the World Cup final (36:13) and discuss how The New York Times figures out which books are bestsellers (46:58). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline (56:05). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Eduardo Ocampo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, it's Ariel Hawani. And I'm Chuck Mindenhall. And I'm Pizzi Carroll and together we are three-pack. Join us on the brand-new Spotify Live app immediately after all of the biggest fights in combat sports. And also during the way-ins because that's when the real drama happens. So what are you waiting for? Follow the Ringwere M-M-A show right now on our exclusive Spotify podcast feed. And come join the best community in MMA.

Peace! We're out of here. David? Yes. A while back, I introduced to Facebook. feature here at the press box called I Read Something. One of my favorites. Kind of a self-congratulatory feature where we get to pat ourselves on the back for actually finishing a piece of writing.

Notice, by the way, we have not actually used that feature one time since its initial rollout. Today, I would like to offer you a companion feature. I saw something. It's a new documentary called Turn Every Page. Oh, all right. It comes out December 30th. It is about the relationship between LBJ biographer and American treasure Robert Cairo and his longtime editor Robert Gottlie, who has edited all the Cairo books going back to the power broke.

Now, for people who don't know, Bob Cairo is 87 years old. He is that guy within the world of books. His LBJ volumes are books that just about everyone buys and a handful of very successful people with a lot of bandwidth are able to read all the way through. Mm-hmm. And I think we would say a guy in book writing who has the rare privilege of having all of his books be of a piece. Yeah. From the power broker through all the way, right? There's not like an old Bob Caro book.

You're like, well, he was really finding his footing. there. Yeah. Kind of the odd one out. There's no, there's no weird first movie, first book for him. He's almost been a finished product for his entire book writing career. It's true. I mean, and I think in some sense, it's like, it's a dream job, right?

I mean, you've got to have to find the dream subject, something that would keep your interest throughout a lifetime. But I think most of us have, you know, given a crystal ball and a healthy advance would choose that sort of success and that sort of ability to to process, to write, to think, you know, about one subject in a really big way over a really long period of time. So Cairo is the writer. The editor in this documentary is Bob Gottlieb,

91 years old, former editor-in-chief of Knapp and Simon and Schuster before that. He also edited the New Yorker between Mr. Sean and Tina Brown. How do you describe Bob Gottlieb's? stature in the world of book publishing? There's nobody, like Bob Gottlieb. I mean, there was a whole bunch of, there's a whole generation of sort of, you know, grand names of men and women of publishing,

of which he was a part, but I guess, but always sort of seemed to stand separate from them. You never, you didn't hear, I didn't think of him in the same breath as, you know, Sunny Mehta or something like that. The people who were just like brilliant and intensely talented,

but Robert Gottlieb, Bob Gottlieb, to those of us that know him, I've never, and I don't know the guy at all, but he's got what, but there's, isn't that a great thing that all the, all the professional Roberts in America, we just call Bob and we're speaking at the, speaking about them in any length. Robert Gottlieb is like,

I don't know, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's, like the name is, is as bigger, the legend is bigger than the person, which is really an unusual thing in a world is, as sort of specific as book publishing. and obviously magazine publishing as well. But he is the editor's editor. He's like the consummate guy.

He was like, like you're right. He was at Simon & Schuster. He's best known as the editor-in-chief of Knaff, but he discovered, what, catch-22 was his first book, I guess, which is my first favorite good book in my lifetime. And, yeah, just sort of went onward from there. I'm really interested to see this,

this documentary because to those of us that have been there and I think to anyone that's spent any time as a writer, I think those sorts of writer-editor relationships are all incredibly interesting. Probably much more so to our generation and those before than those now when not ever even the best writers

don't necessarily have, you know, really hands-on editors. Movies directed by Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie. It's a fascinating study just in visual contrast. Kero turning up to work in a suit looking very natty, even as he's writing alone, Gottlieb turning up for the interview in sweats, which is great.

And, you know, I would call this a good documentary, not a great documentary, but for the people who are like you and me, who are fascinated with writing and books, this has some of the most interesting stuff I have ever seen about being an editor and the process of editing, which, as you say, is kind of a lost art form at this point in history. history. Here's what Gottlieb says of Cairo. He does the work. I do the cleanup. Then we fight. Here's an example of their fights as they were editing and writing these books. Sometimes I'm looking for an adjective. I make a whole list. But if he overuses them, it doesn't read one. We've had some real fights about sections that he's wanted to cut out.

It was not that I was trying to tear his bleeding heart out of his chest. they would have these three or four hour sessions in Gottlieb's Knaf office sitting next to each other, fighting over everything from a paragraph that seemed to go on too long to a semicolon. The whole riff in the dock about semicolons and how to use them properly. There's even a great scene too in here where we actually get to see them editing together. And it's preceded by them wandering around the Knaf offices looking for a, pencil so that they can write the remarks in the margins. And it can't be a mechanical pencil. It must be a regular pencil.

Imagine if we wandered around the ring or trying to find a regular pencil. That would take a while. A couple of quotes about editing I wanted to hit you with from Gottlieb. He says, editors have to be cruel in order to be kind. Which I thought was a really interesting remark. Well, I think it's important to get as an editor. to go in with the foreknowledge that you're going to be perceived as cruel, right? There's a reason why they, or that phrase about editing is kill all your babies, right?

