The Press Box - Is AI Coming for Your Media Job? Plus, the Passion of Tony Romo and the Smugness of Book Collectors.

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Bryan and David react to the news that BuzzFeed will be utilizing artificial intelligence throughout the company and discuss how this could impact the media landscape (5:47). Then, they talk through weekend media takeaways from the NFC and AFC championship games, from the lack of replay shots to Tony Romo’s overly enthusiastic performance in the booth (19:20), before weighing in on Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s column in The Guardian where she discusses the cult of book ownership and why she’s giving away her books (39:46). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Derek Thompson, the host of the podcast, Plain English. We tackle technology, politics, culture, history, everything that's happening in the world and why it matters. New episodes of Plain English drop every Tuesday and Friday on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Yes. The Philadelphia Eagles have made the Super Bowl. I'm aware, yeah? Two things about that are important. There's the football part.

Mm-hmm. And more seriously for our purposes, the empowerment of Eagles fans in the media. More seriously. No, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of Eagles fans in the media. It's not like this is news. They've been in a Super Bowl in recent memory. You know, during my time at the Ringer, there have been any number of meetings that I've found out of after the fact. and said, I wish I would have been invited to that one.

I think maybe that in some ways, the most desirable gathering that I wasn't invited to was the Super Bowl watch party that year when just the Philly crew gathered to watch the game. Yeah, but there's a lot of them. There's a lot of Philly fans in the media, not just here. But this is the thing. Eagles fans don't just come out of the woodwork when they make the Super Bowl. Oh, no.

They're around all the time. Mm-hmm. and all they need is a little shove, a little nudge, a couple of 49er quarterbacks to get injured during the NFC championship game, and they get even louder. Yeah, I mean, I live in Eagles country, broadly defined, but spend a lot of time where my wife's family lives over in Bucks County, where, you know, the land of the only thing that, you know,

outnumbers the hand-painted Trump signs are the Eagles inflatables in people's yards. It's a sounds like a fun place. But no, I mean, listen, there's Eagles fans. I mean, everybody's an Eagles fan when you're over there. And it's part of the,

it's part of the culture. It's not a matter of whether or not you're a fan. It's a matter of, are you just like a, I got a baseball cap for Father's Day Eagles fan or you have a front yard inflatable Eagles fan. You know, I'm taking over my block

with my enthusiastic fandom. I wrote a little bit, earlier about all the Eagles fans that are in the political media. This is a group that includes Jake Tapper, Ken Vogel over at the New York Times, Casey Hunt, Hallie Jackson, our pal Justin Sink, Robert Costa at CBS News, Dave Weigel over there at Semaphore. I'm starting to regret my own part in empowering these people.

Yeah. They've got, but they've got a secret email. chain or semi-secret email chain in Washington just devoted to the Eagles that a sitting congressman is on and that a sitting congressman co-founded? Really? People are among you, David. Yeah. I don't even remember the first time I met living in New York.

I don't remember the first time I met somebody from Philly. I don't know if I ever met anybody that identified as being from Philly. And part of this is, you know, you can be, you can live a long way away from Philly and sort of be in the Philly sphere, but not, you know. You wouldn't, if someone asked you where you were from, you'd say I'm from whatever, whatever in eastern Pennsylvania. But it does, they do kind of fly under the radar until the Eagles win. Casey fans seem so, you know, shy and retiring by comparison. Oh, yeah.

Next two weeks, I mean, Eric Stone Street's going to do a hit on Rich Eisen. That's nice. maybe somebody books Paul Rudd. Well, that's nice too. But it's nothing like Eagle Fandom. Nothing at all. You did an interview with Angelo Cotaldi, the voice of Philly Sports Radio mornings.

I've set up before and I've said it again. I don't even know how to put it into words, but all it took was me living out here for a week turning on the sports radio, not even a week, a day. And there's something about Philly Sports Radio where you just know this is a different. Something different is going on out here.

I remember when I was a kid in the early 90s, the Cowboys and Eagles would have a big game. And the first cultural experience I ever had with Philadelphia, other than maybe the Rocky movies, was Angelo or Tony Bruno or one of those Philly radio guys, popping on to Dallas Sports Radio before Cowboys Eagles. And I'm sitting there listening to it, and I'm thinking, wow, Philadelphia seems like a really interesting place.

That's one way to put it. Coming up on today's episode of the pod, we ask, is AI coming for your journalism job? We've got some thoughts on football that was on TV this weekend and the bottomless enthusiasm of one Tony Romo. Plus, wait, there's a middle class cult of book ownership, two of its charter members way in. All that and more on the press box. A part of the ringer. Podcast Network. Oh, media consumers. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantis here. Let me start you off with two news items, David. Okay. Item number one, in December, BuzzFeed laid off 12% of its workforce,

some 180 employees. Item number two, the Wall Street Journal's Alexander Bruel reported last week that, and I am reading the subhead of her story, CEO Jonah Peretti intends for artificial intelligence to play a larger role in the company this year. So how are they going to replace all those? Oh, wait a second. I see. That's not quite that simple because Bruel reports in her Wall Street Journal piece that some of what AI is going to do at BuzzFeed is going to be to soup up their quizzes. the fabled BuzzFeed quiz. Mm-hmm.

