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Episode: A Holiday Check-in on Anything and Everything With Chuck Klosterman
Author: The Ringer
Duration: 02:41:10
Episode Shownotes
The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Chuck Klosterman to discuss a myriad of topics, including the current state of college sports (3:45), lessons learned (or not) from the 2024 election (30:50), modern NBA superstardom, how the public's relationship with celebrity has evolved, the next generation of documentaries, thoughts from
the Tyson-Paul fight (59:56), HBO's ‘The Sopranos,’ and more (2:08:56). Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Chuck Klosterman Producer: Kyle Crichton The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit www.rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Summary
In this episode of 'The Bill Simmons Podcast,' Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman discuss the transformations in college sports and the implications of the upcoming 2024 election. They analyze the new 12-team college football playoff system, shifts caused by NIL deals, and the changing dynamics of fandom. Klosterman provides insights into the 2024 election, noting the disconnect between media narratives and actual voter sentiment. The episode also covers modern NBA superstardom, the influence of social media on perceptions of basketball history, and the cultural impact of celebrity figures, culminating in reflections on 'The Sopranos.'
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (A Holiday Check-in on Anything and Everything With Chuck Klosterman) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:01 Speaker_02
Coming up, the longest podcast Chuck Kloster and I have ever done, and it's next. This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. It's tip-off time for NBA Cup. So I hope you're all ready and stocked up on Michelob Ultra.
00:00:15 Speaker_02
Notice how I called it NBA Cup and not the NBA Cup? Trying to get that going. We'll see how it goes. I really love how they're getting fans closer to all the action with Michelob Ultra courtside. It has exclusive content and prizes like courtside seats.
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Open to U.S. residents 21 plus. Begins on 10-1-24, goes through 7-1-25. Visit mickelobeultra.com slash courtside for free entry. Entry deadlines and official rules. and void where prohibited.
00:01:02 Speaker_00
This episode is brought to you by Old El Paso. Does game day hosting feel like an extreme sport? Not anymore. With Old El Paso, feeding your hungry crowd is oh so easy.
00:01:12 Speaker_00
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00:01:26 Speaker_00
Shop game day essentials at oldelpaso.com.
00:01:31 Speaker_02
We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. Put up a new rewatchables on Monday night. We did Running Scared with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines. One of the first great buddy cop movies. Also the end of Yacht Rock.
00:01:45 Speaker_02
Also a super fun movie to discuss. It was me and Chris Ryan. You can check that out on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, plus the Ringer Movies YouTube channel. We will have that as well.
00:01:56 Speaker_02
Speaking of YouTube channel, so the Bill Simmons YouTube channel, which I hope you have subscribed to. Do it for the holidays for me. We put all videos and clips from this podcast on that channel. I'm not going to do another podcast this week.
00:02:09 Speaker_02
I'm just warning you now, but I still want to do Million Dollar Picks. I think. I haven't dove into the slate yet. Yeah, I used that correctly. Great. I used to be a writer.
00:02:21 Speaker_02
So what I'm going to do is if I have billion dollar picks this week, I'm going to do it on my YouTube channel. So I haven't decided on Thanksgiving.
00:02:29 Speaker_02
I don't really like the Thanksgiving slate, but if I do anything with the Thanksgiving slate, it's going to be on the YouTube channel on Wednesday. I'll put up a video there on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel.
00:02:40 Speaker_02
On Friday, I'm going to have some million dollar picks, I think, for week 13 to keep it going. Basically broke even this last week. I'm still mad at the Cardinals.
00:02:51 Speaker_02
But that's the plan for million dollar picks because there are no more podcasts this week. Oh, by the way,
00:02:59 Speaker_02
If you wanna bet on the NFL, go check out the Ringer specials on FanDuel Sportsbook on their NFL page, because we put up all of our favorite bets on that.
00:03:09 Speaker_02
And you should also watch the Ringer Sunday pregame show on Sunday, which is on YouTube TV and FanDuel TV with Sal and JJ and Raheem and House. So we have a lot of stuff covered, though. Anyway.
00:03:23 Speaker_02
The Bill Simmons YouTube channel, I will have million dollar picks on there in some form, maybe even two of them. One last thing. We know Thanksgiving is Thursday. We know we have three football games.
00:03:34 Speaker_02
We know we have some family time, some food, some drinks. You know how it's going to go. Well, what you weren't expecting, you knew Black Friday was Friday and there's a football game, you know, there's college football.
00:03:45 Speaker_02
You also have a brand new music box documentary. It is called Yacht Rock, a documentary. It premieres on Friday on HBO and on Max. And maybe even if you're a night owl, late, late Thursday night, it's really good.
00:03:59 Speaker_02
There's no way you're not going to enjoy it. I'm just telling you. And you can watch with your whole family. You know who's going to like it? Your parents. your uncles, your aunts, maybe even your grandparents. This is a great one. Please check it out.
00:04:10 Speaker_02
Yacht Rocket documentary premiering Friday on HBO and Max. Coming up on this podcast, Chuck Klosterman had not been on the podcast for a while. He's a BS Podcast Hall of Famer. and we had a lot to discuss.
00:04:24 Speaker_02
We wanted to talk college football, we wanted to talk NBA, we wanted to talk Sopranos, we wanted to talk documentaries, we wanted to talk about the election. We hit everything.
00:04:34 Speaker_02
This is a really, really long podcast, but listen, you're probably traveling the next five days, you're in the car, you're driving around. I'm not gonna have a podcast on Thursday, so it's basically all the content here right now. Chuck is next.
00:04:47 Speaker_02
First, our friends from Pearl Jam. All right. Our friends shut close to Minnesota. We're taking this on a Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving. Lots of topics to get to. But it's really it's college football time. College basketball feels like it's back.
00:05:22 Speaker_02
I've been thinking about you because, you know, you're a giant college sports fan, a giant college sports believer. Feels like the 12 team college football playoff is working. Cooper flags back like college sports is back.
00:05:35 Speaker_04
Well, sort of. Yes, I guess it kind of is. But, you know, this 12-team playoff in football, it's still keeping things interesting, but in a very different way than it used to be.
00:05:48 Speaker_04
I'm, I guess, pleased, but surprised that it has changed things as much as it has, and yet the games themselves are still really good, and I guess that really is the bottom line, but it definitely, this is a weird feeling, college football season, because of the way things are now.
00:06:05 Speaker_02
Well, when you say they've changed, what's changed? What's different than it was 10 years ago?
00:06:10 Speaker_04
Well, okay. So when there was a 14 playoff, and I think this was at times kind of a combative issue for people, but that the whole idea really was to figure out who would be the national champion. That was really the only goal.
00:06:25 Speaker_04
So like last year when Florida state didn't get in, um, It was because, well, we know that they can't win the national championship, so even if their resume sort of looks like they should be in, it doesn't make any sense to put them in.
00:06:36 Speaker_04
The whole idea of this four-team playoff is so we can clearly figure out who the champion is. But with a 12-team playoff, it's a little different. Now it seems like making the playoff is the reward.
00:06:48 Speaker_04
Like it seems less about just figuring out who wins in the end. Um, and that has changed things quite a bit. It feels different now. Um, like, you know, uh, uh, I like Indiana, for example. Okay. So, so Indiana is,
00:07:06 Speaker_04
Like there's 12 or 14 guys who played for James Madison last year. So it's like they moved over, like, you know, like a third of the best players in the team went to that team. The coaches from there as well.
00:07:17 Speaker_04
And it, nobody is really bothered by that in a way, like, like not, I'm not even that bothered by it, I guess. It's just, it's strange now how it is. And I, it doesn't seem as though, um, the, like the portal and NL stuff and all that is,
00:07:35 Speaker_04
and the playoff, an orchestra all together, has sort of completely reinvented this, and yet the interest in it seems relatively the same, which I don't know what that says about fans, that they don't seem to really care about the structure of the sport.
00:07:49 Speaker_04
Maybe it was silly to think that they did.
00:07:52 Speaker_02
So it's almost like the habits of a college football season, and if you cared about a team or a conference,
00:07:59 Speaker_02
you were just gonna care regardless of what they did, even if they changed, where it's like, oh, we have 20 new guys who were on a different Division I team last year. They're just on our team now.
00:08:09 Speaker_02
It becomes more like professional sports, which people are used to.
00:08:13 Speaker_04
It's almost more than professional sports, because professional sports at least has free agency guidelines and stuff, and salary gaps and all these things. I mean, it's in a way more professional than pro sports is.
00:08:24 Speaker_04
I see people say like, oh, well, Deion Sanders, you know, go to the NFL now. And it's like, this is actually where he should be at college, because he really speaks the language of a kid who's like, I want to win, but also what's in it for me.
00:08:39 Speaker_04
And that seems to be sort of what the nature of this is now. That people were just more accepting, accepting, I guess, of this idea that this, you should be able to just like put these teams together instantly.
00:08:55 Speaker_04
Cause when it really has happened, I think is that, you know, sort of the teams who are always like the elite power teams, they've lost their depth.
00:09:04 Speaker_04
Basically that is what has happened that these coaches have said like, well, you know, there's three strong safeties at LSU or they're, you know, four offensive tackles at Texas A&M. They can't all play.
00:09:14 Speaker_04
They all think they're going to play, but some of them aren't. So now we're going to strip those things away. And it really has balanced things out now. Like, I don't think the SEC is as dominant as it was in the past.
00:09:25 Speaker_04
I don't know if the difference between these teams, not just them and the big 10, but sort of them and everyone is much less than it was in the past.
00:09:32 Speaker_04
And that's why I think when they kind of figure out what teams to put in the playoff this year, at least, I think this idea of really trying to find The 12 best teams sort of in a vacuum. I don't think they should do that this time.
00:09:44 Speaker_04
I think they should kind of like go, well, okay. And we're going to have this many teams in the playoff and we can't really tell who is superior because this thing has been so shuffled.
00:09:56 Speaker_04
They almost have to just kind of go like, look at it like professionally, like it's just who deserves it based on what they did during the year.
00:10:05 Speaker_02
Well, I'm about as casual of a college football fan who knows what's going on as it gets. I was invested in that Colorado game. last weekend because I knew what their ranking was and I knew if they lost, they were probably out of the playoffs.
00:10:19 Speaker_02
I just thought it would have been fun in the playoffs.
00:10:20 Speaker_02
But if it was a year ago, I wouldn't have cared because they just would have been, it's like the question would have been, are they going to play on the December 30th bowl or the 31st or will they be on New Year's day?
00:10:30 Speaker_02
And that really would have been all that was at stake. But Saturday actually cared if they won the game or not. So in that respect, it feels like it's worked.
00:10:39 Speaker_04
I mean, it is, it seems to me like there was be a situation where if it was the old system and they went to say they were going to like, you know, uh, oh, I don't know, whatever, whatever bowl they would be going to, if they were going to some lesser bowl, like Travis Hunter wouldn't play and all that stuff.
00:10:54 Speaker_04
I don't think that's almost seems like a guarantee that would have happened.
00:10:56 Speaker_02
But that's another reason why they did this, right? Because they wanted to protect against shit like that.
00:11:01 Speaker_04
Um, but now it's like, I think there was a sense maybe it's going to be, for SCC teams. four big 10 teams, Notre Dame, probably Boise state. And then one each from the ACC and the big 12. Maybe the ACC will have two teams.
00:11:20 Speaker_04
Maybe it'll be like SMU and Clemson, Miami. And then maybe then it would have to be probably three sec teams then. Um, which is, I don't know, maybe that was the goal all along basically to have it mostly be the big 10 and the sec.
00:11:34 Speaker_04
Yeah, those are the two best conferences, but it, I, I'm really interested in this, but it does it does feel like a different experience watching these games. The games are still good.
00:11:45 Speaker_04
The games themselves, when it's happening, feels exactly the way it always did. But I know in my mind, it's not how it always was. Like, you know, now it looks like kind of in perpetuity now. Notre Dame is always just going to have
00:11:58 Speaker_04
the fifth year quarterback from a school who was kind of academically comparable. Like they're just kind of every year that's just going to be the new quarterback for Notre Dame.
00:12:07 Speaker_04
It's some guy who's in his fifth year who went to school like Wake or Duke or a school that they find acceptable to pull over.
00:12:14 Speaker_02
So, yeah, I can't even imagine what kind of commitment this is. academically, wink, wink, but also like just, like they must start, they have spring practice, right?
00:12:25 Speaker_02
Then they start actual practice for the season, I'm guessing like late June, somewhere in there, like early July. And then they're going all the way through for the next six, six and a half months.
00:12:38 Speaker_02
Like I, you know, my daughter plays Div 3, like she plays soccer, they show up in mid-August, the season goes, if you make the playoffs or not, it's like basically ends like first week of November.
00:12:49 Speaker_02
And even for that, she's like, man, it's nice that the season's over. I can finally concentrate on doing schoolwork and we can go out again.
00:12:57 Speaker_01
And that was a two and a half month commitment.
00:13:00 Speaker_02
These football players, they're going potentially through at least January, but there's more even playoff games. To me, it almost feels like it should just be a pro sport anyway. I don't know how that's a college experience.
00:13:15 Speaker_04
Here's one thing I don't know. is, is there anybody who's on say Texas's roster or Ohio state's roster, anyone on the roster who's not getting paid? Like our walk-ons even making money in some way?
00:13:29 Speaker_02
I don't know. I mean, you tell me the backup quarterback can get paid and not even play.
00:13:34 Speaker_04
Well, I, I, I'm kind of under the impression that some of these deals are sort of umbrellas for the entire squad, that everyone's getting something because that would also, you know, that would, if, if they didn't, that could cause like real inner squad dissension.
00:13:48 Speaker_04
Like it would be a real problem. You know, it's like, it'd be one thing if one guy's getting paid more than another, it'd be another thing if one guy's getting paid a lot and someone else isn't get paid anything, you know?
00:13:56 Speaker_02
I mean, I gotta believe football though.
00:14:00 Speaker_04
Sure. Sure.
00:14:01 Speaker_02
It's harder. Like basketball, you're talking about, basically three to six guys really matter on a basketball team. So then if you get to like the eighth, ninth, 10th man, and they're just being, like this guy, A.J.
00:14:14 Speaker_02
DeBanca, that's coming into the, to college next year, who's, you know, really has, really looks Kobe T-Mac-ish and has a chance to be pretty massive. He's just gonna make more money than everyone else on his team combined, probably multiplied by six.
00:14:30 Speaker_04
You know, well, but it's, it's one thing if the money is coming from NIL stuff, like you're in a commercial for like the local sandwich shop or whatever.
00:14:39 Speaker_04
I think it's another thing when these guys are just sort of like, you know, you see this now that boosters get letters and they're like, we need linebackers. They're like, we need, you know, what are you going to fucking do for us? We need to do this.
00:14:50 Speaker_04
You know? Um, I think I've said this probably on your podcast before. I've said it many times. What I mean to me, I have a sense. of where this is going. Like I might I'll probably be wrong, but I have a sense of it.
00:15:00 Speaker_04
It seems to me like we're probably five years away. from the SEC and the Big Ten, and maybe one other conference, breaking away from the NCAA, just ending that relationship, setting up everything themselves.
00:15:19 Speaker_04
And then if you play for Ole Miss, you can go to school there if you want, but mainly you represent Ole Miss. You play for the team, you're on that roster, you wear those colors. you might be involved in the academic program.
00:15:34 Speaker_04
There may be not, not Ole Miss in particular, all these schools, you know, and I think that they're banking on something, which I think they're right about judging from how sort of this has played out, which is that if you really care about Tennessee or you really care about USC or all these things,
00:15:53 Speaker_04
It's really just the uniform. That's all you really cared about. That's who you're rooting for. And it doesn't matter if there's absolutely no relationship to college at all. I don't know if over time this will be a pretty significant detriment.
00:16:10 Speaker_04
Because right now nobody cares because we're just kind of psychologically shifting everything. It's just like, okay, well, we're not gonna really think about the relationship these guys have to college.
00:16:22 Speaker_04
If it turns out that it doesn't matter at all, if it turns out that none of these guys have to go to the school, they're just basically employees of the school and we're just watching football, it happens to be played by guys between the ages of 18 and 23.
00:16:34 Speaker_04
And it doesn't mean anything else. There's no regional quality to it. then it will then it will basically mean a lot of the things I thought about college football were fucking wrong.
00:16:45 Speaker_04
My whole perception, even what I've told myself what I like about it might be wrong. Like if like it because all these things I've been talking about. They certainly don't inform my experience of watching the games.
00:16:58 Speaker_04
I do not think this when I'm watching it. I only think this when I'm talking about it. And it might be possible that we can just make this split in our mind because obviously there's lots of things about pro sports. Like we don't know.
00:17:10 Speaker_04
spends time watching the game thing, it's kind of weird that I'm watching this 33-year-old guy play baseball. Like, this is weird that an adult is doing this for a living and he's making more than everybody in my town or whatever.
00:17:22 Speaker_04
We don't think about those things. So maybe we just won't think about it. I mean, because the games themselves are still excellent. I mean, every week there's a bunch of games that are interesting. Although I got to say, I was a little disappointed.
00:17:37 Speaker_04
I really did, for a while, think that the army Navy game was going to be two undefeated teams or a team that's undefeated with against a one loss team. That's the only game on that day.
00:17:48 Speaker_04
I think for people like me, the idea of watching the army Navy game as a de facto playoff game would have been one of the greatest experiences of my college football watching life. Not that I have any relationship to the military.
00:18:04 Speaker_04
It's just that you're so used to watching that game and convincing yourself, well, there's something like I got it. It's raining and the guys are in the stands and it's the only game on like it would have been amazing if that game would have mattered.
00:18:16 Speaker_04
But I was kind of a it was probably a hopeless dream. I but that's that would have been amazing. Yeah.
00:18:24 Speaker_02
So after everything you just said, The reason I think college sports is basically invulnerable, there's two sets of fans that I think cannot be killed. The first is like Sal's son, Archie's going to Oregon, right? He's a sophomore.
00:18:38 Speaker_02
He's coming home for Thanksgiving on like Wednesday, and then he's going back to school on Friday because they're playing. They have a huge game that weekend. He wants to be there.
00:18:50 Speaker_02
So it's like these students, it's still a factory of if you go to a school like that, you're going to get swept. He didn't care about. you know, that team before he went there. And now it's like, he's an Oregon fan for life.
00:19:00 Speaker_02
So you have this factory of fans that go to those schools that once it's in there, like they become Scientologists, it's over there and they're in for good. And then the other side, the other piece that just seems infallible is the, is the alumni.
