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That's the Ringer fantasy football show on Spotify. We're also brought to you by the Ringer podcast Network, where I put up a new Rewatchables on Monday night. We did no way out. It was super fun. We ran the entire episode episode on our YouTube channel, Ringer Movies. You can watch that as well. You can watch a bunch of rewatchables and big picture episodes on there. We're also putting up old episodes from 2019, '20, '21 that we had on video that we never actually put on YouTube. We did Hoosier's last week with me and Rosillo. Then this week, we put up Miracle with me and Chris Ryan. You can go check it out, the Ringer Movies YouTube channel. We also put up a bunch of stuff from this podcast on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel. If you didn't know about that, I will not have a podcast on Sunday, but we will have a brand new Rewatchables on Sunday, and it's a really good movie. I'll just tell you that. That's going up Sunday night. On this podcast, our old friend, Derek Thompson, is coming on to talk about the future of everything Oh, yeah, of everything.

Then Joe House. I had to have him on. I'm like, Wayne Gro. I had to get it on, man. I had to get it on. Olympics coming. All we care about is Olympics basketball, whatever. There's sprinters, there's swimmers, there's all kinds of sports. Great. I care about the basketball at this point. We have a bunch of bets. Fandil has a bunch of stuff on there. Joe House and I have some opinions. We're going to talk about that. Maybe a little NFL as well. This is a big mega podcast because I'm going to be gone for probably until a week from Sunday. Just an FYI, but we'll have some rewatchables coming next week as well. All right, here we go. First, our friends from ProJam. All right, we had to do this. The Olympics are starting this weekend. Joe House is here 20 years ago, before podcast, I think we're invented, Joe House and I bet on Argentina to win the gold medal at the 2004 basketball part of the Olympics. They were 10 to 1 odds. We did not put a small amount on it, and they won, and we rooted against our country. But that's how strongly we felt about the team they put together.

House, all bets are off with us from a patriotism standpoint. Our patriotism, our flag is just green. We wave a green flag and that's it. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

We're capitalists. I think it is patriotic. We believe in capitalism.

And yet I think the USA team will win.

Yes.

I don't feel awesome about betting against them, but we might have done a couple hedges. So let's just go through it. We're going to talk about Olympic basketball only. That's the only thing we know about and some of the value we see. Gold medal, USA minus 750, Canada's 10 to 1, France, 15 to 1, Serbia, 15 to 1, Germany, 28 to 1. We dabbled on France at 15 to 1, make the case.

Well, the defense that they are going to be able to bring the table, both in terms of rim protection, but more importantly, in terms of the perimeter. And it's not just the notion of Gobert as rim protector and Wemby covering side to side, playing free safety. Koulibaly is a badass defender, a badass perimeter defender. And so the theory is that it'll be super hard to score against France. They're going to have the home cooking, and anything that goes weird will go in their favor. Now, it's not awesome that they lost a bunch- What do you mean goes weird?

Do you mean shady calls because the France crowd is going nuts?

I mean, did you watch the Moroccans run onto the field and the Morocco soccer game earlier this week. Stuff goes weird. Stuff is going to happen.

Interesting. Anyway. The France piece, I watched every minute of all the friendlies that the US team played, and they made the decision to give the car keys to LeBron, it seems like, for the Olympics. France is going to be a hard team from the size to just basically try to drive The type of team that I thought we were going to have, which was a little more driving kick and a little more guard friendly outside shooting, USA was playing way more power stuff than I was expecting. There was a lot of post-ups of Embiid, there was post-ups with LeBron. I'm not sure that's going to work against France when it seems like France's guards are so bad, that would be our big advantage. I don't know. That match up worries me, but I think they're going to beat France. The team that worries me for us is Germany.

Yes. We're on the same page. We didn't even compare notes on this.

Germany is 28 to one. They could not be less afraid of the US. Schroeder, for some reason, and this goes back to a couple of years ago, the Warriors Lakers series. Schroeder loves playing against Curry. I would say Schroeder is the number one guy against Curry. So if Curry is going to be a crunch time guy, Schroeder is like, That's great. I love playing against this guy. The Wagner is completely unafraid. They have that shooter, Opst, who kills them. I think this is it. Opst? Sure. That guy who murdered them in the World Championships. I don't know. I just like the team. They had size. Danny Tice. Danny Tice.

Yeah, still some bulk in the middle. They have that nice complement. So the FIBA basketball style, you have to have some size, which is why you look at somebody like Canada, you're like, Yeah, 10 to one. Are we getting enough juice? They don't really have that great inside. You better have some inside presence. And that's part of the thesis for France. Their guards are terrible. But Germany has size. I'm not worried about size with Germany.

Germany has size and guys that have played together for a while, what are they? Like a seven, eight-man rotation? Yes. And they're really comfortable with each other. And they have the prototype of these teams that succeed in these international stuff where Schroeder just doesn't come out. He plays the whole game. Wagner slashed in the rim. They have rebounders. They have offensive rebounders. They have guys who know how to bat the ball off the rim the moment it gets there, and they have a couple of shooters. I didn't actually think USA played that bad in the Germany game. I just thought Germany was really comfortable and played really well against them. Usa is my fear with them. We have not talked about this at all. I haven't even talked to you on the phone in a couple of weeks. They moved away from what they thought this USA team was going to be. There's a lot of guys who are like, Yeah, maybe I should be playing Crunch Time. There's some alpha stuff I'm just concerned about. There's a lot of guys who seem like they're not being used exactly how they get used during the NBA season, and I'm not sure it's the best version.

I'm like, Tatum was bad in the exhibition tradition games, I thought. He didn't have the ball a lot, and he just didn't seem comfortable.

We have a threshold question. Is KD playing? Is KD definitely playing? Because we're going to start playing basketball. The US is His first game is Sunday, and he hasn't played with this team at all. Now, does it matter? He's potentially the greatest Olympian in the history of the United States competing in Olympic basketball if he gets his fourth gold medal, and he's a crucial player in previous gold medal runs. But we have a chemistry experiment going on here, an ongoing chemistry experiment, which is why South Sudan was competitive and why Germany was competitive. And your question is exactly the right question, who is the Crunch Time 5? And who is going to feel comfortable with having their minutes diminished and be able to come in and still make an impact? Because we're looking at the props for players, and I put in our thread, what about this player or that player? But the biggest question is, who's getting minutes and who's getting crunch time minutes? How do you allocate that? I think they're a little bit susceptible, a little bit susceptible, which is why you and I both have some exposure to a handful of countries that are not the United States of America.

Yeah, I did the minutes thing on Sunday because I just think people forget every four years how few minutes there are and how you're basically looking at four guys playing between 25, 28 minutes a game, and maybe three to four guys as the bench dudes, and that's it. Edwards and Booker, one of those guys is going to lose. If KD plays, I think Tatum is going to lose. I think Tatum is going to lose minutes. I thought Tatum was going to be the guaranteed Melo Wade's six-man spot, but he doesn't seem totally comfortable with it. They have a lot of guys who are used to having the ball all the time. They made the decision to give the car keys to LeBron, and he looked good in those last two games. But on the other hand, he had the ball a lot. They barely beat South Sudan and they barely beat Germany, and nobody else really looked that good. I think they're stuck because I think they've made LeBron the point forward. I don't like the way he looks with Embiid together. I think they look too slow. It's exactly the type of team. They're not playing with the right pace.

Kerr said this after the last game. He's like, I don't like the way we're playing. We don't have the same pace that I thought we were going to play with because LeBron and Embiid want to play that way. There's versions, five-man versions that I watch where I'm like, That's it. That's how they should be playing. I just don't know if they're going to be able to find the combinations in time. Are they going to win? I would say almost definitely. Are they susceptible? I think they are. Because fundamentally, they don't know who their nine-man rotation is, and I'm not sure they know who the final five are. Do you feel like they know who the last five got? Let's say they're playing Germany and they're down three with four minutes left. Who's out there?

Definitely LeBron.

Definitely LeBron.

Definitely Anthony Davis.

But now you're sitting Embiid, which they were really hesitant. They kept Embiid in that last game until there was two minutes left, and it was clear they needed to bring Davis in. My guess would be LeBron and Davis.

Steph.

Steph. Edwards. I think Drew's in there. I think Edwards and Booker are out. Then I think KD, if he's healthy, is the fifth. I think it's KD and Drew and LeBron and Davis and Curry.

That team could lose. If that's the crunch time, that team could definitely lose.

I don't think you can not have Drew out there, though, because you either need him or White because of the defense. One of those guys is going to have to chase Schroeder. Name an international point card. It's going to have to be one of those two.

Sga?