Your darlings, yeah. Or your darling. So, yeah, it's, it's a, it's, being edited is, feels malicious, you know, especially when you're working with a new person or you're new to the craft or whatever else. But you have to be honest, you know, as an editor. You have to, you have to, I mean, they're paying for your opinion, or you're being paid for your opinion on this thing, right? So you, but yeah, it's, it's a, it's a, that's a, that's a really good line. How many times in your career have you gotten a pieceback in track changes mode?

And you've seen all the lines crossed out. And you absolutely feel like crap for the next 20 minutes. Oh, yeah. I always thought I would grow out of that stage. I'd be like, okay, I'm going to get this piece back. Naturally, there are going to be comments because I didn't write it absolutely perfectly the first time out. And I will take those comments like the adult I am and I will run them through my brain and I will write an even better piece. And I will be thankful at the end, which is all true except for that first 20 minutes where I'm so pissed off.

They should have a track changes mode that's specifically for the editor-author relationship, wherein you only see one change at a time. like you open the thing and it's just like change number one or edit number one and you can be like yeah okay and you never have any idea how many edits there are left because it's something that's saying all the red ink right i mean if you saw it and that's a different thing in the modern world i mean you can see there's certainly manuscripts that are edited you know by hand within an inch of their life um but yeah just looking at and seeing that many because but you know editors now are are doing copy editing and line editing and kind of big think editing at the same time. But yeah, it is hard.

It's hard to get past it. Gottlieb in the movie calls editing a service job saying, I am helping the writer realize their own vision. I'm not trying to change the book or the piece of writing into something it isn't. He says that's where tragedy lurks. But there's an interesting catch to that, which is that Gottlieb himself, as he happily admits in the movie,

he has a big ego. So I am sublimating myself to the writer's vision. Yeah. But as an editor, I also have a big ego so that if I make these changes, I know I'm right.

Uh-huh. I know how to fix this. I know what can make this better. I thought that was an interesting balancing act. That is really interesting. I mean, he's not, going in saying you're a service, you know,

you have a service job, I think is, is really important, right? I mean, so, well, I mean, listen,

there's great editors who are, I mean, you know, everybody knows the legend of like Gordon Lish, just like, rewriting Raymond Carver's short stories, like line by line, you know,

until it's like, just a totally new invention. That's what some people think of as editing. But you're right. I mean, but he's right in what he says. You are, you have,

it is a, supplementary role. Not necessarily a subordinate role, but it is, you know, you know, most, very, very seldom would there be a book on his desk that he had to edit that would not have been published by somebody else, right? So you have to sort of go in with that awareness. Or there was an auction for this book. You know, this is an author that I, that I had to really try to get. But then at that point, it's almost an obligation to make it better, right? It's not just that you have the confidence that you, the ego that you can make it better. It's, I fought for this book. And now it's my job to make it the best book it can be. Ghalib has this

great line about literary people. He says, anyone can be adorable. Not everyone can be industrious with results. As soon as I heard that, I wanted to get that sign made for my home office here. Industrious with results. And over-adorability. Because how many times have you and I been tempted to be adorable, either in person in the office or in a little note we're sitting to our editor where we're pitching a piece of writing? Adorable is easy, right? Being winning is easy for most people. But then actually sitting down and being industrious and doing what it takes to deliver that adorable vision that you have pitched and you have given off. That's hard.

that's where the rubber meets the road. I'll just take adorable personally, I think you're right. Is that working podcasting, adorability? The industry has been maybe kind of a writer thing. Yeah, like I said about this talk,

I'm in the three-star Roger Ebert zone here. I love the stuff about editing. I would have liked more about their battles in the LBJ books because just judging by the length of those things, I'm not sure how many editing battles Robert Cairo actually lost when he was delivering those things. It's supposed to be a three-book series. It is at least a five-book series.

There's also scenes in this movie where Ethan Hawk has been brought on to read passages from the power broker just to give you an idea of Cairo's prose. Wow. I like having Cairo's prose read to me. Not sure Ethan Hawk is anything but kind of a very, very strange distraction in terms of, reading it. But if you're like us, I think you'll find many things to like in the documentary, turn every page. And as always, David, I'm just proud to say, I watch something. Coming up in the press box, more drama with Elon Musk and Twitter. How should we be covering it? Plus, the old Argentinian soccer star still got it. Notes from watching an unbelievable World Cup

final and the secret ways that books get on the New York Times bestseller list. All that more on the press box, a part of the ringer, podcast network. Hello, media consumers, and happy holidays. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Eduardo Ocampo, sitting in for Erica here. David, I know this is going to shock you, but there was a lot of news coming out of Twitter over the last couple of days. Big news. Tell me more.

Well, let's start last Thursday. When Twitter and Elon Musk suspended a bunch of journalists. And this was a bold-faced names kind of list. New York Times is Ryan Mack, Donnie O'Sullivan of CNN, Keith Oberman, Washington Post drew Harwell, Michael Lee of The Intercept,

Aaron Rupar, who used to be at Vox now at Substack, all suspended from Twitter. What did they do? Well, the day before, that is Wednesday, Twitter and Elon Musk had suspended the account called Elon Jet. At Elon Jet. This is the account run by a college student who uses publicly available information

to track Elon Musk's plane. Tell you where it's landing and posting that information on Twitter. So Twitter decides after Musk had declared the opposite that Elon Jet can no longer exist on Twitter. That's it. There is not going to be any more doxing real-time location info, Musk said, especially real-time location info that involves Elon Musk. So that happened on Wednesday.

