The Press Box - Obama Writes a New Book. Plus, Claire McNear on 'Jeopardy!'

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Barack Obama has released his 768-page memoir, 'A Promised Land.' Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss his book, his playlist, and the accompanying poster (2:10). Then, on Listener Mail, they answer the question “What is a piece of media you consume to get away from the world of media you spend the most time in?” (31:12) Then, Ringer writer and author Claire McNear joins to discuss her book, 'Answers in the Forms of Questions,' which covers 'Jeopardy!,' former host Alex Trebek, and much more (44:45). Finally, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, news came out today that BuzzFeed has bought Huffpo. What I want to know is what other odd journalism mergers would you like to see. Guys, is this like internet 3.0 buying internet 2.0 or do I have my, is that, I don't even know where my, where, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, remember when all the fast food restaurants started pairing up. It was like, oh, it's Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. Or it's Long John Silver's and A&W. I didn't really want to go to either one of those, but all they're together. Do you hear the thing that the rumor that Long John Silver is like a front for the cornbread mafia? I've got nothing to have.

Just go down that rabbit hole one night. Or like when Carl's, it was at Hardy's bought Carl's Jr. But didn't actually give up on the Carl's Jr. name because it had so much more value than the Hardy's name. So they're still like, they kind of have the same logo, but there's different signs. That might be where we're headed here.

Huffpo's not going to go away. It's not going to supplant BuzzFeed news, but maybe they'll have a similar little smiley star in the upper right hand corner. Can we bring back some of those like vintage Huffpo bloggers? Remember when they had the celebrities

and pseudo celebrities at the beginning and make them all into BuzzFeed staff writers? Are they all gone? I literally have no idea. What's the dude's name? The guy from all the Christopher guest movies? And The Simpsons and stuff. Oh, Harry Sure.

Yeah. Is he still a blogger? Yeah, he's covering the White House now for BuzzFeed. Harry Sure and Ruby Kramer are going to be filing political dispatches. I cannot wait. Coming up on today's show, Barack Obama writes a very long book. We answer your list or mail. Plus Claire McNair talks Jeopardy.

All that and more on the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Oh, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. David, we got a doorstop of a presidential memoir this week. Barack Obama has published a promise land. His 768 page book. And in 768 pages, Obama doesn't even get us halfway through his presidency. Even Robert Caro thinks Obama's being a bit of a completist.

Oh, man. Well, I would make a George R. Martin joke, but I feel like it's just going to end up being a slight on George R. Martin for not having written any. thing. So not having pages. Barack Obama has pages. I think we can say that with confidence. He filed, as we say in journalism. And it was very clean copy. It is quite well written.

Can I give you a sense to just what an event book this is? I called the indie bookstore I like here in Orange County on Tuesday morning like an hour after they opened. And they were already sold out. It was completely sold out of the Obama book. What? So I went to Barnes & Noble

and I got a copy. And I walked up to the cashier and gave my credit card and she said, oh, let me get you your poster. This is not a joke. And then handed me a poster of Barack Obama, which was my gift for buying the book. I don't think I've received a poster as a throw-in to a separate purchase since like, what would that? I mean, I think there was like a, like those, those muscle men action figures. I think if you bought a certain number came with a free poster.

Right. went to McDonald's, that right week in the summer and you got like a Batman water glass. Yeah. The poster thing does seem very specific. Like, I feel like I must have bought an album that, like, you got a poster with it or something. If you bought it off, if you went and got an opening day from Tower Records or something. But yeah, that certainly marks this as an event. There's no doubt about it.

David, you sent me Obama's very conventional author bio earlier in the week. Oh, my gosh. hold on let me pull it up here all right here we go Barack Obama sorry Barack Obama's name of course is in bold Barack Obama was the 44th president

of the United States elected in November 2008 and holding office for two terms he is the author of two previous New York Times bestselling books dreams of from my father and the audacity of hope

okay can we just hold on right there for a second are we targeting the customer who is walking into the bookstore like they you know look at a clive Custler book or a Lee Child book in the front display and go, Oh, New York Times bestseller, huh? Well, I don't even think Clive Custer and Lee Child are the argument for not doing it, right? Because who cares what awards they've won?

What matters is how high the stack is and what your mom told you about the book and that you should read it, right? I mean, you're familiar enough with the name that you don't need the New York Times' sign off on this purchase, right? One would think that anyone who gives a one solitary dam about the New York Times bestselling bestseller status, all they need to know are the first two words of this author bio, right? And those are Barack and Obama. Yeah.

Nobody's like, I'm going to give this Obama a chance. He's really sold a lot of books. All right. Sorry, I'm going to keep going. He's the author of two previous New York Times Best Sine books to my father and the L.C. of Hope and the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. I would just like to establish that is not, I don't want to read any ill motives onto whoever constructed this author bio,

but putting it having the two books, the New York Times bestselling books, and then comma, and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, sort of makes it sound like he won the Nobel Peace Prize for writing these two books or one of these? Like, like it is a,

like as if it's a literary prize, but no, it is completely separate from this. It was won as part of, as a measure of his presidency and the accomplishment from the first year. Let's move on. Novos Peace Prize Incense.

He lives in Washington, D.C. With his wife, Michelle, they have two daughters, Malia and Sasha. Yeah. I just cannot. There's so many funny things about book publishing, so many things that are particular to book publishing. It will never not be humorous when you take somebody as famous as Barack Obama, whose author bio, again, could be two words or non-existent. And you actually go through all of the motions to say,

He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and two children. I mean, like, it has to say, it has to, it's a most singular book that's going to come out this year in so many ways. And yet everything about it has to be just fit into the comfortable lilt of book jacket copy. Are you surprised he didn't put the dog bow in the author bio like a lot of authors do? Are you also surprised he didn't do like the funny sentence at the end that we sometimes get when you have an author bio? Yes. Yeah. Or also just that, I mean, there's sort of that maybe, maybe this is more of a Twitter bio thing, but I think where you're just like overly specific about your significant other, right? He lives in Washington, C. with his wife, Michelle, the former first lady of the United States of America or something, you know? Yeah, I think we all know who Barack Obama is. I agree, in case you pick this up and we're confused, it might be a different Barack Obama. Then you can, you can read down to the end and be like, oh, yes. I remember Sasha, if not Malia and Michelle. I know exactly who we're talking about here. On that same theme of Obama being a very normal author,

you know how when your friends have a book come out and they start getting really desperate to put like Twitter content out there that's sort of about the book? And you kind of give it a nice charity like on Twitter because they're like, oh, they're just, you know, they're doing, they're doing what they have to do. They're selling the book. Obama put a playlist on Twitter this week,

which I know he has done from time to time. Sure. But it's just like, oh, just coincidentally. I have this list of songs that I really like from Beyonce and you two that I'd like to go ahead and share with America. That was kind of funny. One nice thing about the playlist. I mean, it's always great to see a playlist. But also, there were a lot of people who were making like bootleg versions of the playlist.

You know, they're photoshopping funny songs on there or just like doing whatever with it. I mean, I know that the dying days of the Trump presidency are a catastrophe on so many levels. But I do feel like the amount of just sort of mindless joy that people have had doctoring the Obama playlist is a hopeful sign of, you know, where things are going. That we actually have spiritual energy to put whatever hilarious song on there. You know, if you're going to put nipsy hustle on Barack's playlist, I don't know that we would have had the energy to do that six months ago. How could you comically improve on YouTube's beautiful day? Come on, man. Really?