Sga. So Canada, they're going to play Canada at some point, potentially, and Canada is going to go small on them. And Canada is going to be like, Try to overpower us. Great. We'll give you baskets on that end, but we're going to try to race your dudes around. If you watch them beat really closely in the friendlies, he couldn't jump out on shooters at all. And the announcers were just missing it. At one point, Germany just was... They got three straight threes right off them because they were just putting him in pick-a-rolls or trying to get him, and they knew he couldn't run out in time. That's all Canada is going to do when they play him. They're just going to be like, how? But the problem for Canada is they're just too small. You mentioned it earlier. I feel like LeBron and Embiid could just overpower those guys. The The Tatum piece, the Tatum part is going to be really fascinating because he might play way less than I think people realize.

I think that makes sense, to be honest with you. He He just played 110 games, however many games it was, the longest regular season, comparable to the 2022 season for him. It's a lot of basketball to go straight from that into training camp for the Olympic team and the Olympics.

He's in good shape, though. The question for me is, LeBron was the point forward on an eight seed, that one-one playoff game. Tatum was basically the point forward on a team that went 81 and 20 and easily won the playoffs. Now, are we sure we should be marginalizing Tatum like this?

Well, what's your goal?

Because they just have Tatum on the side.

We're not giving LeBron's minutes to Tatum in the 2024 Olympics.

Well, but that's the thing. They made this decision. They made It's a good decision to give the car case to LeBron. I'm not sure Tatum is a stand on the side guy because he's not a good three-point shooter. So KD, I think, is going to get those minutes.

Wow. Kd, who- If he's healthy. Is healthy? Yeah. Because the other one- We really talk ourselves into this. I love this.

Well, the other one who is not used to not having the ball is Edwards. Sure. You guys who are just like, I'm just not used to standing over here hoping I get the ball. That's not how. I don't really... You watch when Derek White was out there, Derek White and Drew are so good at not having the ball. And Derek White's cutting. The defense is falling asleep. All of a sudden, he's doing back cuts. It's like, yeah, that's what you do when you have the ball. I don't fully know if some of these guys know how to do that. So it was a lot of LeBron just pounding the ball and people just standing there waiting to see what he was going to do. And then there's the deferential piece because it's one of the greatest players of all time. So I can be like, Hey, LeBron, let me take this one. The good stuff was the LeBron Curry stuff I thought was really promising. I agree. Using LeBron as the greatest Draymond ever. There was some LeBron Curry and B triangle stuff that I was like, Whoa, what's that? There's When I'm in B, it's just like, I'm just going to plant my ass down.

Just get me the ball. It's a four-footer. It might be fine, I guess, is my point.

It should be fine, of course. We have the best players from top to bottom.

Yeah, but you and I have known each other a long time.

Yes.

You can't just put a team of your 12 best dudes out there. They have to complement each other in some way. I'm not 100% confident they achieve that with this group they put together. There's versions of it. There's five-man versions, but ultimately, I don't know.

Well, the one thing I do know, is it time to start talking some of these props? Yes, go. Because the thing that leaps off the page based on the entirety of our last eight minutes- We did not discuss this.

I think we have the same one. What is it?

Comparing notes, is LeBron James to be the top US Assist Leader at plus 142? That's probably my favorite bet on the entire board. Is LeBron to lead the US team in assists at plus money.

That was my second favorite bet. I thought the odds, I blinked because I was like, Why isn't that minus 142? He's going to have the ball all the time. Clearly, they want him to be the star of the Olympics. I think everybody's either signed up for that or maybe has begrudgingly signed up for it, depending on the player. I like that one. I love That was my second favorite. My favorite was Anthony Davis, Most Rebounds on Team USA minus 110. I was shocked. I think he's going to win that comfortably.

Yeah, it's right here.

The other thing with Embiid, Well, the other thing with Embiid, are we sure Embiid is going to be able to play in every game?

All we've done is watch Joel Embiid when it becomes like, play off time, important game time, not be able to play. And by the way, he's still not in shape. And by the way, congrats to Philly for having a forced training camp to put the dude through some discipline in the summer post his injury.

Philly is the big winner. Philly is the big winner. He's actually exercising.

It's 100% right. He doesn't want to be embarrassed. I mean, the most important thing I'll knock on wood, I mean, obviously, is slightly disparaging Joel, but I want him to be healthy for this upcoming NBA season.

He's out of shape.

As usual.

What else is new? Just watch him on TV. He's the luxury item of this team that I'm both not sure they need, but then on the flip side, I think they really need him because- They do. Guess what? When they play France, you know who's going to be nice to have? Joel Embiid.

Yes, exactly right.

When they play Jokić, guess what? He's going to be really fired up to go against Jokuj for whatever. But yeah, to me, this is such a good moment for Anthony Davis. This is why I think the odds aren't better for most total rebounds on Team USA because it's Anthony Davis.

What does that mean?

Well, he could at any point just be rolling on the ground holding something. Oh, no. Don't do that. Now, I'm just saying this is- Don't do that. He's not Cal Ripken Jr. I think that's why. Because he clearly should be a heavy favorite for most rebounds, but you have to factor in the- He's been very good in terms of playing the last two seasons. Who did you like for most points? Because I'll read the odds. It's LeBron's plus 320, Curry is plus 340, Edwards plus 440. That's not happening. Embiid plus 650. It's conceivable. Even if he's playing 20 minutes a game, I could see him averaging 19 points a game in 20 minutes. Durant plus 790. I don't see it with the CAAF. Davis plus 790. Then Tatum, 13 to 1, which I really would have liked three weeks ago in that Wade, Melo, Off the bench, instant offense, lots of threes.

There was an early wave of props that came out a couple of weeks ago before... Now, FanDuel, God bless them. They really gave us something. Yeah. Thank you, FanDuel. I spent nearly, I don't want to say how many hours, but quite a bit of this morning down this Olympics basketball hole on the site and doing the evaluation is just a glorious thing. But Steph Curry was the leading contender for me a couple of weeks ago before we started seeing some of these friendlies, because I like the idea of Steph in his very first Olympics. It's going to be his first and his last. I mean, maybe he'll play in the next one. I don't think so. Coming out with Steve Kerr as the coach, coming out of being that scorer and being on the world stage. The problem is, LeBron, this is the going away present for LeBron. This tournament is about LeBron James. There is no question about that now. And so the odds for Curry have been wiped out. And I don't like Curry anymore. I mean, LeBron seems like a reasonable enough bet. I'm surprised you dismissed Edwards so quickly. So here's the thing with Edwards for me.

He, speaking of fearless, is not going to feel like he needs to defer. He's not going to feel like he needs to share the ball. He is going to try and go to the hole when it's crunch time. He had double digits in all five of the friendlies. He had double digits, and not even Steph Curry had double digits in all of those games. So Edwards at plus 440 at that price is attractive to me.

Yeah. I just wonder, is he going to split minutes with Booker? And is there going to be some Derek White moments where they actually just need Derek White out there with Drew or Derek White separately than Drew. That would be my fear. I was looking back in 2008, Dwyane Wade led the team in scoring in 2008, which is probably the most similar team to this team because that team was pretty deep. Sixteen points a game led the team in scoring.

Sure. It's not going to be very many points.

In 2012, Durant led the team at 19.5. And then in 2016, Durant again at 19.4. But he's playing big minutes in both of those years. So then you get to 2021. I think Tatum led the team. Oh, it was Durant again, 20.7. I mean, Durant, one of the great international. I mean, it's really like it should be in the first paragraph of his legacy. So there's a Durant spot, a shooter who could make those short threes, playing maybe 20 to 24 minutes a game. So that could be Edwards, but he would have to hit the threes.

It's what I think. It's Edwards. It's a shorter three-point line, and he can get the stroke going.

I don't love the odds for any of those.

That's fine. We don't have to bet on that At gunpoint, I would say Curry plus 340 because I think he's going to play a lot of minutes, and especially if LeBron is point forward, more of a facilitator and less of a drive to the basket guy.

I'm with you. Lebron plus 142 for assists is an amazing bet.

We love it.

Sign me up. Then wasn't there... Olympics Basketball MVP is a bet. I don't remember them giving this out before. Do you? I feel like we would have argued about this. This might be a new award. I don't know.

We could look it up.

Well, LeBron is the favorite of plus 320. Curry's plus 680. Edwards is 8 to 1. Davis at 9 to one caught my attention, especially if Embiid has to miss a game or two with some neat thing, and Davis is suddenly playing 30 a game, putting up 15 and 11 every game.

You beat me to it. He would have to average a double-double. I mean, think about what he'd have to do to jump over LeBron for that. Lebron at plus 320 is fine. I think those are fine odds.