00:19:15 Speaker_02
And I saw it here in LA when, when Michigan was making its run,
00:19:19 Speaker_02
Um, and I, for some reason knew a bunch of people that went to Michigan and they lost their fucking minds that, that, that this was going and they had groups of friends that they hadn't seen a while or they were going to the game or they were going to watch parties and that I think you put those two subsets together and it just, it will never end because you're constantly regenerating new fans that are just going to care for their entire life about their school.
00:19:45 Speaker_04
That's probably true. And I think that with this new influx of new money coming in, I think this change should be made. I don't think anyone who goes to a college, who's attending a college, should have to pay money to watch that team play.
00:20:03 Speaker_04
It should be free for any student to go to these games while they're there.
00:20:06 Speaker_04
And if you graduate from a university, as long as you keep proof of their student ID or whatever, you should be able to attend games of that team for the rest of your life for $10. Right. There's no reason if all this money is coming in.
00:20:22 Speaker_04
Like when I was in college, football games were free. It was a Division II school. They're not anymore, but they were then. That seemed like a completely reasonable thing.
00:20:29 Speaker_04
It seems very weird to have someone pay tuition to go to an institution, but you can't see the goddamn football team play unless, that makes no sense.
00:20:36 Speaker_04
And it seems like if you graduate from there and you've paid to go to college there, one of the benefits is for the rest of your life, you should be able to go to these games extremely cheaply. And I think that not only,
00:20:46 Speaker_04
Like now a university would hear this and they would be like, that's insane. Because like they would just think about the amount of revenue that they would lose.
00:20:54 Speaker_04
But think of the revenue over time, if you were essentially guaranteed that this will always be an essential thing in people's lives. Like I think it would be good for society. I think it'd be good for sports society.
00:21:05 Speaker_04
And I think it would be good for the schools over time, you know.
00:21:10 Speaker_02
You know what's interesting? We've had 50 years of movies that have talked about how stupid this is. Like, what's the point of student athletes? Why can't we move around the system?
00:21:23 Speaker_02
Like, think about One on One with Henry Steele with the Robbie Benson movie. But the big one, Fast Break, when Gabe Caplan gets, you know, one of my favorite sports movies that's the most politically incorrect sports movie probably of all time.
00:21:34 Speaker_02
It does not age well. But Gabe Caplan gets this job Vegas and he's just like, I'm just gonna bend the system up.
00:21:41 Speaker_02
I'm gonna grab a bunch of people who have no business being in college and we're just gonna try to beat the UNLV school that he has to beat.
00:21:48 Speaker_02
So this is in the 70s where we're thinking about how can we buck the system and it's still going, going, going. Now I wonder, like you mentioned, where this is going ultimately. Like you said, in five years these conferences will be together.
00:22:02 Speaker_02
Just feels like there'll be a 32 team league None of those schools will be considered Div 1 NCA anymore. They just won't even be in the NCA.
00:22:10 Speaker_02
And the new Div 1 will be all the schools that are a little more academically serious, maybe, combined with a whole hodgepodge of other schools. They'll have conferences. And then Div 2 will be Div 2 and Div 3 will be Div 3.
00:22:25 Speaker_02
And that's just how it'll be.
00:22:27 Speaker_04
I don't know if the academic seriousness will be part of it. I think it will be like it'll be 32 or say 40 teams and it will just be the 40 teams who can get into it and they're all going to want it.
00:22:39 Speaker_04
Like they're all like, you know, it's like, uh, it does. It's not going to, I think that, that the value of this is going to be so incredible. The financial value of this, that, that there isn't somebody, I can't imagine the school.
00:22:51 Speaker_04
It'll be like, like if Cal can get in, they'll do it.
00:22:54 Speaker_02
So you think like Cal Stanford Duke?
00:22:56 Speaker_04
Sure. Yeah.
00:22:57 Speaker_02
I mean, all of these like high end academic schools would still be like, fuck it. We're selling out. We're going to be part of this.
00:23:03 Speaker_04
Well, I don't know if they would consider it a sellout. I think that they would see it as a value added to the university system.
00:23:10 Speaker_02
But not what you laid out, though, that people weren't even in the school. I mean, that's like a whole other level.
00:23:15 Speaker_04
I know. In real terms, it wouldn't. But in the sense that it's like if somebody wants to go to Stanford or whatever, it's like they, I think, would like the opportunity to also have this other institution attached, this football institution.
00:23:29 Speaker_04
It'd be the same way it's like if, I mean, I feel like you'd be the kind of guy who you would not love moving to a town that wouldn't have a sports franchise, a pro sports franchise. You'd feel weird about that.
00:23:38 Speaker_02
I think you prefer to be places where- I like knowing that I can go see NBA stars. Exactly. I just think that's a non-negotiable for me. Yeah.
00:23:45 Speaker_04
Yeah, so I think that there, you know, it's when sort of kids and their parents are making up the idea of what this college experience should be. Part of it might involve, you know, seeing the football team on Saturdays or whatever.
00:23:58 Speaker_04
So I think that those universities will still want that. It's also gives them, you know, like such a higher profile. I mean, there are some colleges like, you know, like football sort of raised the profile of like Texas tech to a high.
00:24:14 Speaker_04
Like I, no one really ever thought of that school at all before they got about Boise state Boise state. It's another great example. Yes. You know, that may be even a better one. Um,
00:24:24 Speaker_02
Well, it is funny, like my son's a junior right now and we're just starting to think about college stuff and trying to put it off as long as possible.
00:24:31 Speaker_02
And when you talk to like counselors and stuff, they all, and this went with my daughter a little bit too, but they all say the same things. Like what kind of experience does your kid want when they go to college?
00:24:41 Speaker_02
And one of the things they'll mention is, do you want to go to a big school, a school that has like a good football team and you just get swept up in the whole campus thing? It is a selling point for some people.
00:24:54 Speaker_02
You go to the University of Texas, you are now buying into that team for the rest of your life if you care about sports. If I'm a freshman at the University of Texas, I will now care about this team for the rest of my life.
00:25:07 Speaker_02
And some people, that's a selling point for some people. Or it's an unexpected bonus when you get to that school and you're like, oh my God, I'm completely swept up in this. And I don't think that's ever gonna change.
00:25:19 Speaker_04
I mean, the meaning of college, I feel like has certainly changed, though the meaning of going to college in general, that there is like just a super high degree of skepticism now among about the kind of elite colleges.
00:25:34 Speaker_04
with still the understanding that it is this kind of ultimate networking opportunity. So like when you say when kids are like, they're asking kids like, what kind of experience do you have?
00:25:44 Speaker_04
Like, it would seem obvious that you would, that the answer should be like, well, I'm going to go somewhere where I can sort of pursue the education I want to have a job later. But that's not even kind of, they would never use that language.
00:25:57 Speaker_04
They would use the language of like, it needs to be sort of like a satisfying experience because everybody has to be happy now all the time.
00:26:03 Speaker_02
You want to be a doctor or a lawyer, maybe you're thinking about it differently.
00:26:06 Speaker_04
Yes, that should be the experience. Yeah.
00:26:08 Speaker_02
College was so much scarier when we were going to college because you're just being sent off. And if you're going like relatively far away or far away from your parents or your family, it's a big deal, right?
00:26:22 Speaker_02
You basically, they could call you, maybe you have your phone in your room, they could call and check in. They could write letters. We didn't have the internet, right.
00:26:31 Speaker_02
When we were, we were in college and the way we had it, but you got sent off and it was like, you were kind of on your own really to figure it out. And I look at the way, like even my daughter, like I talk to my daughter all the time. We FaceTime.
00:26:43 Speaker_02
I would say almost every day. Um, I always know what's going on with her. I can check on my three 60 where she is and you know, and she's in a big city. My dad's there. Like it's just not scary.
00:26:54 Speaker_02
Like my son, maybe it'll be different if he goes to some place, but I would still feel like I could at least check in. And more importantly, he would feel like I at least still have a connection to the people that were in my life.
00:27:05 Speaker_02
When we were in college, it was like, you were kind of just,
00:27:09 Speaker_04
off, you know? greater motive to be by yourself and get away.
00:27:21 Speaker_04
I mean, this is, you know, I saw somebody was talking about, it was just some random person talking about how they had had a conversation with someone who'd been a high school teacher for like 34 years or 40 years or something.
00:27:32 Speaker_04
And they asked them, what's the biggest difference? And the teacher apparently said, and this is of course anecdotal, but it seems to make a lot of sense to me, says that in the past, the default setting for a high school student was boredom.
00:27:44 Speaker_04
And now the default setting is anxiety. And I think as a consequence, the idea of going to any college is probably scarier than 30 years ago would have been for a kid from California to go to school in New York.
00:27:59 Speaker_04
Even though it'd be totally across the country, everything would be different. I think that they were probably more interested in decreasing sort of the static boredom of their life. And now it's the opposite where it's like,
00:28:11 Speaker_04
The hardest thing about my life is life. I'm afraid of life or whatever. Not that all kids are afraid of life.
00:28:16 Speaker_04
I'm not saying that, but I do think that the amount that kids feel anxiety and are told they need to recognize that feeling makes going to college super complicated.
00:28:28 Speaker_04
I, I just, I, I, I would guess you were more ready to go to college than your daughter is, despite the fact that you have all this relationship with her ongoing, you know, through technology.
00:28:39 Speaker_02
I'm just guessing. There's been really good pieces written about this the last few years about why teenagers and kids have more anxiety than it used to. And one of the theories is that they're more self-aware about the anxiety than maybe we were.
00:28:58 Speaker_02
In general, kids are more self-aware because they're reading more stuff, they're seeing more stuff, they know about therapy, they know about all these different things that we just didn't have any access to.
00:29:10 Speaker_02
Our generation was like, yeah, you're on your own, figure it out, man. Oh, shit's going down? Maybe you should talk to your roommate about it. What are we going to do?
00:29:19 Speaker_04
Well, I mean, therapeutic language too has just moved into everyday language now. Like people using terms like triggering and all these things are like, oh, like all these, all this language is just sort of like.
00:29:32 Speaker_04
My kids understood that at an age way before they understood things that I thought they should be knowing, you know, that they had just a real sort of like a, um, like sophisticated understanding of these things.
00:29:43 Speaker_04
And it probably like it, there's no question that kids are in a better position to deal with emotional and mental problems now. It's just that they seem to have many more emotional and mental problems.
00:29:56 Speaker_04
So it's like good that they can deal with them because they're just there all the time, you know?
00:29:59 Speaker_02
Or we had, or like our generations and the ones before had way more problems than we realized because we were like dumb and happy. We didn't know what was going on. Like that might've really been the case.
00:30:11 Speaker_04
But how many problems in life, whether you're young or when you're old, are actually temporary and not that meaningful and will just dissipate on their own? You know, you say like you were, you didn't know you had these problems.
00:30:26 Speaker_04
You still don't fucking know you had them, right? Because they just happened. They just moved on.
00:30:30 Speaker_04
It's like, you know, it's like it's, it's really, I think, tricky to tell someone going through this complicated phase in their life that they need to be aware of all the complications. I mean, it's like you have to look for them almost.
00:30:41 Speaker_04
And it's, it's good in some ways. It is like, this is maybe kind of moving off topic or whatever, but you know, I had a, This most recent election, the main thing that I have taken.
00:30:52 Speaker_02
Can you hold this so we can take a break and then talk about the election? Cause we've just gone a half hour interrupted. We'll take a break. Come back. The BS Podcast is brought to you by FanDuel.
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00:33:50 Speaker_04
Well, yeah, I'm not going to talk too much about the election itself as much as I want to talk about this. I really feel. I do not know what's going on in the world now. And I don't mean because of the outcome of this election.
00:34:05 Speaker_04
I mean, of my understanding of what the world was like and then the manifestation of the reality. It's like I I I was so like in 2016, you know, it was like kind of a shocking outcome or whatever. This was less shocking.
00:34:20 Speaker_04
But yet it seemed as though I thought I had a pretty clear or decent understanding of what the situation in the country was. And I was just totally wrong.
00:34:31 Speaker_04
It's like I think the country is, you know, spent so much time, myself included, talking about how polarized the country is. I think in a lot of ways, it's much less polarized than we realized, especially on a whole handful of issues.
00:34:45 Speaker_04
I suspected I just I you were one of these people where I after the the the election, I texted people and I just said, like, yeah, on a scale of one to ten, how surprised were you by this election?
00:35:01 Speaker_04
Not how you feel about it, just how surprised you were. And I found kind of a disturbing pattern. OK, there are some exceptions to this.
00:35:10 Speaker_04
But for the most part, all the people I texted are, you know, they're intelligent people who follow the news, but some people really follow the news. Some people voraciously follow it. They follow all the narratives.
00:35:20 Speaker_04
They kind of know anything you reference. They're like, oh, I already saw that story or whatever. Those people all gave answers like 8, 9, 9.5. It didn't matter what their political leaning was.
00:35:33 Speaker_04
Like if they were really engaged with media, they were shocked by not just the outcome, but the fact that Trump won all the swing states, that he won the popular vote, all of these things.
00:35:43 Speaker_04
The people I know, like a lot of my doctors and engineers and stuff who follow the news, but don't give a shit at all about the narrative. Like when they look at the New York Times website, they do not look at the right side of the page.
00:35:54 Speaker_04
They look at the left side of the page. They all were like one, two, three, like they weren't surprised at all. And I now sort of have the creeping suspicion that engagement with media distances us from reality.
00:36:09 Speaker_04
That the more information I get, the more information I take in, the less I understand the world. And I don't know what to do about that because that's a real issue if that is true. And that's how it feels for me now. It feels like that, that the, that
00:36:27 Speaker_04
my perception of what the world is is being so shaped by these things that I'm not even close to what's actually happening.
00:36:34 Speaker_02
Well, the betting markets would agree with you because I think like five, six days before the election, Kamala was almost even.
00:36:40 Speaker_03
Yeah.
00:36:40 Speaker_02
And there was there, part of the thinking was the abortion. Women are going to come out for this. People don't realize there's a lot of women even telling who they're married to or people in their lives that aren't coming out.
00:36:52 Speaker_02
So you'd hear that there was an Iowa poll that it was like, wow, she's doing great in Iowa.
00:36:58 Speaker_02
So when you're talking about how the media influences stuff, a lot of it is just the media influencing narratives that if you wanna believe the narrative and you hear the narrative, you grab onto it, right?
00:37:09 Speaker_02
So you see the Iowa poll and you go, well, that's a great sign. She's doing really well in Iowa. So it almost feels like stuff was nudging people different ways, but to me it was like,
00:37:21 Speaker_02
I thought when Elon went on Rogan, I felt like that was the most important part of the election, whether people want to admit it or not.
00:37:29 Speaker_02
Rogan coming out and saying that he was going to vote for Trump and that he was in on Trump, I think that influenced people. And I don't know if another media figure has that kind of power to shift votes. I'm not blaming Rogan one way or the other.
00:37:43 Speaker_02
I'm just saying there was real momentum that I think some people didn't want to overlook because they were like, oh, look at the Iowa poll.
00:37:50 Speaker_04
I mean, isn't that a little bit of reverse engineering, though? Because let's say the other- I think that's what every election is. Well, it probably is, okay? And if that's true, then we have a bunch of things to rethink.
00:38:02 Speaker_04
Because in a sense, it kind of looked like, well, you know, Oprah, Taylor Swift, all these people, they endorsed Harris. Nobody cared. Didn't seem to have any influence.
00:38:10 Speaker_02
Celebrities had no impact at all.
00:38:14 Speaker_04
But you just said that you think that Kim going on Rogan was one of the biggest things like Rogan's endorsement matter. It only because it worked out that way. I don't think any of these endorsements mattered.
00:38:22 Speaker_04
I now think that basically any Republican candidate would have won this election. I think that, you know, if Nikki Haley would have ran, I think she would have won probably by a very similar margin.
00:38:33 Speaker_04
I think that there is the sense now that there's all this news going around kind of shifting these stories.
00:38:39 Speaker_04
Like you say, these stories like, oh, there's, you know, people are canvassing and women are closing the door saying, I'm secretly voting for Harris. I'm not telling my husband.
00:38:48 Speaker_04
Now it kind of looks like maybe the opposite of this was the case, that people were saying they were going to go vote for Harris because they didn't want to be maybe judged or have an issue with their friends who they thought were.
00:38:58 Speaker_04
Like it was actually they were saying the opposite of what this supposed sort of trend, you know, because hours before the election, you could go on social media and there were people saying things like, what if I told you this isn't going to be close at all?
00:39:11 Speaker_04
thinking that it was going to be a blowout in the other direction. So no one really had any sense of these things.
00:39:16 Speaker_02
I mean, I, I think that that the, in, in this situation, it kind of felt as though there's, there's one thing on the Rogan point that I think people didn't want to see as it was happening, which was that there was young men,
00:39:30 Speaker_02
basically 18 to 35 that were shifting a certain direction in all these different ways. And the Rogan thing was symbolic to it. It just felt like that was the demographic
00:39:42 Speaker_02
that I think the Democrats were probably counting on that wasn't there in the way they thought. And there were just a lot of people ready for a change. I was thinking, is the opposite of what happened like when we were both in college in 92, right?
00:39:56 Speaker_02
And it felt like there was this Republican stranglehold on the country. It was 12 straight years, a Republican president. And Clinton kind of showed up
00:40:05 Speaker_02
You know, a year before the election, he was, became the hot young candidate and people kind of got swept up in it.
00:40:11 Speaker_02
And just in people, our age or around in the college campuses, all of a sudden something shifted and you could say this was legitimate, or maybe this is what we wanted to think.
00:40:24 Speaker_02
But all of a sudden, like Bush, who was heading into his second term, the older Bush. He just felt like this old establishment that people didn't want a part of anymore. And Clinton, who he barely knew anything about, was this voice of hope.
00:40:37 Speaker_02
And it was like, oh, this guy. And it just became a groundswell. And it felt to me that 2024 was a little like that. In a weird way, it was a little like 2008 too, where it was just people rejecting whatever the infrastructure was.
00:40:52 Speaker_02
And that was the thing I don't think the Democrats really fully came to grips with, that they had become this infrastructure that a lot of people, especially young people, just didn't want to buy into anymore.
00:41:03 Speaker_04
You know, 1992 is a particularly strange case, though, because, OK, so so Bush is popular prior to the run of the election and actually become sort of more popular again after he lose it. It's just this window of time.
00:41:16 Speaker_04
Yeah, he became extraordinarily unpopular.
00:41:19 Speaker_04
the third party candidate of, you know, of Perot getting like 19 percent of the vote that way, because, you know, it's not like it's not like Clinton got a majority that time because there were three candidates.