And then all these journalists were suspended. Yeah. And the reason was that they had reported on the Elon Jet account or tweeted in some way about the controversy. Yeah. And Musk was arguing that just by talking about this thing, they were doxing him. Mm-hmm. By extension, I guess. Yes.

that is that is correct as I as as I know it to be um yeah I mean super just incredibly problematic uh in terms of the way Musk is making rules and and running Twitter I mean I'll set aside the free speech stuff because I don't think that irony is particularly salient here it's certainly not going to be like a solution pointing it out won't be a solution to any of the problems. But I think the most generous way you can look at Elon Musk's decision-making process over the past week is that, well, if you want to be super generous, A, he was honestly and deeply concerned for the safety of his child, right?

And that sort of served as a wake-up call. All parents are going to relate to that to some extent. But then that regardless of how honest he was about or how honest with himself, you know, honest with himself he was about what the new regime the new rules were going to be that he is so sort of um myopically focused on a certain segment of Twitter that

he overprescribed shall we say his new rules uh test drove his new rules on uh on you know a journalism a journalist class that was just doing their job you know right a journalist class in this case it was covering him.

Whether or not, I'll say, yes. So I'll say the ungenerous way is he was using this whole thing, he used this whole thing as a front to to kick journalists who he didn't like the coverage of off of Twitter, right? I mean, I guess I should have said that up front.

And now he's led a lot of them back on, which is, you know, I don't know if that's evidence that he wasn't expecting the pushback that he got or if this was the plan all along. Obviously, the length of suspension was unknown at the time of the suspension. and he left the length up to a public vote at one point, which he seemed to abide by.

But all that's to say he, if he did, if he's not just capriciously like kicking people he doesn't like off of Twitter because he has the power to do it and people that talk shit about him, um, then it's then we go back to the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, thing I said before, or he's just so focused on a certain thing that he can't help but, you know, fumble the implementation of these new rules. You did a very good and fair job

of laying out the door number one and door number two there, but he is almost certainly capriciously kicking people off Twitter. I mean, just look at this list. Yeah, it's a little bit. There's a little bit of the... I mean, I hate that Donald Trump is a frame of reference for everything,

and I don't want to... compare them simply because they share a certain portion of their fan base but there is a lot of like he couldn't possibly be doing the thing he's obviously doing because why on earth would he do that that you remember from the Trump days, right?

And you retroactively talk yourself into 3D chess. Oh, he was distracting from another thing and you did that, you know, whatever, but it just seems so the almost, the near certain reality of what Elon Musk is doing is, it makes sense on its own, but it

also just makes so little sense in terms of in goals, you know, it's, it's, it's kind of mind-boggling. And as you mentioned, these journalists get suspended and then Musk puts up a Twitter poll, which most people use for comic purposes. Yeah. Not to decide policy at a big tech company. 59% of people voted that the suspension should be lifted immediately. and then the suspensions of the journalists were lifted.

So this is a very, very important issue about security, about doxing. But if enough people vote for it in a Twitter poll, then the issue isn't that important. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I mean,

he tweeted he had a Twitter poll today about whether or not he should step down as the CEO of Twitter. I mean, guess what the result was. Yeah. Well, no, I think you made a comeback. I think we'll see. I don't know what the numbers are at the time of recording, but, you know, I don't know if, do you, I mean, do you do a Twitter poll that you end up having to do the thing that you didn't really want to do so that now forever after you can put up fake, put up Twitter polls that you gimmick to get the answer that you want. And everybody's like, well, you know, there was that one time you got the bad result.

I know we're not supposed to say the name Donald Trump here again, but this has a real. you know, look at that, look at that one poll over there, that one thing. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, it's the, the, the, the, the first poll, the poll about, you know, well, actually, it wasn't the first poll. The first poll had too many answers and nothing got a majority, so we ran it again. But the, but the first meaningful poll, which invited, you know, which led to bringing some of those journalists back onto Twitter, um, I think it,

maybe in his head allowed him to look magnanimous or made him, more importantly, I think, allowed him to look impartial. You know, these rules had to be made, but I'm a man of the people, is Vox popular or whatever? Like, I'm letting you, letting everyone else decide

and also sort of washing your hands of it. But it was, it all just seemed, everything from his takeover to now is a unified narrative of Elon Musk. Twitter drama, which is basically swallowed the entire site, at least from where we're sitting, obviously you get certain, you know, the focus on your timeline depends a lot on what you're

interested in looking at. But it's just, it's all Twitter. I mean, it's all Elon drama. It's all Twitter. It's all this self-referential stuff. And if you want to, you know, make Twitter newsworthy. If you want the name Twitter to be trending and not just the source of the trends, I guess this works. You know, if you want your own name to be out there, I guess this works. You know, there's no press is bad press, et cetera. But if you want Twitter to be to grow into anything, then the most basic thing of all is you can't just be a, it can't just be a self-referential, you know, sinkhole. I'm going to use Donald Trump's name one more time in this segment. Because I saw a tweet, I think it's from Dave Weigel a while back