Quoting from her story, a quiz to create a personal, romantic comedy movie pitch might ask questions like, pick a trope for your rom-com and tell us an endearing flaw you have. The quiz would produce a unique, shareable write-up based on the individual's responses,

BuzzFeed set. So it's, if it's something that is, that is, materializes after you take a quiz, this is new content that would not exist otherwise. Right? This is not,

there's no, there's no rubric for a human typing up responses in real time. It would take a human a lot of time to personalize each quiz. And Katie Natopoulos of BuzzFeed said the same thing in semiforce media newsletter this week. But I will note for you also this sentence in Buell's article, which is written with exquisite deadpan. Quoting, BuzzFeed remains focused on human-generated journalism in its newsroom.

I'm not quite sure if this fully reaches the Dothbert has too much status, but when you have to start saying that we are still committed to human-generated journalism, you might have already given up a little bit too much. Let me read you one more passage that is going to make your spine tingle in that same way. Again, quoting from Bruel's article, Mr. Peretti expects AI to assist the creative process and enhance the company's content while humans play the role of providing ideas, cultural currency, and inspired prompts. He wrote in his memo.

In 15 years, he wrote, he expects AI and data to help, quote, create, personalize, and animate the content itself, in quote, rather than just curate existing content. Oh my God. I remember when it was Skynet that said that we were, they were still deeply invested in human generated defense systems. And then things went only, things only went great from there.

Listen, this is terrible in any number of ways. It's frightening from a moral standpoint and also like a job standpoint. I will admit that the prospect of some sort of AI writing a first draft of anything I ever wrote is incredibly enticing. Oh, when you're on deadline, doesn't that sound fantastic? I mean, because, like, I don't write barely anymore. But when I would write, it's like I could write. But I felt like what I really was was an editor of the first draft that I wrote when I was drinking. Was there whatever it was.

Like, so yeah, it would be, it would be really nice just to skip that whole first step. That's true. There are a couple of other examples of AI creeping into or somewhere near the newsroom. Last year, Microsoft replaced human news curators on its MSN sites, people who pick stories or write headlines with AI. This year, the website CNET, speaking of SkyNet, published 77, explainers using an AI tool. According to the Verge, 41 of those 77 explainers

required corrections. Now, if a protein-based life form had written 77 pieces and 41 of them had required some kind of correction or editor's note, the protein-based life form would have been fired. Yeah. Well, we don't really know.

I mean, maybe the AI in question was fired. We don't know what the, you know, the AI org chart looks like back there. You can't claim to peek behind the curtain. A source one said, we do not discuss any AI personnel related matters. Yeah, I mean, they're so working out. I'm guessing it wouldn't, I'm guessing if you did have that kind of error, a fireball offense level error. And it's something you wrote, I'm just working out the kinks on this thing is probably not a defense that your, that your manager would really, let you use.

Yeah. Yeah, that's too bad. I mean, should we be terrified, not just for our jobs? I mean, is this a case of, is this a situation where it's only because journalism is so low wattage, you know, in terms of like, concern, high level concerns to people that matter that, that people aren't freaking out more? So low wattage. And I think also doesn't have an obvious. plan to pay for itself in many cases.

That that's why everybody kind of looks at this. It goes, hmm. I mean, I joked about Skynet, but literally if they were just like, if the government was just like, we've decided to outsource all decisions about military development and construction to this group of robots that we've built who can continue everybody, which be like, oh, no, you cannot do that, right? Absolutely. there'd be just a public outrage.

Before we came out, I was just thinking like maybe there are two reasons to be afraid here. One is what you're talking about, the cartoonish press baron who replaces Brian and David with AI. People like Brian and David. The other one would be, what if internet media sites

start publishing so much crap that's pretty close to what AI could come up with? You know, what I mean. Yeah. News happens. Something is announced.

Someone dies. And every website you find does a quicky version of that story. Mm-hmm. That is their own quote unquote write up, all chasing the same thing, not even putting much or any human top spin on their aggregation. And it all sounds the same. And so what you're doing is you may be giving a human, a job to write that stuff up or publish that stuff up in 10 seconds or less.

But you are pushing us toward a world where a lot of the products of journalism might as well as well have been written by AI. Yeah. I mean, if it's junky and indistinct and, you know, people look at it and go, well, that had no value to me at all. I think that there's probably a lot of, you know, people who with some snarker in their voice will say that like it's you know for BuzzFeed to be the on the cutting edge of this is totally appropriate because fill in the blank insult about BuzzFeed journalism or I guess journal writing you know um and yeah I mean anybody that's been a part of writing that sort of pure reaction

piece especially when you know that you're doing it to to put down a you know SEO footprint and you know and not for any any great value knows how that feels to write and knows exactly what talking about. But, and I mean, and frankly, maybe there are some things like that that make, where it actually makes sense, it makes more sense for some sort of AI to be doing it than a human being. I mean, if, if, I don't know. I mean, I guess that the only upshot of this, though, is that it does seem like, even if this is taking writer's jobs and who knows if it actually will, but definitely it actually

will. It does seem to sort of put a greater importance on on like the copy desk and fact checking and other parts of the newsroom that have been largely like set aside over the past 15, 20 years. Doesn't it? You're talking about the human generated newsroom? Yeah. Like, you know, there are a lot of places that don't have much of a copy to copy desk, you know, if any. And certainly like if you're if you're cranking content through AI, there's going to be, there has to be a premium put on checking these things before they go up or as they go up, you know, right, right?