00:41:29 Speaker_04
I mean, that that was a kind of a strange one. I mean, this is a strange one, too. But like even the way we're talking about this, you said, like, you know, these young men who are sort of moving in a different direction.
00:41:37 Speaker_04
That was the immediately the day after the election. Two days after it was sort of like, why have these young men become radicalized? And then I was like, well, or is it Is it the opposite?
00:41:49 Speaker_04
Is it that all of culture has moved away from young men and they have remained static? That they have actually changed the least because, you know, they're like. I mean, they're sort of, you know, they know 55% of the electorate is women.
00:42:06 Speaker_04
You know, 60% of people in college now are women. So if you're a college age student and you're a guy in a class and like you, you see someone wearing a t-shirt that says the future is female, maybe you conclude, I guess it is.
00:42:18 Speaker_04
Seems that way to me too. And they maybe just did not, they were like, we're just going to sort of check out in a sense. It's not not not pay attention, but just we're not involved with the way culture is changing.
00:42:31 Speaker_04
And everything else in culture changed sort of to leaving them behind, maybe to some degree. And they were kind of like, well, you know, I'll vote for Trump because he doesn't care either or whatever, however they thought.
00:42:42 Speaker_04
I don't want to say I don't I don't. Here again, I feel very reluctant to even give this opinion because I feel less confident about any of these things now.
00:42:50 Speaker_04
Like I I really have a sense that that what is really happening in people's lives is the chasm between that and the way American life is projected through mass media now is so vast that the projection is actually giving us confusion over the reality.
00:43:18 Speaker_04
Do you know what I'm saying?
00:43:18 Speaker_04
Kind of it's like, it's like, so like what, what we think the average American is like, or what we think life is like, or what we think people are thinking or how we think they feel about relationships or how they, all of these things are no longer, um, sort of looking at the reality and saying, well, okay, this is what's going on.
00:43:39 Speaker_04
It's like we're sort of building this, like we're constructing this idea of what the country is like. But there is this whole country that is completely untouched and ununderstood.
00:43:49 Speaker_04
And then when these things happen, when we have a surprising outcome to election, we gotta like go in and then try to re-explain it. We have to like re-figure what we thought, but it's the same thing, it's just guessing again.
00:44:04 Speaker_04
Like it's not... Yeah, but you know what it's like?
00:44:07 Speaker_02
It honestly is like what happens after a sports season abruptly ends. And like, let's say the Chiefs lose in round two this year, right? And then people are like, ah, the Chiefs, Mahomes, he's gonna win it.
00:44:18 Speaker_02
It's just that you gotta trust the infrastructure. Mahomes and Reed, they'll figure it out. And then let's say they lose by 20 in round two and they can't score. And then the next day, what happens? We're like, oh.
00:44:30 Speaker_02
See the chiefs, they, they, they got old, they got to reboot. They're not explosive enough. They got to really, they got to give my homes more weapons. And then we do the whole next two, three days thing.
00:44:39 Speaker_02
It would be like, like the Democrats the day after I thought that was a lot like that. There was all this stuff.
00:44:46 Speaker_02
that was just sitting there that anyone could see, and then when they lost, it's like, ah, the Democrats have to figure out how to reinvent themselves.
00:44:53 Speaker_02
They don't have anybody to, they don't have anybody to inspire, they don't have a message that inspires the country, they don't have politicians that inspire people, they don't have leadership, even the way they handled the Biden thing the last two years, where he was clearly old, and they just kept denying it tonight, and it's like, we need him, we need him, we can beat Trump again with him, just ignore all these other signs.
00:45:13 Speaker_02
Even Jon Stewart, when he came back, whatever he did that first day was showing. He did that thing about how old Biden was and a bunch of people got mad at him about it. And the same thing happened with Charlamagne a couple months ago.
00:45:25 Speaker_02
And it was this elephant in the room that everybody was just like, don't look, don't look, don't look. And now you see him the last couple months and it's like, how did anyone not stop this? Where were people? Where were the leaders of the party?
00:45:38 Speaker_02
What happened to him just having one term and then trying to find his successor and build a succession plan And they just didn't do it in time. To me, it was like just bad strategy.
00:45:49 Speaker_02
And then they shoehorned somebody in who had 107 days to try to figure out how to get their message to the country like that.
00:45:56 Speaker_01
In retrospect, it seems crazy, but everybody in the moment thought, oh yeah, this will work, this will work, this will work.
00:46:02 Speaker_04
Well, it's hard to like who's in a position to tell the president to step down. That's that's one of the problems. It's like even if there's a bunch of people who think two years in, it's like it would be better to transition to something else.
00:46:13 Speaker_04
No one's in the he's the president. Right. So no one can really tell him.
00:46:16 Speaker_02
It would be his wife and his son. And obviously they wanted to keep him as president. But it's that's the kind of thing where your family steps in and goes, hey, dad, Start laying the legacy now to see who replaces you.
00:46:28 Speaker_02
Do one year, you can be one term, you can be a hero, but he's just trying to keep his job like everybody else.
00:46:33 Speaker_04
Is that realistic, though, to imagine? Probably not someone. I mean, like it would be sort of like if like like if if you know, what would you do if your son started telling you you need to retire? Would you be like, yeah, good point.
00:46:46 Speaker_04
He's like, no, I know. And he's like, you'd be like, no, I know I'm not. I'm not going to. Why would I like? Yes, exactly. I gave a great speech two days ago.
00:46:55 Speaker_01
Yeah. Good. Chuck.
00:46:57 Speaker_04
It seemed as though the shorter runway, I thought, would help Paris, right? Because you would have all this enthusiasm and it would kind of bleed on through.
00:47:05 Speaker_04
I think what one of the things that you mentioned that is a real problem, though, and this is the kind of thing that I feel like I was my own fault, that I was sort of deluded about, which is that the day after the election,
00:47:17 Speaker_04
Many Democratic strategists are like, yeah, we shouldn't have done this thing. I don't know why we were saying that. Like, like they almost immediately admitted that they regretted this.
00:47:27 Speaker_04
And what was what is probably true is that people sensed that lack of sincerity during the campaign. It's like, right. Like, you don't really believe
00:47:36 Speaker_04
Like, you don't really believe these things you're saying, or you're afraid to talk about these things in public, so you're just going to say nothing.
00:47:45 Speaker_04
And I think that a lot of people got a sense of that, but someone like me, who's trying to follow this stuff so closely and sort of know the information, I'm the one who ends up being the idiot.
00:48:01 Speaker_02
Yeah, but even in the moment, like their whole strategy with Kamala was they were basically treating her like she was a game manager quarterback in football, right? Like, just, just try to get us some first downs. Don't say too much.
00:48:13 Speaker_02
Let's, let's try to protect protect certain things with you. Like even the fact that she was doing like some, some carefully planned podcasts or show appearances, right? Where it's Trump who's insane, who would just be like, I'll do anything.
00:48:27 Speaker_02
I'll talk for four hours on whatever platform, I don't care. And she never, she never found that middle ground. I still never felt like
00:48:35 Speaker_02
I had, even after those three and a half months, I never felt like I had a complete sense of everything she stood for and what her message was.
00:48:43 Speaker_02
And I think if the Democrats probably learned anything from the last two years, it's like people still want to be inspired. Like they still want to feel like I am. This person resonates with me in these ways because.
00:48:58 Speaker_04
But that was the that was the attempt, though. I mean, up until the last, you know, getting down close to the election, it was sort of like the Republicans have this cynical view, this nihilistic view that America is getting worse.
00:49:10 Speaker_04
We don't think that. We think that, you know, we're, we have, you know, we're, and it didn't work. It didn't happen.
00:49:15 Speaker_02
That's what everybody says during every election. It's like, we were, are you better off four years now than you were four years ago? That's like, we'd been watching that for 30 plus years with the, with both sides, right?
00:49:25 Speaker_02
That's what, when you're the other side, you always try to make it seem like the other side, everybody's worse off. That's, that's the dialogue of an election. And sometimes it's bullshit. Sometimes it's real.
00:49:38 Speaker_04
Well, is it ever real? Is it really?
00:49:41 Speaker_02
Maybe it's that.
00:49:42 Speaker_04
I mean, what does it say? Like the you've learned about the Chiefs, for example, is that the Chiefs go to the playoffs and lose immediately.
00:49:49 Speaker_04
If they lose immediately, then, of course, the response will be like, well, they played all these close games during the year against relatively bad teams and they barely spread it out over and over again. They can't do it forever.
00:49:59 Speaker_04
If they win, of course, then those same wins validate why they won. It was like they were always ready to just, you know, flip the switch and turn it on. So anything in the past can prove anything right.
00:50:10 Speaker_04
Like all these things that people have been saying about Harris, if she had won, would still be part of the discourse. It would just be see it was right. It was true.
00:50:20 Speaker_04
You know, so it's like it because all of this, these all this discourse is just it's it's I don't, I hate to say it, but it is like, it's, it's, it is clearly just made up.
00:50:30 Speaker_04
And what drives me crazy is there's a bunch of people listening to this podcast right now who are hearing me say this and they're saying like, of course, how did you not know this?
00:50:40 Speaker_04
We all know this, you know, and like I, but, but, and, and they're justified in saying that. It's like, I, I, I, I, just I don't fucking know what's going on. I don't know what's happening. Like, I don't know what's happening in the world.
00:50:56 Speaker_04
And I just I have to accept it. I have to accept that. I have no idea what's happening because I don't like it's just it's it's not and I'm not saying this from this position of outrage.
00:51:05 Speaker_04
I'm saying this from a position of sort of like, I guess, in some ways, vulnerability, like just my recognition that that I am now receiving my understanding about life
00:51:19 Speaker_04
through external sources that are not giving me a real depiction of what's happened.
00:51:26 Speaker_02
Here's the question for me. If the Democrats had actually done this correctly and said Biden's a one-term guy, it's gonna be really hard for us to win with Kamala because she was in the Biden administration the whole time.
00:51:41 Speaker_02
So she can't really criticize the current president, right? So anybody who has Anybody who's like, I don't want to vote for Biden again. I'll take whoever the other side is or they like Trump, whatever.
00:51:52 Speaker_02
And you have this new candidate running who can't also distance themselves from any of the mistakes Biden made, like whatever you think those mistakes were. It's just a really unusual situation.
00:52:04 Speaker_02
Like we haven't had this situation that many times in American history where somebody has had a one term presidency and then somebody in their same party is running who then can't basically they're like, I stand for change.
00:52:16 Speaker_02
It's like, well, you're the vice president for this other guy. Like, so what did he do wrong? And she was never able to really answer that. So if you're the other side, it's like, well, I'm just voting for Biden again.
00:52:25 Speaker_02
I don't want to vote for Biden again. It's like, they never figured that out. So I wonder like if they just said in 2022, we're going to have, Biden's going to leave after one term.
00:52:35 Speaker_02
We're going to have this, we're going to do this correctly with the convention, with people running, we're going to have new voices. And then, you know, people that come in and want to have, their version of what they think the country should be.
00:52:46 Speaker_02
I, that might've worked, but whatever they did, obviously in retrospect, it's like, Oh man, that had no chance. Cause she, she got kind of trounced in, in ways that when you look at some of the polling data, we're pretty surprising.
00:53:00 Speaker_04
Well, it is, it is weird how, you know, okay. In a sense that the election is proving to be the popular vote is going to be closer than it initially seemed, but it's a little bit like if,
00:53:10 Speaker_04
Like if Ohio State plays Michigan and it's 28-3 at halftime and half the crowd leaves, and then the final score ends up being like 31-24, it still feels like a blowout. That's kind of how it was.
00:53:22 Speaker_04
I think some people felt like, I'm gonna have to stay up all night to see who wins this election. And it was over so quickly, it kind of creates the sense that it was a bigger blowout than it was.
00:53:33 Speaker_04
I guess now I'm pretty skeptical of this idea of you're saying like, well, if they had done this messaging,
00:53:38 Speaker_04
Or if they had, or if they had sort of been better at explaining this, it would, I feel maybe people now are just voting for full administrations, one of which they felt was moving left, one of which was moving right.
00:53:54 Speaker_04
And the sense is we're just gone too far left. We need to tack back the other way. I think that's probably what it was.
00:54:00 Speaker_04
That's why I say, like, I really doubt it would have made a difference if there had been an open primary, if Trump had been killed and Nikki Haley or whatever had taken over or J.D. Vance had been the candidate.
00:54:13 Speaker_04
I think that people were going to vote not about the person, because now it's so clear that these things are moving in diametrically different directions. There's just no overlap between the two policies at all and the two philosophies at all.
00:54:31 Speaker_04
To a degree that now it seems like there's probably more shared ideas among the citizenship than there are among the parties. That there's more things that Democrats and Republicans agree on as people than they do as sort of political ideas.
00:54:49 Speaker_04
You know what I'm saying? Like, there might be more things that people who seemingly have different political views actually go like, well, that's too much, or that's like, I want this, you know?
00:54:58 Speaker_04
That they maybe have more shared values, because the parties are incapable of sharing these values. A great example of this is like, all this like, RFK food stuff, right?
00:55:07 Speaker_04
Like this idea, it's like, we need to take all of these things out of Froot Loops, or whatever, we gotta, you know, why does, You know, our food have 19 ingredients and like, you know, in England, the same product is for.
00:55:20 Speaker_04
If someone had said this was going to become an issue in 2024, 10 years ago, we would have assumed it was coming from the left, right? That seems like something the left wants to do.
00:55:31 Speaker_04
Like when Bloomberg was like, we can't have big pops at the movies or whatever. It's like that tends to be something that you kind of typically seem from a progressive side of things. And somebody wants to make food heather.
00:55:46 Speaker_04
But because it's just arbitrarily now, he's into it. And he's a Republican now, so now it's a Republican issue. It's just goofy. It has no meaning about, I shouldn't say it has no meaning, but you can't connect it to any kind of larger ideology.
00:56:06 Speaker_04
These things are now sort of, we've almost separated ideology from what these policies are supposed to be.
00:56:14 Speaker_02
So going back to your one to 10 test and the initial premise of this, you were saying that you just felt like, why were you so surprised by this? Was it because of the media you're consuming? It does feel like,
00:56:28 Speaker_02
Maybe you're consuming, not you, but just anyone, where it felt like abortion was going to be the biggest deciding theme in the election, right?
00:56:36 Speaker_02
And then now that we have like all the feedback and the polls and what happened, it actually seems like immigration was just as important, right? People's feelings on crime, inflation.
00:56:47 Speaker_02
There were other things that were just as important and maybe even more important than abortion for what determined the final voting results. But I don't remember reading it in the same way or hearing about it as Zee Bush.
00:57:00 Speaker_02
Now, maybe I'm reading the wrong things, not the wrong things, but maybe I'm just going to a certain sector. I don't know. But then in retrospect, everyone's like, well, of course.
00:57:10 Speaker_02
And that goes back to, I think, your point of like, you know, sometimes, sometimes you don't know until the election happens. It's almost like a game. It's like, well, that clearly was more important.
00:57:20 Speaker_02
It's like, how would we have known that a week before the election? I don't know.
00:57:25 Speaker_04
Well, yeah, it is.
00:57:28 Speaker_04
I mean, abortion is one issue, but and there was a sense that this was going to be a real critical thing, that that that there were people who would maybe I think the assumption was it was it was actually here to a better way to describe it.
00:57:44 Speaker_04
It was almost sort of like we conceded that it was going to be a huge issue.
00:57:52 Speaker_04
We didn't actually think like, well, I was like, certainly there's going to be a ton of women who are going to vote against Trump because of Roe v. Wade no longer exists or whatever. And it was his decision to put those people in the Supreme Court.
00:58:11 Speaker_04
I think that that was just an idea that was never really interrogated. I think that the idea of that, that the the way we perceive who is in favor or against abortion is probably not accurate, not as accurate as we think.
00:58:29 Speaker_04
But we sort of think that there's that, that if you show a picture of someone, show somebody a picture of somebody, that they can look at that picture and say like, I think this person is going to be in favor of abortion, or this looks like a person who might be against it.
00:58:45 Speaker_04
And it's just not, it's not right. I mean, how, The fact that Trump did well, did much better with Latino men.
00:58:58 Speaker_04
There was almost no there was nothing prior to the election that was giving us any indication that this would be the case, you know, and then or like, you know, there was a you know, after I'd seen this before, but after the election, many people brought this up.
00:59:12 Speaker_04
There was this idea that actually a lot of people, a lot of minorities did not like the term Latinx. Okay.
00:59:19 Speaker_04
And then there was, you know, that, that, that, you know, so then Harvard, like, I think it was Harvard did a study where it was like, not only do they not like Latinx, they're, they're, they're, uh, you know, less likely to vote for a candidate who uses that term.
00:59:32 Speaker_04
So it's like somebody like Mexican heritage, here's that term and is repelled by it. And the response seemed to be like, well, that can't be true. And maybe they're racist too. Somehow they made no sense.
00:59:43 Speaker_04
It was like they just like the so the information was there. This study happened before the election. It was we saw it. But then it's only after the election. They're like, how did they not listen? How did they not respond to this?
00:59:57 Speaker_04
Well, you could have said that at the time. But at the time when it was actually happening, when it was still like a dynamic issue, it was just like, well, I don't know. It's probably wrong. It's probably not accurate.
01:00:08 Speaker_04
But after the election, it's like, oh, see, it absolutely is.
01:00:12 Speaker_02
I mean, the one thing everybody could agree on is that the democratic party seemed completely rudderless in 2024. And that's the biggest reason they lost over any other reason. And that's just it.
01:00:22 Speaker_02
There's no, there's no counter to that, that, and this has been a thing that's been happening for a while. I feel like the last Democrat that's actually really inspired people was probably Obama and Obama left office in 2016, you know,
01:00:38 Speaker_04
I just didn't hear this conversation though in August, right? I did not hear people saying that.
01:00:42 Speaker_02
So like how, how can something be so obviously true now that we weren't saying 21 days because here's the reason, because people were like, well, look, we can't let Trump win.
01:00:54 Speaker_02
So I bet whatever, whatever we have on this other side, that's just who, who has to win. Trump can't win. That was basically became the message of the party. They didn't actually have a message. All right, we got to take a break.
01:01:09 Speaker_02
Now it's time for a special part of today's episode, brought to you by NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV. My friend, I love YouTube TV. Racing to the playoffs right now, I'm happy to announce Sunday Ticket is only available right now for $89. That's it.
01:01:26 Speaker_02
when you bundle NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV, which I would highly recommend, because then you get the local games into your multi-view, you can watch every game, every Sunday. So I would suggest you thank yourself this holiday season.