that noted that a lot of the junkie content that used to amount to Trump said a thing that we would do when Donald Trump was president has now been converted to Elon tweeted a thing and what we're doing

is we are covering and I realize the irony of saying this in a segment devoted to Elon Musk and Twitter drama but he is doing things we are giving him attention by covering every single tweet just like we did with Donald Trump. And I would say just like with Trump,

there is this question that hovers over all of it because it's not that it's not news when he does these things. Yeah. But if he is doing it, at least in part to get attention for Elon Musk, should we be just diving on every single tweet and discussing every policy prescription

that lasts 24 hours or 48 hours or whatever it was and be giving him that kind of constant attention? Should we? Like as a journalist, what would be the obligation? Is that the question? I think so. Or just what feels right? in this case, because I think a lot of it comes down to what do you think is news?

Well, yeah. I mean, in some ways, this is just like the, like a pure distillation of the internet, right? Where it's just like these are, there are very, very major free speech issues on why. I hate you. I don't want to use that term. But, you know, I mean, there are very important, like journalism issues that are on the one hand. And on the other hand, it's like the mod on the message board is acting like a dick, right? So, I mean, it's like the most sort of insular web-based nonsense at all, the stuff that you would, that is may or may not be necessary.

I mean, important to report, but certainly not that anybody would ever read, you know, unless it was a beautiful magazine feature or something like that. So, I mean, it's a tough call. I do think that journalism broadly defined, whatever, quote unquote journalism is in an odd place. here because I don't because I think that as with Trump there's only so much sort of you know rallying support for the greater good of journalism that is that will ever particularly work regardless of how good the villain is and in some sense it's just keep your nose to the grind stone and do the job but I think that um this is a particularly strange place that we that journalists I find themselves in Josie Duffy Rice had a great tweet last week that I sent you

or she said Twitter has been filling in for robust journalism infrastructure for a long time and that is bad she goes on but there's very I can't there I can't imagine really many other I mean what another example would be of a general like social media ban being so kind of cataclysmic for a the career of someone in a specific profession you know it could be, you know, if Taylor, if Taylor Lorenz never gets back on Twitter, I'm presumably she'll be fine and continue to be employed, but that is like a major, that, that is a, like, major shift in her, not just like public facing identity, but her, her life, you know, obviously, there's workarounds and everything else, but I'm just saying, like, that's, to not, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, people of Twitter because he doesn't like what they say, changes the, well, the metaphorical algorithm entirely. I want to bring up another question that goes directly to your point about infrastructure. So Musk and Twitter suspend these reporters. And their websites,

their media organizations issue those statements. We are very, very concerned about this. We strongly object to these baseless suspensions. Yet the media organization, organizations themselves, as Jeremy Barr and Sarah Ellison pointed out in a Washington Post piece, kept tweeting during the whole thing. Like filling Twitter with content, even though their reporters had been taken off Twitter for what they thought were unjust reasons. Now, that's an interesting one to me, too. I had not exactly thought about that. But we see this in journalism sometime.

If you're David are covering a wrestling promotion. And the wrestling promotion says, we are denying David all press access, all credentials going forward because he has violated our rules and it's all bullshit. The ringer isn't going to be like, okay, we'll send Brian Curtis to cover the wrestling promotion instead.

The proper response to that is we've got our guy. And he's going to go back and we're not going to cover you or at least cover you on a day-to-day basis until you put our guy back in there. But these news organizations are so reliant on Twitter, or at least so enmeshed with Twitter, whatever the actual translation of clicks is, you know, to tweets, that they're just still tweeting.

Here's some stories we wrote. Here are some more tweets. Here you go. I thought that was really interesting. And I didn't see a lot of grappling with that because it's kind of like, okay, well, you know, we've still got our stories to try to publish us. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's, it is sort of an impossible position.

Um, we've had these conversations. We have had similar conversations when people have been, you know, suspended for tweets that they've made, suspended by journalism, by, by, by whatever outlet they're working for, for things that they've tweeted. Obviously, it's a very different thing, but you're always walking this fine line. between wanting, you know, free speech or whatever it is, you know, and the self-promotion inherent in social media and everything else.

And just sort of trying to, well, I'll say it a different way. As a newspaper, as a magazine, as whatever, you are both in the position of having to stand up for the greater good, for these absolute values of journalism and democracy and everything else. and also like not have every day be a shitstorm so that you can continue to do your job, right? I mean, there has to be some, you know, grown up in the room aspect to your,

to how you kind of set your policy. And it's, it's incredibly difficult. And especially difficult now because it's just, because there's this chaotic. There's this element of it, right? There's this unpredictability. The Elon Musk poll, I'm looking at it right now, David. The final results are in.

Should I step down his head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll, Musk tweeted. Yes, 57.5%. No, 42.5%. So he lost his own poll. Oh, my gosh. One more bit of drama here. This was on Saturday.