Maybe not. Maybe I'm, maybe I'm just assuming too much about that too. No, but this is like the shoemaker plan for AI writing your first draft. If you're going to do what CNET does and say, hey, AI, write an explainer, then the least you can do is have, and I do mean least,

the least you can do is have, of a human being read it and being like, is this original work? Is this right? Is this something that's going to, you know, calls us to have to apologize for it at the end? And at least for the time being, the editorial presence is incredibly important too, right?

Because you can say, I know, I know in these apps you can say, you know, write me 10,000 words about, whatever, about the latest legal verdict and make it sound like Jeffrey Toobin wrote it or whatever. And they can like shoot. that out, right? You know, well, okay, maybe it's a bad name. But, but, but, you know, they, they can, they can make it happen, but, but in a lot of cases, I think choosing the direction to

point the AI is just as important as, and I mean, choosing the, the, the, the story to assign, you know, in, in, in human terms is, is, is sometimes as significant as the writing, right? And, and, and even though we're talking about a much faster pace, that editorial, that editorial, that editorial eye is still going to be really important for, I mean, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, directing the army of robots. There were some takes about this story. Some people tweeted out one from the Times of London by James Marriott. I'll read you this headline.

AI spells trouble for creatives. About time, too. Machines that can write and paint are a welcome rebuff to the prestige enjoyed by artistic types. One way of looking at it. Okay. And the kicker to the story comes from Alexandra Bruwold. Wells Wall Street Journal piece, quoting BuzzFeed shares more than doubled in value Thursday, closing it $2.9.

Well, that's just perfect. I mean, I guess nothing else would be, I mean, nothing else should be expected from a thing like this. I mean, listen, this is terrible news. To take another movie of our childhood, I don't know if life will find its way, life will find a way is too rosy an outlook on this. But like, we've been dealing with the shrinking newsroom and the loss of jobs and journalism are literally our entire careers, right? But like, when we, when you had your first internship in the journalism world, nobody knew that they needed gawker.com, right?

They certainly didn't know they needed a version of gawker with like 12 writers that can fill up your whole day just reading through it, right? And we didn't know we needed Grantland and the ringer and we didn't know we needed any, like literally all the sites that we spent all of our time on. And even if you don't go to homepages anymore, all the sites you click through Twitter or Instagram and go visit. We didn't know we needed these things. I mean, we didn't know that, you know, and there's, I mean, everyone that we know has made careers working in those places.

So I don't know. Maybe, hopefully there will be more opportunities, even as the robots take all the ones that we have now. Coming up in 30 seconds, do big players need to make big plays and big games, Jim? Does somebody need to step up, Jim? But first, 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. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received.

Very tough situation for the San Francisco 49ers Sunday, David, when they were playing the aforementioned Eagles, they started a third string quarterback and lost him to injury. They then put in a fourth string. quarterback and lost him to injury as well. It was an overword Twitter joke to write. San Francisco's fifth string quarterback is George Santos. If you thought a volleyball scholarship to Baruch was just the beginning, congrats. You made the overword Twitter joke of the week.

Speaking of football, let's talk weekend football TV in our notebook dump here. It's conference championship weekend in the NFL. First game was the NFC champion. championship, Eagles Niners. Yeah. Did you catch the play early where the Eagles wide receiver, Devante Smith makes this amazing catch down the sidelines?

We're checking to see if he's and bounce. Fox runs a couple replays. It's like, oh my gosh, what a catch. The Eagles quickly run a play, score a few plays later, and then we get a replay that reveals, oh, wait, Fonte Smith did not catch the ball. Mm-hmm. And the fact that the Niners didn't challenge the point.

play was due to not only the Niners, or excuse me, the Eagles running up to the line really fast, it was due to the fact that we did not see the replay on television soon enough. Right. Would you make of that? Seems like they need AI controlling the cameras and the replays. Yeah, that was a real whiff, right? I mean, it did, I think, you know, the fact that all those quarterbacks, the two quarterbacks went down after two had already gone down earlier in the season sort of saved the day in terms of

the narrative here but that was a real i mean that that that if this had been a closer game that would have felt like a real real cataclysmic problem right i mean it's not there is not i mean i don't know is it the is it given that they would have that the niners would if they had seen the the replay the right replay would have called it would have challenged it is it seen as the responsibility of the to have that stuff on the Jumbotron fast? Or I mean, how do they see it? Are they just watching live on their iPads or whatever? Well, I think it's a gray area.

