The Press Box - GameStop Takes With Katie Baker. Plus: Super Bowl Hype!

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are joined by Katie Baker to help break down the stock market, GameStop, and the ongoing saga (3:00). Then they discuss what the Super Bowl could look like without all of the hype of past years (27:45). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Katie Baker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, the New York Times, Nick Christoff recently wrote a column called A Letter to My Conservative Friends. What I want to know is, if you were writing a column as an open letter, to whom would you address it? Oh, man. I'm sitting here looking out the windows. And for some reason, that probably is the reason. and my head immediately goes to like a letter to my animal friends or a letter to all animal species in our, in our backyard. I don't know.

What is the letter? I don't know what massive group I really have anything to say to that they would listen. Although I'm not sure that Nick Christoph's conservative friends are listening to him necessarily. What is your answer? Well, I just feel this whole open letter style comes from a previous era of punditry. it's a little bit like starting something a modest proposal colon. I don't mean like that modest proposal. I just mean like the,

you know, about like 15, 20 years ago, an open letter to, where you're sort of feeling the power of the internet. Like I can write something and everyone's going to read it. Yeah. I'm going to write an open letter to somebody.

Yes. Yeah, I mean, you could totally, you mean, you could do it too. I mean, it was,

if you were one of the first, first 100 open letters on the internet, it really felt like you were doing something novel. And yeah, you could say things, there was a lot more freedom. I mean, it's from the pre-internet time, there's a freedom to be redundant. It's a freedom to be, you know, same-sy with everybody else. No idea was assumed, presumed to be new, or maybe they all were at that point. Now you've got to try a little bit harder than a letter to my fill in the blank friends, right? Isn't every column an open letter. Like, people who are not conservatives are allowed to read Nick Christoph's column.

Well, I know. But if, you know, the totalitarians that websites all over the world keep turning off comment sections. And it really. David just took it to the total difficult. I'm just kidding. Turn off all your comment sections. That's what we have Twitter for.

Coming up on today's show, why is GameStop such a wonderfully juicy story for reporters? The ringers, Katie Baker is here to explain. explain it to us. Plus, what if we had a Super Bowl without the same amount of Super Bowl hype? Would Tony Romo's voice still get really high when he gets excited? Just like this? All that more on the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. David, first up, we've got a very special guest. She loved the financial industry so much that she became a sports writer.

She just wrote a fantastic explainer dictionary about the game. Stop Saga. She is ringer, staff writer. Katie Baker. Katie, thanks for coming on the press box. Hello, fellas. Thanks for having me. I remember when I first met Katie and she had this great, I mean, she had this reputation was burnished by the fact that she had a real job in finance and was writing about sports for fun. But then when she left the financial job to write about sports full time, it's like we really got her. It was like we, we nabbed her. And now, you know, she gets to write about about GameStop stocks when things go crazy on the side. So I'm glad you're here, Katie.

It's been fun to watch CNBC all day. It's bringing back some repressed memories. So help out two financially illiterate podcasters here. Why is the GameStop story so interesting for reporters to cover? I think first of all, what always makes things interesting is just the there's a layer of absurdity. Like it's a layer of absurdity on top of a lot of really important pillars. And so it's as a result, anyone can understand it, even if they don't understand anything

about what's actually going on. They can still understand that it's funny that people on Reddit are talking about chicken tenders and bringing down Wall Street. So if that's your level of grasping it, that's still interesting to read about and to text your friends about. And then there's kind of an escalating, you know, constellation of takes and, and opinions and news going on throughout. So, you know, I was kind of thinking about how I used to love New York Magazine's, the undulating curve of shifting expectations. It kind of looked like a stock chart. It kind of was a stock chart. It was about,

you know, the hype to something and the backlash and the backlash to the backlash and the, you know, reconsidering everything at the end. And I just feel like that's what's been going on. You know, you, you, you hear about bringing down Wall Street and then you hear, actually, they're not bringing down Wall Street because Wall Street's in on both sides of the trade. And then you have this app Robin Hood that I think a lot of people have probably started to tinker with over the past year, you know, whether or not you're, you've graduated to the Reddit point of it, or you're just kind of, you know, looking at it. It's a really cool app and it's really well-made app. fun to use. So, you know, there's just so many aspects to it. Stevie Cohen's involvement,

you know, Jim Kramer, it's just, there's, there's just a lot to grab onto no matter who you're writing for. There's probably an angle that's relevant to you. You mentioned, you mentioned Steve Cohen, new Mets owner, former Twitter user. Uh, RIP, pour one out. I think that, you know, I'm not sure there's any reason to demonize him at all. but what I did find about his interaction with Barstow's Dave Portnoy interesting was that he seemed to be