The other thing about being the president, David, the former president is you get a dream rollout of your book. Every time an author has a book come out, they want as much publicity as humanly possible. So Obama is kind of an experiment in what if you could get any booking you wanted? Your book would be promoted in any way you possibly could dream of. What would you pick? Well, of course you would have the.

excerpt in the New Yorker. And here I want to ask you, do you think David Remnick edited Obama for the excerpt? Do you think Obama got something back in track changes mode with like one sentence highlighted that said nice? I know that you mentioned this before. The New Yorker is sort of known for doing this, right? But it is, it's a little bit precarious. He can't over edit an excerpt because it exists elsewhere, right? But yes, I'm sure.

I feel fairly confident that the edits were minimal if there were in. at all. He said this in the interview with the Atlantic. He said there were parts, there are parts of the book where I just had a really nice description I wanted to leave in. And the editor was like, do we really need this? Like, do we really? And I said, eh, I like it. Sorry. That's just a pretty description and I want to leave it. Spoken like a true writer. Uh-oh, Chris Almeida, who takes that stuff out for a living is giving us a thumbs down. Listen, no one's going to, I understand the anxiety. No one, your boss is not going to come into your office and be like, why the hell is this book 800 pages long? You're fired. Right? I think, I think that it was the president told me to leave a bunch of stuff in. I think it's an appropriate answer. Uh, interviews on 60 minutes, CBS Sunday morning. Oprah Winfrey's Apple TV show. We had one of our listeners email me and say, which podcasts do you think Obama is going to go on? It's funny, right? He could do, okay, so, I was about to say

for all of you aspiring writers or writers or even publicists out there I mean if you're if you're ever wondering why somebody is going to be is doing a publicity hit somewhere if you just want to know what the platonic ideal of a book rollout campaign looks like look no further than Barack Obama's

and then you can kind of work yourself work backwards from there then you work your way down to the press box exactly what do you do what I mean part of it's the I mean you would target specific audiences I mean, I think the first question is what podcasts are big enough if you're just really trying to sell books, right?

I mean, you go do Mark Maren's podcast because it's like, you know, a huge podcast. You do, I don't even know. And he's already done that one, so that might figure in this too. Right. But if you do the biggest of the big, right? I mean, you could just, you know, you could go on, you can, he could be on any podcast that he wanted, right? But, but, but, uh, does he do Ezra Klein's podcast to do kind of a policy centric one within all the comedy podcast? It's weird, right? I mean, if you're Barack Obama, any podcast you choose would feel like you were doing somebody a favor, you know, and then there'd be, I mean, if he did Ezra Klein, imagine what the, you know, crooked media guys would be come. They'd be just like in his text messages nonstop. Well, he just did, he just did them, though, before the election. This is a thing. Obama can be spread around. So it's like, you know, it's kind of thing. He did them before the election. So, but I figure you need like a political podcast, maybe a kind of policy podcast with somebody who'd push. you a little bit on what you did when you were president. You also want, when you referenced Mark Marin, a kind of comedy entertainment pop culture zone podcast. Who's your daddy? Would that be on the list? I don't think Obama will be appearing on the barstool network. Oh, who knows? Who knows? Yeah.

So yeah, so you would go, I mean, Marin's easy, but that makes a lot of sense. I would love, I'm trying to think of like the bit, like the old school, like the legends of podcasting at this point. There have been a lot of Joe Rogan talk than this presidential season. No, no way. What, uh, he should, there should, they should do, I mean, what are the great, what if he, could he go on like, how did this get made and just like make fun of some bad presidential, presidency movie from the 80s?

Okay. Sure. Um, he might have one of those, right? This is the guy who did between two fern. Yeah, sure. Kevin Smith must have a politics podcast at this point, right? Somewhere in his empire. Could we just, could you squeeze Obama in there?

Oh, God. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it'll be, it's weird because we have podcasts. I mean, we talked about Rogue and all the people I just mentioned are just, you know, making millions of dollars from pushing record ones or more a week. And it still kind of feels like we're in the underdog industry, right? I'm not just talking about the press box, but, and part of that's a book publishing is old school. And, you know, it still is more meaningful to them to be on the front page of the Times book review than it is to be on some form of new media that, that, that reaches a billion times more people.

But also, yeah, podcasting is still just very, it's a very, it's sort of the Wild West still. CBS Sunday morning is his old media choice there. I mean, that is as sedate and calming and for a very, very particular slice of TV viewers as you could get. But yeah, so I would figure he's going to mix that with some new media stuff. I want you to help me with the numbers, David, as a veteran of the publishing industry. New York Times reports that a promised land is getting 3.4 million copies printed here in the United States and another 2.5 million for international readers. So is that like a Stephen King mega novel?

Is that like two or three Stephen Kings? How do we understand those numbers? I have no idea. 3.4 million intercontinental. I mean, that seems incredibly high for even for Stephen King. I mean, that seems like the scope of like, I would think a breakout novel, like your Da Vinci codes or whatever that sort of like,

catch the world by storm would be in the 10 million range, but I'm totally guessing. But that's how many they've sold over the course of the... Right. Oh, yeah. I mean, the big novels, I mean, novels, big books like this, you know, there's not a ton of downside and overprinting at the beginning. Your costs are so... I mean, the unit cost gets so low beyond a certain point. And, you know, most of these are shipping, right? I mean, if, I mean, you can get return. You can always get returns, but I'm guessing most of these are going to Barnes & Noble or Amazon. They're sitting in one of their warehouses.

But yeah, like you said, the demand is going to be crazy for this. I mean, it's just going to be, I mean, they're probably going to sell all those copies. He sold 890,000 on the first day. So that's a pretty good start. I did want to talk to you, too, about Obama the writer. Now, nobody except a handful of journalists. who were paid to has read this entire book. If you hear somebody say, I read the Obama book this week, I do not believe that person.

They have not read all 768 pages. I read about 100 pages, which is the part of the book about the 2008 campaign. Quick aside to the listeners out there, if you hear anybody say, no one's read it, but I've read, but I read 100 pages, they're lying to. Go ahead. Okay. Okay. I did a little skimming. A little skimming.

But that doesn't mean I can't make some sweeping judgments here. Please do. Please do. A couple of things. One is Obama is so big now and he's been the president. He has this world historical figure. When you get to that point, some of your book is going to sound kind of like a political speech. Yeah.

And this book does suffer from that at times. I will also say that some of it sounds a little bit like a list that you've. give in a political speech. He's talking about winning Iowa, the Iowa caucuses in the 2008 campaign. And he says, it's due to the efforts of the following people and then it just lists like five or six names. Like this cannot

be interesting for the reader. This is like you're standing on a stage thanking those people. Yeah. There's that. There is some I can cuss vibes in the Obama book, which is sort of a goes against the whole idea of speech making. But again, he's talking about 2008.

I guess his campaign had leaked an unflattering memo about Hillary Clinton. And here's Obama. My team insisted the memo was never meant for public consumption, but I didn't care. It's shoddy argument and nativist tone had me rip shit for days. Surely the first time rip shit has been used in a presidential memoir. Certainly on this podcast. Go ahead.