And I think part of it is the networks are so good at getting those replays up so quickly. People have just become reliant on it. Uh-huh. Yeah. And you definitely know there are people watching who are going, challenge it, challenge it, challenge it. And I know when I'm watching Cowboys games, I'm always like, and there's a close catch on the sidelines, I'm like, don't put up a good replay right now. Because I want this to count.

Yeah. I find myself rooting against the production truck. Mm-hmm. And by the way, in the second half of the double header yesterday, Chiefs versus Bengals, there was a contested catch in the end zone. CBS showed two pretty bad angles of. Andy Reid's like, man, I have a touchdown. I'm challenging this. That should have been a catch.

He challenges it. And then CBS shows the revealing replay, which shows it was an incomplete pass. Yeah. So he wasted a challenge on that too. There was also the punt in the early game that they didn't have footage of, right? Wasn't there like it? So that was a weird one. Yeah, all of Eagles punt and all their players are pointing up in the air saying the punt hit the wire over the stadium.

But somehow that was the only unf photographed thing in an entire NFL stadium. Like anything else we can find a camera angle on. certainly someone in the fan and the crowd had that on their iPhone can't they can't just stop the games anyone anyone get that this is why we need AI to be re-looking at all the iPhone video in real time and um David's really making the case for AI this actually sounds a lot like my long time theory that if you ever needed you know if you ever just needed the ball I mean in a desperate situation of football game you should just have all the players on your line just jump up in unison and point at the same person on the other line and just like hope that the referees who just feel obligated to make an off-sides

call. Yeah. It's, it was weird. It was certainly weird. That's a lot of, a lot of, a lot of things slipped through, or a lot. There were a few things that slipped through the cracks, which is, I think we just all got into the point after segments on shows like hours complaining about how there's too many cameras and others, you know, when you're sitting in the crowd, there's the, there's the, you know,

the overhead shots on the wires and that gets in the way of. seeing things sometimes. It just, you know, I think we got to the point where we had all just assumed that there were cameras filming literally everything. And the fact that it's not, it's just sort of surprising, you know, it's, it's like, frankly, when, you know, the referees miss a call or something, you know, or even when they miss a call on review, it's just like, God, we've given up so much to make this thing at least seemless, at least correct at the end, if not smooth, if not seamless, if not actually

fun to watch. We've given so much. And it's not, and it doesn't work all the time. And with the referees, you're just kind of like, well, let's just get rid of instant replay sometimes. You know, it's just like, this is only causing more problems or, you know, let robots call the game. But the, but with the cameras, it's, it's, it's like, we've never even had to wrestle with this. You know, it seems like, and now, and now it just gets, you know, this becomes such an issue. It's sort of shocking. Brock Purdy, the 49ers quarterback, was one of the great Cinderella stories in sports this year. The last pick in the draft.

Third string quarterback for the Niners comes in, saves their season, 14 touchdowns and two picks going into yesterday's game. Then he gets hit in the arm and he can't play anymore. I think it was our pal Lewis K who tweeted the Brock strikes midnight. It's always weird to see the end of a Cinderella story. Yeah. And it was particularly weird to see a Cinderella story.

story in like that. Yeah. With him standing on the sidelines, seemingly looking no worse for the wear, and then having to come back in the game when the Niners other quarterback got injured and just not being able to throw the ball more than a couple of yards. Yeah. That was rough. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, again, talk about things you don't normally see on a football game, particularly a big-time playoff football game. You never, I mean, the idea that, like, one of the teams wouldn't be able to field a quarterback just sort of seems beyond the realm of comprehension, right? I mean, shouldn't we just have like, you know, like just Drew Brees warming up in a, in a, you know, generic jersey on the sideline to come in and help somebody if there's ever a need

or something, just so there's a, just in case, in case both, you know, all the quarterbacks go down. I mean, it's, I mean, what a bizarre situation. On the other hand, there's probably no, like, I mean, it's terrible for the, Brock Purdy, you know, I mean, but it's probably no better way to go out, right? If you're the Niners, then to just be like, well,

I mean, there was literally, it was almost literally impossible for us to have won that game. I mean, everything, the whole, mother, mother nature and all the gods conspired against us. We just, we didn't have, we didn't have a quarterback. All right, let's run with that point. Because as soon as the Niners ran out of quarterbacks,

I immediately felt bad for the Fox announcers. Kevin Burckhardt and Greg Olson. because something happens when you have a disaster scenario like that, which is that it becomes very hard to construct a narrative to reward the team that wins. Because you're sitting there and you're like, well, the Eagles just made the Super Bowl. This is undeniably a big deal. But the circumstances in which they made the Super Bowl, which was that the 49ers, were like a team from the 1930s who could not throw a forward pass.

Maybe the Eagles win anyway. Maybe they went in a romp anyway. I think that's totally on the board here. Yeah. But you saw Burkhart in the second half and he's like, you know, you got to give it up for the Eagles defense. Only 155 yards allowed. I'm like, well, you know, the other team can't throw.