he himself seemed to be slightly oblivious to the reason why people were interested in the story it seemed like and I guess as someone who has paid more attention to this world in her lifetime than either of us ever will I mean as someone who still I'm sure pays attention

to some degree or can wrap their mind around it do you was it shocking to you that this was the story that grabbed everybody's attention, or do you, or is it, is it, is it just clearly one that you can just get your fingers into? So yes, everyone is just, you know, that you understand why it's so, so it's all, all encompassing now. Well, it's kind of, you know, I was thinking when I was writing sort of a dictionary of terms about all this for the ringer.com. Thank you for doing that. I was thinking about bubbles and stock market bubbles through the past and, you know, kind of

the day trading phenomenon in the late 90s, which by the way, I want to come back to because I want to ask you guys what you remember about that because it was an interesting time in my life too. But with Steve Cohen, what's interesting to me is that he is someone who, when I worked in finance and he was at SAC Capital before that got kind of taken down by regulators eventually, but he was known as just this very shadowy figure, this, you know, the sort of Dr. Claw, didn't talk to the press almost ever. You know, you only knew about him

through what you heard from some analyst friend of yours that you were talking to at Dorians or whatever. And then he bought the Mets. Then suddenly he's Uncle Stevie on Twitter, you know, asking people what kind of ice cream cone helmets they want. And I think, I honestly think he got a little used to piling around with people on Twitter. You know, those of you who read his tweets, it was like very specific syntax, you know, not just two spaces after a period, but two spaces before a period.

And then all of a sudden when, you know, he had kind of a, the tough night that he talked about and was like, keep it upstock jockeys. And I think he just wasn't prepared for the combination of all the people pouring into talking to him, kind of really understanding, like, he sees himself as a trader. I think that's what he was talking about with Portnoy. He's like, you and me were just two guys trying to make a buck out on the trading floor, which is a little disingenuous. But the fact that he actually sort of had to log off,

it was all like a very, you know, kind of a supernova of a Twitter account. I just think the combination of him being involved with, you know, infusing more money in and to Melvin's, Capitol, which was kind of his protege, the guy that runs Melvin Capital. So I don't know, like, who made the call that he needed to get off Twitter. He said his family was getting correct. I don't know what that refers to. But, you know, that was just like that.

And that's one tiny little angle of like this whole story that has a gravitational force of sorts. That was another thing that really interested me was the everybody's a pundit quality of GameStop. Because if we had like a great scandal in sports, Mark Cuban might weigh in. But Bob Kraft wasn't going to weigh in. And Tiger Woods isn't going to weigh in. But here it seems like everybody has weighed in. Is that a quality of financial journalism or is that unique to GameStop, do you think? I think there's always, you know, there's hashtag fin twit is always a very rollicking place on Twitter with a lot of opinions flying and people being accused.

I mean, there's people I follow on there that I don't even really know who they are, but they're always, like, in a feud with this other person that I don't know who they are. and it's like been going for years. So there's a lot of that always happening. But, you know, this is the kind of thing that my mother-in-law, when I posted my article, you know, texted, oh, my husband Sam was just asking if I knew what GameStop was. So it really got to a different layer where you started having it on, not just CNBC, but on CNN and on the nightly news.

And, you know, I'm sure the Today Show, SNL, like all those things, it captured their attention. Because, I mean, at its root, this is about GameStop. Like, we all have been to the mall and seen, walked past GameStop or stood in line at GameStop. It's not a very exciting, futuristic place. I don't think it ever even once was, even when video games were the future. And so it just pulls people in. We're not talking about some company called, you know, I don't even know, Melvin Capital.

Like, it's, we're not talking, you know, as soon as you say GameStop, people know what that is, the stomach's head, and it's like a way in. It is. I mean, and again, thank you for the explainer. I, as soon as this thing started getting enough traction that, that Ringer editors were discussing it, I dropped our editor, Bing Glickson a note and said, we need to publish a piece called What is a Stock? Because people are already jumping too far ahead.

You didn't do that. You're too smart to have written that, but you got close enough that I actually could digest it. So I appreciate it. But yeah, GameStop is tangible. I was there myself, like within the past two weeks. And I think that, and honestly, when this thing started happening, one, you can understand this sort of emotional connection to whether or not you're a GameStop patron. You can understand why people, you know, there is an emotional aspect to the story, right?