But overall, David, from my 100 pages of reading or reading and skimming, this is the amazing thing. Obama has the quality of being an incredibly famous person, an incredibly important person who can still write a really, really good book. In that quality, his book is almost British. You know, British politicians always, you know, they leave office and then they write these really, like, juicy, thorny memoirs. Obama is almost British. He really is. Like, his portraits of John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008 are great. great and sort of merciless. I mean, the way he has, you know, McCain calculating and doing this, Palin, he writes, had no, had absolutely no idea what the hell she was talking about. This is,

this is real writing. This is not something that was like, let's go the safe route and, you know, write something for history. This is, I'm going to give you some observations that are often pretty, pretty, pretty raw. And I think it's kind of amazing. Yeah. I mean, Listen, I can't claim to have read even 100 pages of it. But he's a great writer. He's a, he is a very insightful writer, right? Very incisive. Kind of maybe the most incredible part about him as a writer think or whatever is how

sort of self-aware he is, at least, you know, in retrospect that he can, that he can be that incisive about things that he lived through, but also about his role in them. but yeah I mean it's it's an interesting it's an interesting look and people are incredibly complimentary of him and justifiably so I have a hard time sort of looking reading him with clear eyes right I mean he was writing he wrote his well he wrote his first book before anybody knew who he was or at least he before he had a place in the national stage and so without being you know too condescending towards anybody else I mean that he sort of earned that one right and now he's but now he's he's he's regarded as a great as a great writer for an ex-president i think is

but but how but is he a great writer i mean that's sort of the question right is this like is he like uh like an ethan hawk level of writer like who are the who are the various or the james franco i don't know how to take that one but is he is he is he above or beyond james friday or steve martin i love shopgirl back in the day is he steve martin is he better than Steve Martin? I think so, right? These are such weird comps. Also in New Yorker contributors, Steve Martin. I'm talking about people who

had other careers before they, who were famous and we read them not as writers, but as famous people who are also writers, right? It's like Dame Lillard, the rapper. Like, do we, are we really, are we really, do, can we really judge them? Can we really judge them appropriately? Anyway,

regardless of, of the answer to that question. Yeah, I mean, it's, he's, he's, He's a fantastic writer. And I think that the length of the book, well, I mean, talking about his refusal to edit or whatever, I think the more, I mean, the more we can get from Barack Obama on the printed page, the better, right? I mean, I understand the act of editing and being succinct and everything else.

But if he thinks something's a lovely turn of phrase that he wants to leave in, I'm glad that the world gets to see that, aren't you? Oh, absolutely. You'd rather have, you'd rather have more than less, especially for. from a really, really good writer like him. And I'll also say this. We've been talking about how the economy, which is torn apart by coronavirus,

needs a stimulus package. This book and its sequel are Obama's stimulus package for bookstores. And that's not nothing, right? I mean, I saw that Kramer Books was open at midnight on Monday night to sell the book, which happens often with presidential memoirs. But if you have people marching into a bookstore

and putting down $45 to buy Obama's memoir. That is good for the part of society that you and I like. That's great. And the fact that my indie bookstore here was sold out, that made me so happy. I was like, wow, they did a lot of business today, and they're going to do a lot more. How much money is too much money?

$45 would have been shocking 10 years ago. But we were kids. How much money? What is the line? What is the line? What would be the line where you'd be just like, I'm not going to, even for my job, I'm not going to pay that much for the book, $100? Yeah, I mean, even over 50 seems like a lot of money for a book, for a new book.

It's a really nice first edition. I mean, okay. But, you know, I think, I think if it had been $51, I would have been like, really? But somehow, 45 was just under the line for me. Yeah, that sounds about right. Before we get out of this, do we want to have some fun with titles of previous presidential memoirs? Oh, yeah. So a promised land, which is the title of Obama's book, evokes Martin Luther King, who was, of course, evoking the Bible.

Good title. Not every president has been quite so skillful. George W. Bush's memoir was called Decision Points. I still don't understand. I understand the definition, but I don't understand when that, it's one of those titles

that makes you think you're not catching the illusion or you're not catching the literary reference or something. And then the longer you live with it, the more you're like, how has it now been three years, five years, 10 years since that book came out? And I still have never heard

the Bible verse that has decision points in it. Like I don't, like it's, it doesn't make any sense at all. It feels like George W. Bush butchering a phrase. Maybe that. That's the, maybe that's what it is.

Maybe that's the idea. You know, it feels like that they just did, that they just put a bunch of words in a hat. Then they drew two words out. And that was the name, like the way they used to pick names for like, like rap rock bands, you know? It's like a slip knot is not, whatever. Let's just put the pull the knot out. But they, yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all. But what are the other ones you have written them?

Well, I was just going to say, too, that a couple of times ago when I was in North Texas, I went to the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas. with my mom. And there was an interactive decision points feature where you could sort of RPG the Bush presidency. I'm not joking about this.

It was called the decision points theater. So I guess there's a possibility that he titled the book so that there would be a tie-in to the thing in the presidential library. Could you imagine just making the case for synchronicity for like a multimedia experience

when you were writing this book? That would have been just incredible. I mean, I don't remember. I did play whatever this thing was. I don't remember it, but I'm imagining it as like you go up to a screen and it says, do you want to bring the full power of the federal government to help save the people after Hurricane Katrina? Yes?

Or maybe not, like Bush did. I don't know. I don't know. I don't remember. But it honestly, it really does exist. I think what gets me most about decision points is like you're a president, right? you can title this book. There's no, there's no worry that it's going to get confused with another book, right? No. So why would you not just call it decisions? Or why, you know, you call it like what,

it can be very, very simple, right? It can just be one word. You own the word. You, you have all the space you need. You have all the elbow room. You're George W. Bush. So one of Hillary Clinton's books was called Hard Choices. I, listen, I don't like hard choices either. Why would that? I mean, I understand there's a difference between choices and hard choices, but like, I would just call the book choices. But wouldn't that have been W's way of kind of dressing up a lot of bad choices? It's just call them hard choices. Like, hey, you might have thought I made eight years worth of bad decisions, but they were tough decisions. Hard choices should have been the George W. Bush memoir name, hard choices. That's a much more W. And, you know, Hillary could have just had

decisions. Bill Clinton's memoir in 2004, which I was also required to read for work. This is, by the way, the third straight presidential memoir, I have been required to read skim for work was my life. Well, there you go. Listen, no one else in the world gets to write a book called My Life unless you are like one of the five most famous people on the planet, right? But if you're, but if you're a president, you can get by with my life. It's fine.

And you should just embrace the opportunity to do something that simple and broad. Gerald Ford's A Time to Heal, which is I guess his way of explaining the Richard Nixon pardon. Nixon's memoirs were in the arena, which is an incredibly generic presidential memoir title. And RN was another one that he put out. I went back to as far as Harry Truman, who maybe had the ultimate generic memoir title, Year of Decisions, Year of Decisions. Now, is a year of decisions better or worse than decision points? I don't know. Maybe I just don't understand the allure of decisions and choices.

I get put some action into an otherwise pretty static narrative, I would guess. I like the RN, by the way, you know? I mean, I always try to find opportunities to compliment Richard Nixon, but maybe you just go the Washington football team route, you know, with any of these. Just say, just call it the memoir by George W. Bush. So it's like the daily show, the book? Yeah, exactly. Just put your name on the book. and that's it.

And then let the, I mean, as a former bookstore employee, that would, nothing would make me more angry than something, than having to try to figure how to key that in

to a computer, but that would make me want to buy the book. Just, I mean, honestly, is anybody buying this Obama book

that would not have bought it if it was just the photo on the cover? No. Absolutely. Absolutely. That would have made no difference in sales at all.

I want to know if the Truman Library had a year of decisions interactive feature that had like pull, and stuff like that. It's like the old mouse trap game.

There's a contraption at the heart of the old thing. Cages rise and lower. Yeah, that would be fantastic. All right, let's do the Overwork 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.