So it perhaps made it a little easier for them to contain the 49ers attack. And again, he's not doing anything wrong. just I just can feel it through the television, this whole thing of like, we don't want to undersell what the Eagles did because that seems wrong. It would also make everybody on Twitter mad, but it's hard to properly sell what they did given the circumstances of this game. Yeah, it's true. I mean, it's also hard to get to outrage the other direction, like you just said because the Eagles were, especially for the first two-thirds of the season, just like, just incredibly dominant, you know, and then injuries sort of brought them back down to Earth

a little bit. If it had been more of a Cinderella story team in that situation who just sort of lucked into the Super Bowl, then that would be a narrative in and of itself. It might feed into the Cinderella story. Who knows? But that would become the story, right? I think the fact that the Eagles romp even can say, even with a healthy quarterback was on the, the table makes it a little bit easier to digest, but you're right. I mean, it's, this is, the broadcast is a narrative form, you know, and then you kind of lose a lot of the story when, especially once Purdy came back into the game and it was just clear you couldn't do anything, you know, and, and, you know, everybody got through their, every, you know, once we realized

they weren't going to, they, they weren't going to just like run the wildcat, which by the way, was just, I will always go down in history as like the first football formation that, that, that, that non-football, non-ex football players knew in our lifetime. But as soon, but so everybody, of course, had to ask immediately, oh, are you going to, are you prepared to run the wildcat, you know? But as soon as we realized that wasn't going to happen, and they were just sort of going to do, try to do some laterals and just lean on their supreme athletes, you know,

and it wasn't going to work. What's the story? It's funny. As soon as the game was over, I flipped over to CBS, and CBS pregame show was taking stock of the NFC game. They're broadcast in the AFC, but they were given some thoughts on the NFC game. And Phil Sims seemed to reach into a box of takes and pull one out.

And he said, in reference to the Eagles 49ers game, quote, the game was won in the trenches. One team was like handcuffed to the trenches. So I guess in some sense, that's true. Yeah, one team was literally stuck in the trenches because they could not complete a pass. Yeah. I tweeted that out in these empowered Eagle fans,

at least one or two of them were in my mentions being like, well, how's that not true? We knocked their quarterbacks out of the game. Well, maybe you should just say that instead of the game was one in the trenches. You know, it didn't even occur to me. The Eagles fans were out there celebrating the fact that they knocked the quarterbacks out of the game.

Oh, yeah. Obviously, they are. I was going to go to the bar to I was going to go to a Pennsylvania bar to watch and end up not, but that's I think that's what I missed out on. Damn. Same pregame show, James Brown,

J.B., as we know him, got the unenviable task of reading some promos for some upcoming films and television shows. Should we play the audio of J.B. reading these promos and see which one he has the most enthusiasm for.

We're going to rate the enthusiast. We're going to rate his what? Rate how how sincerely he is invested in whatever he is he is about to he's about to promote.

Sincere is a weird word for television. So how about just broadcaster professionalism? Okay. You got to sell it, baby. Here's J.B. Reading a promo for the Super Mario Brothers movie.

Hey folks, we are inching closer to kick off to this much anticipated AFC championship game, but we're also excited for the upcoming movie from Nintendo and Illumination. Check out this special look at the Super Mario Brothers movie, only in theaters, April 7. A lot of professionalism there. I liked the tenor of his voice, the timbre of his voice, when he was actually saying the name of the movie. The lead into it just felt so disingenuous, just that like the totally untenable segue that it just felt like it kind of casts a shadow of everything that came after it. But I think he did a pretty good job. That was definitely not one of those promos where it said add your own experience here.

Add your own experience with Super Mario Brothers. He was sticking with the text there. Yeah, for sure. That was pregame. And then at halftime, J.B. got to read a promo for the final season of Picard. Here's that one. And now, we're excited to present the world premiere of the official trailer for the final season of Star Trek, Picard, streaming February 16th exclusively on Paramount Plus. Here we go.

Do you think the word exclusively was underlined there? I think it probably was. This one just suffers from the fact that I just, I think J.B. In my imagination, is way more of a Super Mario guy than a Picard guy. You know, like, I just, I just can't imagine him really being that invested in the final season of Picard. Do you really believe that? You think that's more likely that J.B. is excited about a Super Mario brother's movie? But I think he's more of a Super Mario.

I'm just, I, I guarantee, I think that he probably, I can imagine him looking at the, looking at the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, just kind of, like, shaking his head. I sort of could imagine him watching Next Generation episodes back in the day. More than playing through the Mario games, but maybe. I don't think he's playing the games, isn't that in my

imagination? It's more than he's just sort of Yeah, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, I just think it's a little bit more digestible. Our friend Andy, Andy, Andy Mosley sends this one to us. Fourth quarter.

of that Bengals Chiefs game. It's like 10 minutes left. The Bengals stopped the chiefs on third down. It's a big play. Went through with a whole play, but then the play did not count because a referee that no one had seen or heard

was running onto the field during the play and essentially blowing the play dead. Right. And he says if a whistle is blown in a stadium, and no one hears it, dot, dot, dot.