It's not just people trying to get the short sellers. It's people who have a little bit of nostalgia for GameStop in their hearts, right? I mean, that's a real thing that they've had experience with. And I also, but the thing that occurred to me at the time was I thought about the guy that literally two weeks ago in the store convinced us very politely that our 12-year-old probably shouldn't get this cyberpunk game because it was too, you know, rated R for him. And we're just like, okay, cool, like, thanks for doing that. And I knew this kid was like, this kid would have been one of my friends, you know, in the 10th grade.

And I couldn't help but think, like, that kid could lose his job. You know, and like the whole generation of that kid is not going to have a job because of everything that's happening. So there is something deep, there is something, like I said, tangible and personal that you were getting at. What do you think, do you think that at the end of the day this is a, I mean, you wrote an explainer. Do you think that this situation is itself sort of enough of an explainer for average people like me and Brian to wrap our heads around what's going on?

Is this going to be our way in? to discussing the stock market for the next several years? I think what it does do, I mean, it's hard. Like, there are certain things on my explainer that I couldn't even take a crack at. Like, I sort of understand what they are when I, you know, from my background, but I could never explain it to someone, let alone explain it to someone that really doesn't know what a stock is. And that's a lot of people.

And even it's kind of like trying to explain the rules of NFL football to someone. Like, you know it. but when you say, okay, you've got four downs to get a first down. It's like all of a sudden, and someone's like, I have no idea what you just said. And so there's a little aspect of that to it. But I do think it just shows the interconnectedness of everything from, you know, the markets to the money to, you know,

one thing that's been really interesting as, and I think has also been one of the reasons that this has had some staying power is it's starting to show a little bit of a, not dichotomy, but just like a little bit of a cleavage between high finance and high tech. And I think those, like, you're starting to see, it's like that's something that's interesting to me is you have these finance guys who were sort of the story of the, of the aughts, you know, these hedge fund guys. And now it's like these VC guys and these tech guys. And, you know, you have some going on CNBC and kind of taking it to the anchors. And then the anchors are

a little taken aback. And so there's these very real trends. And yet, obviously, those People are raising money from people with money. And when Robin Hood sort of found itself in some regulatory financial straits, you know, it's still a part of the capital markets, even if it's an app. And so it still has to deal with boring things like clearing houses, but they're not so boring. So that's been like a fun tension that I am excited to continue to watch. You mentioned Jim Kramer earlier. What has this done for the discourse, if that's the right word for it on CNBC?

Well, CNBC, I haven't really seen Kramer so much, like, in the past few days. But, you know, Jim Kramer, for those who don't know, is kind of the, he had a show on CNBC called Mad Money. And you probably, like, heard it or seen like a spoof of it or something. You know, he's got his sleeves rolled up. He's stalking around this, like, very small cramped man financial cave type thing. And, but it's a very, it's like a call-in radio show. basically. Like he's taking calls, someone saying, you know, what do you think about this company? And he's kind of doing on the fly analysis. It's a really fun show. It was a big kind of TV hit.

So he's always positioned himself as kind of the, you know, the voice of the little guy investor. And now we have these, you know, supposedly little guy investors. And it's kind of a Frankenstein out of his control a little bit. But, you know, so I think CNBC largely, the number one thing that I've heard on watching CNBC over the past week, which has gotten really annoying, is that everyone has to preface every statement by saying, look, I'm all for people being able to invest in the market. And I'm all for a person making their first trade. But what happens to these people when they're left holding the bag? And like, that's fine. Like, that's not, I don't disagree with, like, having that line. of thought. It's just a little disingenuous, given that they go to commercial and it's, you know, we'll buy your jewelry for gold and, you know, all these, all these, what CNBC even is in general and what it stands for. So the attitude on CNBC has been really fun to watch. It's been, you know, it honestly reminds me of watching CNBC during like the market crash, just in terms of the spirit of it, the sort of nobody knowing what's happening next.