Yeah, those are like Mahomes NFL MVP odds. Just like, yeah, not great value, but they're clearly gearing the team around him, so it's the safest bet. Then you go to the other countries. Shay is 13 to one. Jokuj is 14 to one, Wemby, 15 to one. What a story that would be. Then Schroeder at 30 to one, I thought was interesting. That would mean... So you bet on Germany 28 to 1 to win the thing, or you bet on Schroeder 30 to 1. I'd rather just have the Germany 28 to 1 bet. Giannis is 35 to one. There's really not a lot of MVP value. You know what's really happening house? They've just ruined our future bets. They just remove all the value from all of them. Really, the only way you can win on a future anymore in a real way is if you bet the Patriots to win the AFC East at 50 to one, and they actually do it. Other than that, they remove all the value. Even the Bucks, who I think are really the stealth contender for the NBA this upcoming season. Are you talking about the Milwaukee Bucks? I'm talking about the Milwaukee Bucs.

They're 15 to 1. They're not even good odds. They're not even good odds.

They're not good odds, and they're not good. So there you go. It's a stay away. It makes it easy.

Your favorite under was the under for the Celtics for the season, Well, I mentioned it on Monday's East Coast Bias with Rahim and JJ, just because 58 wins is- Fifteen and a half.

Very likely, I know, but 58 wins the East, right? 58 is still a great season. It's a lot. It's respectful. It's reflective of how committed they are to the regular season. It's just they don't have poor Zengus. I agree with you that it's been- At least till the All-Star break.

Yeah, February.

February. It's just that fatigue. It doesn't make sense. They don't have to go full pedal to the metal the first part of the season. They're going to win their share of games. I mean, 58 wins translates into whatever the win percentage is. It's still very high. I just felt like 58 and a half. They don't need to win 60 games, and I don't think they're going to.

I don't think anyone wins 60 games in the East.

No argument. I think if we get a 60-win team, it comes out of the West.

It could be a team like OKC. I could see them being 6-7 wins better just because they got deeper and better and their guys are a year older.

I love they're over.

All right, so our recommendations. Usa minus 750, we don't like the odds. France, 15 to 1. Germany, 28 to 1 as long shot bets. Pretty good odds.

Just a little bit. Just a little taste.

Like a sprinkle, you can still feel patriotic and root for USA. Then we both love LeBron for best assist at plus 142.

That's right. Now, we'll part Jocq-Landale, catch your attention at all for Australia. Top rebounder for Australia, Jocq-Landale at plus 128. They have no other size. They have Duop Reef. I believe that's how you pronounce his name.

I didn't realize that was something you could bet on. I didn't get to the unfandled. I didn't get to the Jack Landdale section of the sportsbook. You didn't go all the way down to Australia in terms of these props? I didn't go all the way I didn't realize.

Gidey is available at minus 290 to lead Australia in assists. That's fine. You just have to lay the juice. That doesn't feel like a bad bet. But Jack Landdale available plus 128, plus money for Landale to lead in rebounds. That's my other favorite bet on the board.

That's really good. Most points for them, Gidey's plus 184. I thought I saw one of the Australia games, and I thought, Gidey, you could just see it. He's going to be good in Chicago. I feel pretty confident. That's a perfect situation for him. Yeah. Guess what? He needs a ball all the time, which puts something in common with him and half the guys on Team USA. We'll see how it goes. I'm sure there's going to be some drama. There's going to be a game in the first four where they look like shit and they're losing at halftime. I still think they're going to win. And I think the LeBron MVP bet is the smart thing, too, because he's going to bring the flag out at the beginning of the Olympics. It just feels like this is the LeBron thing. It's an interesting spot for Curry, by the way, because I think Curry was like, I thought this was going to be my Olympics. I've never been on the Olympic team.

I agree.

What happened to the Steph Curry Olympics?

This is going to be the LeBron going away present. This whole year, he gets Bronnie. I mean, would it surprise you if he plays this year, gets all this stuff with Bronny, then retires at the end of the season?

He gets Zach LaVine.

That's the Celtic hater in you. Just trying to talk some shit into existence.

I don't know what moves are available for them. They haven't made a move. They haven't even sent free agent. That is hilarious.

It's great. They're a play-in team. What do you want to say? The Lakers are a play-in team.

You think they're even a playing team? What was there over under on Fandil?

43 and a half. Lakers.

Oh, my God. Warriors. 43 and a half.

Houston. These three teams. What do these three teams not have? Which one of these doesn't belong. Houston, 43 and a half. Lakers, 43 and a half, Warriors, 43 and a half. It's awesome. So good. I'm so excited.

This West, where we only know that Portland and Utah are going to suck. Even San Antonio, I'm not 100% convinced it's going to suck. Then you quickly move into the Houston Clippers, Kings, Warriors, Pelicans, Lakers. Who the fuck knows?

It's great.

So good. I can't wait. It's going to be a fun season. But we are way more excited about NFL.

I know you've been doing prep. The prep, yes. I'm going to be- We're thinking of deep dives.

I'm going to be diving in. All right. Good to see you, house.

Always a pleasure, BS.

All right. We basically do this twice a year. Derek Thompson is here. He hosts the excellent Plane English podcast for The Ringer. He also writes for The Atlantic. He's one of the best people in the business. And twice a year, we try to figure out the future of everything. And we separate it into four categories: sports, culture, tech. I think we did science last time. We might switch it to politics, but you can drive it. What we do is we don't tell each other what we think is the future of whatever, and we just do it. If we overlap and have the same thing, so be it. But first of all, good to see you. How's the summer going?

It's great. Just moved to North Carolina. I really loved it. I'll be here for the next year. My wife is finishing her PhD in Clinical Psychology, so we moved here for her I've had a blast living in Chapel Hill.

Can the Hornets pull you in maybe to do some advisory stuff for the team? Maybe some VP of Common Sense stuff? I don't know. You should throw it out there.

I'm happy to consult for the Hornets or anybody else in the area. I don't know that much about being- The Panthers probably need it the most. Yeah, it's going to say, there seems to be a lot of need in this particular state. I'm not sure if I'm the best person to give counsel, but at this point, how much worse could things possibly get?

You start us off. I I don't know what vertical you want to hit, but you go. You have first pick. You do whatever you want. You can go anywhere, any of the verticals.

I want to save the most fun stuff for later. Culture, sports. Let's start with politics. It's been probably the craziest month in political news that I can remember. So it's a little bit funny to talk about the future of politics when the recent past of politics is so insane. I want to talk about something that I'm writing about right now that I've been thinking about a lot in the last few months, which is people We'll talk about polarization in the US electorate. People are polarized by race. They're polarized by education. I become very interested in how America is polarized by gender and the possibility that the US is more polarized by gender than any time in American history. So as a general rule, women vote for Democrats and men vote for Republicans. This has been true for 50 years. Democrats have not won a majority of the male vote since 1976. But there's some data that suggests that men and women are pulling further apart today. According to Gallup Polling, the political gap between young men and women is the highest in history. Men under 30 are leaning toward the Republican Party more than any time this century.

And we did a show on this in February with the scholar Alice Evans called The Gender War Within Gen Z. People can look that up. It's plain English, The Gender War Within Gen Z. I talked to a lot of political scientists after that show, and some of them took issue with my framing. They said, the thing we know for certain isn't so much that gender polarization is growing. Rather, it's the way we talk about gender that's polarized. There is now a Republican way of talking about masculinity that is very distinct from the democratic way of talking about men. There's a democratic way of talking about women, and there's a Republican way of talking about women. So it's not so much like men are from Mars, women are from Venus. It's more like Republican men and women are from Mars, and Democratic men and women are from Venus. So my future of everything prediction on this subject is that number one, especially now that the election is almost certainly going to be a Republican guy against a Democratic woman, I think we're going to see a year of extraordinary gender polarization in the way this election is fought.

And I think November could be the largest gender gap in American history, the largest gap in the way that women and men vote. And so my eyes are fully on this being maybe the edge of the present, the near future in politics.

So how much of this do you think has to do with all the stuff that's happening with Roe v Wade and women's the right to control what happens to your body? Because anecdotally, people in my life, especially my wife and daughter, this is their number one thing they care about.

I think it's absolutely huge. If you look at Gallup polling and you ask men and women, are you pro-choice or pro-life? Historically, and this surprised me when I saw this, men and women are pretty similar in identifying as pro-choice and life until about 2020. And then women got much more liberal, I suppose you could say, more likely to say they were pro-choice, such that now the gender gap on this issue of abortion is the highest that it's ever been. I think a lot of this has to do with DOBS. I think a lot of it has to do with the salience of abortion, which is also obviously the salience of how much power do we want to give government, which is disproportionately male, how much power do we want to give them in terms of telling women what they can do with their bodies? Absolutely a huge part of the rising gender gap as I see it.