And then, of course, the outcome is they have to play third down over. The Bengals commit a penalty in the secondary and the chiefs have a first down. Right. So that was a weird one too because the play happened. And there wasn't any evidence that the play would have been, anybody stopped because they saw the referee. Like everybody's playing football. So we have a football play that is completed.

No one including the announcers hears the whistle. But then the plague doesn't count we have to do it over and it's the opposite result. Another weird moment for television and reality and everything. Just a lot of weirdness this weekend. We got to talk about Tony Romo too, dude. I was thinking about Tony Romo watching the game. It's a negative review. I try really hard, you know, and I'm watching football.

especially to to to pay attention to the announcers because my there's some you know the way that my brain and ears work i don't i'm not always that's not you know sometimes people will complain about an announce team or something and i'm just like i honestly didn't notice at all you know i'm just sort of zoned out or zoned in or i don't even know what it is but i was paying person yeah i was i was paying a lot of attention i think though it felt like romo was sort of is like edging into just the you know we've said this five million times in the show but the whole like the butt had that the buck Aikman Booth just sort of sounds like a professional football game. It's like Tony Romo was like going for that but with not actually like saying words,

like literally trying to just make the sounds of a professional football game. Like is someone in the stands? No, no. Like the sound. There's a big play right here. Yeah. I was going to the sounds of someone calling the game, but not like the substance of someone

calling a game. Yeah. It, um, I don't know. I mean, I find it hard to complain. But why don't you go ahead and do it? Oh,

allow me then. Because you know, I feel this way. When he comes onto the scene at CBS, never having called a game before in 2017, his big thing besides predicting plays was his enthusiasm. Yeah, of course. To be in the booth. And I thought that was and still think that that is really refreshing. I think there is something very winning about somebody who is watching an awesome football game turning to their partner on television and saying, this is awesome. Yeah. This is really good. cool. It's really fun to be calling this game right now.

Something that I think most of Tony's contemporaries would have only done during a commercial break. Yeah. They would not have said that over the air or, you know, emitted that feeling over the air. So I am, I am in favor of that in theory. But what happens is he comes out for a game last night and for three hours is just all enthusiasm. And no actual analysis. And no actual analysis of the game, it's what you're saying like you can't do that for the entire broadcast.

Yeah. And what happens, I think is not only is it kind of annoying that he says like nine different versions of Chris Jones, your big players got to make big plays and big games. Yeah, I got it. Thank you. Got it all the way right to the very last Bengals possession. But when you're in at a 10 on the enthusiasm meter for the whole game, I as a viewer stopped trusting you that every single moment of this game

is so freighted and so exciting. Right? Like if you and I were doing a Star Wars podcast and we just saw the best episode of Andor that had ever been made and ever could be made, we could not do an hour of just saying that over and over again. There would need to be pauses where you bring it down a little bit, where you analyze what you saw, where you compare it to something else. where maybe you even say a couple of negative words

about the thing you just watched. Like Andrew Mahomes threw a really bad pass right there. That was a terrible throw by Joe Burrow, a bad throw by Joe Burrow. He wishes he had that one back. Romo barely says that anymore. Yeah. If there's a bad pass,

he salutes the cornerback for making a great play. It's just like this one state of enthusiasm that he can never get out of. And you're just like, I can't do this for three hours, man. you're just going to have to pick your spots. And like I said, the biggest problem is, I don't trust you if this game is boring,

or if this game has no, you know, no momentum, no real flow to it for you to tell me, or the players are playing badly, for you to tell me that. Because I think you're just going to put this in the blender of excitement and Tony Gasms for three hours. It's like the boy who cried wolf except football excitement.

Yes, it's the boy who cried, this is great, Jim. I just think he needs to throttle back. And I think if you went back and looked at that broadcast, it's like, what did Tony tell me about either one of these teams? Like what they did, what their plan is today. I think it would be very, very little. And it would mostly be Tony telling you how excited he is to watch the thing in front of them. Yeah.

Again, that's my critique. Everybody else, enjoy the game. Be like David. Don't think about the announcers too much. All right. One last thing for you, David. I learned about something last week called the cult of book ownership. Okay.

There's a column in the Guardian last Monday. Its original title was reading as precious, but the cult of book ownership can be smug and middle class. Headline was later softened, reading is precious, which is why I've been giving away my books. doesn't sound quite as forbidding. Author is Rianna and Lucy Couslet,

who has been giving away books. Coslet had a whole bunch of books, slowly been donating them or putting them outside for others to take, and found that only twice did she have to go back and actually repurchase books she had given away to find something in them, which of course you can do cheaply now thanks to the internet. Yeah. So let's start here.

have you found in your old age as you have accumulated books like I have that you have been able to get rid of books? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, moving across the country twice helped. Obviously, you know, start a family and there are, you know, other people in your life that you have to prioritize in any number of ways. it doesn't really feel as central. I mean, like,

it's one thing to be like, like, of course I can have all my books, but if it's, but if, you know, you move a bookshelf to put in a baby's crib,

it kind of like, rep, putting the bookshelf somewhere else and putting all the books back on, it seems a little bit secondary, you know? But yeah, I mean,

I've gotten rid of a bunch of my books. The, you know, the first, the first time it was harder, you know, well, the first time there was probably a lot of, you know, just waste, you know, just books I never intended to have, let alone never intended to read. A lot of chaff.