except in this case, it's just a little funnier. You know, you're talking, they're trying to explain to the viewers, like, what 10Bs are. And so,

yeah, CNBC's, you know, it's funny, I turned on CNN, and I was like, so boring. I need to get back to CNBC,

and that's probably not a good thing. Are they, forgive me, I haven't watched it for a second. Are they, are they, are they, are they,

are they, are they, is CNBC treating this, like, election night? Like, are they, is Jim Kramer

working 15-hour shifts so that just to get the top performers in front of the cameras for as much time as possible? Or is this just, right? Or this status quo, like, everything is going as normal. There's just a lot more eyeballs on us than we're used to. It's funny now that you say that, Jim Kramer's totally the like sort of finance Steve Kornacki. I haven't seen that much of him, but I might have not been watching at the right hours. But the thing that they keep saying that I'm laughing at is they've sort of decided to name this whole thing, the Reddit Rebellion. And they came talking about the Reddit rebellion. It's just a little silly. And it's just, you know, you watch all these people and you, every now and then they'll

have a representative sort of of the people or someone that isn't, you know, the chief macro strategist at XP investment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And when they do, it mixes it up. But otherwise, it's a lot of befuddled people who aren't really sure, like, you. how did what to take of this and uh it's been very chaotic energy have they figure have people have the guests figured out they did they figure out pretty quickly to did it going on to cnbc and and crying about how they're losing money is is a bad idea like it did they or the the rich folks realizing that they can actually you know they did they're those clips can get passed around Twitter there's definitely some scolding um going on but you this is sort of a tangent but you made me

think of it. One really kind of funny side note was that some guy on Twitter made a joke like I just took out a second mortgage on my parents' home or something and put it all into GameStop, something like that. And one thing led to another

and the New York Post ran an article taking those at face value. And it reminded me of very like hanging on the flippity flop you know, era just shenanigans that was very enjoyable and low stakes to watch.

We had a person send us a Twitter joke last week that deep fucking value, who is a Reddit user mixed up and all this will be the hero of a Michael Lewis book in like three years, which may be true. But Katie, you texted me yesterday to alert me that we have entered the Ben Mesrick portion of this whole thing. Can you give us an update on that? Yes. So Ben Mesrick, the author of the author of,

of such favorites as bringing down the house and the accidental billionaires, which became the social network movie that we all know and love. As he, I think, did with his book proposal for the accidental billionaires, he has sold it to, he sold a new book proposal called,

I think the anti-social network is like the working title of it, to MGM, I think for a movie. So the book The book hasn't been written Obviously the proposal itself I think is still Hasn't even been auctioned yet But already the wheels are turning And then I just saw today actually

That Netflix I think is ordering Some kind of series that has Their favorite Netflix star I'm sure I'm going to mispronounce his name Because I haven't talked to another human in the year But Noah Centennial is that how you pronounce it? He's in all the he's in like all the boys I love before all those cool young movies.

And then the one thing that I'm concerned about with this project is that I saw that Professor Scott Galloway is an advisor for the script. And I don't even know how to explain his recent take that he made. But he basically has decided that this is all a story about like in-cell young men in their parents' basement who, you know, are lonely and untouched by the hand of another. and so he has been sort of doubling down on that. I just saw some weird news appearance from MSNBC, I think. So he's a advisor on the script.

So I'm very interested to see if this is just like a weird, you know, movie about someone, a sad young man. I did take this in. I took it, I saw that quote. The background of that segment is just kind of indecipherable. He has all these newspapers like weirdly arranged as his backdrop. But he was a crazy monologue where like, looking away from the camera, he was ranting about the lost, like, social capital of young

men obsessing over the Robin Hood app instead of making money and meeting girls. Like, it was the, it was the most bizarre thing ever. And then, by the way, all those girls, he then pivots to say they're all in their rooms cutting themselves because of Instagram. So look forward to that movie on Netflix in the coming year. But, yeah, the Ben Mesrick one, you know, he's kind of got a track record of this. exact type of story. And based on his Twitter, he seems to be a former GameStop visitor himself. So I think he's excited about it. It's a really interesting story for a lot of reasons.

And I think that there's a certain, you can, you can neatly parallel the way that the average people are excited about it with the way that, you know, everybody from Scott Galloway to the various, you know, execs and CEOs that we've seen make fools themselves on CNBC. Their, their befuddlement is like is at a perfect right angle to everyone. everybody else's interest in the whole thing, right? Because my wife, we were watching this, we went into the news about it and talking about it the other day. My wife said, this is what makes me so mad about conspiracy theories, because there's so much to be outraged about, like, right here happening in the real world. And I said, but here's the thing, like, Q is actually

way easier to understand than the stock market. Maybe this is going to be people's, well, I don't want to say this is the cue of the stock market, but this, this makes it understandable in a certain way and it certainly makes, listen, we feel so much of what we do on outrage now. This does make it easier to be outraged about the way that the system seems to be rigged, right? Yeah, and it's also like another thing that's interesting is that, like I said, it's so funny and it's so silly, and it sort of has that in common with elements of Q, once, if you remove the, you know, insurrectionist outcome of it. But similarly, in a sense, it has like much bigger ramifications And so, for example, AMC theaters is another one that was kind of identified as a stock that a lot of people began to invest in,

but that a lot of sort of the smart money was already short. So it kind of fit the, and, you know, you have a little bit of a nostalgia. Not that that's what they're picking on, but it sort of seemed like there was a theme there. But, you know, so they, their stock price went up so much that the $39 billion hedge fund, that had a huge stake in AMC beforehand, decided to basically get out of their stake while the getting was good. And, you know, at the same time, AMC is now trying to use their high stock price to sell stock to the market so that they can pay down some of their debts.