Do you think the way people have cared about politics over the years has changed? Because, I don't know, 60, 70 years ago, it was all about all these different factors, right? Well, you believe in there's way more idealistic, and it was the total package of what somebody brought to the table. And now I wonder if it's just one issue for a lot of people, where it's like, I just care about this one thing, and this is the swing for me, and wherever it stands one way or the other, that's where I'm going to drift, which ties into what's happened with society in general, where everybody has become more narcissistic and more in their own worlds. And I wonder if everything's tied together. Is that too crazy?

No, I don't think it's necessarily too reductive. One shift that I'm really interested in is there's this political scientist named Ronald Ingelhardt who came up with this theory that politics has shifted from materialism to post-materialism. So what that means, materialism is like your bread and butter policy issues, taxing and spending and insurance and regulations. That's materialism. That's economics. And he said, once a country becomes rich enough, they actually stop caring so much about economic policy. They want to just have culture wars. That's post-materialism. And I do think that politics has become more about culture wars, post-material fights. Not what policies do you support, but who are you? And that goes directly to my future of politics prediction, that this question of What do you think is the proper role of men and women in society? Do you think women should work or should they stay home? Do you think women should have the choice to have an abortion or not? These cultural issues, identity issues, weigh so much more in politics than they did 60 or 70 years ago.

Well, and you've even seen in the election just in the last week since Harris stepped in for Biden, and then all of a sudden we had the cat lady stuff. Jennifer Anaston, who's never said anything about anything. All of a sudden, she's waiting in attacking JD Vance. But it was interesting that that was one of the places the Republicans went right away. It was like, We're going to attack this person, basically because she doesn't have kids.

It was an interview from from two years ago, but it was really interesting that it circulated.

It resurface in a way that seemed aggressive.

Then Tim Walsh had an interesting quote when he was on MSNBC. I have it right here. He said that when you look at the Trump-Vance ticket, it looks like a He-Man- Woman-Haters Club. And that right there is such an interesting stark contrast. You have the Republican vice President saying that the Democrats are just a, quote, bunch of childless cat ladies. And you have a Minnesota governor, Tim Walsh, saying the Republican Party is a bunch of he, man, women haters. That again is my point, that we are becoming polarized in the way we talk about gender. I don't think that was necessarily as true in the past.

Yeah, it's weird because it feels like we've made all these incredible strides all over the place. So you think that would make it less polarizing, but instead it went the other way. I like what you're thinking because it does feel like this is going to be, especially as we get closer to the election and we have the possibility of a female president. And we saw some of this in 2016, but in general, now that we have the Supreme Court shifting like it did, and it just feels like it's going to be dominant thing. All right, that was a good start. Here's my politics future of everything. It's really the short term future. I would say it's the next six months. We've been heading this way for a long time. We've been heading this way since days of Oliver Stone and the early JFK assassination stuff. Then we move into the internet era and early days of the internet message boards. Then it really starts rounding in this shape after 9/11 and this conspiracy culture comes into play. That's the last 20 years, and we've seen it in all these different ways. It's just getting worse and worse.

I feel like right now, I don't want to call it the apex. It's more like the Nadir. This is Nadir Mountain. It feels like right now is the worst the conspiracy stuff will be in our lifetime. You just think of all the things that happened recently. Trump, his almost assassination, and immediately There's this whole separate dialog about, well, what happened? Who tried to kill him? Did the bullet hit him? 19 different storylines come out of that. Almost seem to take precedent over the fact that somebody died, other people were shot. It was just, what happened? How did this... We're having a hearing with the Secret Service right away. They move to conspiracy mode immediately. Then Biden gets pushed out of the race. There was a real thing for a couple of days. He's not alive anymore. He's dead. He's died. They're covering it up. This is now the movie Dave. We're now living in real life. It's like, well, what? Then he finally gives a speech on Wednesday, and it's like his watch was at the wrong time. People are just fucking nuts. Now people think the Democrats tried to kill Trump. That's out there.

You have the Epstein logs, which everyone wants answers for that. Who was on there is the whole Epstein culture. All the people who are tied to Epstein And then the Obama piece of it where he hasn't... We're taping this on a Thursday where he hasn't come out and directly said who he wants. It's like, well, he wants Michelle in there. And it just feels like this is the dialog now. It's insane. You go to the subreddit for the conspiracy, and it's the all time, most insane it's ever been. I just wonder, is that who we are now? So my future of everything is like, well, 2024, is this the culmination of a 35-year journey to get to this point where people are now just insane, and now you're bringing an AI and the ability to tweak video, to tweak audio, and we're going to start to lose the sense of what's real and not's real. What happens the first time somebody tweaks a video of Kamala saying or doing something that she didn't do? I think this is going to be the worst part of the election, and that's saying something because there's going to be a lot of worst parts.

So that's my prediction. Next five months will go to hell.

Next five months will go to hell. But you said earlier, this could be the worst that the conspiracy theorizing of America gets. I almost feel like I want to be like Homer Simpson when Bartz is like, This is the worst day my life. And Homer says, The worst day of your life so far. That's how I feel. This is going to be the worst year of conspiracy theories so far. There's no reason to think it's ever going to get better. And the answer, this is a slight preview of my tech future of everything. One answer is AI. It's going to be so much easier to lie, to do deep fakes. And with the presence of and possibility of deep fakes, you have an audience that just doesn't believe anything. If it's a true video, they say, I think it was a deep fake. If it's a deep fake, they can say, I think it was a true video. I also think something that happens that makes it easier to become a conspiracy theorist is that it's just easier to forget what people said last week. I remember getting You get so upset about something you see online.

Someone has a terrible opinion. You get so upset about it. And then if you make a calendar event for one month in the future and you're like, What were you so upset about one month ago? It's so hard to remember what that one thing was in a world like that where there's so little accountability and where our memories are all like goldfish, it's weirdly rational for people who only care about getting attention to throw around conspiracy theories all the time because no one can remember all the times that they were wrong. They just can maybe remember the one time they were right. So I feel like all of the incentives and all the technology is pointing toward a political media environment that's going to be more conspiratorial with every passing year. It's actually very difficult for me to think of a really compelling reason why conspiracy theories would crest, why the apex, the peak would be in our near future. I think conspiracy theories are very likely to have a really, really long runway, especially as AI slop takes over so much of the Internet.

So maybe I should have tweaked my theory, too. This is going to be the pre-AI nadir of conspiracy culture. But now we're going to move into this whole new world, especially as people are going to able to... I noticed this this week, actually, where somebody had... Because I went to the conspiracy because I was like, I wonder what these people are talking about. And somebody had Biden, his audio, and they were like, it's a 92% chance This is the audio. I was like, Wait, AI can do that already? They can determine basically an AI shit detector for what's real or not. So if we have that combined with people taking liberties to Do crazy shit. Something will happen over the next four months with AI that threatens to swing the election, or it's going to have to be this national awakening of like, Hey, this didn't actually happen. This thing that was in your Twitter feed and your Reddit and Snapchat, everything else, this didn't exist. This was made up. This was created. And that's probably going to happen the next three weeks, right?

Yeah. Conspiracy theories are the best stories. And so often on the internet, the best story wins. And so this is one reason why I am absolutely... I'm an optimist in so many different ways about America or the world. I'm such a pessimist when it comes to most things that involve truth and media. I just think that the the Internet by rewarding negativity and rewarding high arousal stories and rewarding just the most dramatic story you can possibly give to a set of events, all of these things are just absolute catnip for for conspiracy theorists. So I think you're absolutely right. I think it's a fascinating prediction. And I wonder, maybe it gives me an idea, maybe I should talk to someone in the space of social media about whether or not there's any way to really fight against this stuff. Is there a betting process? Yeah. Yeah. Because I would expect that you're going to have this race in the AI front between the ability to create AI and the ability to test AI. And then we can create a a little bit more sophisticated AI, and then maybe AI testing gets a little bit better, the bullshit detecting.

But that's a race that's going to go on for a long while. There's no way to invent tomorrow an AI bullshit detector that can detect AI bullshit that's invented two years later. It's going to be a race that continues.

It's a bittersweet time for Conspiracy Bill. I got to be honest. Once upon a time, conspiracies were fun, where we just had like, Hey, did David Stern freeze the envelope up or not? Did Michael Jordan get suspended for gambling or did he not? Did David Stern pull the Sonics out of Seattle and put them in Oklahoma City because he then wanted to threaten all the other teams to build arenas so they could lose their team next? Did Roger Goodell keep LA free of NFL teams because he wanted them to basically be the extortion city for all the other teams to build arenas? That stuff was fun. It felt like 9/11, which was probably the most horrible event of my lifetime for so many different reasons. But then also the conspiracy culture that came out of it where people are like, No, the planes actually didn't hit the buildings. The planes were exploded before. And it was just like, Wow, this is insane. What are we doing? Then everything leads to Sandy Hook, which was... That was the darkest moment of all this. I thought it would get better. Maybe people were like, Yo, but it's not.