A lot of chaff. And then at some point, it's hard to get rid of this book or that book, but if you sort of put your books into tiers and then you, you know, not saying I'm going to get rid of this book, but like this is a tier one book, which is obviously a keep all the way down to tier four or five or whatever. and then you look at the tier five books in a pile, you're just like, yeah, I can get rid of that whole stack. Also, I don't know about you, but the entire genres,

like entire bookstore sections disappear because you realize, I mean, I think that one of my biggest criteria at the end is like, am I ever going to pick this book up again? So I can justify keeping all the, you know, paperback crime novels that I have because it's just like, I've already forgotten most of what happened in there. Now, you know, I might just need to grab something to take on a train someday.

But like, especially like, like dry history books. I'll just pick up and be just like, this is all on Wikipedia, you know, like whatever. And I can, apologies to any historians out there for what David just said.

I mean, yeah, full apologies, but I bought the book. I owned the book. I presumably read some or all of the book. But if I need, but if I'm just like,

if I, even if I remembered the book in question and I wanted to, and there was a fact and I was like, I got to track that fact down. I would go to the browser on my phone to figure it out, right?

I wouldn't go page through 400. pages to try to like locate it. What you mean is that everything I will need to know about this topic is on Wikipedia. Yes. Yeah. And I mean, not just Wikipedia, but also just available on the internet, right? I mean, and if it's not. And sometimes that means a Google books result and you end up, you know, buying the book again to have it and whatever.

But like as books as resources, with the exception of, you know, art. And even then are, you know, not as central. anymore. So I don't know. What about you? How many books? I mean, you're speaking with a wall of books behind you, but how many, and I know that, I know that you still buy a lot of them. Have you gotten rid of a lot of books over the years? Well, I approach it like the national debt where it's not so much about paying down the debt. It's just about accruing it more slowly. Yeah. So I think what I could say is that I've bought fewer books. And you and I used to walk into a used bookstore. And every single time we would come out with five things. At least. Minimum. Minimum.

minimum. Like that's if it was a bad use book store. We would go to the strand and we would go to the strand when we were broke. I mean, pretty, pretty literally. I mean, we didn't have a lot of money to spend on, I mean, we weren't going out to the bars or anything. You know, this was like, but we could, we would buy so. We were doing that, but, but also. Yeah. But like, you know, not every weeknight or I mean, whatever. We, we weren't spending a ton of money, but we, but we didn't have the money to spend on books, but we would buy books. And not only that, we would buy so many books that we'd also be like forced to take a cab home to get to get the books back you know like it was like a thousand but that definitely happened you know and that was we

never took cabs yeah um but yeah we we would buy a whole lot of books a whole it was impossible i walked into a bookstore uh one of my favorite used bookstores in charlotte um when i was there last and it's moved since the last time i went but the store is pretty similar um it's called book buyers everybody should go. And I had one book. Actually, I think I might have had two at some point, but I just had one book in my hand and felt really wistful. It just felt like I felt sort of down, leaving with only the one book. But I couldn't, I certainly could have bought 30. I would have felt sadder, I think. But it's just that time is past. I went to bookbuyers in Charlotte when I was there to interview Paul Feinbaum last year. And I did my new trick at the used bookstore, which is you show up,

you pick out a couple of things you want, but don't carry them around with you. Just pull out the spine a little bit on the shelf and leave it there. And then walk around, do all your shopping. And it turns out you won't go back. Oh, that's a good one. Four out of the five things.

Because you'll just be like, it's on the shelf. If you already had in your hand, you'd just take you to the register and buy it. Yeah. Because now we've got a little more cash to buy these things. But as it turns out, you just leave it on the shelf. So that really helps.

Now, you mentioned when you were thinning out your bookshelf, books that you would not read again. Yeah. But there's also the books on the shelf that we never read the first time, which is always a funny decision because on the one hand, that should be easy to get rid of. On the other hand, you always hold out hope that there's going to be a time in my life where I have nothing to do, but sit down and read that wonderful 400-page history of whatever. or that major novelist that I've never gotten around to, which with you and I is many, many major novelists. One of my first memories of being, I mean,

I know it wasn't the first time it's in your house, but I have a very early memory of our friendship being in your room and pointing out Thomas Pensions, Mason Dixon on the shelf, and you were just like, yeah, I'm never going to read that, do you want it?

And by the way, can confirm that that has never happened. That was in high school, I'm pretty sure. I did not read it then either. Still trying to make it past the crying of Love 49. So there's that. I tell you the easiest books for me to get rid of are the ones that I bought because I thought I was going to write about a particular subject.