There's, like, actual corporate finance going on fueled by some of this. And again, everyone's kind of interconnected and, you know, no one can really parse anyone's motives. Like I was listening on Clubhouse last way. I hate myself for even saying that first to Elon Musk, even worse. And he was interviewing the guy, the CEO of Robin Hood. And he was saying to him, like, this sounds shady. Is this shady? Is this suspect? And so, you know, you've got the conspiracy going all the way to the top as it always does, both in terms of, you know, the accusations behind it and the people who believe it. Before you go, Katie, You want to bring us back to late 90s day trading?

Because I knew David in the late 90s. I'm pretty sure he wasn't day trading. I'm pretty sure neither one of us knew what day trading really was in the late 90s. So how does that? But yeah, but you guys, I bet you guys remember the like the Pets.com Super Bowl ads and those sorts of things. Sure. Sure. How does this remind you of that very special period in American life?

It reminds there's two things. One is that at my high school computer lab, I just remember there was this guy that would always fit. And he had a small world. Was that the name of like the really old fantasy sports? Like one of those, it was called like small, small world or sports or something. Oh, yeah. And this was like in 1990s, eight or so. And then he had like e-trade this new thing, you know,

and he was day trading from the school computer lab. So I remember that. And then I also remember that when I was a really, really cool teenager, I was an online chat room monitor for a company called Talk City. And I had stock options and Talk City went public and this was into the big dot-com boom. And I remember my dad came home and said, this is amazing. Like this is going to pay for your college education. Like he was so excited.

And I think we can all probably guess what happened to my talk city options that expired worthless and the company that stopped existing. but I was only like 13 years old and I was kind of wrapped up in this huge bubble at the time. And there's, you know, there's a lot of things now that remind me of it. I don't know that this is necessarily exactly the same, but just the frothiness and the way it like penetrates the mainstream. And all of a sudden someone's like, maybe I should be buying, you know, the silver ETF without having any, you know, interest in the actual silver market behind it. all right you can read the game stop stock market saga explainer dictionary i got through that whole read without messing up on the ringer dot com right now katy is tweeting through this at at katy bakes katy thank you so much for coming on the book wait before we call this a day i just

want to answer i want to answer the question that katy asked earlier small small world small world fantasy uh was acquired at some point by the sporting news which was and there was a huge like bracketed lips is here. Now has been most recently acquired by DeZone. So maybe we should get John Skipper on the phone and see it. It's all connected. Katie and John Skipper are bringing small world fantasy

back. You heard it here first. Call me Skipper. Thanks for coming on the press box, Katie. Thank you guys. David, it's time for the overword 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. Send your nominees to

at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. All I got this week were GameStop jokes. That's all I got personally myself. So let's do this. That's great. Yeah. Remember when we were just getting Bernie Sanders mittens jokes? Yeah.

And then we just switched over completely to game. I mentioned this last week, but how is it possible that in the post-Trump era, we are closer to a Twitter monoculture than we were during the Trump era? It's a great point. that's a great point I have no answer for you we can perhaps explore that on a future episode

in the meantime David it was an overwork Twitter joke to write any tweet telling showrunner Brian Coppelman that the GameStop saga should be the next season of billions it was an overwork Twitter joke to tweet a giff of Mel Gibson

and Braveheart saying hold and finally it was a very overworked Twitter joke to write thanks to the Robin Hood app if you want to see some bad trades, you need to wait on the Houston Texans.

Thanks to Zach Barnett, Don Steele, Ben, Lincoln, Truly, and Zach Brooks. If you're waiting until Super Bowl Sunday to reload your Twitter jokes, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, time for the notebook dump.

And I want to talk to you about Super Bowl hype, particularly the lack of Super Bowl hype. Because if you remember this week last year, I did this podcast from Radio Row. Oh, yeah. And I still remember the strange looks from the sports radio guy from Milwaukee or wherever when he would hear me talking about the Ukraine scandal.