It went the other way. You could feel it with the with the Trump assassination, because one of the best things that's about conspiracy stuff, if you like it, is sometimes there's pieces of things where you go, Yeah, that is a little weird. You could see it with the Trump near assassination. It's like, Well, why was that guy in the building for 25 minutes? Why was he flying a drone around 2 hours before? Why didn't they have that part of the thing secured when it was close enough that anybody who was a decent shot, probably I get it, but I just feel like this is where we're heading now. Everything is questioned. Nothing seems real. What are we doing?

I think maybe an important skill for the future as an audience member, as a reader, as a watcher, is having good taste in conspiracy theories. Because if every day you're waking up to this infinite buffet of conspiracy theories about the world, whether it's Trump, the Celtics, it's important to have good taste. What conspiracy theories are more likely to be true? I'll give you my top principle for conspiracy theories. I'm not a very conspiratorial person, even though I enjoy listening to Conspiracy Bill. I think groups are very bad at keeping secrets, but individuals can be very good at keeping secrets because there's no one for that secret to be shared with. So I tend to believe conspiracy theories that involve one person and disbelief conspiracy theories that involve hundreds of people. So when there's a conspiracy theory about 9/11, that the entire US government or the whole Bush administration was in on this thing, I think you're telling me 100 to a thousand people are behind a conspiracy to bomb the largest building in New York, and none of them have slipped the secret to anybody? That's not human nature. People talk, they share secrets. But if it's just one person, if it's just a lone gunman, or it's just David Stern, and it's basically him and whoever else can freeze the envelope, it's a secret share between two people, the fewer number of people that are in the conspiracy, the more likely I am to at least give some time to that conspiracy.

Well, I wrote about this in my basketball book, this thing that I know happened because it literally happened to me. Before I became a calmness that any person would recognize, I'm sitting at a Celtic Sixers game, and sitting behind me is this guy, Pat Croce, who used to run the Sixers for a couple of years. It was right after Iverson, that year when he released the music album, and it had bad lyrics in it, and Stern was fucking pissed. He's telling the story to the person next to him. Stern called Iverson in, and he's like, This fucking happens again. I'm going to suspend you for a year. I fucking suspended Jordan and threatened him with that. I was just sitting in front like, Whoa. I had already thought the Jordan thing was fishy. So did Stern say that to Iverson because it was just a way to threaten him? Did he actually suspend Jordan? It It's just reinforced. But those were the fun days of... Now, if that had happened to me in 2024, I'm immediately on some Reddit board, right? I was sitting in front of... I don't know. It was sweeter, more innocent time, and now we've lost our minds.

But the best conspiracies are always like, Yeah, that is a little weird. And the JFK one is the best one of all of them because they didn't realize all this stuff was coming. They didn't realize the Internet was coming. They didn't realize the fast destination with this stuff, and they just felt like they could get away with it. You even go to the autopsy. There's so many indications that something truly sinister happened. That's the only one when you mentioned how hundreds of people needed to pull it off. That's the only one where it really feels like something happened, right?

I'll say that that might be the only exception to my rule. We did a podcast episode on this, too, where I talked to some guys who was to podcast about conspiracy theories, stuff they don't want you to know. And we talked about the Kennedy assassination. And I think I revealed there that I'm basically an anticonspiratorial person. My taste is to disbelief every conspiracy theory that involves them two people, except for JFK. I'm not entirely sure I believe the official story on JFK, there's just too many little details.

Even if you see the video when the shots happen, they're all pointing to one part. They're pointing the grass, and it reminded me they're in the near assassination of Trump. The shots happen, and they're all looking at the same spot because they know where the shots are coming from. I'm like, that's our belated more proof on the JFK thing. Anyway. All right, we're going to take a break, and then we'll do tech. All right, coming back, future everything. You want to do tech, which ties into the conspiracy stuff, I guess. So go.

It ties more into AI, which again, tied into conspiracy. So I don't think this is a flip flop necessarily. I think artificial intelligence intelligence and generative AI is really fascinating. I also think it's way, way too soon to call the AI boom a bubble. But I think at some point in the next six months, people are going to be opening up the newspaper, they're going to be opening up the front page of whatever news site they rely on, maybe Twitter, Instagram. And the phrase AI bubble is going to be all over the news because the big tech companies are spending so, so much on chips, GPUs, and so much on data centers, the infrastructure, that spending is running way ahead of revenue. So a couple of data points. One, the information reports that OpenAI is projected to lose $5 billion this year. Meta and Google are spending tens of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure. That's both the chips and the data centers. If you listen to what the CEOs are saying, they are practically telegraphing that they are spending, quote, too much on AI for the time being. Here's Sunder Prachai, the CEO of Alphabet, One way to think about it is when you go through a curve like this, the risk of under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing.

Mark Zuckerberg, I'd much rather over-invest in AI and pay for that outcome than save money by developing more slowly. What these guys are saying is, Hey, investors, don't punish us for spending too much money on AI. Please don't punish us. We are trying to spend too much. We are to overinvest. Overinvesting AI is good for technology. It's good for pulling the future forward. So I think we are in the early innings of something that will reveal itself to be a AI bubble. It doesn't mean that AI is a joke. It doesn't mean that generative AI can't do stuff. I think it's more like if crypto was money in search of a use case, people are going to say in the next few months that AI is like a use case in search of money. We don't have a business model yet that we can match to the promise of artificial intelligence. And as a result, I think we're going to be talking a lot more about the potential bubble of AI, the bubble of AI spending. And that's going to have some really interesting implications for the big tech giants, NVIDIA and Meta and Amazon, OpenAI, Microsoft.

And it could also have really big implications for the stock market as well, because really in the last few months, the stock market has basically depended on these big AI spending companies in order to move forward. What happens when all those companies draw back? We might be beginning to see the answer to that question.

So on a scale of one to NFT, how high is the concern level?

So again, I want to distinguish between NFTs, which I was academically interested in, but I thought were a joke that wouldn't do anything and would entirely crash and burn. Return. Which is what happened. Which I think is a semi-objective way of describing what happened. Whereas with AI, I think it's more like when you think about the Nasdaq bubble of the late '90s, early 2000s. The Nasdaq declined by, at some point, 60, 70, 80%, maybe more in the early 2000s in the dot-com bubble. That didn't mean that dot-com was a bubble. The Internet ate the world. Software ate the world. All of these ideas. Like pets. Com. I rely on delivery of everything involving my dog, whether it's the food or the toys. I get all of that stuff from Amazon and other pet delivery services. So it's not as if these ideas were NFT-like failures rather in a way they were ahead of their time and you needed a bubble and a crash before you had an infrastructure built to really grow the market. I think it's much more likely that something like that is what we see. I'm not predicting anything like the dotcom crash, by the way, which entirely wiped out the Nasdaq.

I think it's more that we've seen this enormous sworn of enthusiasm into artificial intelligence, that there's going to be a significant correction between right now, I think it's already happening now, and the next 12 months, and then the real AI boom, like the real software boom between, say, 2007 and of 2020 is going to come in the next few years.

Everything you laid out before you said that last part reminded me of that early 2000s internet thing because I was there for that. And it was exactly the same, where it was clearly This life-changing thing is coming. All these big companies are spending a bunch of money trying to get in there. It's a car before the horse classic. But the pets. Com is the perfect analogy. It was a great idea. It's just the world in the internet wasn't ready for the idea yet, but the idea was the right idea. I remember when I had my old sports guy calm before I went to ESPN and I was writing for Digital City, Boston. It was AOL had all these digital cities, and they were like, We're going to be the first digital news place. It needs to say it didn't work. It was a good idea. It's just the internet wasn't ready. You had to go through AOL. But fundamentally, you think, what is Apple News right now? Apple News is probably like 20 years, 25 years later, whatever the digital cities were trying to do. They were just trying to get people to come in through the door and read news that was either localized or customized.