To start off with David, there has been this whole subcategory now for more than a week of Trump won't concede the election jokes. that is just eating up Twitter. Everyone is writing something flattering about themselves and then attaching the this claim is disputed tag to the bottom of the tweet. We've also got the one when your team is ahead early

in a football game. You tweet stop the count in all caps. And then finally this week, Michael B. Jordan, I guess, was named People's Sexiest Man Alive. And Frank Luntz, yes, the slubby pollster Frank Luntz, tweeted, he only

won in the eyes of the fake news media, I concede nothing. Was Frank Luntz actually kind of funny for the first time in his entire life? Yeah. He's found his stride, I feel like. Thanks to Don Steele, Bernard

and Zach Flood for that one. David Vulture has reported that country music superstar Dolly Parton was one of the major funders for Moderna's coronavirus virus vaccine, which has proved to be nearly 95% effective. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, working 95.

What a way to keep us living. Wow. That's really good. We would have also accepted to the tune of Jolene, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. Thanks to Gruns, David Osborne, Chris Fitzpatrick and Eben Anderson. That's my Dolly Parton impression for the day. And finally, David, according to the Hill, the University of Texas's very own,

Matthew McConaughey, says he'd consider running for governor of Texas. A lot of good responses. Texas would be a lot cooler if he did. McConaughey might be the first person to ever receive 420% of the vote. And my favorite, would he run as a Democrat or as alt-right, alt-right, alt-right,

alt-right. Thanks to John Paul Rome. and Charles Prayer the third T. Cizzle and Michael T. If you found a candidate who had a better chance of winning than most of the Senate candidates, the Democrats throughout this year, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, let us do a little listener mail. And last week, someone asked us,

who was going to win the Time Magazine person of the year? And we settled on either Dr. Anthony Fauci or the coronavirus. Well, a whole bunch of people wrote in and said, You idiots. What about essential health care workers as kind of a group prize? The people fighting the virus. Oh, yeah. That's it, right?

Yeah. Yeah, we all bang our pots and pans and appreciation. That's it. You could see also like Fauci being the cover with a bunch of the essential health care workers behind him. That feels like the winner. I can't believe we didn't think of that. Anyway, thanks for everybody who sent that in. Also, we asked what David's wrestling.

theme substack newsletter should be called. Listener football suggested substacks Calhoun. In reference to the great wrestler Haystacks Calhoun. Thank you very much footballs for that. All right, listener mail. Mike Sumetta, what is a piece of media you consume

to get away from the world of media you spend the most time in? A pallet cleanser, so to speak. Oh, man. I think the biggest The number one pallet cleanser in my life is whatever my wife and oldest son are watching. Because it takes, there's no volition in it, right? You just sit down on the, you walk into a room, you sit down on the couch, I don't even ask what's on and just let, so, just see how long it takes my mind to sort of acclimate to the fact that I'm watching, this is us,

you know, with no preparation, or that, you know, we're like halfway through Rick and Morty season four. to figure out how deep he's gotten. The first one was not, it was the way, if not the son. Yeah, or whatever it is. I mean, it's a nice way to just sort of completely take your mind of it. Because otherwise, I mean, I just don't, I don't actually watch a ton of TV that's not,

well, that it doesn't, that I don't watch a ton that's not kind of mandated by work, but certainly not that's not work related, because work related is a pretty broad definition now, right? I don't know. What about you? Well, children's media. is actually a really great answer.

Oh, you know what? That's it. I mean, I watched that. I mentioned the older, but yeah, the baby shows. I watch a whole lot of Sesame Street and the Wiggles and a lot of, you know what's crazy? We have the Disney,

the Disney app or whatever, but my almost two-year-old has basically only gotten, I mean, only really enjoys, well, there's some Mickey Mouse, like TV shows that I'm not a huge fan of, but he loves Winnie the Pooh,

like the movies of Winnie the poo and he loves Fantasia. And I know that like the classical music supposed to be good for the developing brains or whatever. I feel like it's done good for my brain. Like just like at first you're just like, why am I stare? Like what is this? What is it?

Like I remember Fantasia. I don't want to watch it 20 times. But after like 10 times, I'm like, yeah, I'm glad Fantasia's on. Like it just makes me kind of, it kind of bluses me out. All right. Baby Einstein has made David a better podcast. This is, this is fantastic. All right.

From James W. Denison, request for an analysis of Wednesday's, NBA draft broadcast. What have we learned about doing such events remotely since April's groundbreaking NFL draft? Oh,

wow. We're talking about the official ESPN NBA draft broadcast and not the various other remote ones that were done. I mean,

Bill and Rissillo, I mean, the Ringer show last night was also had Kevin O'Connor and Raja Bell, but Bill and Rassillo went in on this a little bit,

Rissillo in particular, that like, the degree to which Now, every single draft broadcast has become the sentimental story behind every draft pick. That was rough last night. Yeah, I mean, and instead, like, you know, and I think Bill made the point, like, you have, you can put this on ABC like you did with the NFL draft, you know, like put all the, put all the, emotional, put all the, the, the, you know, feature stories on one channel, but let's, let,

give us at least one channel that's just, just stat heads and nerds arguing about whether or not that was a good pick for that team, you know? or like speculating about trades. Like that's really what we need. I mean, it's funny because we spent so many years talking about how Woage, before Woj was at ESPN,

how Woj was sort of like preempted the draft broadcast itself, right? Not just by saying the picks ahead of time, that, but also just by focusing on the things we care about. We care about who's going to get picked and who's going to get traded and which picks are going to get traded and everything else. And it seems like,

I mean, they have Woj just sitting there and they don't, and they're going, but they're moving in absolutely opposite direction. Now maybe that's the way to go because they think everybody's going to be on Twitter anyway and getting all that stuff on their own, but they're certainly not trying to fight back against that, you know? And it does seem odd that I know that they have deals with the NBA and everything else,

but it seems really bizarre that for a television production that you wouldn't just have the inside scoop being broadcast in real time. I don't know. Maybe that's too much to ask. It's the college game deization of the NBA draft and everything. else. I love college game day. That is like one of the only pregame shows I watched. I think I said that the other day on the show. But there are basically two kinds of features they show on college game day. One is somebody had some kind of tragedy happen in their family. And the other one is the person was

under recruited. They didn't get the offer from the school they wanted to. And the reason those are the two stories they do is because these people are 18 or 19 years old. They're pretty unformed. And if you're trying to do a feature about somebody like that, you often only have so many options. But somehow that spirit has now become this animating spirit of the NFL draft alternative broadcasts you mentioned that ran on ABC last year. And then last night's NBA draft. And it just felt like something like I think I want to take all those stories seriously.