You mentioned Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post. She was working on a story about Musk with her post-teammate Drew Harwell. this is a story you alluded to about Musk's security team having a run in with an alleged stalker came out of what he said was the Elon Jet thing. Lorenz and Harwell

would report that police see no link between those two things. Lorenz in reporting this story reached out to Musk on Twitter for comment and then when she checked back found out her account had been suspended. What apparently got her suspended was she put up a tweet

with her handles on Mastodon Instagram and other competing social media platforms. And Twitter put in a rule that that was no good anymore. Yeah. That you could not point to your platform, your profiles elsewhere. Musk tweeted casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd and extreme.

they added that policy and then deleted the policy almost immediately from their website, Musk explaining that he had not conducted a poll to find out if Twitter users agreed with that policy change. And he was sorry and wouldn't do that again without conducting a poll. Yeah. I mean, just incredibly, the polling thing is just going to continue to be bizarre. Because it's like the fallback plan, it's the excuse, it's the rationalization, the post-rationalization, and the rationalization for what's going to come. Maybe we should all be doing polls.

Should we just do that here? Just like, I'm sorry about my take last week. I hadn't conducted a poll yet. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's just very strange, right? I mean, here's the thing. There's a lot of here's the things in you. He can do whatever he wants with Twitter.

He owns Twitter. Right? I mean, that's not really in dispute. I said semi-seriously a few weeks ago that part of me wondered if he if he was actually trying, you know, if you go with the notion that he didn't actually want to buy Twitter by the time he was sort of forced to buy it. Part of me wondered if he was trying to just tank it in some sort of too big the fail scheme to like, you know, make it clear out necessary a public utility it was and force the government to buy it somehow. I don't know. But there's, you know, he could do whatever he wants to with it. He's going to get incredible amounts of pushback, though, because of how significant it is to so many people, right? I mean, people were generally happy. People complained about it before.

But this is the same thing with every website, you know? It's like you complain about the navigation bar on the ringer.com until we redesign the website. And you're like, I can't find anything, you know? I mean, it's just, this is the way we interface with the internet. And part of, you know, you think that he's, he would, be aware of it. And that's why I think people would go to the kind of conspiracy theory that he's doing some of this on purpose.

I don't know. I don't know what the plan is. But he can do whatever he wants. I just don't know that he can, man, I don't even know how to say it. He can do whatever he wants, but it's, you can't, you have to be self-aware enough to know what the, what the reaction is going to be. You can't just, after the everything, just do things and say, hey, I'm going to do this poll. I mean, you might want to kick all the journalists who say shit about you off Twitter,

but if you do it, you better, you got to, you should probably, you know, stick to your word, you know, just keep, build the wall and keep your kingdom safe or whatever. It's just, you have to know what people are going to see when you do this stuff. And just making up a thing about how it was your sharing location and whatever else just doesn't, it doesn't hold water. And you have to understand that self-rationalization doesn't work. work for everybody else. It's just really hard for one person to do what he's doing.

Even if the person we're trying to do it well and not just drive everybody nuts. We're all going to be driven by our egos and by our petty grievances and everything else. That's a part of what makes us human. Thankfully, there's not a lot of operations of this significance where there's one person in charge, and thankfully it's not him, you know, specifically. Coming up in 30 seconds, the old guy still got it. Brian and David's match report from the World Cup final. Plus, how does the New York Times figure out which books are bestsellers

and how do authors and publicists contrive to get their books on the list? But first, David, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Senior nominees to at the Pressbox pod, where they are always, always gratefully received. this week's runner-up went to many tweets

sent during that amazing World Cup final between Argentina and France. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write I'm supposed to watch insert terrible NFL player here play quarterback after this. Thanks to Michael T. By the way, I think Zach Wilson

was the runaway winner in that tweet. But this week's winner, David, comes from our pal, Adam Zalanka. Some sad news from the world of streaming Netflix had a series called Blockbuster about life at the last Blockbuster video store. Well, the show has been canceled. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write.

Can't believe this is a second time in history that Netflix put Blockbuster out of business. Thanks to Adam for that one. If your tape is already three days late, congrats, you made the Overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, the notebook dump. We've got to talk about the World Cup final because this, my friend, is the podcast

where people come for soccer news. the press box. Yes, it is. Two lifelong fans of the sport talking to you here today after a fantastic final. Let me tell you something. The best part about that match for people like you and me was you didn't have to know anything about soccer. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

To be into that. It was like England, France. I get it. I understand right away what the stakes are. I understand how cool this is. is, I understand how exciting this is. Then you get a match

that is tied through regulation at the end of regulation, I used to say that it's tied after extra time. And you go to the shootout. It was fantastic. Strong old guy still got it vibes for Argentina's Lionel Messi, who is

35, but wasn't it cool to have an old guy still got it versus does this young guy already have it vibe going on during a sporting event? Yeah. Yeah, it's been, it's, you know, LeBron's been an old guy, so got it for a little while, but Tom Brady, you know, but, but it was, it was definitely nice. Killinghamapé, 23, had an absolutely incredible match for France.