They just didn't know how to do it yet. I would say there's three phases of the internet, at least for content. The mid 2000s was when it was people like my dad knew how to find my column and people like my stepmother. It was by around 2004, the internet didn't feel like, Hey, what's that? I would tell people I wrote on a digital sports column, and they'd be like, How do I get that? It's a lot of that. By 04, everyone was like, Yeah, I know what espn. Com is. And you could just feel something shift. And then the second shift was that '06 to 2010 with video, where YouTube comes in. Still not perfect, but it's getting better. But I remember we tried to do Main Street That Kenny Mayne Comedy Show. We tried to do that on video on espn. Com. We tried to do the Grantland 30 for 30 shorts in 2012. When we relaunched 30 for 30 after they tried to kill it for two years, we relaunched it and we were doing videos. And the video parts still didn't totally work. And this is the ESPN. We have the most money out of anyone.

We have the best infrastructure out of anyone. And the videos would stall and stop. So that '06 to '12 is like another weird era. And then when the videos finally get going in '13 and on. So you think there's four or five errors. So what are the four or five errors of AI look like to you, or is it too early to predict?

I think it's probably too early to predict, but I'll give it a shot. I think right now, when I talk to people at Microsoft about what we should expect in terms of the next five years of AI, and I think what they're interested in, or at least what they'll tell me, is that right now AI feels like an individual technology rather than a technology that makes an entire company more productive. I wrote a piece a year, maybe a year and a half ago, where I said, I think the headline was AI is a waste of time. What I meant by that wasn't that it was entirely a waste, but that the most interesting use cases were basically games. When I was playing around with Midjourney, I was playing around with ChatGPT, I wasn't working. I was making funny things that I could put on Twitter and then maybe get retweets for. That's leisure time. That's not work. I think what we need to see is that the capabilities of AI actually make companies more productive at scale rather than just being incredibly neat things that pass the LSAT. Because right now, they're just incredibly neat things that pass the LSAT.

That's going to change. And certainly what's happening in drug discovery is really interesting and complicated, and I want to do a lot of shows about that. But I think the implications could be vast. And it's probably difficult even right now to really guess which fail business models are going to be the business model of 10 years from now. I was just looking up the fact that... Remember Webvan? So Webvan was one of these online companies that failed in 2001, declared bankruptcy in 2001. They had a business model of online grocery delivery. So if you were a smart guy in 2001, looking at the bankruptcy of Webvan, you'd say, well, this thing of online grocery delivery obviously doesn't work. No one's going to get their groceries delivered online in the future. I mean, how are you going to keep it cold, number one? Now, Now, online grocery delivery is a massive tens of billions of dollar business. It's a huge part of Whole Foods' bottom line. So I think a lot of things in the world of AI that might even look like abject obvious failures today are going to be big business models in the future.

I just think the entire industry might go through a bit of a dot-com bust phase, hopefully a small version of that, but a bit of a bust phase before we actually reach that promise land.

I like it more than most people. I think some people are a little scared and freaked out by it, but I look at it from trying to do glass half full. We've talked in the past about in a year from now, can somebody take my voice and do this podcast take your voice and my voice, and now somebody in Germany gets to listen to us or somebody in China? Could we put it in Portuguese? Is that threatening? To me, it's like, that doesn't sound threatening at all. I think if the more listeners we could have for something that we care about. That sounds good to me. Where it gets dangerous is... I really worry about the creative side, the script writing and the things like that, that AI being able to pump out premises, which Hollywood is already so freaking robotic with how they think about almost everything. I really worry about that side of it.

I guess my question there would be, it's possible that AI is really freaky for Hollywood creatives, but what would be so scary about using ChatGPT to spit out premises? So let's say, for example, you're a writer in a room on a CBS Procedural, right? And CBS Procedural. And you give ChatGPT the last 75 episodes of your show, right? The description you might find on IMDb or Wikipedia, right? Just a really simple plot summary of each of these episodes. You say, come up with 30 more ideas. I mean, number one, how different does that work really than just going to a whiteboard and filling out 30 ideas with a room full of people? Like, fundamentally, both the humans and the AI are just taking what you've done in the past and iterating on it to create future ideas. And second, someone has to write that screenplay. Writers ultimately are going to be paid based on the dialog.

I guess the thing that would scare me is cementing the sameness of stuff, I think, scares me because you can already feel it in movies and TV, just in general. There's a sameness to a lot of the stuff and a safeness that I just think is concerning. I find myself more bored by the new... Well, I don't want to step on the culture.

I was going to say, this sounds like your culture, future, everything.

I had a thing in this. All right, I'm going to do mine. I really thought you might have this one, but what you did, I think, was It's better than mine, but mine's good. My kids are old enough where we let them Uber around, and you have to, especially where we live. A couple of months ago, my son signed up for a Waymo He didn't tell us, and there was some waiting list, and for some reason, he got picked. It was cheaper than Uber. He didn't tell us, didn't clear it with us, but he's like, Oh, I I got the Waymo list. I'm like, What the fuck is that? A week later, I'm in traffic and I'm at a stoplight, and I look over, and there's a white car, and nobody's driving it. It's completely empty in the front. I'm like, What the fuck is going on? I look and there's somebody in the back on their phone, and I look and it says, Waymo. I come home and I say to my son, This Waymo, this is driverless? I thought it was an Uber competitor. He's been taking it for the last two months, and he loves it because there's no driver.

He's just in the back. He's on FaceTime. He's talking to his friends. He doesn't have to worry about people listening. He just likes it. I've noticed because obviously, I do a lot of walking around weird parts of LA, but I've just noticed more and more waymos, and then what Tesla has, the robo taxi. It feels like something's happening. I have two questions. One, how many Americans are going to get over the hump of I'm climbing into a car and there's no driver? My son is already way over the hump. He loves it. He puts a seatbelt on. He says he's never even Had one concern, whatever. The second thing is, what does this do to the workforce, potentially all these people that have gotten jobs on Uber and Lyft and wherever else? Do they just get replaced by non-human beings? And then the third question for me is because Uber is involved They're involved in Waymo and they have some partnership. Does this somehow make Uber stronger? What do the next five years look like? This is a company that we thought was one of the most powerful companies of the last 15 years. Is this the next generation?

And now they're basically removing humans. They have these self-driving cars, and they're removing all the variables that could happen with some crime that happens with a driver or people flaking or whatever. And now they're just out of humans, just transporting humans around? What happens?

The first thing I want to say in response to this is that I love this as an observation because I've been so interested in the self-driving revolution for a long time. I was lucky enough to ride in a Waymo back in 2015, I think, when I wrote a cover story for The Atlantic on Google X, which is the research and development technology division of Alphabets, which spun out self-driving technology, spun out limo. I've been in these cars. They're fascinating. They're fun. This is a great example of how technology works. Because I remember in 2015, 2016, people were saying, self-driving car is going to take over the road in three, four years, and it didn't happen. And everyone laughed.

It seemed insane. We were like, No, that's never happening. I'm never getting one of those.

This is ridiculous. It's 2021 now. Everyone predicted that we would be driving around in self-driving cars. They're nowhere to be seen. Tech was wrong. And then you fast forward three months, and slowly but surely, these cars are becoming more common on the roads. They're in DC, they're in Los Angeles, they're certainly in Phoenix, where I think the first pilot was. They're in San Francisco. I think it remains to be seen how big a deal this is for Uber's bottom line. But I remember when I was reporting on this a decade ago, driving is the most common occupation among American men. And so if this technology took off, the disruption potential for American male employment would be really interesting to look at. I'm not trying to make some dystopian prediction here, but the possibility of disruption there is huge. So I think we are in... It's weird because it's not really an early inning in self-driving cars. We've been hearing about this now for over a decade. But it is so interesting that all eyes were on this technology when people predicted that it was the future. And now that it's actually here and people like your son are riding around in them, they're weirdly under the radar.

So it's just weird sometimes when technology stories work out like that.

Yeah. And I wonder, there's so many variables to this that could go bad. What if two people climb in a waymo and they just start filming a porn video? What if somebody just attacks the cameras? I'm sure there's some stuff to figure out, but I haven't heard anecdotally of any super bad thing. But the thing that's the most fascinating to me is what you just said. We I heard about this forever. It was like when I was a kid, and I don't know if it was because the Jetsons was still the residue of the Jetsons, but like, someday there's going to be flying cars. When I was a kid, I just assumed someday cars would fly. That's where we were heading. Which now seems insane in 2024. But a lot of the movies from back then, you would see cars, like the sci-fi movies, cars zipping around. It was like, we'll head there someday. And now the self-driving car is the last 10 years where they're like, These are coming. I'm like, All right, yeah, that's the flying cars, but now they're actually here. So I'm like, well, we have flying cars someday. Is that now in play?

To me, the ceiling is now off.