01:01:39 Speaker_02
Again, NFL Sunday Ticket for just $89, and the offer ends on December 2nd. So, I mean, you got Thanksgiving, we're all gonna watch the three Thanksgiving games, but then on Sunday, some really good early games, Chargers, Atlanta's a good one.
01:01:57 Speaker_02
Pittsburgh, Cincinnati. Cincinnati playing basically to stay in the playoff picture. Arizona, Minnesota. And then I'd probably throw in Seattle and the Jets just to see what's going on with Rodgers plus Seahawks trying to protect their NFC West title.
01:02:11 Speaker_02
But those are four really nice multi-viewers. I'll personally have Drake May on one of my four screens because that's how we roll in the Simmons house. But thanks to our friends at NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV for sponsoring
01:02:23 Speaker_02
this part of today's episode. Don't forget, right now, again, the Thanksgiving sale price on NFL Sunday Ticket, just $89, and all you have to do is sign up at youtube.com slash BS, my initials, youtube.com slash BS. Offer ends December 2nd.
01:02:40 Speaker_02
Local and national games on YouTube TV. NFL Sunday Ticket for out-of-market games excludes digital-only games. Terms and embargoes apply. Device and content restrictions apply. This episode is brought to you by NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV.
01:02:57 Speaker_02
There's a lot to be thankful for this season. For one, I'm thankful you can get NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV right now for only $209. That's exactly what you need as we head right into the playoffs. You can invite your friends over.
01:03:11 Speaker_02
Maybe you have a multi. You could have four different games, one for you, One each for the three other friends you invite. You can change the games around. As soon as a game, the outcome becomes pretty certain, dump that game, put in another one.
01:03:26 Speaker_02
I've become the multi-view master. The moment one of the games is losing steam, I'm ready to move right in and move it for another one. Build. Your own multi-view, one of my favorite words. Thank yourself this holiday season.
01:03:39 Speaker_02
Get NFL Sunday ticket for the rest of the NFL regular season for just $209. Sign up now at youtube.com slash bs. Terms and embargoes apply. Device and content restrictions apply. No cancellations.
01:03:52 Speaker_02
So I was talking to Van and Big Waz on my pod about NBA superstardom and the concept of Kobe and Curry and LeBron being the last three American stars that we've had. and how each situation was a little bit of unicornish, right?
01:04:11 Speaker_02
If Kobe, the son of an NBA player who ends up on the Lakers, playing with Shaq, he's in the finals by the time he's in year four, then has a bunch of, they win three straight titles, he has the trial, the whole arc of it, then he has to come back and keep reinventing himself, the whole arc of it can't be replicated.
01:04:32 Speaker_02
Curry comes in, son of an NBA player, completely changes how basketball is played, and kids gravitate to him like he's a Pied Piper. And he's playing in a big market in San Francisco. Can't be replicated.
01:04:46 Speaker_02
LeBron comes in as the most hyped non-center we've ever had. lives up to it and then has the decision which pushes him to another level, wins titles, keeps going and going and going, now he's in year 22 and still relevant, can't be replicated.
01:05:03 Speaker_02
And people are asking, where's the next NBA star? What happens when Curry and LeBron leave? I don't know if there's another unicorn coming, which is what I said to Van and Waz, but I need your take.
01:05:16 Speaker_02
Can we have a giant American NBA superstar again, or has the culture just changed against it? What needs to happen?
01:05:24 Speaker_04
Well, okay, you kind of went through all these guys, and with every case, you were sort of like, this sort of unique scenario happened, okay? Unique to them, you know? I mean, that will happen again, right?
01:05:37 Speaker_04
There will be unique situations that we can't foresee that somebody will, you know, achieve sort of a level of fame that will be, you know, unlike any other superstar from the past.
01:05:49 Speaker_02
I would argue it's happening right now with Anthony Edwards. And yet there's I don't know why. it feels like he doesn't have the same chance that those other three guys had. But I would argue that, I love watching Anthony Edwards.
01:06:04 Speaker_02
I watched the Celtics-Timberwolves game and I was just like, I fucking love this guy. I love the way he plays. I love how hard he plays. He's so charismatic. We always talk about how NBA players hold back or they're not authentic.
01:06:15 Speaker_02
This guy's completely authentic at all times. He's amazing to watch. He really gives a shit. He's an awesome two-way player. And yet, I don't think he'll ever be as famous as Kobe was.
01:06:26 Speaker_04
I don't think so. No, I think that's unlikely. Um, I don't also don't think he's, he's going to be as good as Kobe relative to his peers. So that's part of it as well. He's right.
01:06:35 Speaker_02
He's on the same track for Kobe at least like stats, um, ability stuff he's done already at his age. Like he's parallel at worst.
01:06:44 Speaker_04
So, so you, so you think that there is a high likelihood that he will retire among the 15 best players of all time?
01:06:52 Speaker_02
I don't, but you know, he's also not playing with Shaq for the first seven years of his career. Like, which goes back to like the question I was thinking for you is like, if Kobe, so these are two separate questions that are the same question.
01:07:05 Speaker_02
Kobe just gets drafted by Charlotte and plays at Charlotte for his entire career. Is he Kobe? I don't think he is.
01:07:11 Speaker_04
No way.
01:07:12 Speaker_02
If Kobe's If Kobe's just Italian, never lived in America, and his name's Kobe Bryantini, and he's an Italian, you know, phone through comes, he has an accent, and ends up on the Lakers, but he's Kobe Bryantini, the Italian, is it the same?
01:07:31 Speaker_04
I don't, I don't think so. I don't. Okay. So, um, that's a little tougher one. I mean, sort of like, so, so, okay. By this logic. So like if Luca was from Nebraska, right.
01:07:48 Speaker_02
We talked about this with was a band. If Luca's name was Luke Jenkins.
01:07:52 Speaker_04
Okay. Okay.
01:07:53 Speaker_02
Would he, he's basically the Matt and over character in blue chips.
01:07:57 Speaker_02
Because I grew up, he had a tractor, his dad had a tractor, and it's just, because there's this whole other piece that a lot of the best guys in the league now are foreign, and we haven't seen a foreign player yet resonate with American fans the way that those three guys that I mentioned, plus MJ, plus Bird and Magic, no foreign player has been able to even touch those six guys.
01:08:24 Speaker_04
Well, you know, we did a podcast before, I think, Wemby's rookie year or maybe during Wemby's rookie year. And I said that I thought he was going to have a good rookie year and a good second year.
01:08:39 Speaker_04
And he was going to have sort of a statistical explosion his third year. You're on pace. Oh, yes, because I feel like this year, you know, is probably going to be very comparable to his rookie year, a little better. He's getting a little more time.
01:08:53 Speaker_04
Uh, but I think he could have like a, I don't know, I wouldn't say a wilt like year, but like he could have some real, I think he's gonna have a couple of seasons where he is, if he's healthy, he'll have some sort of insane numbers.
01:09:02 Speaker_04
He'll be an interesting test case. I think like if, if, um, um, I, uh, but like with, with, you know, Luca would be more, I think, popular among Americans if he was an American player.
01:09:19 Speaker_04
But I also think that there's also sort of a certain cachet to him because he's a foreign player. I mean, it's it's really hard to deduce of like, what is the prejudice level of prejudice against European players?
01:09:34 Speaker_04
Because it's a different kind of prejudice, right? It's a different kind of prejudice than sort of a solely sort of race-based or faith-based sort of prejudice.
01:09:45 Speaker_04
Like when someone, if someone doesn't like a foreign player or doesn't like them as much as they would if they were American. Or they're apathetic. Yeah.
01:09:55 Speaker_02
It's apathy. The apathy is the number one thing.
01:09:58 Speaker_04
I do think sometimes it's just the ease in saying the name and the understanding of what this person is like. I mean, certainly the Joker should be as famous as any athlete in the country, right? Shouldn't he be?
01:10:19 Speaker_04
I mean, it's like in terms of what he has accomplished and the way he plays and all of these things. And he is a popular player. Uh, you know, like you mentioned Cooper flag or whatever.
01:10:31 Speaker_04
So, um, how good does Cooper flag have to be to sort of become, uh, the biggest player in the league? Does he have to be the, does he have to be the best player in the league to be the most famous player?
01:10:44 Speaker_04
Are you sort of suggesting that Cooper flag could be maybe a tier below Anthony Edwards and be more famous? I don't know.
01:10:54 Speaker_02
No, I would say the comparison to me would be Cooper Flagg versus like Tim Duncan.
01:10:59 Speaker_04
Okay.
01:11:00 Speaker_02
So, and Tim Duncan, he's from St. Croix, but is somebody that I don't think resonated, and probably in the way that he should have, and even now I find myself trying to defend him all the time. He won five titles, two straight MVPs.
01:11:13 Speaker_04
I think he's- Who are you defending him against? Who's criticizing him?
01:11:17 Speaker_02
I think as the years pass, especially like if it's a basketball reference slash TikTok culture of Tim Duncan, like he's just not gonna do as well. Because,
01:11:30 Speaker_02
His game and the stuff that he was good at was so day-to-day, week-to-week, he didn't care about stats. He affected his team in all of these amazing ways that I just think as the years pass,
01:11:45 Speaker_02
it's people are going to start chipping away at it the same way that Carl Malone is going to gain steam as the years pass. You'd be like, Oh my God, look at those Carl Malone stats. Um, with Cooper flag.
01:11:55 Speaker_04
I don't feel like that's happening. I don't feel like Carl Malone statuses is being elevated over time.
01:12:01 Speaker_02
Well, he has other issues, but no, I'm just saying if you're, if you're basing it on stats,
01:12:05 Speaker_02
and you're in 2075, the year 2075, just studying basketball players, you'd be like, oh, Carl Malone, if he just won a couple more titles, he's right there with Tim Duncan. And it's just like, that wasn't the case.
01:12:18 Speaker_02
But with Cooper Flagg, I think you'd have to win titles. You'd have to be this Duncan KG type player, which I think he is, and then it depends on the situation.
01:12:30 Speaker_02
Would people root for that in a different way than they would root for it if he was from a European country? Or he was from Slovenia. I do think people would have more of a connection to it. It's the sad reality of how NBA stars are treated.
01:12:46 Speaker_02
He's from Maine. He grew up idolized in the 86 Celtics. That shit's gonna play a little differently.
01:12:52 Speaker_02
Wemby is the interesting test case for me, though, because it seems like if he doesn't get hurt, he is gonna be the dominant player in the league at some point. You know, what is that going to look like? Is that going to sell shoes?
01:13:05 Speaker_02
Is he going to have the most commercials? Like, I'm just dubious because we've never seen it before. I said to Waz and Van, Hakeem.
01:13:13 Speaker_02
who was amazing, who was one of the 12 or 13 best players ever, who was super fun to watch, who was great to watch in person, who was unlike anybody on the planet, who beat Shaq in an NBA Finals, who won two titles without really an all-NBA player on his team, and had one of the best three-year stretches in the history of the league.
01:13:37 Speaker_02
Um, it's just not as famous as Shaq is and wasn't as beloved. And I think if you ask most people who had a better career, Hakeem or Shaq, just about everybody would say Shaq.
01:13:48 Speaker_04
Well, it's possible that right now that might happen. Yeah. Right now they would say Shaq. I don't know if they will in 10 or 20 years though, because, um,
01:14:01 Speaker_04
It's like you say, like, you mentioned like TikTok or whatever, like in the TikTok world, Tim Duncan is, you know, not beloved because a collection of Tim Duncan highlights is not, you know, an amazing thing to watch.
01:14:14 Speaker_04
It doesn't work the way you say, like, you know, there's a ton of players who you've mentioned before.
01:14:19 Speaker_02
Like T-Mac, Vince Carter. Yes, yes.
01:14:22 Speaker_04
But is that really a real reflection of how these things are going to be remembered?
01:14:26 Speaker_02
See, I think it is. I think that's the part you're missing. I think for people under 25.
01:14:32 Speaker_02
who I'm just shocked, I see it with my son, I'm shocked by how much information he gets from these YouTube videos and TikTok stuff that makes him think he understands the history of basketball. And that's the part that scares me.
01:14:46 Speaker_04
But look what you just said.
01:14:47 Speaker_04
Makes him think he understands the history of basketball in the same way, I'm guessing when you were his age, when you were his age, you believed you had a full understanding of basketball and the history of basketball that now, looking back,
01:15:01 Speaker_02
Our generation had to work harder at understanding basketball though. We had to read all of these different books. We read Sports Illustrated every week. We were watching whatever games we could watch on TV.
01:15:12 Speaker_02
They weren't like these digestible 20 second, 30 second, 60 second videos. I sound like an old guy complaining about it. I'm not. I'm just saying it's way easier to shift perception now than it was in 1989.
01:15:26 Speaker_04
Well, it is. Yes. It like, is it possible that if I, if tick tock, tick tock had existed when I was younger, would I have like, would I think Connie Hawkins is one of the five best players of all time? Would I think world be free is better than he is?
01:15:41 Speaker_04
I guess maybe. I mean, this is like.
01:15:44 Speaker_01
World be free is a good example.
01:15:45 Speaker_04
It would have been a whole world be free is a problem. Yeah.
01:15:48 Speaker_02
It would have been like LaMelo Ball right now. LaMelo's averaging 30 points a game. And if you're just dissecting him on the internet, he seems like he's one of the seven best guys in the league.
01:15:57 Speaker_04
I've read this book a bunch of years ago. The book is called The Black Swan. The guy who wrote the book, he gets kind of a punching bag now for some reason, but this book had some interesting ideas in it.
01:16:07 Speaker_04
One of the things he mentions is this, kind of as a side sort of, is something that I've always kind of kept in my mind, which it was this test that one time was done on people, where they would say like, take a picture of a fire hydrant next to like a Volvo, okay?
01:16:26 Speaker_04
and then they would make the photo extremely blurry, okay? And then they would have two groups of people look at that image, slowly become sharper. They would take away the fuzziness.
01:16:37 Speaker_04
Some people were given 25 steps, like there'd be 25 steps along the way from the most fuzzy to the least fuzzy, and some people would be given 10.
01:16:46 Speaker_04
I'm just kind of making these figures up, but one is like, it's 25 incremental steps against 10 incremental steps. And they did find that the people who had 25 incremental steps more information, figured out it was a fire hydrant and a Volvo later.
01:17:01 Speaker_04
Because every sort of wrong image allowed them to sort of make up what it could be. Maybe it's a Dalmatian. Maybe it's a Rubik's Cube or whatever.
01:17:12 Speaker_04
Whereas the people getting only the 10 incremental changes were better because they were like, they didn't have the ability to sort of project other ideas onto what it was. What you're saying is kind of the same thing.
01:17:24 Speaker_04
That you're saying that because of TikTok in a way, people are getting all these sort of random images of things, it allows them to have sort of obscure, arcane, inaccurate thoughts. That they're seeing more stuff. That could be.
01:17:38 Speaker_04
That's not such a crazy thing.
01:17:40 Speaker_02
I think the perception right now, if you ask an entire generation of people under 30, who is better, Kobe Bryant or Tim Duncan?
01:17:49 Speaker_02
based on the last 10 years of how those careers and highlights and everything else has been pushed out, I think 90% of the people would say Kobe Bryant.
01:18:02 Speaker_02
If you ask anyone under 30 who is better, Kobe Bryant or Tim Duncan, I feel like Kobe would get 90% of whatever this imaginary vote is.
01:18:08 Speaker_04
Okay, but this is a mistake that you make and a mistake I make too sometimes. But one thing is like these ideas, like you ask the random person under 30.
01:18:17 Speaker_02
I'm saying anyway, I'm saying every single person under 30.
01:18:20 Speaker_04
Exactly, exactly. That's the mistake.
01:18:23 Speaker_02
Yep.
01:18:23 Speaker_04
the idea that sort of like we can have an understanding of these things by casting the widest possible net. So any random person's ideas have to be sort of taken seriously. But that's not actually how it works.
01:18:35 Speaker_04
Like if we, you know, say with music, for example, when we think about like, you know, which acts from the past are significant, It can't be that you ask every single person who had a bigger impact on music.
01:18:48 Speaker_04
If you ask Fleetwood Mac and The Velvet Underground. It's like more people have obviously heard of Fleetwood Mac. They're going to give that answer, right?
01:19:04 Speaker_04
But if you keep moving over time, say we get like 50 years down the line where the commercial significance of something will matter less and sort of what the sort of very small sliver of people who really care about these things say,
01:19:20 Speaker_04
then the answer maybe flips. I mean, like you talk about, you say like, you know, you ask some random 27 year old, like, you know, who's better between Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan?
01:19:30 Speaker_04
They probably do say, you know, Kobe Bryant, but you can ask that same person a lot of binary questions and they'll give an answer that would be rejected by an expert.
01:19:39 Speaker_04
But you will still be talking about this in 20 years, unless your son convinces you to retire. But you'll still be talking about this, right? You'll still be talking about basketball from the early 2000s, okay? Most people will not.
01:19:53 Speaker_04
And those end up becoming what the true answers are. Early 2000s?
01:19:56 Speaker_01
How about the 80s? I'll still be talking about all the eras.
01:20:00 Speaker_04
Well, sure, sure. But what I'm saying with any of these, I know we were using Kobe and Tim Dunn.
01:20:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, no, no.
01:20:06 Speaker_04
I'm with you. But what I'm saying is that it is, Yeah, you you see this all the time. Remember, OK, there was a time when like Kanye West made a song with Paul McCartney and it was really popular during this.
01:20:17 Speaker_04
We don't see this much anymore, which is good. But there used to always be a situation like that would happen.
01:20:22 Speaker_04
And you'd see a story where somebody would just link to a bunch of tweets about look at all these people who don't know who Paul McCartney is, like, you know, all these people going like, who's this person? Kanye West is making a record with.
01:20:34 Speaker_04
And we look at that and we're like, oh man, young people are idiots. Well, actually no, those people are idiots. There's always some idiots, right?
01:20:40 Speaker_04
There's always some people who don't know about the past and are going to be very vocal and almost happy about it. But those opinions don't stick. I mean like those opinions fall by the wayside.
01:20:51 Speaker_04
So like, you know, it's like if, you know, you would use, you sometimes will like, I've mentioned I think Jason Williams sometimes is an example of a guy.
01:21:01 Speaker_02
Oh, White Chocolate. White Chocolate was a problem.
01:21:04 Speaker_04
That drives you crazy, kind of. And he's like, you know, and he's a great example of this because his highlights are amazing, but his statistics, his performance makes him like, you know, I mean, he was the second best player on his high school team.
01:21:17 Speaker_04
knew who his best player was, Randy Moss. But regardless, what I'm saying is that sort of that that interest, that interest in Jason Williams, that that sort of like that, you know, there's no criticism of him either.