I felt a little bit like this was the Brady Mahom's Super Bowl, at least as it was set up to be that we didn't quite get because Patrick Mahomes didn't have an offensive line that could block for him. Our teammate Brian Phillips tweeted this. He said, if you're looking for an American sports analogy, it's LeBron versus MJ in a double overtime finals game seven and they go for 60 and 50 respectively. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that it was really clear. I mean, this happens to every World Cup, every Olympics, whatever, you know, you can watch people watching soccer, you know, with some dedication for the first time in their life, right? We all have family members and friends who sit down and watch a game from start to finish and, you know, a third of the

way through, you start hearing the same thing. It's just like, oh, now I understand why everybody likes this, right? And this one was just, like you said, storyline-wise, just totally blown out. And I think part of what makes it really incredible is it doesn't, it, it doesn't neatly glom on to some other American sports parallel, right? Those things are clear and yet it's still very much its own thing. And it was just incredible to watch. How often do you, how often in sports do you watch a thing where the announcers are saying, this is the greatest whatever we're watching of all time? And it's kind of as far as I know, correct?

So like, I mean, like, it's hard to imagine a, you know, I mean, how many points would LeBron have to score in game seven of the NBA finals for people to be saying this is the greatest finals performance of all time? A hundred? I mean, like 50 points would people be saying that out loud in real time? Yes. I mean, I feel sports Twitter is a very cheap date. And if you turn on any game that is remotely compelling and has. a lot of scoring and goes into OT, you will get a lot of football is great.

I love this. This is the best thing I ever watched. And then six weeks later, you go, what was that again? It was like a Boise State triple overtime game. Like, what happened?

This was one of the ones that truly justified it. Yeah, and it's not, I'm not talking, obviously you're not disagreeing with me, but it's not sports Twitter. I mean, this is like the announced team

and the studio team. We're all just like, it was almost all. really. Yeah. They went to, they did that thing where they just kind of bounced out of the booth and went to the Rob Stone and the studio team on Fox between periods. And it was almost like nobody knew what to say other than I can't wait to watch the rest of this. Yeah. Because it's going to end. And it's funny. I was watching with my wife. And at the very end, it almost felt anticlimactic. I think because everybody was so tired. Yeah. And it was almost like the celebration on the field, which is usually like, the most exciting, you know, big capper to a huge sporting event. It almost, it was almost muted because the match itself was so exciting.

And so every moment felt so freighted. One TV note for you, that was funny. So Fox showed this here in the States in the morning. It started at 7 a.m. Pacific 10 p.m. Eastern. Yeah, we had it at a very humane time over here. You should try it sometime. and of course

this is world sport David we're all coming together this is awesome oh wait Fox has the NFL yeah starting exactly three hours later

and this match goes on and on and on and all of a sudden I was saying you know because I had my things to do for the day watch World Cup final watch Cowboys Jags and I'm looking

you guys to see the two greatest sporting events of their of all time. I know and I'm like, wait, this starts in like 15 minutes. And I know, I know France, Argentina is a much,

much, much bigger deal in the history of everything. But if we're talking about paying the bills, NFL football is what pays the bills. It was, yeah,

the transition between the two is incredible too, because the greatest, the greatest soccer game of all happened. And like I said, they were saying this out loud and everybody's reacting to it. And then almost as quickly as the, you know,

ball and goes into the net, Rob Stone's saying, due to our NFL obligations, well, we have to go. But this will continue on FS1, you know. And first of all, due to our NFL obligations is, was like, it's so funny that, I mean, no complaint about Rob's delivery there. It's just so funny that due to our NFL obligations has some sort of like salience in the modern world, right? Everyone's just like, oh, yeah, they have to show the game. We understand how the contracts work.

But yeah, I mean, it was a very, very quick changeover. Yeah, it was hilarious. See, we'll continue with our NFS1. So more postgame, if anyone's interested. You American viewers want them more. I mean, I understand, but it's important because it's the NFL obligation. I think it's the obligation to show the game, right? I mean, I think even most football fans, American football fans would have been like,

yeah, we can just, we can hang out here for 25 more minutes, you know, get some interviews, just get some real perspective, something. But no, we had to go see the Cowboys get beat. Sorry. I'm just, I was so mad yesterday. There's, there's being mad on Twitter, that performative anger you do as a fan. And then there's just being mad inside your house. Yeah.

I was being mad inside my house yesterday. And I was just pissed off. when I'm pissed off, what do I do? I write a podcast. That's what I do. A couple notes from Twitter for you. Did you catch any of the tweets that were going out during the World Cup final that said, hey, soccer's boring, huh?

What do you guys think of that? Are we still fighting that battle? Were there soccer trolls amongst us yesterday? We're like, I'm not watching this crap. I only going to score six total goals. regulation well first of all yes I mean there are still people saying

there's somebody on Twitter sure there's somebody on Twitter saying everything well I mean there were people texting me you know I had friends in group chats that were like I still don't get the appeal what's the you know like whatever you know people were out but those people were watching it I think that's the thing is it

soccer is still on such a sort of cultural awareness curve in the United States the Lites that we are that like that there are, it's not just new people who are exposed to it every game. It's like potential audience members are exposed to every game. I mean, new audience members

in every big game. And so people are grasping at how to comprehend it who normally would be like, I mean, listen, you throw a big Super Bowl party, half the people there are just there for the commercials, right? But they don't sit around saying just like, what a barbaric sport.