Well, if you want to know if flying cars are finally here, on May seventh, we did an interview with Gideon Louis-Craws about the future of flying cars. And what I thought was the most interesting part of that interview is that he made the point that the Jetsons didn't really use flying cars to do anything that interesting. George Jetson just flew to work. And if you think what's a technology that we use in order to be at our house and then instantaneously be at work, that exists. It's called the laptop. It's called remote work. The laptop essentially does for a podcaster exactly what the flying car did for George Jetson. It's just a means of taking a person instantaneously from house to work. But back to self-driving cars. I think over the next decade, as this technology really proliferates, we're going to get a lot more stories about the anxiety of its potential to displace male drivers that especially will come down the pike, so to speak, when we have self-driving trucks, because it's really not just in taxi services, but also in trucking, where you have full-time employees that are dedicated to driving all day long and all week long.

So that's a really interesting place to look, especially when you think about the economic impact. What happens when the driver of your truck fleet never has to sleep, never has to eat. You simply press start, and the person starts driving from San Francisco to Boston. So there's a lot of really interesting implications in a world where self-driving technology really begins to take off. Right now, it seems mostly to be a bit of a peripheral player in the zone of taxis.

I'll tell you what one thing is going to happen that is going to be interesting is the first horror movie about a Waymo. Yeah. The self-driving car you can't get out of. That's probably coming in the next year. Yeah, I can't believe the day is here. I got to be honest. Are you going to do it? Do you want to do it? Yeah, my son's done probably 15, 20 at this point. And they are cheaper. They're probably, I don't know, $10. If it's normally a $35 Uber. Now, it's like a $22 Uber, but he's about to get his driver's license. So I think... I don't know how much Waymo is going to be in this future, but yeah, I'm not against it. All right, we're going to take another break, and then we got sports and culture. All right, we have two verticals left. Where do you want to go?

Let's do culture. I wonder if we have the same thing on culture, but I'll tell you this. I just finished Presumed Innocent.

Loved it. It did as well.

I thought it was at least two episodes too long. There was padding in the middle that didn't forward the story at all. It was just like mini-series, television show, should be 6-8 episodes these days. We're just going to have two episodes that don't really move the characters or the plot forward at all to get us to eight.

It's a fake heart attack. Oh, no, he's fine. He's better than ever. Yeah.

And that made me think, is everything too long? Presumed Innocent was too long. Dark Matter on Apple, also absolutely too long. The Bear, everyone's complaining that this season wasn't even necessary. Too long. True Detective, Night Country, Lord of Mercy, definitely too long. The Curse, brilliant. Frankly, could have been 25% shorter at least. Follow the House of Usher, Mike Flanigan, Absolute genius. That show was too long. Almost all of his shows are at least one episode too long. We're in a situation right now with television where there is no reason why anything should be a certain length. It's not linear TV where everything It has to be half an hour or an hour. We don't have any commercial obligations to fill. Everything can just be as long as it needs to be, and yet literally, everything is too long. I think there's a few things happening here. I think the fact that subscription culture is taking over from ticket culture means that these networks assume that the longer something is, the more you are stuck to that service, which means unlike a ticket, where a movie that's four hours long costs the exact same as a movie that's 90 minutes long.

Instead, now that it's subscription culture, they really want people to stick around the service longer and longer and longer, so everything is longer. More content now means fewer editors per content. There's less high touch on particular shows, particular movies that go straight to streaming. And as a result, I think there's just a lot of padding and things just billow and billow. And it made me think that there's actually a bigger theme here than everything being too long. It's also that nobody knows when anything should stop. This isn't just Netflix. This is Joe Biden. Joe Biden didn't know when his presidency should stop. The Marvel comic universe doesn't know when it should stop. Literally every single Prestige TV show is too long. Literally every single one. Boomers are holding on to power across industry. The mics or the Bob's at Disney don't know when to retire. That is my future of everything, extremely broad theme of the moment.

Sports owners. You left out sports owners.

Nobody knows when anything should stop. Everything is too long.

I like it. You left out one key part for the script data and for documentaries. And obviously, I have some first-hand experience with this one, just watching the market and being in it. You make more money if it's more parts. That has fundamentally changed the quality of documentaries because if people can make an eight-part something or a nine-part something when it should be six parts, they don't care because you just get paid more because it's more content. That changed, I would say five, six years ago and has completely upended all this stuff. If you're doing eight episodes of Presumed Innocent, you get more money than if you did six. That's it. I hate to be cynical about it, but I think that's 90% of it. It's one of the things, especially in the documentary front, I'm involved in two big projects right now. One of the things that I'm passionate about it. It's just like, I want them to be the right length. They're both multi-parts, but it's like, I want all the parts to make sense and not be like, Oh, we added two extra episodes because I don't know. That gets really dangerous when you start doing that.

So the Presumed Innocent is a good example. It should have been a six-episode show. And the episodes were like 45 minutes a pop, right? So they move fast. But ultimately, 45 minutes of pop, 90 minutes, six episodes. We're at 270, which is a four and a half hour movie. It's probably what it should have been. Everything else is padding. I still liked it. It ties into the culture thing I wanted to do. But from a staying around too long standpoint, this seems to be something that the super rich people, the number one thing they're the most interested in, this would have been a good one for the tech thing. Rich people, all they care about is longevity. Because because they're really thinking about themselves. How do I stay operating at the best possible level when I'm in my '70s, '80s, maybe even my '90s, which means I get to keep making money and I get to stay in power. So if you When you think about a lot of the science and a lot of the stuff people are funding and they're interested in who have money, well, it makes sense. It's like they want to be involved in this stuff that might actually keep them in power longer.

We also have people can operate at a high level of success at a later age, probably more than any other time in history. You think like when I was a kid, Wilford Brimley was 46. He seemed like he was 100. Now people take care of themselves. There's different things you can do to stay a little sharper. You take care. There's more awareness of when something's wrong with you. To me, the Biden trying to hang on forever, I just think that's where we're going. Don't you? I don't think this is a fad.

I think it's absolutely where we're going.

And- By the way, Ruth Bader-Gainsberg is another one.

Absolutely.

They had to basically pull her out at the last minute. She actually really hurt the country that she made so long.

And she specifically hurt her own cause. No question. I like the way that Esra Klein put it, which is that there's no decision that she wrote that was more important than the decision that she made to stay in power and then die under a Republican president so that she could be replaced by someone significantly to her right. That is a huge part of her legacy. I'm being a little bit flipped by saying that the overlongness of Apple TV shows is similar to or related to politics. But I do actually think that an important thing here is that it's been lost on people, and maybe specifically on the boomer generation that has amassed so much power in this country, that a really important part of leadership is understanding when to stop being a leader. That succession is a critical part of leadership. That's true for Biden picking a vice president who he actually likes as opposed to a vice president who he spent fighting internally for three and a half years. It's true for Bob Iger at Disney, picking a successor that you actually trust enough to stay in power for three years is a really important part of cementing your legacy.

It's incredibly important if you're the leader of a company to understand that a huge part of your leadership is your legacy, and your legacy is contingent on the people who come after you and the talent that you help to build that can carry your legacy forward in the future when you're no longer there. And so I think it's hard. I don't think it's easier to talk about than it is to do. But this is a really important aspect of the nobody knows when anything should stop theme of culture, I think.

Iger is the best example of this, and I like him. I've done a podcast with him, but he played it perfectly, and he got out at the right time. And he probably got out a tiny bit too early rather than a tiny bit too late. What happened? He groomed the wrong people or people that, obviously, and I don't know how much he undermined them when they were in the seat. There's been a lot written about that. But ultimately, he just missed being in the mix of stuff. And eventually, now he comes back. And I think it did her his legacy. Because like what you said, part of your legacy, this is David Stern. However you feel about the last six, seven years of when he ran the NBA, the best thing he did was put Adam in a position to succeed when Adam Silver took over. And maybe Adam should have taken over two years, three years earlier than he did. I remember, so my dad was a superintendent for a long time, and he He retired when he was 60. I think he was 62. We talked about it, and I was like, I feel like you still have your fastball.

I don't know why you're doing it. This is what he said was what you're talking about. He's like, I'd rather leave a year and a half, two years early than a year too late. I can set this up. The next person's coming in. Everything's in good in shape right now. This seems like the right time to leave now. I don't think a lot of people think that way. I didn't get it in the moment. I was like, You could still do this. Why wouldn't... But I guess the big question is, how do you know? Sometimes the person is the last one to know. How's Robert Kraft going to know, maybe I should pass the Patriots off? Part of what makes you great at what you do is you have this insatiable appetite to succeed and be good and beat other people. And how do you just be like, All right, now I'm good. This is basically what succession was about, right? This was Logan Wright.