01:21:32 Speaker_04
But it's like that's not going to sustain a reputation over time. Like that's going to appeal to the most casual person.
01:21:41 Speaker_02
Yeah. Well, unfortunately, it's a lot of sports fans. What's interesting to me is when we've all, we all decide something when we're there in the moment and it becomes like, look, we're locking this down. Just put this in the vault.
01:21:55 Speaker_02
We're done with this. And then as the years pass, it starts to shift. Like I look at Joe Montana this way. And now Brady, I think Brady took the GOAT title from Joe Montana, there's no question.
01:22:09 Speaker_02
But I think as the years pass, now we've hit a point where if you showed somebody two minutes of Steve Young highlights and two minutes of Joe Montana highlights, they'd be stunned that Steve Young didn't take Joe Montana's job immediately when he was on the 49ers.
01:22:22 Speaker_02
It was like, well we were there, we were watching all the football games. Joe Montana was the best. If your life depended on a game, you would just pick him. I don't care what the stats are. He was absolutely the best. He was the best at crunch time.
01:22:33 Speaker_02
He was the best at everything. Him versus Marino versus Elway.
01:22:37 Speaker_02
Joe Montana was the answer, and then the years passed, and it's like, ah, Joe Montana, well, he did have Jerry Rice, well, he did have Bill Walsh, well, they did have some luck, and you could start picking it apart, which I think, it's weird to me as I get older that certain things that we just thought were irrefutable are now up in the air.
01:22:55 Speaker_02
Joe Montana to me was unassailable, somebody's gonna have to take the GOAT title from him, the same way I feel about Jordan.
01:23:03 Speaker_04
Well, you know, it would have been interesting if, if Montana had not went to the Chiefs, not that he played poorly with the Chiefs, but you know, he went over there and if he, if he had just ended his career after say the fourth Superbowl or whatever, I think it would be different because not only then did the Niners win with young and that Jerry Rice basically had similar statistics with both guys.
01:23:24 Speaker_04
It was almost like they did seem a little bit, you know, uh, like irreplaceable in that regard. Um, and then there was a whole glut of guys. who came after Montana in the 90s, who, you know, it was who had kind of huge years and didn't seem
01:23:42 Speaker_04
that far below him. Far, you know, sort of the end of sort of looking at Marino's career and the statistical achievement, the fact that Elway still played pretty late into the 90s effectively. Steve Young did have a good period there.
01:23:57 Speaker_04
Jim Kelly had some great. Jim Kelly had a good run. And it wasn't, it wasn't as though, uh, like, you know, like when Jordan left the league,
01:24:08 Speaker_04
And they did feel like, well now there's this huge hole and this huge gap, and the best guy now is not even, like if Jordan comes, while he's playing baseball, the assumption is he's the best player.
01:24:19 Speaker_02
And he comes back and says, yeah. Why do we spend so much time, football is way more popular than the NBA, like way more, it's not even close.
01:24:29 Speaker_02
Yet we spend way more time talking about legacies and all-time greats being measured against each other and how the current guy measures against some guy from 30, 40 years ago than we do with football.
01:24:41 Speaker_02
And it almost makes me wonder, do we just not understand football? Because the only things I will believe till the day I die or until somebody passes them, Jerry Rice is the best receiver I've ever seen.
01:24:55 Speaker_02
Lawrence Taylor is the best defensive player I've ever seen. And those are like the bars to me. And I don't, I don't even want, I wouldn't even bother like doing evidence cause it's, it's a little harder to do doing football.
01:25:06 Speaker_02
Montana was the QB for me and then Brady took it. But I just feel like that's always going to be the case for me. And I don't think people would challenge it in the same way they would with the NBA, right? The NBA, I, and I don't know why that is.
01:25:18 Speaker_04
Well, okay. I, I have a theory on this, I guess. Okay.
01:25:22 Speaker_04
So again, I last podcast, I did this, so I'm working on this book and this is something that's going to be a part of this book and I don't want to talk too much about it, but football has, wait, did we do this last podcast?
01:25:36 Speaker_04
Well, no, I was talking about why football works so well on television. These are all part of the same book. This book is about kind of the sociocultural meaning of football in a very broad sense.
01:25:47 Speaker_04
One of the things that I write about in this book is that this kind of paradoxical advantage that I think football has, because I'm going to say something that's going to sound real bad and real negative, but actually works to football's benefit, which is that football is a dehumanizing enterprise.
01:26:03 Speaker_04
Football dehumanizes the people on the field. We can't really see their faces, their colors. The colors of a football uniform matter more than any other sport. It's very easy to watch a college football game if Tulane is playing LSU or something.
01:26:19 Speaker_04
Just the matchup of those colors is enough to sustain it aesthetically. We don't even have to think of the guys. Um, you know, it's, uh, the, the, it's, it's a, it's a completely controlled, uh, sport with like such a hierarchy.
01:26:31 Speaker_04
You know, the plays coming from a guy in the box down to the coach on the sideline, putting it into the quarterback, who's then relaying it. Nothing is happening by accident.
01:26:41 Speaker_04
There is like a famous, you know, the famous, uh, Dave Hickey essay, the heresy of zone defense. Are you familiar with this? Okay. Yeah.
01:26:48 Speaker_04
Basically, this art critic wrote this great essay about basketball, and his whole thing was that all the rules and all the nature of basketball should be pushed toward freedom, because that's what we think we want from sports, right?
01:27:00 Speaker_04
We think we want to see the players be free, have unlimited agency, and in a conversation, that's how it works.
01:27:07 Speaker_04
So when we're talking about superstars, it's great to talk about the NBA because we see these guys, we really know these guys, we feel like they do. But football success comes from the fact that it's not dependent on the people.
01:27:18 Speaker_04
It is dependent on the actual game. What people love about football is not the things around it, but what is literally happening between the sidelines and the end zones, what's going on there. That is what matters.
01:27:32 Speaker_04
So basketball is the exact opposite, right? What people seem to care about now is everything else around it. Everything around basketball seems more meaningful than the actual sport. We talk about basketball as much in August as we do in the season.
01:27:49 Speaker_04
It's almost like the games have taken on this strange, almost perfunctory role, where they're only there for all this other stuff. And because of it, it becomes completely based on the quality of the celebrities involved.
01:28:03 Speaker_04
So when LeBron was at his apex, when Curry was doing great, Kobe, you mentioned, it was like, you know, it was like, ah, we're seeing these guys, these people, we're seeing these people, these humans doing this and they're awesome at it.
01:28:16 Speaker_04
But now those guys are still playing, right? Like Durant's still in the league. Giannis is still in the league. They're not quite what they used to be. We're familiar with them as celebrities.
01:28:25 Speaker_04
We're not as interested in them and their success because it's like the game is like they've sort of worn out the juice they had as a new person. They're not new people to us now. They're just familiar people who aren't as good as they once were.
01:28:41 Speaker_04
So, I mean, I really think that There are many reasons that football matters so much to the culture, and I think this is one of the weird ones, which is that, in a sense, what we want from a sport is not what we say.
01:28:58 Speaker_02
Interesting.
01:28:59 Speaker_02
Yeah, I was thinking, I have a thought of what you said on the basketball piece in a second, but the football piece, the most interesting piece I would add to what you said about football, they changed the rule where you couldn't take your helmet off on the field.
01:29:17 Speaker_02
Right? And that was something guys really started doing because it was the one way you would know what they looked like.
01:29:23 Speaker_02
And they would do it after a third down sack, after a big catch, anything, they would pull the things down and their helmet would go up and they'd be like, here's me, here's my face. And the NFL's like, fuck that.
01:29:34 Speaker_02
You're not, not only you're not doing that, we'll call a penalty even after you've caught like a Hail Mary with three seconds left and you got so excited, your helmet came off. Like you're never doing that until you get to the sidelines.
01:29:46 Speaker_02
And it feels like along the lines of what you were saying, like they really wanted to make the NFL the product and not the players. I still feel like they need six, seven players to market.
01:29:57 Speaker_02
They're always going to need Mahomes, Allen, Burrow, Dak Prescott, maybe Drake May, but they're always going to need their seven dudes. The quarterbacks that are there for 15, 16 years that we have a history with.
01:30:10 Speaker_02
But other than that, they don't need anything.
01:30:12 Speaker_04
The quarterback now, that position has become so outsized compared to the rest. It's almost like a different entity. It's almost like every team has two teams. The team and the quarterback. Did you throw Drake May in there on purpose?
01:30:24 Speaker_04
Is that what you said?
01:30:25 Speaker_02
That was the... I've been trying to shoehorn him into all the great TV conversations. I have a lot of Drake May stuck.
01:30:32 Speaker_04
He's my guy. What's interesting about football is because it's so restricted, But even with him with restrictions, you still get a form of originality, like uniforms in the NFL. You got to wear a certain kind of socks and stuff like that.
01:30:51 Speaker_04
And occasionally, like who was that running back a few years back? He wore legal socks. I think he was playing for Washington at the time. May have been a running back from Denver who went over to Washington. I can't remember.
01:31:04 Speaker_04
But there was like, there was, there was discussion about this guy's socks, right?
01:31:07 Speaker_03
Yeah.
01:31:07 Speaker_04
Like his, that, that was enough because there's so many obstructions. There's so many rules that it's kind of like if you send your kid to a private school and they all got to wear uniforms.
01:31:16 Speaker_04
And then one kid's is like, you know what I'm going to wear though? I'm going to wear this, like a, I don't know, the sublime pin on my uniform. And it's like, Oh wow. He's like, he, he finds a way to break the rules within you. Like in, in,
01:31:30 Speaker_04
The NBA, in a sense, it's like the guys have more freedom. It's actually, in a sense, harder for them to be individuals because everyone is sort of starts in the default setting of being their own person.
01:31:42 Speaker_04
You know, it's like in football, you got to kind of break out of it.
01:31:45 Speaker_02
We're going to take a break because I want to talk about the basketball piece of this. Hey, you know what I've been enjoying? The NBA cup. I like the courts. I like how hard they're playing.
01:31:57 Speaker_02
I even like when the game seems like it's over, but everybody's trying until the bitter end. You know what makes the NBA cup even better? A ringer profit boost token on FanDuel. FanDuel actually listened to me. I told them.
01:32:08 Speaker_02
Let's have fun with the NBA cup. Let's do some profit boosts. So we created the 30 on 30 ringer profit boost token. Boost any 30 point score or 30 on 30 special bet on this Friday's NBA cup slate. So obviously I'm taping this on Tuesday.
01:32:25 Speaker_02
I'm going to tweet out my picks. on Friday, and first week, I went one for three, hit Edwards. Second week, went two for five, and my long shot hit Cam Johnson 12 to one, so we'll see if we can keep the momentum up.
01:32:40 Speaker_02
I already noticed Charlotte's playing New York during NBA Cup day, so LaMelo is red hot by now. Maybe he'll be one of them. Anyway, hope you like the Ring of Profit Boost. We'll be doing it each Friday during the NBA Cup.
01:32:52 Speaker_02
Just look for 30 on 30 in the FanDuel Sportsbook app. This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. It's football season and Uber Eats is dropping undefeated deals on all your game day favorites.
01:33:04 Speaker_02
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01:33:18 Speaker_02
Uber Eats, official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL. Order now for game day, terms, taxes, and fees apply. See app for details. One question I didn't ask you, just quick.
01:33:31 Speaker_02
Is Caitlin Clark a bigger under 30 star than any under 30 star in the NBA?
01:33:37 Speaker_04
Yes, I think she is.
01:33:39 Speaker_02
Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. I don't even think that's a debate.
01:33:41 Speaker_04
Yeah. Um, it, and, um, it is like, you know, uh, uh, her, her, her stardom in a way is, is, uh, like it, it is, it has changed many conversations about sports, I feel like, especially women's sports. Um, and, uh, uh,
01:34:06 Speaker_04
I'm interested to how long it will last. And I'm also interested to see if she is just like one of one, or if now moving forward, 40% of the time, the most popular basketball player in the country is a woman.
01:34:20 Speaker_04
Like if the girl from UConn comes out and she sort of plays a similar role, I don't know.
01:34:26 Speaker_02
I mean, shit, I was excited that UCLA beat South Carolina in a November women's college basketball game. I literally did not care about women's college basketball 10 years ago in any way, shape, or form.
01:34:39 Speaker_02
So I think some things have moved toward just the quality of play is more fun to watch, but she seems to be some sort of catalyst that is just, it's like before and after, and now we're in the after. I'll be interested to see if it trickles to
01:34:53 Speaker_02
other women's sports in the same way. I think it really might be a phenomenon in her. And the question to me is, if she was a tennis player, would this have happened?
01:35:05 Speaker_04
I don't know. I mean, I think part of it has to do with it's, it's real difficult now for a guy to become famous in basketball at the collegiate level, but it still seems very plausible for a woman to do.
01:35:17 Speaker_02
Well, this is, everyone's made this point and it's super important, but you have this history with these women's players in college for three years.
01:35:25 Speaker_02
you know, where you're watching them and you start, you can maybe attach yourselves to one of them or you just kind of have a sense of their game. So when they come into WNBA, you know what they can do.
01:35:36 Speaker_02
All right, off this basketball thing, because you mentioned about there's I think it's a really interesting point about the NBA that I've been thinking about a lot.
01:35:46 Speaker_02
And I've test-driven it a couple times on pods, but about the lack of mystery with NBA stars. Like, do we have too much access, too much information, too much everything day-to-day, social media, the pods? The fact that there's no mystery left
01:36:04 Speaker_02
with any of them. And I was trying to think like what celebrities, there's two separate ways I want to go, but I'll go this way first. There's not a lot of celebrities anymore who have mystery to them. I was thinking of Leo.
01:36:16 Speaker_02
is one of the only ones that I really don't know that much about. Like De Niro was able to cultivate this. There's been some musical artists, obviously, like we've always wondered what the fuck was going on with Bob Dylan.
01:36:27 Speaker_02
I think Kendrick Lamar has done a really good job of, we don't know that much about him, even though we basically know what we know through his music and his lyrics. And I wonder with NBA players, because I was thinking about
01:36:42 Speaker_02
It's a 30-year history of follow a team or a player behind the scenes through a documentary or a docuseries, right? Because Hoop Dreams came out 30 years ago this fall. I remember, I'll just list a couple and then we can talk about this as a theme.
01:36:58 Speaker_02
There was a Pat Summit, Tennessee, HBO documentary in 1998. I think it was called like the Cinderella season. It was like just a year behind the scenes with Tennessee's women's team. And it was amazing.
01:37:09 Speaker_02
It was like, oh my God, I can't believe they're showing this. And you said all of this access. So at that point, all we're doing is watching. a team on TV.
01:37:18 Speaker_02
Now all of a sudden I'm watching them in the locker room, I'm watching them cry after games, it was incredible.
01:37:22 Speaker_02
Hard Knocks in 2001, that Ravens series, where all of a sudden we're with Brian Billick and Ray Lewis and we're watching them practice and cut guys, that was amazing. There was a couple MTV Cribs episodes with athletes.
01:37:36 Speaker_02
I remember they did a Steve Francis one that I loved that I remember writing about at the time where he went to buy like a Ferrari. There was an incredible Zach Randolph one. So you got a little insight there.
01:37:46 Speaker_02
There was an awesome show that, by the way, is not on YouTube, which I can't believe, that show The Life on ESPN. They followed the Clippers for like six games and Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles.
01:37:58 Speaker_02
And it was like, here's what these guys' lives are like. I was like, this is the most interesting thing I've ever watched. Then it started to shift. We had that Barry Bonds, what was that called?
01:38:07 Speaker_02
Bonds on Bonds, whatever it is, that 2006 show where it was like, it took a lot of criticism because it was like, no, this isn't authentic. We're not getting, this isn't journalism. It turned into a big debate at ESPN.
01:38:18 Speaker_02
It says, should we have shown this or not? Kobe doing work, the Spike Lee thing that he did in 09. I was like, what is this? And then 30 for 30, that's when 30 for 30 really took off and the HBO docs were still full swing.
01:38:32 Speaker_02
We had a lot of these looking back documentaries. We didn't do any follow the team documentaries at all in the first two volumes. But we did do the Steve Nash finish line thing that we did for Grantland. where we followed him during the season.
01:38:47 Speaker_02
And I remember, and you can go back there, pretty interesting actually about he's near the end of his career trying to hang on and we're just documenting him.
01:38:55 Speaker_02
And we started, instead of making a documentary, we said the crucial tweak was let's run these episodes in real time so people can watch them during the season as Nash is playing. This will be cool. Nobody's done this before, which nobody had.
01:39:11 Speaker_02
And it was really cool, I was really proud of the finish line.
01:39:14 Speaker_02
But that eventually led to, there was more and more stuff like that, because the videos got better, internet video got better, YouTube, there's all these different ways to do real-time stuff, leading to the first season of that F1 series, Drive to Survive, which completely invigorated and changed the sport, made it appeal to people in America.
01:39:35 Speaker_02
And I think that was like four or five years ago. And I wonder if we're at the finish line of all this stuff now because that starting five show on Netflix, people didn't care. Um, I wonder if we just have too much access to everybody.
01:39:47 Speaker_02
And I know personally, like I see this stuff now advertised or whatever. And I'm just like, I'm probably not going to watch that. Whereas like 20 years ago, it would have been like, oh my God, we're in Anthony Edwards house with his friends.
01:40:00 Speaker_02
Like I'll pay whatever the price is for this. So are we at the end?
01:40:04 Speaker_04
Okay. Well, okay. I have a few responses.
01:40:07 Speaker_02
I figured you would.
01:40:07 Speaker_04
Yeah. First person you mentioned was DiCaprio. He's kind of a special case, right? Because he is the only superstar like that who was both the last vestige of the old Hollywood system. and the beginning of the fan-driven, technocentric fandom.
01:40:27 Speaker_04
He'll be probably the only person who will experience both of those things.
01:40:32 Speaker_04
Where he was in some ways, after Titanic, he was famous in the way John Wayne had been famous, but then he was the beginning of people who are famous in this new way where it's, I guess, however you want to look at it.
01:40:46 Speaker_04
OK, as for these other things you're talking about, everything you're saying is kind of true.
01:40:51 Speaker_04
And I think, you know, you mentioned that like the first that Ravens hard knocks and all these things and how that really did seem crazy, like really like I remember really watching that.
01:40:59 Speaker_04
Well, these are regardless of the subject, whether it's, you know, F1 racing, football, sports, whatever. What are these? These things are ultimately art. Right now, what kills art? What's the thing that most often kills art?
01:41:15 Speaker_03
a lack of authenticity?