Like, why does anybody want to watch this? You know, they go eat chips. and they talk to the other people who don't care about the game. It's just that it's this sort of novelty, you know? It's just like it's it's somewhere between kind of earnest potential fans being one over on one end. And on the other end, it's like old people hearing rap music for the first time, you know? It's like we, it's both varieties are both, both types are people who feel obligated to have an open opinion, whereas they wouldn't in another sport. I go back and forth on the idea of freezing cold takes.

Sometimes I'm like, that was a terrible take and should be held up for mocking and ridicule. Sometimes I think, yeah, really, really going to ding the sports writer for that one. Well, there was one during yesterday's match that really justifies the form. It was by Josina Anderson, who's an American football expert for CBS. she tweeted during the match, I'm still waiting for Killian Mbapé to impress me in this World Cup.

Yes, he attracts defenders, but speed and scoring potential are not enough. You have to purposely dribble with directive control, create for yourself, and thus be a constant actual threat to the net throughout the tourney. After that, tweet, I mean, within about 15 to 20 minutes, Killingen Mbapapet had what a friend texted me

was one of the best 30 minutes by a player in the history of world sport. World sport? World sport. Okay, so we can narrow it down to your British friends as there's mystery present. The whole former British Empire perhaps included, but yeah.

I mean, it was one of those where you're just like, oh, wow. Yeah. Didn't hold up. Let's talk about books, David. You sent me this Esquire story by Sophie Verschpo about the

New York Times bestseller list. Title is the murky path to becoming a New York Times bestseller. Yep. Before we get into that freighted headline and all the reporting Verspo did that went into it, we know that every author, every publisher wants their books to sell well. What is the value, the actual value within publishing to have a book on the New York Times bestseller list? Well, in some ways it's more.

more important than ever, right? Because shelf space is at such a premium and no matter where you go, there's a shelf, there's a whole bay that's the New York Times bestsellers in the airport bookstores. You know, that's in some of those stores, that's 75% of the bookshelf, you know, is the New York Times bestsellers or wherever they're going to do it. So to have a sort of, you know, the one scale that people care about, right? I mean, there's, the fact that it stood the test of time, whereas, you know, most other traditional forms of rating have gone, have sort of been, have been toppled by whatever modern contrivance, the New York Times book review,

I mean, the New York Times bestseller list still, still, you know, is really significant. I mean, the New York Times, in general,

we're in a much different place, right? I mean, I don't know about the bestseller list. I know, I mean, there was a time not that long ago, where you would get tipped off that you were going to be on the bestseller list

and start printing books immediately. if you were, well, one of the most extremely fortunate, someone who didn't expect to be there that sort of popped on on the list and whatever, it could not only change your fortunes dramatically, but it could also put you in a really tough spot because if you have 5,000 copies of a book in circulation and suddenly there's demand for 50, it's going to take, you know, two weeks to get them to print them and get them to the store. It's a weird thing.

But just as afraid, I mean, if you knew that your book, even a book that was already some measure of success was going to pop up in the top of the New York Times best seller list, that could mean that you push print on 100,000 copies that, you know, the second you find out. It's a huge, huge deal. But, you know, it means different things now. So Vershbo notes in her piece that we don't know how the New York Times calculates its bestseller list. And this is on purpose. Yeah. Because the New York Times doesn't want people to monkey with the numbers or be able to game the list. Is that right? But that would be their argument. And there's some validity to it, right? I mean, even if you were

a certain sort of, you know, information absolutist or whatever, like, everything should be public knowledge, you can understand the framework of an argument that, like, I mean, the reason why the recipe for KFC fried chicken is a trade secret is not because they have an ingredient that no one's ever heard of, right? It's because that, like, it's actually probably very easy to reproduce, but we just want to make sure that no one else knows exactly how we do it, right?

Somebody in a piece compares it to the formula for Coca-Cola. Yeah. You can guess what the ingredients are, but you don't know exactly what the measurements are, how Cokebooks together a can of Coke. And part of the deal is that it's small sample size, right? I mean, I think they do use Book Scan, although they

denied it. I mean, there are, you know, these public, I mean, these big database that count book sales and stuff like that. But like, I think that they probably figured out a way to do it. I mean, they figured out a ranking system that works, or at least works for them that is not some sort of actual representation, I mean, representation, not some actual counting of all the books that were sold. It is a sample size that they, that is very functional.

And if you, and it's probably small enough that if you knew how to do exactly what they were looking at, yeah, you could gimmick. the system, right? So that would be what the argument is for keeping secret. Also, it would diminish it. I mean, I don't think it's, this isn't some sort of like, like, you know, some open records argument or whatever, but if you knew exactly how, how they tallied the numbers, it's not just that the mystery is interesting. It's like the majesty is interesting, right? It seems like it's more than, it's more than an accumulation of numbers. It is a, it's alchemy, you know.

It's, it's whatever they do to get it, impart some sort of deeper significance. This is like when we were kids and you realized that the Nielsen ratings weren't calculated by this magic machine that knew what channel everybody's television was on. Which seemed totally plausible and still seems totally plausible. Like how was it not plausible? Yeah, you'd take a sample size of people.

people and say, ask what they watch and then you figure out from there a scale of what people are watching versus other shows. First Post says has a source that tells her the Times data sources, at least what we think are the Times data sources include Amazon, a distributor for box stores like Target and Walmart and Hudson News, which we see in every airport, individually reporting stores, maybe with an eye toward independent bookstores that they can go to and say, what books are you selling? I believe I've worked at one of the reporters. You can do your homework on that, yeah.