We were the only two people having the Ukraine conversation in Miami. This year, I'm not in Tampa. And most of the hundreds and hundreds of media people who would be there in a normal year aren't either. So it strikes me that we're in the strange place of having a Super Bowl next Sunday without the amount of Super Bowl hype that we're used to. It is kind of weird also that they broke that this is the first time

that someone's had a home game for the Super Bowl. Is it ever? Or was there one way in the past? It's like the bucks winning somehow broke the spacetime continuum. So the video game won't allow fans into the stadium or whatever they guess they're going to allow a few. But it's just it's all so bizarre.

I'll tell you last year, the single kind of, you know, let us say, I don't know if saddest is the right word, but the kind of most secondary Super Bowl media interview opportunity was the tourism people from Tampa, because they were in Miami saying, hey, hey, Tampa, next year, we're here. If you want to interview us about next year's Super Bowl, we're here. That was not exactly a desirable interview. But I just got an email saying, hey, we're still here. Tampa tourism, if you want to hit us up about it. anything. It's like, oh. Wow. Yeah, I don't know. I want to start here. Is there any bit of Super Bowl chatter that would have come from Tampa this week that you actually miss? Well, I mean,

it's an interesting thought experiment. It's hard to, it's hard to, I've definitely been sitting here over the past, what, 16, 18 hours, trying to imagine how the Matt Stafford trade to the Rams would have played to a more coalesced, a more quarantine, sorry for the, sorry for the pun, NFL media. It would have had a different tune to it,

although I can't quite imagine what exactly it would sound like. So, I mean, there's a, there's missing something, and then there's missing something, I guess. When it comes to specifically to the Super Bowl, I can't say that I feel like I'm missing anything, missing anything in particular, but as much as his radio row stuff was, well, we talked about

it last week, it's not some like, you know, paragon of sports journalism, but it was sort of inescapable. And I've barely, you know, had ESPN on. I feel like it's in the amount that I would normally have done it. It would be, I'm not, I'm not consuming in the same volume as I would in years past. And that can only, I mean, I can only point towards, well, how much, my life is different in an era of coronavirus, but also besides that, to how the Super Bowl is being covered differently. And that's the thought experiment here.

It's like, we know the Super Bowl is going to be huge. It's going to have 100 million people watching it, the biggest single TV event in American life, as always. I don't think that number is going to change very much because of the coronavirus. But what is it like not to have that red carpet walk up of a week of people just telling you to watch the Super Bowl? Yeah.

Because that's what they're doing. You know, all of us ringer people who went last year, we can consider ourselves good journalists. We're doing this the right way. But whatever we're doing, we are reminding people to watch a Super Bowl. Oh, that's why they let you in the door, right? I mean, it's not something is a conflict of advertising. It's not a conflict of interest to accept that. I mean, that's it.

Absolutely. No, that is, right? And you sort of at some point go, oh, I'm here providing free advertising. Even if you want the full Hunter S. Thompson and just sliced and diced, you know, whatever the media apparatus around the Super Bowl is, you wouldn't detract interest. You'd probably actually increase it even by that method. Give those people something to talk about. It's also something kind of funny, I think, that's happened over the course of the pandemic, which is, remember when the NBA shut down in March? And like a couple of days later, Adam Schaefter started tweeting out NFL free agent signings like nothing. happen. And it was like sports has stopped in America, but somehow we still have sports hype

shoulder programming still going on. I almost feel like that has now flipped and we now have actual sports. Like we have an awesome Super Bowl matchup ready to go Sunday. But we don't have as much of the hype anymore because of travel restrictions because of just a weird way the world works now. And it's almost kind of gone the other way. yeah i mean it's again i've not been watching to the degree that i have in years past but i feel like i heard a lot more talk about the marketability of the brady mahomes matchup before that was the official matchup right it was there was a lot of kind of conjecture but but now that it's on the table it just feels like it almost it feels like like people are kind of putting their heads down

and trying to get to the super bowl right like like Let's get there and like just grab on to as many viewers as you can grab. And let's get there without, you know, messing this up somehow. Totally. Because everybody needs it. CBS, which is showing the Super Bowl, absolutely needs the Super Bowl to happen on schedule. Mm-hmm. And like every sports writer in America needs a Super Bowl to happen.