01:41:17 Speaker_04
Self-awareness. When art becomes too ingrained with its own sort of existence, when it becomes to understand what it is, it starts to fall apart. This is what happened with Hard Knocks now.
01:41:30 Speaker_04
Like hard knocks is never interesting anymore because we know exactly what it's going to be as does every involved person. They know that if they act a certain way, the response will be this.
01:41:40 Speaker_04
A coach knows that if he comes across as a little bit clinical, he will be displayed as hyperclinical.
01:41:48 Speaker_04
If he comes across kind of like the Lions coach did, like an old school gritty guy, you know, Dan Campbell then becomes this different kind of character. The F1 racing show worked because it was sort of like, this is a new thing.
01:42:00 Speaker_04
People never thought like, I never followed this. People in the United States never followed this.
01:42:04 Speaker_04
The people on that show, I haven't even watched it, but I know enough about it to know that it was something that, like the first season of the real world or whatever, where people are doing this for the first time.
01:42:16 Speaker_04
They have no idea what these interviews are actually going to look like once they're on TV. Now everyone knows this, okay? So celebrities have completely taken control of their messaging through social media.
01:42:27 Speaker_04
They don't need now to go through the traditional sources. And as a consequence, what do we have? A lot of banal information about these people.
01:42:36 Speaker_04
If you let people control how they are perceived, and you let them control what their public facing entity is, of course it's not going to be interesting, or it's going to seem so fake that no one's going to have any interest in it whatsoever.
01:42:50 Speaker_04
The thing about the idea that, okay, Taylor Swift now never has to give interviews, right? She can just control all that herself. That means that there's absolutely no possibility
01:43:02 Speaker_04
that she's ever going to have to address something she doesn't want to address. You know, and that and that is where a lot of this tension comes from. Right.
01:43:11 Speaker_04
It comes from the small sort of moments where somebody has to answer a question that they would prefer not to be in public. Right. And that's just that's not going to happen anymore.
01:43:21 Speaker_04
So as we've sort of all these things you've mentioned, I don't I don't think you're sick of them. You're just comfortable with them. Like, you know what you're supposed to see and something has to be outside of that for it to be good.
01:43:34 Speaker_04
I mean, like in that, in those Netflix shows, like the one about the quarterbacks or whatever, like, you know, occasionally there'd be a small, interesting moment.
01:43:41 Speaker_04
Like Kirk Cousins has a little secret room in his house where he keeps all his stuff and he has like in his backyard, he has this huge fire pit, like the biggest fire pit I've ever seen. Neither of those things mean anything about football.
01:43:54 Speaker_04
It was just like, oh, this is something I didn't expect to see. In most of the things you're describing, we now see what we expect.
01:44:01 Speaker_02
And it's the inauthentic version of what we're seeing that's the other thing. And I've made this point before, but it's something that, think how many autobiographies we read over the years, right? Some of those autobiographies,
01:44:17 Speaker_02
they're being spun by the person who wrote them.
01:44:20 Speaker_02
Like my favorite, which you love too, is the Wilt Chamberlain autobiography, the one, Wilt, Man Above or whatever, the picture of him says, it's like one of the most fun books you're gonna read about sports because Wilt's not self-aware as he's writing the book, so it's his take on stuff and he really believes it and it's kind of crazy half the time, but it's also like real access in his life, real access in how he thought about stuff and you leave the book going,
01:44:44 Speaker_02
I can see why he was so frustrated in a play with, I could see why he was traded three times, right?
01:44:49 Speaker_02
Whereas Bill Russell, you read Second Wind and it's like, holy shit, this is one of the most thoughtful people we had in the 1960s and early 70s about everything that was going on in America.
01:45:02 Speaker_02
I always feel like you can get value out of autobiographies and I want to feel that way about some of these follow the people around, follow the players around, and I just don't. And I find myself not watching them anymore, like at all.
01:45:15 Speaker_02
I don't watch any of them.
01:45:17 Speaker_04
Well, you know, I saw that there's this Ted Turner documentary that's coming. It's a documentary series about Ted Turner, which I was kind of interested in until I found out he has complete control over it. It's like I have I have.
01:45:30 Speaker_04
Why would I like a Wikipedia entry would be better in some ways, because at least it would be somebody who is just sort of giving the information without sort of.
01:45:37 Speaker_04
I mean, it is it's not that these things are immediately terrible because the person is involved. That's I don't want to say that. But I mean, you know, it's
01:45:48 Speaker_04
It has become, this has become seemingly like a common move now for people late in their career.
01:45:54 Speaker_02
Because you make money and it's basically the video version of mineral biography. That was one of the things, when we did the Vidsvik band thing, you know, I just don't want to be involved in stuff like that. So it wasn't.
01:46:05 Speaker_02
It was like, hey, we trust you guys. Make the best possible doc.
01:46:11 Speaker_04
Uh, how did, how did you ultimately feel about that? I thought it was really good to be honest, but I didn't know any of that stuff in terms of like anything post like 1999.
01:46:19 Speaker_04
Like I, I didn't know anything that had gone into wrestling in that world since then. But what, like, how did you feel about having worked on it all those years?
01:46:29 Speaker_02
I mean I was pumped with how it came out because it just seemed like it was going to die three different times and the story kept changing and it's so hard to work on something like that when you feel like you're headed toward whatever you thought was going to be the version of it and then you have to flip it and change it again and not know what was coming next, not knowing if Netflix was going to pull out.
01:46:48 Speaker_02
So it was a roller coaster.
01:46:51 Speaker_02
You know, when you're trying to make something like that, I think that's different than what we're talking about, because we're trying to make a document, a real documentary about somebody that they participated in and did an interview with, but didn't have creative control over, and trying to capture like,
01:47:09 Speaker_02
What was this? What was this career? What was this impact? Was this guy a shrewd businessman? Was he a bad person? You're trying to juggle all these things, but you're also trying to do it for the widest possible audience. It's just different goals.
01:47:22 Speaker_02
I think the stuff we're talking about with this is if any athlete or musician releases a big documentary about themselves that they're executive producers of or that their production company did,
01:47:36 Speaker_02
We should regard it the same way we would regard somebody just writing, releasing an autobiography, but I don't know if we're there yet, culturally.
01:47:46 Speaker_02
I still feel like people don't understand the difference between documentaries and, you know, basically self-produced hagiographies.
01:47:54 Speaker_04
Well, because sometimes they look the same. I mean, that is the problem. It's like the modality of it makes it look the same. I mean, this is the same way with like when, say, broadcast news became very partisan, right?
01:48:07 Speaker_04
It still looks the way news used to look. It's still somebody sitting in front of a desk giving you information. There's a screen behind them showing kind of illustrate, you know, images that illustrate their point.
01:48:18 Speaker_04
It looks formally the way news looked when Walter Cronkite worked. But it's not, right?
01:48:23 Speaker_04
These documentaries look the way, you know, I'm trying to think of like an older documentary that looks the same as the ones now, but we know it was different because the times, I guess the assumption of what it would be.
01:48:39 Speaker_04
Well, you said like, you know, spinning an autobiography. I mean, I guess every autobiography is kind of a spin job, right? It's like you're, you know, it's rare that somebody would write a memoir.
01:48:49 Speaker_02
How many times does somebody say, write a biography of me? Here are the car keys. You can interview all the people in my life and, and however it turns out, it turns out. It used to happen a lot. It doesn't happen as much anymore.
01:49:01 Speaker_04
That happened with the Jan Winter biography.
01:49:04 Speaker_02
Right. And think about how that played out.
01:49:05 Speaker_04
Yes. Yes. I mean, that's that that might be the last time someone like does that, you know. And it wasn't even that it was just like incredibly unfair. It was just kind of unfair. But the guy had a perspective.
01:49:17 Speaker_04
The writer, like Joe Hagan, wrote the book and he's like, I have ideas about this, too. I'm putting them in there.
01:49:23 Speaker_02
Well, but there's another piece of this where if all of the celebrities we have, for the most part, there's a couple exceptions, but they're super available all over the place, right?
01:49:33 Speaker_02
In the old days, it was, there was an infrastructure with celebrities of you released a movie. Who's that? Like, think of like Kathleen Turner in 1981. She becomes famous and it's like, well, who is this? And there would be
01:49:46 Speaker_02
maybe a giant Rolling Stone profile about her. She'd go on Letterman, maybe she'd go on Carson. Other than that, you didn't really know anything about her. And now there's this whole infrastructure in place.
01:49:55 Speaker_02
So like, you haven't seen Inora yet, but Mikey Madison's like unbelievable in that movie. Mikey Madison's been around, you know, she became famous, social media happened, right? She's a social media president. She's done podcasts.
01:50:07 Speaker_02
I felt like I, not only did I know who she was, but I'd seen her and stuff and had a feel for who she was. the same kind of mystique, because she'd been around and she'd been around in a 21st century way.
01:50:19 Speaker_02
And I felt, you almost feel like you know somebody, obviously you don't. But I feel like if that Onora comes out in 1982, it'd be like, holy shit, who is this actress?
01:50:30 Speaker_02
And you just wouldn't really have any way to find out anything about her, other than these little tiny pieces. It's just so different.
01:50:37 Speaker_04
It's strange. I think the promotion probably hurts them. The idea of being an actor is that you're completely becoming someone who isn't you. So it's to your advantage if we don't know who you are.
01:50:57 Speaker_04
But that's like, I don't know if that's really a possible thing anymore.
01:51:03 Speaker_02
By the way, now that I'm looking at this, I'm not sure if Mikey Madison's on Instagram, so maybe she's more mysterious than I thought.
01:51:11 Speaker_04
But even like you and I are talking right now and it seems like we're just, you know, I think both of us feel like we're just having like, you know, a free flowing conversation. Yeah.
01:51:22 Speaker_04
And that we're both just sort of talking off the top of the dome or whatever. But we do, I guess, have creative control, right?
01:51:27 Speaker_04
If I accidentally said something extremely provocative and dangerous, we would take it out or could take it out if we wanted to. Um, so is this, is this unreal? Like, you know, or like, that's why I like doing the Sunday nights with Sal.
01:51:41 Speaker_02
Cause it's like, we're just live on YouTube. Here we go. There's no safety net at all.
01:51:46 Speaker_04
So you do this live, you do them complete, like it's going out.
01:51:49 Speaker_02
We do them on YouTube. Yeah. We record the whole podcast as it's happening, which I think is fun.
01:51:54 Speaker_04
And then it stays on YouTube. So if something was troubling, it would still be there.
01:51:58 Speaker_02
Huh?
01:51:58 Speaker_04
I didn't know you were doing that. Um, It's a strange deal. You've had, I'm guessing, dozens, maybe hundreds of profiles written about you in your life. What percentage of them would you say had something wrong in the story? Something.
01:52:17 Speaker_04
Something that was either not really what you imagined.
01:52:20 Speaker_02
When you're written about, I don't think you're ever going to be happy with how it came out. It's just, it's just a fact. But I also, I mean, I haven't done, I don't think I've done an interview in like, like that and probably the entire 2020s.
01:52:32 Speaker_02
I think what you realize is if you don't need to do them, it's, you'd rather just kind of not do them. I mean, yeah, I remember you wrote that. What was the one you wrote? The Tom Brady one?
01:52:42 Speaker_04
Yeah.
01:52:44 Speaker_02
which you've had a few that were great and great for you, and I'm not sure it was great for the person you were writing about.
01:52:52 Speaker_04
Sure, that's true, but what I'm saying more like is, okay, so I asked you this question, I could have asked myself this, because I've had profiles written about me too, and I would say if somebody asked me what percentage of those stories had something wrong in them, I would say probably, it feels like 100%, right?
01:53:07 Speaker_04
It feels like 100% to me. But there's always been something in there that was either, that was like, if nothing else, like a misinterpretation of what I meant.
01:53:17 Speaker_04
Like they used a quote of mine and they quoted me accurately, but that wasn't really what I meant. So I think to myself then, so let's say I had control over that profile.
01:53:25 Speaker_04
Let's say that the writer had to send me the piece and I got to fix these things.
01:53:29 Speaker_02
You had to send them edits?
01:53:30 Speaker_04
Yes. I will say like, you know, because sometimes, you know, and younger writers will do that sometimes. But I think to myself, it's like, so would that, that would better reflect what I actually meant.
01:53:40 Speaker_04
If someone is reading this story, you would think that what they would want from it is to know If they're reading about me or they want to know about me, if they're reading about you, they want to know about you.
01:53:52 Speaker_04
So they would actually, you would think, want the most accurate depiction of how that person feels. But yet, we would not, we don't take that as seriously, right?
01:54:01 Speaker_04
Like if it turned out, if you were at a profile of someone and at the bottom of the story it said that the subject was given this story beforehand and allowed to fact check and make changes to quotes and stuff like that, we'd be like, oh, it means nothing.
01:54:13 Speaker_04
even though that actually would be what the how the person wants to be understood.
01:54:17 Speaker_03
Yeah.
01:54:18 Speaker_04
And that should be the goal. So it's so it is it is a complicated deal. It's like we trust.
01:54:25 Speaker_04
Documentaries more if the person doesn't have control and the documentary filmmaker has kind of adversarial with them because we don't trust the subject, but somehow we're supposed to trust the filmmaker.
01:54:37 Speaker_04
Like, well, why, why do we trust the filmmakers perception on this? Why, why are they the person who can kind of be the arbiter of reality?
01:54:44 Speaker_04
And it's the person who we're watching should, should have absolutely no say in this or should, or should be sort of forced to be themselves and then live with the result. I don't know.
01:54:53 Speaker_04
I mean, these are like, you know, like, well, you know, what's interesting about this.
01:54:58 Speaker_02
If you're actually making a real documentary that's not, you know, hagiography or like a self-produced thing or whatever, you do have a responsibility. This becomes a document, right?
01:55:09 Speaker_02
And you're shaping people's perceptions of the people that are in it, right? So I just went through this with the Celtics documentary we did, which is like nine parts. It covers 75 years. You're actually in it. And what happened with The Last Dance,
01:55:26 Speaker_02
was really informative for how we were thinking about the Celtics thing because, and in that case, like Jason Harris, my friend, like he played it perfectly. He had the iPad with Jordan.
01:55:36 Speaker_02
There was some real Jordan Isaiah tension and, you know, dysfunction between those guys. You have the iPad. So, but the two biggest losers, I think coming out of that documentary, were Isaiah and Pippen.
01:55:48 Speaker_02
And the Pippen thing, I don't even know if he watched the whole thing, because when you get to the last episode, when he basically helped save the 1998 finals, he's like a hero. He's playing Hurt, he's on a shitty contract, he's carrying himself.
01:56:03 Speaker_02
But Pippen latched onto what happened when he asked out of the Knicks game, which he just didn't want to hear that that was part of his legacy. I thought all that stuff was fair, keeping that in.
01:56:13 Speaker_02
I think what you can do though, if it's in the wrong hands, shift certain things against people or for people if you're trying to create heroes and villains.
01:56:22 Speaker_02
And I do think like some documentary people think about what's gonna be cut out and put on Twitter. Oh, I got this awesome soundbite.
01:56:31 Speaker_02
And what it does is, especially if you're making a document, sometimes you really have to be careful, including stuff that might not be true that somebody's saying, right? As the years pass, like think about the Klosterman family vacation.
01:56:44 Speaker_02
And you got your 80-year-old uncle, and he just has some crazy memory from 40 years ago. It's just not true. And it's like, no, that's not what happened, Uncle Al. That can't be in the documentary. This is still a document.
01:56:56 Speaker_02
Whether he said it or not, whether it's good TV, That doesn't mean it should be in. And I do feel like we're even losing that. I worry about this next wave of documentary directors. I've obviously made a bunch of them.
01:57:09 Speaker_02
Gearing stuff toward what might play on Twitter or what may play on TikTok. is I think, you know, you're incentivizing the wrong thing.
01:57:20 Speaker_04
Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is kind of far field, but like, you know, talking about media type media type stuff or whatever, it's like, who would have thought that it would have been terrible for like newspapers, like
01:57:35 Speaker_04
at the Times and the Washington Post to be less dependent on advertising and more based on subscribers.
01:57:41 Speaker_04
Like everybody would have thought in the 1990s, we would have said like, what if we didn't have to worry about whether or not Ford advertises with our newspaper? What if we could just give people what they want?
01:57:51 Speaker_04
You know, we thought that would be better. And now that's kind of what it is and it's so much worse because now the reader is not, is kind of seen as a like a customer. You know, so we're going to give them what they want.
01:58:05 Speaker_04
You see this with headlines all the time. It's like, I will see the headline to a story and I will think to myself, it's like, that can't be what the story is about. And 95% of the time, I'm right.
01:58:16 Speaker_04
that the headline was so much more provocative and bombastic than what the actual information is. But what do they need? They need me to sort of engage with it.
01:58:26 Speaker_04
The thing about the last answer, I would say, it's like also it's like I have a theory of what really bothered Pippin about that more than anything else, because all the other stuff.
01:58:36 Speaker_04
The stuff about him pulling himself out of that game, he probably expected that to be there. He's dealt with that before.
01:58:42 Speaker_02
I mean, I love Pippen. When I wrote about him in my book, I wrote a whole probably page about that game because I thought it really unfairly shaped his legacy as a player. It was the first thing people pointed to.
01:58:53 Speaker_02
So for it not to be in the documentary in a real way would have been disingenuous.
01:58:57 Speaker_04
But I mean, and this might be a projection, but if I'm Pippen, you know what part of that documentary would have drove me insane? the time when Jordan says, you know, you got to say Pippen was the best player I played with. He was my best teammate.
01:59:14 Speaker_04
If I'm Scottie Pippen, I'm like, yes, obviously. Yes. Why are you like, right.
01:59:18 Speaker_02
Why is that need a qualifier?
01:59:20 Speaker_04
Yes. Like, why would you have to mention that as if there's anyone out there who doesn't think that that's the kind of thing when you're in a personal relationship with someone that really bothers you. Right. Like, you know, it was like he's good.
01:59:33 Speaker_04
Jordan is giving him a compliment. Jordan would probably say like, I couldn't give a bigger compliment, you know? But in this case, it's not, right? Because everyone in the world thinks that is the case already.
01:59:45 Speaker_04
And for Jordan to mention it, it almost implies like it's up for debate. When like Bird would say, his best teammate, his favorite team was Dennis Johnson. That was always like, oh, more than McHale, huh? That's interesting.
01:59:56 Speaker_04
You know, it's like I can see it, but you know, it does. It's a real compliment, right? Because he's saying something that the world doesn't necessarily assume to be true.
02:00:04 Speaker_04
When Jordan says Pippen was his best teammate and the best player he played with, and it's something that prior to Jordan even saying that, it wouldn't have even been a question.