Oh, yeah. And rather than actually doing the hard work of writing of getting that terrible first draft down on the computer, I just bought more books. And then every time I walk by the shelf, they would just remind me that I never wrote that thing I was intending to write. Yeah. Those are the first ones out. That is out of here. Yeah. I do want to tell you what the Guardian column by Rianne and Lucy Couslet thought was, quote, smug and middle class about the cult of book ownership. She writes, I don't mean reading, provided you're lucky enough to still have a local library, that is a pastime that is accessible to almost everyone.

No, I specifically mean having a lot of books and boasting about it. Treating having a lot of books as a stand in for your personality or believing that simply owning a lot of books makes one, quote, no things. she had seen a poster of a cat that had the slogan, that's what I do. I read books, I drink tea, and I know things. So I was reading that and I was thinking it was interesting. By the way, this is one of those columns that was not that bad. No.

It had the bad title and everybody got mad. But if you read this column, it's mostly about one person's decision to give away books, which is a perfectly fine decision to make. Yeah. And one that you and I might make someday. But I was interested in the whole thing about making, books a stand-in for your personality.

Because it strikes me of all the things you could buy that would be a stand-in for your personality, like an expensive car or clothes or sunglasses or whatever it would be that books are probably the least, the least sucky of all those things. I know where you were going to go with that. If you had to pick one thing to stand in for your personality, surely a wall of books is not the most horrible thing in the world. No, certainly not. Well, books great.

And if you've ever had somebody walk into your room for the first time, and this is when you say room, because it was, you know, I'm imagining being in my 20s and 30s and just having like a room and a place. But if someone walking to your house, your apartment or your room, and just seeing that giant wall or multiple walls or multiple bookshelves or whatever of books. And I'm just going like, wow. Like that is a wow. That feels like a well-earned wow, right?

Yes. I was like, yes, I did accumulate all of this trash. And then they always ask you, have you read all this? these books? You're like, absolutely not. No, I haven't.

But, and by the way, I want people to come in and see the wall of books. There is something very vain about that, right? Yeah. It's like,

these are the things that are important to me. Mm-hmm. Could be other stuff, you know, back in the day, CDs or it could be DVDs or whatever, but like, and that's fine,

nothing wrong with that, but like, I want this, you to think that this is what I am, because it is what I am. It's a real thing. And people really got into showing off their, like,

vast music collection. Totally. And then those same people, the people who were, the audio files, you know, then they had hard drives and, you know, MP3s and everything else. And then they had to reconcile themselves to the cloud, which I guess we all do, right? I mean, we, like, you can't even, you can't really get new music on CD. Obviously, you can get vinyl or whatever. But like, you know, we'll get to a point where you can't get new books on, you know, get new books on paper someday, maybe, but you'll still want

to buy the old ones, right? They're still, they're still nice to display. I don't know. It is, it is. It feels good to show it off, even though it is like, you know, it's certainly vanity. Speaking of vanity, it's time for the press box's own vanity project. It's David Shoemaker guess is the strained pun headline. All right. Last Monday's headline about Warren Buffett's opposition to a new Omaha streetcar was a streetcar named Undesirable. A lot of votes for. a streetcar named

denier a streetcar nayed by Berkshire there was some meat on the bone that everybody left on there you and me and the headline writers and the Times both

today's headline comes from Jason McAllister it's another funny food bit David to go along with chorizo me crazy from a few weeks ago there is a food cart Portland that got broken into last week.

And there was a story about this that had some puns, but I want the name of the food cart. The food card specializes in breakfast sandwiches, something you and I ate with our limited funds back in the day. Oh, yeah. The cart especially prizes sandwiches with fried eggs. Fried eggs. What was a Portland food cart's strained,

pun name. This is not about the robbery. This is the name of the cart. Just the name of the cart. That's all I want. Friday egg. My girl, Fridayg.

Pretty good. Friday, I'm in love. Is this, am I going in there? Oh, wow, you got it. Really? You did it. That's great. Friday, I'm in love.

I thought I was going to have to sing. You can still sing. Well, we're all good there. Can I give you some of the dishes in the Friday I'm in love menu. Please. I mean, if we live in Portland, we would be at this place

all the time. Yolko Ono. Amazing. Smells like protein spirit. Okay. Egg Zeppelin. Syracha mix a lot. Free range

against the machine. Yeah. Vegan and Sarah. And if you're in the mood for a breakfast burrito rather than a fried egg sandwich, Rito suave. Rito suave. Congratulations to the people at Friday. I'm in love for all the fine work. And sorry about last week's little glitch in your operations. You've done some fine, fine, strained punning. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. coming up Wednesday, the second installment of our one perfect story series,

which is about one awesome magazine story and how it came together. And something else to put on your calendar, Super Bowl is February 12th. And David, you and I will be doing a live podcast on Spotify Live as soon as the Super Bowl ends. So people can take in the game, the announcers, the commercials, the commercials, all the elements that we would call media and they can pop on Spotify live and hear us freestyle

for an hour after the game and we should take calls again. Oh yeah. Well, yeah, users can talk. Yeah, sorry. Human generated content, I meant to say. People should be able to talk to us

because it was very fun to talk to Pressbox listeners last time. Back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.