So that they get to write pieces and be useful and that their various sites and TV networks and all that stuff get viewers and readers. Like everybody has a collective interest in this coming off, which I guess you could probably say about the entire NFL season, which by the way, miraculously has basically come off if we're knocking on wood here. Yeah, it's true. I mean, and we're going to get, you know, so many articles about the commercials,

is that we always get all these, you know, all this like industry response to the commercials that run during the Super Bowl. This might be the year where that matters more than ever. But it's going to be an interesting thing to parallel that with the, or to set that aside the NFL coverage, too. It's just a different year. It's hard to imagine exactly what we're going to get. I also feel, David, like, every time there's a big sporting event,

I'm always like, I read all the hype, right? I read all the rumors before NBA free agency. I read all the mock drafts and prospect breakdowns before the NFL draft. I'm like, one year, I'm just going to walk in here cold. I'm not going to read it. I'm not going to waste all my time. and I'm going to see if my enjoyment is any different, plus I will have gained like 900 hours of my life back.

Yes. This is kind of our chance to do it with the Super Bowl, right? It's true. It's totally true. We could go blind on this one. It would not be difficult. And I'm not sure. I mean, I can only speak to my own experience right now.

I don't feel like I'm lacking in information. I don't feel like when I sit down in front of the TV to watch the Super Bowl with my wife and kids, when they ask me questions about what's going on, I don't feel like I'm going to have a lack of words coming out of my mouth. Like I feel like I know enough about the Bucks and the Chiefs this season to explain what's going on and sort of set the stage and, you know, get some, you know, get in some direction of the odds. I don't know that. I'm not sure we'll be missing out.

Yeah, I can still. fake my way through football analysis without even a week of Super Bowl hype. Like I can just do that, right? Like that was a great pass. Oh, that was, you know, Tom Brady, wow. You got to take your hat off to him. I don't know if I need Radio Rota to quite manufacture that take.

True. Other thing I want to run by you is this whole idea that you and I talked about before the season of what is football on television going to look like this year? What does sports on television going to be? to look like this year. And I've been talking to a few people this week just about various things. And one thing that's come up with producers over and over again is, can you believe how normal everything looked this year? Yeah. I mean, even the stuff about the can crowd noise kind of went away after a few weeks after we all got used to it. And some of it, by the way,

was pretty good. Yeah. Sports looked like sports this year. And I think that's a pretty, probably pretty surprising and also a pretty considerable accomplishment. No, it's a huge feat. It's a huge feat. I mean, the infection issue, and that was not a non-story this season, but maybe

less of one than it could have been. I mean, that sort of seems a little bit like a miracle, especially considering their direction it felt like it was going in the first kind of third of the season. But the presentation, I mean, that is just, you know, pure unabashed kudos to the NFL and their television partners for making this whole thing feel normal.

We did talk about it at the beginning. I mean, I think that we were both hopeful, but it was just, I mean, that it would seem, that it would, you know, feel normal. I'm sure there's going to be an incredible oral history of how the season felt to the players at some point down the road. But for sitting at home, I mean, podcasts that we listen to that spend hours and hours breaking down every week, having. talked about the ambiance since week three.

You know what I mean? It's just been a non-factor. No. And I feel, you know, like watching the NFC championship game this weekend. There's incredible Tom Brady to Scotty Miller passed right before the end of the first half. Mm-hmm. And Joe Buck called it. And then Troy Hickman says something like, oh my gosh.

Which was a perfect call because that's exactly what I was saying on the couch at the time. Mm-hmm. And I remember sort of like reeling from that moment and then coming back and be like, This just is like a football game. Yeah. It's like something amazing happened in a football game. And again, I think that's probably partly just because the football was pretty normal other than the crowd. Everything looked normal.

But it is, I think if you and I had said that in the summer, that would have been kind of an upset. Yeah. I don't think that would have been, I don't think that would have been the most obvious answer. I mean, but of course, now to bring this back around, we're walking, I mean, we're entering a stadium. for the Super Bowl, and one of the storylines that we're not getting partly because media has drawn down, but because the stadium's going to be, have a severely reduced capacity, and travel is a non-starter. We always get stories every year about how much of it, how much each team's fan base has traveled

to the game, right? When you get into the stadium, does it feel like these are, is it 50-50? Is this going to be, you know, has Mahomes and the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the chiefs. if they earned 40% of the fan base in Super Bowl Sunday, you know, whatever. I mean, it's just not going to be a factor this year, right? Or it's not going to be a story.

If it is, it's going to be like a sociological study. I mean, it's a, there's certainly going to be some things that we're used to hearing every single year, but there's just no means to discuss it, except to discuss it in the negative. Yes. That is always a weird one. And that will be, yeah, the, what does the crowd look like?