And those are obviously that means you saw the tears last night and some of the pictures of relatives and things like that means an awful lot to those people. but there's got to be a different way to handle that. So that it just is, I don't know what it is, just a different approach or something or on a different part of the broadcast, something like that. I just don't know,

but it just feels like a very, feels like the DNA of one show has gone from Saturday mornings to now, like all kinds of places in the ESPN universe. It's true. And there's also the feeling that you get by watching it in real time. And again, I'm not saying this is the, this is the,

a better way to do it or whatever else. But you do what I was watching. I was watching last night and thinking, like watching Malika Andrews, Jay Williams, Mike Schmett. I mean, we all know Jay Billis, but I was watching, I mean, I could just, I know that I'm going to listen to a podcast

within the next month that Jay Billis or Malick Andrews or somebody does about what it was like to broadcast it. And that podcast will be better than the broadcast. Which is so weird. Just like the discussion of the decisions that were made and what it was like and what they were experiencing and a real thing, real time is going to be better than what we were actually watching. And it's, it's just sort of

crazy that that's where we are. Jason Gay had a great tweet last night. ESPN's set looks like detention at a men's warehouse. Wow. It was, that was a very unique set, right? I didn't, I mean, I'm sure there's been, there must be a precursor to it, but to have everybody spaced out like they're at a giant desk, but actually at four separate seats. They look like they were in high school desks. Yeah. Individual desks. I have never said, that before. I mean, you can space people out in different ways, but it was just really it's just really weird. Also, that, what

was that, like, club beat that was playing every time Adam Silver went to the podium? Did you notice that? They just turned up the music whenever he went to the boat. What in the hell was that? Quite weird. All right, this is from Pep, David, which late night host

slash show most benefits from the election results? We have most benefits from, like, and Trump contesting the election and everything? No, I think, Biden winning because we had a kind of resorting right Trump became present 2016 Stephen Colbert who people were you know saying well is he going to get canceled is he going to get replaced by James Corden all of a sudden his ratings went through the roof and Jimmy Fallon who really doesn't do politics went way down so what now happens during a

Biden presidency? Um I mean I think that there's a lot of a lot of validity to the sort of comedy there was no real comedy under under trump uh argument and so i think that the ones the people that are going to that are that are going to most benefit or i mean i think like the daily show was going to most benefit i think there their stuff since the election has actually been on the whole better than what they were doing during trump presidency they had a lot of i mean it was just too many targets i mean the target was too easy during the trump the trump years and i think just getting back to doing what they're used to doing will help them a lot uh as far as specific, like the actual, like the traditional, the big three or whatever late night shows.

I don't know. I mean, I think that the freedom to, like I was saying earlier, the freedom to just sort of laugh and enjoy something that's apolitical is going to be sought after by many people over the next several months. And so like maybe James Corden is like the leader in the clubhouse for that or Fallon. You know, I mean, I don't know. But it will be, it'll be interesting to watch. this is from Aaron Safian

Can you talk about how Ron Claim, that is Biden's newly named chief of staff was once played by Kevin Spacey. I always wonder how he feels about that. This is in this HBO movie recount, which is about the 2000 election. I had kind of forgotten this movie existed. I had

especially forgotten that Laura Dern played Catherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, first of all, those movies are always so weird. Remember, I think the late show on HBO was the first one of those that had just some guy that vaguely looked like David Letterman playing David Letterman. Mm-hmm.

But what a weirdo genre that is. I really hope we don't get one of those about the 2020 presidential campaign. I'm looking at the recount pictures now. Tom Wilkinson has like a deep tan. Who is he playing in this? It's like they get a couple of lookalikes. I don't know. No, he's playing James Baker.

Oh, it's just this, it's just set against the silver hair, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's, there are just, there are a lot of, there's a lot of good. You got to,

you get a couple of lookalikes, and then for the TV movies, just sort of best, best actor available, right? Ed Bagley Jr. is in here. Of course. Uh, oh, Laura Dern.

Lara Dern, quite a transformation there. But anyway, yeah, it's, uh, yeah, I'm,

now, now we have to rewatch this great. All right, finally, David, we got a note from a preacher in Statesville, North Carolina. Preacher in Statesville, North Carolina. Did it arrive by telegram? How did this? Yeah, who may or may not be David's dad. He writes, as the Trump presidency draws to a close, two questions for the press box, what is the best name for the Trump presidency autobiography? And then he answers, the memoir. pretty good

pretty good and number two for shoemaker what wrestler would Trump most resemble gorgeous George what wrestler would you choose to play Trump in a movie

I mean there is a lot of gorgeous George there right I mean just the sort of the pompadour the tan skin and the sort of I the sort of the hamminess

the hamminess of the whole thing the pomp and circumstance I mean and the you know, there's, you know, the nature boy, buddy Rogers, too. I mean, there's a lot of just the old school heel that we kind of look back with the kind of glamour that. I mean, obviously, gorgeous Georgia was a sort of cut up in a lot of ways,

but there's a lot of that old, the old blonde pompadour look was a heel look. You know, I mean, you put on, you, you, you dyed your hair to sort of get a rise out of people. And I think that there's a lot of that's, that's in Trump too. but man, what wrestler should be playing Trump right now? I don't know, though that's really possible. Oh, I mean, come on. I mean, a lot of them have died, obviously. But, man, there's got to be somebody.

There's got to be a right answer to this question. All right, Dr. Shoemaker, David will be continuing his answer on a catch-up phone call late this week. Just FYI. If you don't hear from him, call me, and I'll make him call you. All right, David, when we found out our colleague Claire McNair had her Jeopardy book coming out, we had to have her on the podcast. I wanted to hear about the reporting of it. I wanted to do deep meta-think on Jeopardy and trivia and being smart in America

from the 80s to 2020. Let's talk a lot about what it's like to interview Alex Trebek. Here's Claire McNair. What a treat to have Claire McNair here. You know her ringer pieces about sports. And you also know her pieces about game shows which she covers like sports. She has now produced her Friday Night Lights, her money ball. The book is Answers in the form of questions a sparklingly written history of Jeopardy,

its host and its contestants, which she's here to talk about. Thanks for coming on the press box, Claire. Thank you for having me. So I want to start with your interview with Alex Trebek, the late host of Jeopardy. That still feels very weird to say. Because I feel as reporters, we get to interview a lot of famous people, but you really only get one or two interviews with people who loom truly largely in your life. What was it like to interview Alex Trebek?

Yeah, it was weird. I mean, it was, I spent a few days in early 2019 on the Jeopardy set while they were filming a tournament called the All-Star Games. And I got to, you know, just kind of spy on production and talk to a bunch of the contestants. But, of course, I knew at some point I was going to get this sit down in Trebeck's dressing room with him. And it was this crazy thing where it's like I had read as many previous clips from his past interviews as I could. And I mean, he had been doing it for so long and was sort of just like such a good performer that he really just kind of had his talking points.

He had his jokes that he told over and over and over. And so there was this anxiety of like, am I going to get him to say anything new or at least like address a new subject. So I mean, it was great though. I had been, I had worried he had something of a reputation for being a little bit prickly. Like, if he thought it was a dumb question, he was going to tell you. And unfortunately, he did not tell me off because I don't know that I could have taken that on just a personal level. How eager was he to talk about his life and his career and really be introspective? Yeah, I mean, I think to the end, he kind of kept people at, or kept the audience, I should say, at, at our.

length. He published a memoir in July, and it was sort of pitched as, you know, him finally dropping the veil and, you know, getting honest about his life. But he kind of stuck to the talking points a little bit. He really was not inclined towards deep kind of personal introspection, but I think that actually made his, this last year and a half as he was going through treatment for pancreatic cancer. He was really open about that. And he was really honest about the pain and the discomfort and the uncertainties of that. And he said subsequently that, you know, he in some ways regretted having been open about that because it led to more questions and it led to people sharing their own really tough stories

with him, which were hard for him to hear, I'm sure. But that was like an interesting moment in his career where he kind of did open up. And that's part of his self-created mythology, right? He's not Richard Dawson on the family feud who's going on and kissing everybody on the line of contestants. You write in the book, he doesn't even really spend much time at all with contestants. He keeps everybody away. Yeah, I mean, part of that, specifically with the contestants, I mean, he's kind of barred from interacting with contestants more than you actually see in that episode because of these funny federal laws that dictate, you know, how Quishos operate and have made. it illegal to cheat on any quiz show. And at Jeopardy, they take it very, very, very seriously.