02:00:13 Speaker_04
Nobody was ever debating who Jordan's best teammate was, or did Jordan play with any good players. That question is never brought up, right? Like Pippen's one of the 50 best players of all time, or 75 now, or whatever the fucking list is.
02:00:25 Speaker_04
But I remember thinking if I was him and I heard that, I would have lost my mind.
02:00:30 Speaker_02
You know?
02:00:31 Speaker_04
Yeah, you know?
02:00:32 Speaker_02
Yeah, because to me it's like, you know, I've said a million times, Jordan's the best player I've ever seen and he's always going to be number one for me. Somebody would really have to take it. But Pippin to me is such a big piece of...
02:00:47 Speaker_02
Still watching them together, especially as they got a little older when Jordan came back, that was one of the great sports fan thrills of my life, seeing those two guys play basketball together.
02:00:56 Speaker_02
They were so in sync and they were so great as a combo, and I've only really seen that a couple times on a basketball court, the way those guys kind of coexisted and made each other better. I can't even think of anybody in the NBA now who does that.
02:01:10 Speaker_02
I watch the Celtics as a team,
02:01:14 Speaker_02
show flashes of it, and I almost feel like they're not, like Brown and Tatum, it almost needs like two more years to cultivate, but those guys really have this chemistry now of when to know, all right, you take this one, all right, I'll take this, and there's no ego left with them.
02:01:31 Speaker_02
It feels like Mitchell and Garland are starting to develop that a little bit in Cleveland, but you know it when you see it. Whereas like you watch Minnesota and it's like, oh shit, this Randall Edwards thing, yikes, like they need to figure this out.
02:01:44 Speaker_04
Do you feel like the NBA has to make some real changes for the product? I feel that way.
02:01:50 Speaker_02
I've been thinking about it a lot about whether there should be a cap on threes, whether you just get 40 threes in a game and that's it.
02:01:57 Speaker_02
But it's a crazy idea, but I'm also like if they did this, I might, I might think it's fine or just second quarter. Nobody threes or twos.
02:02:07 Speaker_04
Well, no, it would have to be a situation. What you're saying is like one of the things on the clock is like the number 40. And every time someone shoots a three, it counts down because then sometimes you need to save some for the end or whatever.
02:02:20 Speaker_04
But I, uh, I don't, I don't, I don't like that's it. That's kind of a, it's just too, it's too weird.
02:02:26 Speaker_02
Radical. But like, I want like Celtics Clippers last night and the Celtics killed the Clippers. Somebody texted me the first half shot chart. And it was just, it was all threes around the arc and then stuff in the paint.
02:02:44 Speaker_02
And I think there was like one shot, you know, from 12 feet. And I'm like, what are we doing? Like people have been theorizing, this is one reason the NBA ratings are down.
02:02:53 Speaker_02
I don't think, I think Derek Thompson nailed it when it's six, nine months ago when he was saying how it's really easy to follow the NBA in a crazy, passionate way without actually watching the games.
02:03:05 Speaker_02
or just watching fourth quarters or pieces of game. I think that's the biggest issue with the league. There's too many games.
02:03:11 Speaker_04
I mean, he's a smart guy, but there's a flaw in that thinking, though.
02:03:13 Speaker_02
What is it?
02:03:14 Speaker_04
The flaw in that thinking is when you make something easier to follow, that typically does not decrease the amount people want to see it for real. I mean, it's totally easy to follow the NFL without watching the games.
02:03:24 Speaker_04
You can do it in the exact same way, but that has actually spurred it.
02:03:28 Speaker_02
But the NFL is two things. The NFL is gambling and fantasy. The NBA doesn't have either of those things in the same way.
02:03:35 Speaker_04
I play fantasy basketball and it's driving me crazy because everyone's hurt all the time. That's a huge issue.
02:03:39 Speaker_02
I retire. I give up. Fantasy basketball is done.
02:03:42 Speaker_04
You can't do it. I don't know. It almost seemed better with load management. My suspicion is because NBA teams just don't practice anymore. that.
02:03:56 Speaker_04
And when they, you know, it's all sort of like individual training sessions for these guys, you know, to get ready for the year that that that when they start playing games, they all get hurt.
02:04:04 Speaker_04
I mean, I got a fantasy team where it's like 14 guys are on the team. I can't put like I have like seven guys hurt or eight guys hurt. I can't figure out what to do.
02:04:14 Speaker_02
There's too many games and basketball's harder to play. I'm gonna die on that hill. I firmly believe there's more running and it's just harder on your bodies. Even the equipment, I've talked about this, but even the equipment's better.
02:04:25 Speaker_02
The no practice thing is, anytime you, if you talk,
02:04:32 Speaker_04
It can't be harder than football, it's not. It's not physically more demanding than football.
02:04:36 Speaker_02
Oh no, I'm saying just basketball compared to basketball in the past, even though the shoes are better, all the stuff we've always talked about. But the no practice thing is such a big thing with coaches.
02:04:47 Speaker_02
I remember when Doc got the Milwaukee job, obviously I'm friends with Doc, just talking to him, he took that job, they were playing, and they just hadn't had a chance to practice for weeks and weeks and weeks. And he was saying, just to me,
02:05:01 Speaker_02
Just people don't understand how hard it is to not practice. You don't understand like how damaging that is when you have this schedule piece where it's like three, four weeks in a row.
02:05:13 Speaker_02
You just know you're not going to practice because it's not even the top eight guys are fine. It's everyone else on the roster. They just atrophy. This is one of the crazy things about Brani being, you know, in the NBA now and just not playing.
02:05:25 Speaker_02
He doesn't play in the, he's only playing G League home games, but he doesn't play for the Lakers. Like what's the point of him being in the league? I don't understand.
02:05:32 Speaker_04
Well, yeah, that, that ended up looking, I mean, it's, it's terrible that I, I, in a sense, I feel like if we're talking about like, you know, LeBron's career has been, you know, remarkably absent of major missteps really for a long time.
02:05:47 Speaker_04
It was just the decision. But in some ways this one was almost worse to me. Why? Because, because there was nothing like, So the goal was to have this sort of meaningful moment where a father and son played on the court at the same time.
02:06:03 Speaker_04
And it ended up having no meaning at all. Like none, the entire thing seemed like a construct. There seemed to be nothing natural about it.
02:06:14 Speaker_04
The fact that he's already in the G League and may never be in the NBA again or whatever, it's like what, well, so what good would this do? Like what, like it was bad for Bronny, for sure. I mean, it's gonna damage the way he is perceived.
02:06:27 Speaker_04
It's made him be perceived worse than he is. Um, it, it, it's not as though we look at LeBron now and be like, well, that's like one more, you know, thing that he accomplished. I think the opposite is true. I, um, maybe even he feels this way now.
02:06:40 Speaker_04
I don't know, but.
02:06:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, I don't, I didn't understand it as it was happening because the high school resume didn't match what people were really saying. But even like Jared McCain was here in LA and he was, I tweet, I was tweeting about it during the draft.
02:06:55 Speaker_02
Jared McCain is unbelievable. He was unbelievable in LA. He was the best guard here for three years. His team's always won. He was fucking awesome. He went to Duke. You could see the second half of the year.
02:07:06 Speaker_02
He was awesome there and he was just clearly going to be really good. Um, It just felt like Brani should have been in college for like at least three years, just trying to get better and trying to conquer that level before you go to the next one.
02:07:19 Speaker_04
Sure, but when you say like, I didn't understand it, it's like, you did understand it. The thing is, you feel like you shouldn't understand it, right?
02:07:30 Speaker_04
I'll try to be not too far on this, but I feel like this is something that I see a lot when people are talking about the news in any sense. They're saying they don't understand something, and they do understand it, but we feel like we shouldn't.
02:07:42 Speaker_04
Like for some reason, the idea of a kid playing with his father, even though he isn't warranted, that we should be like, that makes no sense. And it makes complete sense. We all know why it happened.
02:07:52 Speaker_04
I mean, it was like, I thought of this when, you know, this, this Tyson Paul fight, you know, I, you know, like leading up to that fight, I started getting tons of texts from people asking if I was going to watch it or what we thought of it or whatever, to the point where I suddenly realized almost every guy I know is going to watch this.
02:08:10 Speaker_04
Like, I don't know what the final numbers on that thing was. They had to have been massive, right now. So there was all these ideas like maybe, you know, maybe Tyson will just come out and just knock him out with one punch. Maybe Tyson's too old.
02:08:24 Speaker_04
Maybe he'll get hurt real bad. Like there was all these different ideas of what it might be, you know? And then as it turns out, it was exactly what the most predictable outcome would be.
02:08:35 Speaker_04
like a pretty uninteresting, not very physical fight that feels like it might've been rigged, even though it probably wasn't, it wasn't dramatic at all. Now it was probably good for boxing, right? Cause the undercards were pretty good fights.
02:08:49 Speaker_04
People watch these fights.
02:08:50 Speaker_02
The women's fight was one of the greatest women's fights ever.
02:08:52 Speaker_04
Yes. People, you know, so it probably was good for the sport, but in another sense it was just like, it was just like a, a domino effect of just sort of made up events all kind of falling in a row in the way that in the most predictable fashion.
02:09:14 Speaker_04
I don't know, it's very strange. It was like, it seems strangely symbolic to me. You know, it's like the fact that like, so Tyson sort of represents the past. He sort of represents our generation, right?
02:09:27 Speaker_04
Like that he was like a kind of a Gen X figure, I guess in some ways, you know, and then he'd had this, this life where life of crime and these terrible acts and, but then he comes back.
02:09:38 Speaker_04
And he's fighting this guy, he's fighting this guy who sort of represents almost like a caricature of young people now or the young adult person now, you know, that his entire life is based around his ability to sort of generate celebrity on his own through social media and all these things.
02:09:56 Speaker_04
And then everyone's rooting against the guy, right? It seemed like everyone was rooting for Tyson despite Tyson's life. But people were like, we're on his side, sort of.
02:10:06 Speaker_04
So it's like this person who represents the way the world is now, the way sports works now, the way media works now, nobody wanted that guy to win.
02:10:18 Speaker_04
And it seemed like almost it was people saying like, we want Tyson to win this fight because it will mean that the world's not really going in this direction.
02:10:31 Speaker_04
That if Tyson wins this fight, it sort of says the way things have changed is not good in any way. Like not only do we not like this Jake Paul character, but we don't like what he really represents about how sports works now.
02:10:44 Speaker_04
We don't like how the way entertainment works. And if he gets knocked out, It'll show that it was all this sort of like fragile fake thing.
02:10:51 Speaker_04
And when he fights a real person, a guy who's actually a real fighter, when he actually gets punched for the first time, he's going to collapse and this house of cards is going to collapse. But that's not what happened.
02:11:03 Speaker_04
It was the most predictable outcome. It was just a slow, laborious fight where a guy who's too old to be out there was able to sort of manage being with a guy whose main goal seemed to make sure that the event finished.
02:11:16 Speaker_04
So it felt like people couldn't say they got financially ripped off. And it's just, you know, like, like, like Paul bows to Tyson at one point in the fight. So he's like, we're honoring you in this.
02:11:25 Speaker_04
Like, that's not a fight, you know, that's not a boxing or whatever, you know? Um, but yeah, we're not surprised. Like, like it is exactly what we thought it would be.
02:11:34 Speaker_02
Yeah. Well, you know, it speaks to what we talked about earlier with the election after, as the, even as the fight was midway through the fight, people were like, I knew it. I knew this was going to suck. Oh my God.
02:11:47 Speaker_02
And it's like, well, before the fight, Tyson was plus one 70 to win. Right. Jake Paul was a two to one favorite. Everybody claimed they knew after the fact that it was going to be this terrible, but a lot of people thought Tyson was going to win.
02:12:00 Speaker_02
And then once we started to see the results of the fight, we were like, oh yeah, of course the guys, 58.
02:12:06 Speaker_02
He's admitted long time, used all kinds of drugs, has led a really hard life, got knocked out multiple times when he boxed, had some sort of health event in June that seemed really bad.
02:12:20 Speaker_02
It's like, what made anyone, including me, think that there was even a slim chance this would happen? It was because it's what people wanted to happen. They wanted it to be the Rocky Balboa movie.
02:12:31 Speaker_04
Yeah, well, I think that there was also this sense that when the first bell rang, like maybe Tyson's going to come out and charge him and he's going to hit him one time. Yes. Suddenly going to become obvious.
02:12:41 Speaker_04
But what became obvious was that, oh, you're actually going to go through with all this. This is not really it's not it's going to be, you know, it's weird. It was like, I don't know.
02:12:51 Speaker_04
I don't know if I can even say it was a disappointment because how can I be disappointed if I'm admitting that's what I knew was going to happen?
02:12:59 Speaker_02
Yeah, I wrote a piece, first year I was at Page Two, I wrote a piece about how I was over for Tyson after getting knocked out by Lennox Lewis. The whole thing, I was like, this is it. Like literally, 2002, I didn't even move to L.A. yet, I don't think.
02:13:11 Speaker_02
We can either end the podcast or we can take a break and talk about The Sopranos, it's up to you.
02:13:16 Speaker_04
I'll talk about The Sopranos, sure.
02:13:17 Speaker_02
All right, we'll take one more break. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. As a small business owner, every new hire added to your team needs to make an immediate impact. Think of CJ Stroud in his rookie year, how he transformed the Texans.
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This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. Seeing a band or your favorite sports team in person is great, But it could be even better with the Chase Sapphire Reserve card.
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Find your next experience with Chase Sapphire Reserve. Learn more at Chase.com slash Sapphire Reserve. Cards issued by J.P. Morgan, Chase Bank, and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval, terms apply. All right, we're gonna end with The Sopranos.
02:15:01 Speaker_02
I've been re-watching it yet again, and you texted me how you've been watching it as well, and we haven't talked about this other than that just you know that about me, I know that about you, but you really wanted to talk about it.
02:15:13 Speaker_02
I kind of really want to talk about it too, and I'm interested if it's for the same reason, so you go.
02:15:18 Speaker_04
Well, okay, so I'll just quickly get into how this happened. So for a variety of reasons, I ended up watching the last episode of Mad Men, the series finale of Mad Men.
02:15:32 Speaker_04
And that was very surprising to me because, of course, I remembered what happened to Don. Do you remember what happened to any of the other characters, to most of the other characters?
02:15:41 Speaker_02
I haven't seen that. I've been saving that for a rewatch too. I don't remember one other thing that happened other than the ending.
02:15:47 Speaker_04
Like, did you remember that Peggy ended up with Stan? I totally remember. Do you remember that? Like, like Roger apparently moves to France. It's like, you know, Pete Campbell moves to Wichita. All these things I had forgotten. It was blew my mind.
02:16:02 Speaker_04
All these things I didn't remember about this show, which I, you know, which I really like. I watch really closely, whatever. So then I was like, I wonder if the same thing would happen if I watched the last episode of The Sopranos.
02:16:13 Speaker_04
So I watched the last episode of The Sopranos again. because I also I'd watched that documentary that they, that, that was really got me back. I really liked it.
02:16:20 Speaker_06
Yeah.
02:16:20 Speaker_04
Um, you know, and, and it was, uh, I watched the last episode and it was not what I remembered because again, I only remembered the very end of it, you know? Uh, but it was good.
02:16:30 Speaker_04
So I ended up watching a few more episodes from that last season and then I decided like, this is so enriching to me. I'm going to go back and like rewatch the third season and,
02:16:41 Speaker_04
One thing it does is it really shows me how much television was just better during this period.
02:16:48 Speaker_04
Like that was just really, and it's not to blame anybody making television now, it's that this was like a collection of things that were happening in the culture that it was like the depth of every character is incredible.
02:17:00 Speaker_02
Well, season three, season three is also the most violent of all the seasons too. And Chase is really going for a lot. I think season three is really, really great, but he's going for a lot of themes in that one too.
02:17:11 Speaker_04
Yes. Yes. And, and, you know, you know, but also like, uh, not, not in obvious ways, like all the stuff with the racehorse. That's kind of interesting. Carmelo and Furio being together, that's kind of... Well, that's season four, though.
02:17:28 Speaker_02
Season three is when Ralphie kills the dancer.
02:17:33 Speaker_04
Maybe I'm already into it.
02:17:35 Speaker_02
Dr. Melfi rape scene. It's pretty violent.
02:17:39 Speaker_04
I guess I'm in season four now. I guess I, I must've started with three and I'm moving forward because I'm just hitting forward. Maybe I'm getting close, you know?
02:17:46 Speaker_04
Um, uh, so I guess I'm in, in the middle of, but I'm just saying that those, that these, the, the, the storylines for these characters, it's just so, it's really funny. All the stuff with Christopher is real great.
02:17:57 Speaker_04
He's such a, you know, Christopher is such a likable character despite sort of how his life plays out.
02:18:04 Speaker_02
It's such a likable fuck up.
02:18:06 Speaker_04
Well, it's not just that he's like, he seems like he's trying, like he's really trying, you know, like he wants to make these things work. He wants to make everyone happy in a way. He isn't some degree selfish, but it's like it is.
02:18:24 Speaker_04
Well, what did you want to say about it? Because it's like I, I just I have really enjoyed this experience. We watch it again. And OK, go ahead. There you go.
02:18:34 Speaker_02
I think so I rewatched it like two years ago, probably rewatched it five years for that. So I think this is like either my fourth or fifth rewatch. And I think it's one of the great pieces of art.
02:18:46 Speaker_02
that we've produced this last, I don't know, 25, 30 years, there's no question.
02:18:52 Speaker_02
And one of the reasons I think that is, when I watch it, I pick up new stuff every time, and it's almost like reading the best books you've ever read, or your favorite books when you were a kid or a teenager, where you're just like, I'm just gonna read this book again, this book is so good, I wanna dive back in, I wanna study how
02:19:09 Speaker_02
this author like turn phrases and turn sentences and how they did this character. Maybe I'll notice something different this time. That was what we grew up doing. You would, you'd have 10, 12, 15 books you loved and you would read them.
02:19:21 Speaker_02
I don't know how many times I can see it with some of the books I have in my library and the Sopranos to me. I pick up stuff every time.
02:19:30 Speaker_02
I think it was so much more sophisticated and well thought out that maybe I appreciated the first and second times I watched it.
02:19:37 Speaker_02
All the characters, all the stuff as you get older that Chase is trying to say about family, about mortality, about who do you trust in your life? Is all this shit worth it?
02:19:49 Speaker_02
just themes that I wouldn't have picked up the first time I watched it, from 1999 to 2007, because in the moment, you're just invested in the characters, you're trying to figure out who's gonna die, which Chase really turns the audience on a couple times.