Who makes up the crowd thing will be one of the, one of the like genuinely interesting and unresolved things about Super Bowl Sunday. Should we in here, by the way, with the dirty secret of why reporters like to go to the Super Bowl? Please, might go right ahead. There's the covering football part. But equal and perhaps even bigger than that, David, is the status symbol part. My organization sent me to the Super Bowl. Here I am at the Super Bowl.

If I haven't emphasized this, I'm at the Super Bowl while I am making this kind of content. I'm sure you have a little bit of this with WrestleMania and some of the paper views over the years, right? Like there is a certain, there is seeing it in person, which is cool and, you know, doing all. I was going to say for a second, I was worried you were going to say it was for seeing the Super Bowl, but I, but go ahead. There is, you know, the stuff you can observe firsthand, but then there is being there, right? There's a little bit of a trade convention aspect of it. Oh, yeah. Where you look at other people and go, oh, you're here too. Oh, we're here too. That means we're the, we're in the certain, you know,

echelon of sports writerdom. Yeah. And, and I guess these days that our publication is in a certain echelon of solvency. Yeah. Oh, of course. Yeah. And, you know, in a year where solvency is more of an issue than ever, people aren't going to be able to flaunt that. I don't know. I mean, do you think that affects coverage at all? Well, they think that'll affect coverage this year at all? I mean, do you think people are going to be producing less because they're not sort of having to justify the expenditure of travel and everything else? I think probably the opposite. I think they'll probably produce more because one, all of us are, I think, running in the hamster wheel as fast as we can to try to justify our places in the sports writing universe right now. But also, I think people are just more efficient in a way. And I guess that's the other idea at play here is just,

you know, what's all this going to look like next year in Los Angeles? You know, is everybody going to get on a plane and go again? Because we've proven that we can do it at home. That's sort of the big question of the whole pandemic as it relates to the media. In some sense, the Super Bowl coverage and Radio Row sort of epitomizes it. It's just so sort of, what's the Latin phrase here? So it's so it's generous. So it's so it is what it is to the extent that like its absence doesn't prove that it doesn't

need to exist. I mean, we all knew it didn't need to exist, but its absence sort of legitimizes the whole thing in a certain way. Like, we're going to go back to normal. We haven't figured out a half measure for Radio Row. And I think of all of the things, I don't know that there is one, really, you know? I think it's either Radio Row this like, this just, you know, earth-sucking amoeba that just, you know, pulsing in and out of our lives, or it's just not going to be there. Like, it's not this year. So I mean, I hope that it continued to exist

because it is, I mean, it really is something special. Yeah. It's, um, is an old football player would sell us boner pills,

but not sell us boner pills on radio road. Maybe we could find a halfway measure for that. Transaction to happen. Speaking of Super Bowl hype, David and I are going to be doing a special podcast after the Super Bowl. See, Bill and Cousin Sal, David and Kevin and Nora and everybody else,

they get to do the actual game. You and I get the announcers. We get Jim Nance and Tony Romo. We get the Super Bowl commercials. We get the whole media apparatus. So join us Sunday after the game for that. And now it's time for David Schuemaker guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah.

Thursday's headline about post-lockdown economies was I get locked down, but I get up again. Today's headline comes from Charlie Couts. It's from the Tampa Bay Times. a.k.a. the city hosting the Super Bowl. Now, Tampa, David, for the reasons we just discussed, is in a very weird spot. Because the Buccaneers are in the Super Bowl, which is awesome, but they're not getting the fans and hotel bookings, which from an economic standpoint is not awesome.

I think that probably gets you enough. What is the Tampa Bay Times' strained pun headline? That's all that I get? Yeah. Okay, Tampa, so Tampa, Keep this real simple. The quarantine Super Bowl, we don't get the,

they're not getting with the, the, the money. The money. As much money. Super, is it a Super Bowl pun that I'm looking for here? No, I think you're going to go with the name of the team is, is what you want to go on. A buck. Yeah, bucks.

The bucks ain't here. Oh, the bucks, bucks, bucks stop. Bucks stop here. That's really good and probably better than actually what it is. Bucks, but not. But I'm going to let you off the hook. Don't me, bugs, but not. Bucks.

Bucs, Bucs, but not Bucke us, but not Buckey. Man. Yeah, he is David Shoemaker. Yeah, I would, I would. I would have gone with the Bucks stop here, I think. I think you could have made that work. The newspaper version of that is the Bucks Bucks, Bucks stop here.

He is David Schumacher. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. Thursday, reminder is our special show, How to Cover the Senate. And then we're back Sunday with all the stuff about the Super Bowl. Join us for more Luke Wormt takes about the media. See you then, David.

Later, Brian.