And it's sort of like a weird thing to encounter because it is a game. But they have, they're law firms that specialize in what's called standards and practices. And basically just they have a lawyer from an outside law firm who sits at the judge's table for every Jeopardy taping, just, you know, making sure everything's totally fair that there's no illusion of any, you know, favoritism towards a given contestant. But it means that Tribeca, didn't talk to the contestants when they were not actually taping their games. But also, I mean, he would

high tail it out of the studio as soon as he was done taping. Like, he was talent. Like, he wasn't sticking around to make sure, you know, everybody wrapped up. So the eternal question about Trebek is, was he a genuinely smart person or was he playing a smart person on television? From spending time with him,

where do you now fall on that question? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a little bit of both in that, I think to a large degree, he really was that character. He really cared about the classics. He loved Mark Twain. He thought that these things were important. One of the great discoveries that I made while reporting out the book is I talked to somewhere around 100 contestants for the book.

And what I heard from a lot of them is that, you know, in those closing moments of the game, as you could see Trebek walk over to the contestant lecterns and shake the champion's hand and kind of chit-chat. They cut the mic so you can't hear them. And often what he was doing was just rehashing the final jeopardy question. And if it was a particularly tough one, he was like, oh, how did you get there? How did you work that out? Did you get this hint that was in there?

Or if they didn't get it and they're just totally heartbroken having just lost on jeopardy. He's like, oh, come on. I mean, don't you remember reading about that? Like, he really did care about these things and he knew a lot of it. But I think he also knew that he was expected to be this scholarly authoritative of the year. I think he did kind of consciously shape that as well. You mentioned something in the intro of the book, which really spoke to me, which is when you were a kid, you watched your parents watch Jeopardy.

What was that experience like? For me, so much of my early experience with Jeopardy was kind of the realization of a canon, just like the idea that there were these things, all these things that I knew nothing about that you were expected to know, you know, a well-informed, educated, you know, good member of society would know about the things on Jeopardy. And I remember, you know, kind of watching an amazement as my parents did know a lot of those things. But it had, there was something about Jeopardy that just had this kind of official seal of approval. It was like, this is what our culture has decided as important. So,

you know, you better study up. Yeah. It is this coming of age quality, isn't it? That we sort of hit at different points in life. And I remember the same thing because I used to, my parents work, so I was often with this elderly babysitter whose name was Mama Louise. How Texan is that? Fantastic. I know. But she would watch Jeopardy and I would watch her and she would get them all right. And I'd be like, oh my God, you know, this woman is the smartest person in the entire world. And it really is this as a kid, you're just hoping, God, someday I hope I will be that smart and I can get all these questions. Right. Right. Yeah. I think a lot of different. Jeopardy contestants dream specifically of competing on Jeopardy, but I think for me it was so much just like, you know, I hope that, you know, one day I'm like my mom and I just know about Europe and things like that.

I feel there's the childhood stage of Jeopardy watching and then there's the college stage. Partly this is because maybe it comes on at a time when you're sitting around about ready to go out and the TV's on and everybody's just kind of watching. But partly too, and tell me if you had this experience is you start to be able to get like a handful of questions. and it really feels like you're on the threshold of adulthood, but not quite an adult yet. Is that what you experienced? Yeah, I mean, you've just like, I think as a college student, it's the first time you've maybe started to like specialize a little bit. Which is not to say that you, you know, you have your career chosen or you know what you're going to do in life or like that your college major particularly matters or I mean, like I studied political science. What is political science?

I don't know. But you feel like you now have some little. quarter of expertise maybe where you're like, see, I own that. I've got that categories. How old were you when you felt like you could watch Jeopardy from home and actually not be completely overwhelmed by the game? You know, that's tough because I think there was a while there in my adolescence and early adulthood where I kind of fell out of Jeopardy. I didn't have cable in high school. I didn't have it in college, not right after college either. So I kind of went away from it.

And it was only really as I started to get back into the habit of watching it pretty seriously, maybe about five years ago, that, you know, suddenly like, oh, yeah, I get this. Like, you just kind of get, like, which is not to say that I would do well on Jeopardy, I would do miserably on Jeopardy and, in fact, had to audition for the book and it did not go well. So thankfully, I will never be on that stage. But you just, you get it. You kind of understand the puzzle, I guess. Yeah, and there is something about the eternal quality of it, too, that's really pleasing.

It's almost like you go home and the sports radio shows in your hometown haven't changed and they're still doing the same bits and talking about the same stuff. You could leave Jeopardy for years and you go back and beyond like a few video clues, it's the same show, right? Right, right. It is such a reliable routine. And I think that it is so much, I think that most people who love Jeopardy have a kind of long running thing through different points in their lives. Like it often is this multi-generational

tradition where you have these memories of watching it as a kid, maybe with a parent or grandparent or babysitter. But it kind of moves with you through your life. And you do watch it in different ways at different ages, but it creates this like intense, like personal nostalgia for people, I think. You write in the book about how the producers like to make Alex Trebek rap and do other things in later years. How worried were they about changing any parts of the show to kind of keep that eternal quality? Yeah, I mean, very little about the underlying format has changed. I was talking to this guy in Corey and Otta, who writes about game shows and is very much like a devoted game show fan in a way that I'm not really. Like, I grew up with Jeopardy, but that was really it.

And he brought up all these different kind of very short-lived variants of Jeopardy that were introduced in different formats of the show. Like they brought it back for one year in the 70s before the Trebek version began and it was still Art Fleming. And, you know, tried a bunch of rule changes. There's been like an experiment with triple Jeopardy, I think, abroad and some foreign version of the show. And there was a version with four contestants instead of three. But none of them have worked. And they haven't really messed with the core jeopardy. And I think it's just that they know it's a really good format.

Like it's very simple. You understand it immediately. I think that's why it lends itself to all these, you know, parodies of it. You know, I think they're very protective of it. But, you know, introducing more pop culture is really kind of the only change that they've made, I think, in 36 years to the kind of basic deities. of it. The Trebek-hosted version, as you noted, starts in 1984. And it's this kind of moment in American life where general trivia makes a comeback. Trivial pursuit you write in the book was created three years before that. How would you describe the kind of knowledge that those two games

are rewarding us for having? I mean, it's tough. I think what is great about those two games is is there not just this fussy academic trivia. There is this pop culture sensibility as well. So it's this really kind of satisfying payoff where you feel like, you know, most of it, I would say, in both the games is like, oh, I remember that from school. I remember reading that in a book. But then you also get the reward of, you know,

just being a person in culture who knows the cool band or who saw that movie. and it's just, it's two very different things. And in the actual trivia community, less so now, but there has long been a kind of disdain for strict pop culture trivia that it was kind of looked down on and seen as not as good as those classic academic categories. And in fact, it was called trash, which I think has been blanking on it, but they've turned it into a nickname, like lovingly for pop culture trivia in particular.

But it was this kind of controversial thing. first. Charles Van Doren, who was the later disgraced star of the quiz shows of the 1950s, you write. So he was pitched as essentially this academic who was wandering onto a game show and drawing from his reservoir of knowledge. We now know he got some of the answers, but drawing from his reservoir of knowledge to get these right.