02:20:03 Speaker_02
Chase doesn't like that people gravitated to the violence of the show in the moment, so he made season three becomes intentionally violent. He's really trying to fuck with the audience. But I think the characters and what he created
02:20:16 Speaker_02
It's all been discussed a million times, but I still feel like it's more interesting than any new show I could watch.
02:20:23 Speaker_04
Well, you know, watching them in a row is interesting, too, because I now recognize how watching it a week apart altered my experience with it in a sense that like, OK, when the series was ending, especially right when it got over, there was all those people writing about The Sopranos and they were like, you know,
02:20:44 Speaker_04
Why did people, uh, relate to Tony Soprano? He's like an obviously terrible person. He's like, he's like completely transgressive, awful person.
02:20:53 Speaker_04
And when you watch them all in a row, like when we, like when I'm kind of like kind of, I guess, binging them or whatever, I'm just right. You really do see that, right? Yeah. But when you're watching them a week apart, it didn't feel that way.
02:21:04 Speaker_04
Because in every episode, maybe he would do something bad, but he would also do one thing that was charming.
02:21:09 Speaker_04
And then somehow, like he would have, he would say something to Milfy, or he'd say something to his kids, or he'd just do something that was likable, and it sort of balanced it out. But when you watch them all in a row,
02:21:20 Speaker_04
You really see what kind of a diabolical person he is and like how how like how just completely like bottom line person he is.
02:21:29 Speaker_04
But what also is weird is that even though that I'm watching this again and I'm maybe more clearly seeing that this character is just really, you know, just like a bad dude.
02:21:43 Speaker_04
In some ways, I relate to this, even though I mean, I don't know how I can say I can relate to a gang.
02:21:49 Speaker_04
I mean, you know, but sort of his sense of like the things he questions about his own life, like you mentioned, maybe it's just because I'm older now. But I there are certain things, moments in that show when I'm like, I know how that is.
02:22:05 Speaker_04
I know how he feels right now. Like, I know what that is like. And that's something I do not remember from the first time I watched, you know.
02:22:12 Speaker_02
Yeah, the Tony piece, I think the reason we were all attracted to him as a character was he's completely authentic and he's always on brand at all times.
02:22:25 Speaker_02
Like he's so well written and so well sketched out, but all the decisions he's making in real time, you believe in a hundred percent, whether they're good or bad. It's like, oh yeah, like when he goes, he's in the Mercedes dealership,
02:22:39 Speaker_02
Um, after he sees, um, what's her face, the Annabelle Sierra character, when he's with her in therapy, the first time they meet, they're just in the waiting office. It's like, Oh no, this is going to be bad for Tony.
02:22:50 Speaker_02
And then it's like, he shows up at the Mercedes dealership. Cause of course he does. And you just know it's going to end badly. Um, every piece of how
02:22:59 Speaker_02
They cultivate his character over the course from season one to season seven, like adds up when you watch it.
02:23:05 Speaker_02
I don't, I don't think of an, uh, I can't think of another show, like even shows like lost, like breaking bad had moments where it kind of went sideways. People were complaining about certain things in the, in the Sopranos.
02:23:16 Speaker_02
I, I can't really complain about anything. I don't love the Ralphie character in season three and season four, the Joey pants character. I don't, I don't feel like Chase ever solved that character.
02:23:26 Speaker_02
completely, but when he gets to Buscemi in season five, playing the other Tony, he had everything. That character was well-sketched out, beautifully acted, but also really made sense against Tony.
02:23:40 Speaker_02
It was like this alternate version of where Tony's life could have gone. I think of all the stuff he had to do with the show, where you're having I don't know, 15 main characters, four characters you really have to care about.
02:23:56 Speaker_02
But then this whole other, like there's another 50 on the show and all of them make sense and interconnect together. I honestly don't know how they did it.
02:24:05 Speaker_02
This is one of the rare, this is the only TV show where I'm like, I don't understand how they pulled this off.
02:24:12 Speaker_04
There's many things about that are just sort of, it is incredible.
02:24:15 Speaker_04
Like, okay, so, like, Tony, in order for this to work and for him to have this position and be in the position he's in, he's always kind of got to be the smartest person in the room, okay?
02:24:27 Speaker_04
And he usually is, particularly if it's any situation where he's dealing with the business of being an organized crime leader. Yeah. he's often wrong about other aspects of life.
02:24:44 Speaker_04
but he can't, it's hard for him, like, it's like he's the smartest person in the world, in the room, and then sometimes he's not, but like he can't, he can't accept that in a sense, he's gotta believe he still is, I mean. Right, rational confidence.
02:24:57 Speaker_04
It's just, yeah, well, not, not, but for him it would be rational confidence, right? Because in situations where he's gotta deal with the life or death, money or nothing situations, he's really good, he's a good negotiator and all that stuff.
02:25:10 Speaker_04
It's the things that are, um, He has a really intense theory of mind, a weird kind of sense of empathy.
02:25:28 Speaker_02
So the last season, there's two episodes. Well, actually the end of the season before, after he gets shot, which is like if you're watching real time when it's like week after week, Tony's recovering. It was like a long month on that show.
02:25:41 Speaker_02
I don't think that's like the first part of that season is not fondly remembered. But it's super important because it leads to that episode when, uh, when he's coming back, he's healthy, but he's not 100% healthy and physically he's diminished, right?
02:25:59 Speaker_02
And the two big episodes of the physically diminished Tony are the episode he's got that big, strong driver, the guy that drives around, the young guy, he's ripped. He looks like Vin Diesel. And Tony can kind of sense that his crew
02:26:13 Speaker_02
feels like he's physically vulnerable. So he starts a fight with that guy and beats him up, right? Because he has to kind of prove to his crew that he can still be the guy, he can be the physical. So then the other one is the Bobby Bacala fight.
02:26:27 Speaker_02
Bobby Bacala, he's super drunk. Bobby Bacala beats him in the fight. And he can't let it go. He's gotta make Bobby do the one thing Bobby never did, which is just to kill somebody for the family because he has to win that one thing over him.
02:26:42 Speaker_02
And what you realize is, when we say Tony's a bad guy, it's like, oh yeah, because he killed people, he's a mobster. It's like, he's actually way worse than that because he's all about how can I win over the other people in my life?
02:26:53 Speaker_02
How can I tilt this against them? How can I always stay in power? How can I fuck with them? That's what drives him ultimately.
02:27:01 Speaker_04
When he fights Bobby out by the lake and all that stuff, you know, his crew is not around. It's really just his wife and his sister. Like he's talking to like Carmel. He's like, you know that if I was younger. Right.
02:27:13 Speaker_04
You know, it's like it's like she doesn't care at all. She's like, I wish this wouldn't have happened.
02:27:17 Speaker_01
Right.
02:27:18 Speaker_04
Why are you trying to convince me you won this fight? You shouldn't be fighting your friend. You know, that's like who invited this out here.
02:27:25 Speaker_04
But it's it's it's it's like his his not his own self-knowledge that like the other fight is because he's trying to prove it to his crew. And this one he's trying to prove to himself. But like I'm saying, yeah, yeah.
02:27:38 Speaker_02
Same episode, another example why he's a bad person. So Janice is happy, right? His sister who he kind of has this love-hate, mostly hate relationship with. But she found Bobby, nice guy. They have this lake house.
02:27:49 Speaker_02
Things are going well and they're at dinner. and she seems a little too happy, and he's just like, I gotta undermine this, and that's when he starts making the jokes about how he used to blow guys under the boardwalk.
02:28:01 Speaker_04
They're playing Monopoly.
02:28:02 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, and he's just like, you know what, she's feeling herself, I have to bring her back down, and he just figures out a way to do it, but that's what he does. He's really mean. Remember when conversation with Pauly Walnuts?
02:28:17 Speaker_02
where he's just like, remember when's the worst form of conversation, gets up and leaves. And Pauly Walnuts is a pretty loyal guy to him who treats like shit half the time.
02:28:26 Speaker_02
But everyone around him, he just can't, he has to treat them like shit as a way to have something over them. Which is why when you re-watch the show, there's so many examples of how he does it.
02:28:37 Speaker_02
And he's way better at it in the second half of the series than the first half. First half, he's still feeling himself out. He's not sure if he's gonna be the mob boss yet. But by the time we get to season three, he's like a monster.
02:28:49 Speaker_04
I mean, like what you said, that's a very key point because he often mentions how he doesn't like people reminiscing about the past. He hates nostalgia, right?
02:28:58 Speaker_04
And the reason he hates nostalgia is because he feels that talking about the past means the past is over. And he thinks the past should still be the present.
02:29:08 Speaker_04
the way things were when he was growing up, seeing other people, you know, like that, what, you know, that, like, that's how it should still be.
02:29:14 Speaker_04
So he doesn't want people to reminisce because that distances it from the possibility that that's how still the world's still that way, you know? And I mean, like, that is a, that's like the kind of idea you can get in a novel.
02:29:26 Speaker_04
It is very difficult to reflect that through dialogue on a television show. And they do a lot of things like that. Like they have a lot of like the, I guess the word they always use now is the interiority.
02:29:38 Speaker_04
They're able to sort of get inside these people's very complex feelings about life without showing a lot of it. Pauly and like his relationship with his mom, for example.
02:29:50 Speaker_04
That shows us something, his desire to make his mom happy because he thinks that he doesn't have a family, so he's got to do this. He's got to do this for his mom.
02:30:07 Speaker_04
Navigating Meadows relationships and stuff for Tony, it's like these are things that don't they're not just plot points. Like they're not, cause a lot of times a lot of things don't happen. It was like Carmela Furio thing.
02:30:20 Speaker_04
Like nothing really happens between them, but there is a lot of pathos in that relationship from both sides. And like just, she is so good as an actress of illustrating the feeling of desperate hopelessness.
02:30:35 Speaker_04
Yeah, like there's just nothing I can do that this is how my life is. And all these things I want and they seem simple. They seem like simple things I want, but I know I can't have them. So I got to convince myself it's OK.
02:30:47 Speaker_04
And then every once in a while it's not. And she just cracks.
02:30:51 Speaker_02
Yeah. Well, and that's the other thing with rewatches, because you're watching these all in a row at a much faster pace. And Carmela is one of the great female TV characters ever.
02:31:02 Speaker_02
The way he builds her from season one, what she is, what she's basically like, it's a time where the scutch for Tony, like she's busting his balls the whole first season and doesn't seem that happy to be married to him, but she's happy with the life that she has, but doesn't seem like she likes him that much.
02:31:17 Speaker_02
Then as it evolves, And you start, she starts having that moment where it's like, what, what is my life? My kid, I spent 15 years like trying to raise these two kids. Now my daughter hates me. My son's in his room all the time. I have this husband.
02:31:36 Speaker_02
This is like this, he's going fucking his goomars all over the place. Um, What do I have?" And then every once in a while, he brings me home this necklace. Like, is there something else out here? And that's what season three and season four is about.
02:31:50 Speaker_02
Because it's Furio just coming over and being in the doorway for three minutes. It's like the most exciting moment of her day. Her daughter doesn't respect her.
02:31:57 Speaker_02
And then how that evolves over the whole course of the series is... I mean, the Whitecaps episode is the famous episode, and that's like one of the great... great combo acting thing.
02:32:07 Speaker_02
That's another thing with the show is the acting of Edie Falco as Carmela and then Gandolfini as Soprano, it has to be two of the best 10 TV performances ever. I mean, maybe even top five, six or seven.
02:32:21 Speaker_02
Like Gandolfini, you watch this, he's so incredible as an actor. I really feel like it's one of the great achievements that I've seen.
02:32:29 Speaker_04
I, well, it's, and it's, it's like the perfect role for him.
02:32:33 Speaker_04
Like, I mean, I, like, it's not, not to say that he's not a great actor, but it's like, it's just, that, that is one situation where, you know, when you watch that documentary and they show some of the other people who tried out for these parts, it, it, it seems like it, this is, it only could have worked one way.
02:32:46 Speaker_04
It had to be this way. Right. Like he was the only guy who could have done this and who would have done it like this effectively, you know? And, um, uh, it's, uh, I, it,
02:32:59 Speaker_04
I remember writing for Grantland or whatever, talking about this, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Wire. At the time, I concluded that Breaking Bad was the best of these.
02:33:12 Speaker_04
It actually ties back to the thing we were talking about, the NBA and TikTok and stuff like that. In the moment of these things happening, you can have a feeling, but then as time passes,
02:33:26 Speaker_04
It changes, and the only people who really care are the ones who decide. And I do think maybe the decision is going to be that actually of those four shows, it really was The Sopranos that was the best one.
02:33:36 Speaker_04
All the other ones, in some way, are like a version of what that show did. In a sense.
02:33:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, I agree with that. I think The Wire has the best case because of what it was about, and I think it's aged really well. Van Lathan and I talk about this a lot about, because I think he's in The Sopranos camp,
02:33:53 Speaker_02
just for what's gonna have the longest tail. I feel like The Sopranos is a show that's 50 years from now, it's still gonna hit the same way because of the themes that it's about. It became timeless in a really unusual way.
02:34:07 Speaker_02
You think about the first couple years of the show, You know, there there's the cell phones they're using and, you know, the eight there's later on like ages on the Internet a lot. Tony's like, what the fuck is he doing?
02:34:18 Speaker_02
He's just watching a video on the Internet and laughing. I like he's like complete disdain for him. And that's basically, you know, what society is now. Yeah.
02:34:27 Speaker_04
But the thing is, you can make cases for all four of the shows. It doesn't detract from any of them to say this. And you know, this kind of story does seem to hold up. I mean, it's like, Goodfellas holds up pretty well. Godfather holds up very well.
02:34:45 Speaker_04
It's like, for some reason, this particular thing, like the Italian organized crime world,
02:34:58 Speaker_02
There's one other piece, which is why I think all those things have in common, is that some of the shit's super funny. Like Pauly Walnuts, as the show goes along, Pauly Walnuts, really starting with the Pine Barrens episode,
02:35:12 Speaker_02
is one of the funniest characters for me of like I would put him against like shows like Seinfeld characters like he's so fucking good and so funny and like his faces and I just I he just makes me laugh and I think a lot of the people on the show are just like genuinely funny.
02:35:31 Speaker_04
Like when Christopher gets out of rehab and Tony's asking him like, have you went through all the 12 steps? And he's like, well, not the last one where I kind of apologize to everyone, make amends. And Tony's like, I don't know if you should do that.
02:35:44 Speaker_04
And he's like, oh, I agree. So, you know, in some cases, you know, I'll send flowers, in some cases cash.
02:35:50 Speaker_04
And it's like it's like it's not even like set up to be funny, but it's just hilarious that somebody would be like, oh, I've had my heroin addiction has really screwed up these people's lives. But let's not delve too much in them.
02:36:01 Speaker_04
I'm going to give an envelope of like 20 grand. I don't know. He's just easy. The delivery of those lines is so it's so perfect.
02:36:09 Speaker_02
The intervention episode, the five minute intervention, which was like coming on the heels of what we would have in the eighties and nineties, which shows like every show would have an intervention episode. Right.
02:36:20 Speaker_02
Like the, probably the best one was party of five when they intervened with Bailey Bailey's alcoholism, really, really good stuff, but obviously a TV show and chase. Chase is just like, I'm fucking taking this nine other levels.
02:36:34 Speaker_02
And that becomes one of the funniest five-minute sequences in the history of the show. It's just the humor mixed with the fact that these characters are all kind of awful and how they navigated it. Even the episode when Annabella Sierra's character
02:36:51 Speaker_02
when Tony sends the guy to basically threaten her and be like, you're... Yeah, yes. You've said the sentence you should never say in our world, which is, I'm going to tell your wife.
02:37:01 Speaker_02
Not only are you not going to tell your wife, and he's like, you're going to leave this man alone. or something horrible is going to happen and he's like, it won't be cinematic, right?
02:37:10 Speaker_02
And scares the shit out of her and we never see her character again. But the last scene of the episode is him bringing groceries back to his family. This guy just was like the most violent, sociopathic, scary dude
02:37:23 Speaker_02
And then it's like, hey, did you remember to bring the milk home? Yeah, yeah. He's coming back with his groceries. And I think that's why people like this world, because it's like the worst impulses people have, but also things that we care about.
02:37:34 Speaker_02
Family, friendship, loyalty, you know, these things that are like enduring themes. Gandolfini though. To me, it's number one. I can't think of a better performance on a TV show.
02:37:50 Speaker_02
I'm sure other people would argue, but I can't imagine anyone else in the world, and I think he's the biggest reason this show works.
02:37:58 Speaker_04
You're probably true, but I also wonder if I had re-watched a different show, if I might feel differently. That's how it feels to me right now, too. It feels that way.
02:38:08 Speaker_02
All right, we did it. We made Nephew Kyle's week because he loves nothing more than a good Sopranos talk. Chuck Klosterman, that was one of our longest pods we've ever had. I really had a good time, though. It was good talking to you.
02:38:20 Speaker_04
Yeah, it was good seeing you. Have a good Thanksgiving.
02:38:22 Speaker_02
Yeah, have a good Thanksgiving.
02:38:23 Speaker_04
Are you a big Thanksgiving guy?
02:38:24 Speaker_02
I love Thanksgiving. I love the football. I love the food. It's people say, like, it's my favorite holiday. It might be my favorite day.
02:38:32 Speaker_02
Especially now when your kids come home and you get to have your whole family together, like when your kids get older, it's like the best.
02:38:39 Speaker_04
It's my, it's my favorite holiday too. I feel like for the best holiday, you have to say Christmas in the same way, like you have to say like, you know, the Beatles or Citizen Kane or like Christmas needs to be the biggest holiday.
02:38:51 Speaker_04
Some people would go Christmas Eve.
02:38:53 Speaker_02
Yeah.
02:38:54 Speaker_04
But I think everyone likes Thanksgiving the most.
02:38:57 Speaker_02
Yeah. A lot of people do. All right. Good to see you. Happy holidays. Bye bye. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Chuck Klosterman. Thanks to Saruti and Kyle and Gehau. Don't forget you can watch.
02:39:11 Speaker_02
All of this entire podcast will be in the Bill Simmons YouTube channel and my Million Dollar Picks. If I do them this week, I promise to do something fun.
02:39:19 Speaker_02
But it will only be on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel because I will not have another podcast the rest of the week. I'm going to hang out with my kids and my fam and we got Thanksgiving coming. And I can't wait. I love Thanksgiving.
02:39:32 Speaker_02
And I hope you have an awesome, awesome holiday. Safe travels. I will see you in this podcast on Sunday and I'll see you on the Pilsen GT channel at some point over the week. Enjoy Thanksgiving.
02:40:09 Speaker_02
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