And book scan, which you mentioned is this big data source for how many books are sold that's used widely through the publishing industry. If I wanted to try to game this system and Verspo talks about this in the piece, people that have figured out how to game it, how would I do that? Because the obvious way, right, is like, I'm going to order 10,000 copies of my own book. And that will, I'll spend a lot of money, but that will get me on to the New York Times bestseller list. Times tries to control for very obvious crude manipulation like that. You're talking like the people that used to pay for Twitter followers, right?

You pay 500 bucks for 10,000 bots to follow you, and then that would push you up the algorithm. So what's the slyway that people try to get onto the list? Well, it's less straightforward variations of that, right? I mean, it's just, there was, they talked about one sort of quote unquote marketing company, that sort of did that for you, right? They would send people out to different stores in different places that just buy one or two copies of the book or order them and that would

that would, you know, push it. Obviously, there's some very legit. Reporting stores, right? You go to the indie bookstore, you know they use and say, oh, I'd like two copies of David's new book. And when they start doing it, they're like, well, people are always talking about this Brian Curtis book. But yeah, and then also there's the,

there's also very legitimate ways that people do it, right? Which is to like encourage pre-orders because all those orders, all those pre-orders will count on day one of sales. That's why your favorite authors on Twitter encourage you to do that. And you should support your favorite authors, you know? That's always funny to me and totally legitimate, as you say.

But like, if I go buy my friend's book two months before it comes out, that's going to be a week one thing, which will then boost the numbers, which could then get them onto the best sell list. So this is not a book where it's out there and people are reading reviews and being like, aha, this is a good book. I want to go buy this. or they hear their friend says, you should go buy this new book.

It's awesome. Yeah. This is a marketing thing where you get the word out so people buy it in advance. And then it looks like, or it appears like in the numbers, that there's this week one cavalcade of excitement to buy the book. Yeah.

And then there's people who do pretty close to what you set up top, which is like you have, there are instances of like the Republican National Committee or whatever, the various packs who will just buy tons of copies of a book of someone that they, you know, think tanks will buy the copies of the book that people who work there right or whatever and give them out as gifts to their members or to whoever they're giving out gifts to. And I think The New York Times does their level best to sort of like account for those not being conventional sales.

Like Donald Trump Jr.'s book, yeah. You know, if you say, you know, the New York Times is one thing, you know, the book says over 100,000 copies sold at the top of the paperback. edition. You can sell them any way you want, you know. That's what I want, like the McDonald's style sign on the top of my book. I don't care if it was on the New York Times best sell list. I just want bulk. More than one billion served. In print is the other good one because every Lord knows you print books and they don't sell. They send them right back to the distributor. And half the time they just get set on fire, you know, well, you can print a whole lot of books

without selling a whole lot of them. Check out Sophie Verspo's piece in Esquire, the murky path to becoming a New York Times bestseller. Now to a place where the numbers are always legitimate. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses, the strained pun headline. Yeah. Thursday's headline about a rattlesnake found at a top golf location was a swing and a hiss. Today's headline comes from valued listeners Michael Solomon and David Rosenberg. So in the New York Post, it's a story on the cover of the post about FtX,

crypto guy, Sam Bankman-Fried. Uh-huh. As you might have heard on the pod we did with Katie Baker last week, some of SBF's rumpled mystique came from his unkempt hair. David, his unkempt hair. What was the New York Post's strained pun headline? It's got to be Maine, right? Is it Maine? No.

Oh, okay. Like a little J.K. Rolling here, perhaps. What? Mop? No, no. Right down the middle here. J.K. Rowling. Book series about her character is.

Harry Potter and the... Okay, so let's play with that. Harry... Oh, Harry... I thought it was supposed to be using words that she would use for to describe hair. Harry Plotter. There we go.

Stop the count. Harry Plotter. Harry Plotter. I don't even know, man. All right. He is David Chewbaker. I'm Bright Curtis. Production Magic by Eduardo Ocampo. I'm going to be back later

this week. And then we've got two new episodes of the press box to keep you warm over the holidays. Monday, December 26, David, we'll have our Year in Media podcast. Revisit all the big stories, birth, deaths, everything in between. And then on Wednesday, December 28th, I want to start a new little mini franchise here

at the old press box. It's going to be called One Perfect Story. Oh. You know the Twitter account One Perfect Shot about the movies? Uh-huh. This is One Perfect Story. We pick a story that has a handy peg and we bring the author on to tell us about how they wrote it.

In this case, you'll remember 10 years ago, David, you and I were. sitting in our computers when Stephen Roderick published a story in the New York Times magazine about Lindsay Lohan and Paul Schrader making a movie called the Canyons together. Yeah. And we all read it and we're like, wait, he was on the set the whole time

and saw every battle that these two people were having together. Yeah. Roderick joins me next Wednesday for one perfect story. And Shoemaker, you and I are back after the holidays with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, buddy. See you later, Ryan.