You think the image of a Jeopardy contestant was different than that? Was there a more regular guy, regular gal quality to it? Yeah. I think that's totally right. I mean, one of the, like, fundamental myths of jeopardy is, I mean, it is a game that is built for you to play from home. But I think the second beat of that, if you're watching from home on your couch playing along, is this idea that you too could go on jeopardy and you could win. And these are ordinary people. And that was one of the things that I wanted to capture in the book because I think that that's changed a little bit over the last five or ten years.

you know, a decade ago, a contestant who found out they were going to be on Jeopardy, and most contestants have about four weeks between being invited to the show and needing to go out to LA tape. You know, they might have, like, watched a few old episodes that they happen to have like a VCR or something or bought like an old book of Jeopardy Clues at the show itself actually published. But there, you know, there wasn't that much training. And now it's not all contestants, but your average Jeopardy contestant has probably really worked very hard. And maybe they started before they were actually invited to go on the show. They do buzzer training to work on their reaction time.

They study math to tell them what to do in Final Jeopardy. Like there is a very kind of complicated, rigorous thing happening now. This is what you write is the money ball era of Jeopardy. So tell us what does one do buzzer training? What do you do in terms of knowledge? and preparing for the categories and the answers? Yeah, that's a little bit harder because you're not going to learn everything

that is going to be on Jeopardy. It's not possible, though some people have tried with hundreds of thousands of flashcards. But there are some people who've had kind of a computer science background and have basically downloaded the entirety of Jeopardy because there are these fans who maintain a database called J-Archive, where they basically manually enter the clues from every single episode of the show. And it's not, they don't have quite every

episode since 1984, but it's pretty close. It's like 400,000 clues. And use that to basically build a map of what Jeopardy tends to ask about and use that in turn to tell them what to study. And it's not just what the most common categories are, but it's also the Roger Craig was a very successful contestant. He used knowledge tracking. So he was after not just what was likely to be on the show, but where those things came. Like was opera, opera comes up fairly regularly, but it's disproportionately in high value places. So it's an important thing to study if you don't know opera.

And I think, of course, most jeopardy contestants don't. So it's, it's, you know, it's people kind of just ripping apart Jeopardy and looking at the guts. Alex Trebek called one of the contestants who had tried to game Jeopardy, a dickweed, quote, unquote. Did that affect your enjoyment of the show knowing that people, we're putting that much time in on the back end? I think it's a different thing. Like, I think I watched Jeopardy differently now, knowing that.

And I think, I mean, for me, having talked to so many contestants, both for the book and for reporting at the ringer, I think I have probably too good of a sense of how important it is to the vast majority of people who make it to the Jeopardy stage. and many of them have been trying to get there for years and years and years and years. And maybe they've studied in these crazy ways or maybe they've just kind of worshipped this show. They grew up with it and have been kind of obsessed with it. And I had somebody run the numbers for me and nearly three quarters of Jeopardy contestants lose their very first game.

Like it's even worse than if we're just random chance. So most people don't win at all. And it is this crushing, crushing thing. So, you know, I, knowing about the semi-professionalization of the show and knowing also that it has this really profound emotional meaning for people in that kind of trivia community, there are about 100,000 people every year who take the Jeopardy contestant test trying to get on the show. It makes it tough to watch two people lose every game. Yeah. See, I can see that. And that is like if you're, if this is your dream, then you want to do everything you can possibly do to maximize the dream.

Yeah. It's like you get one game and it's the Super Bowl. Right. This is your life. Yeah. But I guess it also makes me sad because there is something about just the old ideal of Jeopardy that you could sort of just walk in. Yeah. And if you were fast on the buzzer and you were smart or you could recall things that you would have a fairly equal chance to win with everybody else without having this giant training course that you have to go through to actually win. Yeah. I mean, I think that.

that version of the show still exists to some degree. You know, not everybody is training this way. And there's also just so much luck inherent in Jeopardy and what categories are going to come up. And if you have the buzzer timing, like you don't know. Ken Jennings made this great comparison that I loved,

which is that Jeopardy is like this, it's like an Olympic sport. But when you're watching, it's the Olympians, it's every single Olympians first time ever doing that sport. Like you don't have any idea if you have the buzzer timing down. You could have trained for years and bought a buzzer and watched hundreds of seconds fall away from your reaction time.

But you really don't know if you just have that exact Jeopardy timing. So I think that there is kind of just a really like surface level human element of it still. And certainly you do get people who just kind of, you know, just love Jeopardy and just show up and don't really rearrange their lives for it. Yeah, surface level is a perfect word because I feel like I haven't read William Faulkner in its entirety or really at all. But I feel like I could recall the names of most of the novels. I have a shot at the major characters. I would have a shot at the county where they take place.

Maybe one or two facts about Faulkner's life, which I could at least guess. So then I'm good, right? That's the level of knowledge basically about William Faulkter that I would need to compete in jeopardy. Yeah. I mean, they probably only ask about 25 total things about him and his work, right? Trivia knowledge, and I didn't really get into this in the book, but trivia knowledge itself is such an interesting thing. And what I enjoyed learning was that even people who are really good at it, who've won big on Jeopardy, who are just, you know, and continue to compete in the trivia world and win a bunch of events, for the most part, they are kind of the first people to say. say that it is not really the same thing as intelligence or even, you know, education. It is, it is this kind of separate skill, this like fast recall thing where it is just kind of skating around the surface of all these different things that you're shuffling through in your head and being

able to do it really quickly about a whole lot of things. Like I've heard from contestants that sometimes they don't even know that they knew the answer to something. And it's only as they're watching their episode air that they're like, oh, God, really? Like, If I were to be asked that right now, I'm not sure I would know the answer to that, but they're on the stage. They just nailed it without thinking about it. Trebek died 11 days ago. And at that moment, seemingly every sports writer in America was able to put up a picture on Twitter of themselves competing on Jeopardy. It was almost like we'd asked all of us to post the picks of our Jason Isbell ticket stubs at the same time.

Everybody had one. Do you have a theory for what accounts for that, the sports writer Jeopardy Continuum? That is a good question, and I'm not sure I have a great answer. I think that there, so much of it is this, like, grazing curiosity that I think dovetails with maybe media generally, but perhaps something about sports in particular. And I mean, like, I really believe that Jeopardy is a sport to a large degree, and that it is competitive and it's quick. And I think that that, I mean, that's why you see so many sports public. just cover Jeopardy. It's like they don't write about any other show,

maybe The Bachelor, but Jeopardy is kind of treated as a sport, and no other game show would be. I'm sure if you asked any of those editors if they'd run something on like the Price's Rider Wheel of Fortune, they would just be like, what? Like, what are you talking about? But it is just accepted as a sort of sport.

Totally. And SI wrote a big piece about Jeopard in the 80s, Franz Lids. And I went back and looked today and there were all these outraged letters to the editor. Like, why is this in SI? One of the letters read question, what is in jeopardy answer my subscription renewal?

Like, we just couldn't imagine that SI would cover, you know, yeah, no, it's funny. Because my only theory about sportswriters is that we are even more desperate than other journalists to prove that we are well-rounded people by virtue of being sportswriters, that we can recall the names of FDR's vice presidents and stuff like that. Right. So maybe that's part of it. Right. There is this interesting interplay, too, with how the trivia community looks at sports. Because I think, you know, similar to pop culture, there is this kind of disdain for sports and amongst a lot of people who are these elite trivia figures. And of course, that's why those moments when the contestants on Jeopardy don't know the answers to a sports category that's maybe not conventionally really difficult, always go viral.

because, I mean, it fits so perfectly with that stereotype of, like, the dark who, you know, doesn't, doesn't know the difference between basketball, football or whatever it is. Right. But there is this kind of, like, deep-seated hatred, I think, of sports in a lot of these, like, elite trivia people. It's like the opera category for a different. Yeah. I mean, it's just like, oh, who cares? That's not serious.

I can't be bothered. We're obsessed here on the press box with Wolf Blitzer, and you wrote that Wolf Blitzer's appearance on Celebrity Jeopardy was quote disastrous. Can you explain why Wolf Blitzer failed at Jeopardy? Yeah. So he had previously been on Celebrity

Jeopardy and and he had done well enough that he was invited to this tournament they held about a decade ago I think less than that. That was sort of a tournament of champions for celebrity contestants. So they'd all

been there before. They'd all done pretty well. And I talked to Andy Richter for the book who played against Wolf Fletzer. And basically two things happened. The first thing was that Andy Richter was really good at Jeopardy. He was really good with the buzzer timing. He was really good with the general knowledge. So he just had himself a hell of a game and dominated the board and didn't let his opponents, one of whom was Wolf Flitzer, just ring in much at all.

So he had the highest score in any celebrity Jeopardy game ever in that game. But then also, Will Fletzer just, it just wasn't his day. And I don't think he's ever talked about it on the record. I could be wrong about that, but I'm not sure he has. Where he just, he didn't know the categories. And he had a couple, Andy Richter called them brain farts, where it's just like he said something that was just kind of obviously wrong. And you kind of think that he probably did know the right answer,

but just like in that moment, it's just, you know, just couldn't couldn't get it. And Annie Richter was telling me that, I mean, it was not fun. It was not fun to be part of this just like beat down that like, I don't know that there was a sense that it would go viral at that point, but like it very much did. And it is a thing people continue to love to like post videos from and pictures from and talk about because it was, I mean, it was funny. It was funny television. But he was saying that, you know, Wolf Litzer and his wife just kind of hurried out of the green room. Like, it was just like a really, like, painful thing for them.

We're not used to seeing Wolf Blitzer at a moment of weakness. No, no. It's, yeah, it's tough. I really have a lot of respect for the celebrities who go on the show. And I guess that the celebrities who have sort of serious public personas, because if it does go badly and Jeopardy goes badly for a lot of people all the time, it's going to be like a problem. It's going to be a thing that is brought up for. ever.

What did you learn about writing a book? This is your first book. You plunged in. You did it quickly. I know that. What did you come away with from the experience? I would say definitely do not go on book leave for two months immediately before a global pandemic.

So the beginning of my 2020 was I went on book leave. starting just a little bit after New Year's. And the plan was I would hand in my final, or my first draft, my first full draft with, you know, probably minimal revisions after that on March 15th. And then on March 28th, I was going to get married. So I was going to sleep for a week, then go to New Orleans where my fiancee and I would get married. Some things changed. So, yeah, we ended up canceling the wedding on March 15th. But I got a little bit of extra time to work on the book. So that was great. And, you know, then just everything else.

But it was this weird thing where in like the two months before the lockdown began, I had been out of the house like twice. Like I hadn't seen anybody. I hadn't done anything. I was like, I just can't wait for March 16th. Like, I'm going to get so drunk. Like stay out all night. And then, of course, the pandemic had arrived.

And I mean, that's low on the list of terror. things that the pandemic has caused. Not the saddest story of the pandemic, but. No, no. Heart rending in its own way. Yeah. I mean, it was, yeah.

So someday. Yeah. We had Reeves Wyden on the pot earlier this week and he was saying the pandemic kind of canceled any excuse a writer can make to their editor. Because what else are you doing? You know? Right. Right. Oh, no.

I didn't see that email. It's like, you're looking. You probably did. You probably did. All right. Finally. Scott Tobias, the writer asks, do you want to spitball Jeopardy host?

Who is Ken Jennings? Seems like the obviously correct answer to the question, but I'll try to stay open-minded about it. Who is going to be the next host of Jeopardy? I think Ken Jennings is certainly the likeliest option, and I should say I'm a little bit biased. He graciously wrote my foreword and talked to me a lot for the book. Lovely, lovely guy, even smarter,

funnier, kinder than you think he is. I think that he makes so much sense. He's synonymous with Jeopardy. He's, I mean, he's now working for Jeopardy since the start of this season. He's been a consulting producer and helping to write. And, you know, I guess he's going to work with getting contestants involved. But he's, I mean, he's in-house. And he just, he has some of the categories, or the qualities, I'm sorry, that made Trebek work so well.

And that he is this kind of smart, authoritative figure. But he's also, like, he's really funny. Like, he's good on television. And like the greatest of all time tournament was really fun. He can just get in a barb and it's it's great. Like he's great at that. So it does just make a lot of sense. And is he accepted by the Jeopardy masses?

I mean, because he was such a good contestant, do they, will they immediately say, okay, he could be the heir to Alex Trebek if anybody could? I think that, yeah. I mean, there's not a human being on earth that, you know, would not get a lot of criticism because nobody is going to be Alex Trebek. But I think that most Jeopardy fans recognize, like, the basic truth of that, that he does make so much sense and probably would be really good at it. But an interesting thing is that because he's been on the show so much of her the 16 years since he first competed in 2004, Jeopardy has done this really great thing where they've built characters kind of out of people like Ken and Brad and James who come back to the show and had these long stints on the show. where you root for them, or maybe you root against them.

In the greatest of all time tournament, I think there were people who were Ken fans or James fans or Brad fans, and they were rooting against the other two. And so the weird downside of that, because I think it has made the show a lot more fun to watch, is that there are people who identify as, like, against Ken Jennings. Like, they don't want him to succeed. So it's a really strange situation in that sense.

I think that, you know, if he is named as, as the host, people would learn to love him quickly, I think, those, those who don't already. But it is, it is tough. I would not want to be the person making the decision or the person trying to, you know, calm people who are rightfully heartbroken over the loss of Trebek. All right. She is Claire McNair. You are commanded right now to make your jeopardy puns. By the way, how many of those have you got on this book for? It's a few. A few. You'll notice I did not make Annie today.

I appreciate it. Avoided. Answers in the form of questions available everywhere right now. Thanks for coming on the press box, Claire. Thank you so much for having me. All right. It's time for David Chumaker. Guess is a strain pun headline.

Yeah. Monday's headline about data science coming to high school football was Friday night bites. Today's headline comes from Noah Leiford. It's from the Economist Radio. We should do a segment sometime about how all kind of old school magazines call their podcast radio. Yeah. The story is one that resonates today after that wacky,

Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell Press conference. Team Trump, David, is filing tons of lawsuits, but they're not really getting much bang for their buck. There's a name for that principle, which I encourage you to pun off of. What was the Economist's Radio's strained pun headline? Bang for their buck. Fuck. Is this a legal term that a legal phrase specifically or just a general one?

Start with a general one here. Empty suits. They're not getting there. Return on the investment. Oh, we're getting there. Return is a good word. Return on certain kind of returns. Oh, a good return.

Oh, what is it? Many something returns. Many returns are going down. Oh, diminishing returns. Okay. We start with the law of diminishing returns. So put on the law and the law and diminishing return. The lawyers of diminishing returns. The lawyers of diminishing returns. All right. That's good. A lot of help needed there, but that was, that's a good one. He is David Chewmaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeida. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. A real treat Monday on the press box, Ben Mankowitz, aka the smart dude from Turner Classic Movies, is here to propel us into Thanksgiving week. We'll also have Josh Dean of the very in the news podcast, Camelian, Hollywood Con Queen. Plus, of course, more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. Before we go, the answer is Greg the Hammer Valentine. 2020, Greg the Hammer Valentine. I'll see you next week, Brian. There you go, Dr. Schumacher. See you, David.