Yeah. Specifically on the issue of work and people staying in their jobs forever and ever, it relates, I think, very much to a piece that I wrote a few years ago about an idea called Workism, Which is a theory that in an age of declining religiosity, work does for many people that which organized religion used to do. It provides meaning, it provides a schedule, it gives rituals, it provides a possibility of transcendence and self-actualization. And In a world where work is for many people their religion, why would you stop? People don't stop believing in God when they're 75. Why would you stop working? And now that work is much more physically easy, it's much less physically demanding than it used to be. This isn't the 1870s. We're not working on Moby Dick ships and hunting sperm whales and cracking open their skulls to get their bladder to light our lamps. We have physically easy jobs. We sit in chairs and we tap on keyboards. And in a The world where that's work, why not do it until '75? Why not do it until '85? But it creates this dilemma, which is, is the company I work for?

Is the institution I represent? Are the people who are under me better served with me claquing away at '87 or with me having a succession progression plan. And I think this is going to be a really interesting dynamic because there's no way that Joe Biden... Poor Bob Iger. I like Bob Iger, too. But there's no way that Joe Biden, let's say, is going to be the last really significant succession story of our times. We just saw a front page, Rupert Murdoch is trying to change his irrevocable trust. I didn't even realize he could do that. He's trying to change his irrevocable trust. This question of how is the historically wealthy boomer generation working in white collar jobs that are not physically demanding, going to actually, finally pass the torch to Gen X and Gen Z? It just goes right back to this question, do people know how to end things?

Yeah, the problem with Biden was that was a failure of the people around him because he was clearly declining a little bit in some way. And that's when somebody like your wife has to be like, Yo. But I think everybody around him had vested interests, whether it's staff, family, to keep him in the mix. But all he had to do is compare the clips. It landed on the right place. I think it gets a little dicier when you talk about owners, which is just in sports, what we've seen or people that run these multi-billion media companies like Murdoch. What are they going to do? I remember talking to a family member recently about this who is still working in It was early '80s at this point. He was saying to me, Well, I still get energy from this. I look around, a lot of people around me, they retire and then they die. They play golf for a couple of years, then they're done. I don't want to be like that. The people that are still around are the people that still have something to get up every day. They're like, That's interesting. I don't know if there's a right answer or wrong answer, but I do feel like this is going to get worse because of what all this longevity stuff that everybody's working on and all these...

The science of basically staying alive longer but also being competent longer, it's going to make it worse. My culture point is tied to Presumed Innocent as well, a show that I really liked, which I didn't love. Then I really liked the last two episodes, and I thought they landed the plane. I don't want to spoil it, but I thought they did a good job as somebody who read the book and saw the movie. A lot of people in my life anecdotally watched this show and enjoyed it, which is interesting because Apple TV is not exactly like setting the world on fire. I think it's getting killed by Roku. Just in general, it's one of the ones that's losing the streaming wars. They've only had a couple shows that people even It's good. This one was a belated one where anecdotally people started telling each other, You're watching Presumed Innocent, it's good. I don't think that's the reason the show succeeded. I don't think it's because Jake Gyllenhaal is a famous person who was in it and it was well cast and well-acted and Sarsgaard was tremendous. It was a simple, well-done show for a lot of people that was well-executed and well-done.

I wonder, in TV, do we just not have those anymore? Presumed, it was good. Both of us thought it was two episodes too long. We both liked watching. It was probably a B plus. But it stood out in this weird world of content we live in now where everything is niche. We're in the multiverse. We're in fantasy worlds. We're in alternate universes. We're in outer space. We're in these crazy horror films. We're science fiction crossed with something's wrong with the house. And did we just lose the narrative? Maybe let's just make stories about people that everybody can relate to. And by the way, murders, courtrooms, hospitals, police stations, that shit's been working for 70 years. Maybe more of that stuff. Did we just overthink everything?

One way this clicks into a thought I've had about the evolution of streaming and television is that clearly, streaming has become the new cable bundle. In a way, as you were talking, I was thinking, it's almost like you're saying presumed innocence is doing for us something very similar to what a lot of David E. Kelly shows the 1990s were doing for us. Really simple meat and potatoes, legal drama shows.

Somebody died. I wonder who did it. People have different agendas, and then we get to be in a courtroom. It's like, it's not fucking rocket science.

I I'll say this. When my daughter was born about 11, 12 months ago, and for the first three months of her life, when she was just sleeping terribly, just basically never sleeping. I was up all night. My wife was in the other bedroom, and so I'd be in the bedroom with the baby, basically reconciling to myself to not sleeping that night. What would I do? I would watch Lawn Order, not New Lawn Order. I would watch Old Lawn Order from the early 1990s. I think I probably watched every single episode of the first eight seasons of that show. I don't know what it was doing right, but it was doing something very right at a meat and potatoes level.

You had to use your brain, but you didn't totally have to use your brain.

It was never trying to get across a political message. I do think that late law and order got a little political. We're going to enter a political debate and expose the good guys and the bad guys. It wasn't doing that. It was telling straightforward traumas really, really simply. And I loved it. I just absolutely ate it up. And it made me wonder, why isn't there an effort to recapture whatever the special sauce of early law and order was? And I I agree. At a archetypal level, that is exactly what Presumed Innocent did for me.

How about ER? How about ER? Er should just be back. What is NBC doing? Just bring back ER. Put more young people in a hospital in Chicago. And who cares? It Oh, it's like the Doug Ross character. Nobody cares. Presumed innocent. I read the book, saw the movie. Guess what? Thirty years later, I watched the TV show. It's fine.

You know what's funny about that? The creative tension here is 25 minutes ago, you and I were saying, We can't give screenwriters access to ChatGPT because all they'll do is do the same thing over and over and over again. And then 25 minutes later, we reached ourselves to the position of, You know what television could use right now? Er2.

Well, I think that's one of One of the reasons White Lotus succeeded for HBO. It's, I'm on a vacation, I'm going somewhere, some weird shit's going to happen. It's like they're filming season 3 right now. I think it's in Thailand. It's like, Guess what? The resort's going to be great. It's going to be some actors I recognize. Some weird shit is going to happen. Someone's dead in the first 10 minutes. Yeah. If you look at every three months, they'll release what succeeded the most on streaming in the shows. It's like, guess what? The Night Agent was Netflix's biggest show. It was like, yeah, that was discount 24. I watched every episode. I really liked it. Amazon has like, Bosch and Jack Ryan or they'll have some rom-com where somebody has to go stop a wedding in some foreign location. It's like, yeah, some of this stuff is pretty easy. So maybe gravitate more toward the easy stuff to why. I don't know. I just feel like that's I presume didn't say work because there's just not a lot of shows like that right now.

It's funny because- How about Suits?

Suits was the biggest show on Netflix for a year. It's like that show is not even that good.

No, it's not. It was my airplane show for a long time. I would I'd really watch it when I was 35,000 feet in the air. It's funny that now I feel like we've come entirely to the opposite end of the problem, where now I think, what's the easiest way to possibly make ER2 for the 21st century? You probably just pop all the episode descriptions of ER1 into to a chat GPT and say, Give me 100 ideas for episodes. You could do the same thing with Grey's Anatomy, which I suppose is still running. But this, I think, it touches what has to be a very deep and difficult creative problem, which is How do you come up with ideas that are surprising enough to make people feel like they haven't seen them before, but familiar enough to make people feel like when they watch them, they're going home? And this is that ineffable secret sauce of making the most popular content in the world. Presumed Innocent, nailed it. Early Law and Order Seasons, absolutely nailed it. I wonder if maybe it's just easy to describe and incredibly difficult to do.

Yeah, people, they got pretty caught up with these shows where somebody is that big little lies formula became a formula. Oh, here's all these people. Everything's going great, but there's this dark secret. And then they butchered those. It's like, you know what works? This guy had a mistress and she's dead, and he's trying to pretend he wasn't involved, but he actually was. Now we got to figure out if he actually killed her or not. All right, let's do sports really quick. What do you got for sports?

All right, so there's a concept that I recently learned about, and I'm sorry to begin this in academic world, but It'll hit sports very soon. There's a concept in sociology I recently learned about called Sport Space. I think you might like this. It's the idea that culture only has room for three to four sports at scale at any one time. This term comes from a book called Offsides, which is an effort to explain why soccer is the world's favorite pastime, but a distant also ran in the US behind football, baseball, basketball, maybe hockey. The thesis from this book, Offside, was in the space between 1870 and 1920, America's sport space was filled. Baseball, football, basketball is invented, takes over. America at the time was very interested in honing an identity that was distinct from Europe and certainly distinct from England. And so we resisted soccer. And for the first 100 years, football and basketball and baseball crowded out the game of soccer, essentially. And boxing. Yeah, absolutely right, especially in the early 1900s, mid 1900s, too. But this idea of a fixed sports space would explain why it's really hard for sports to break into mass, mass culture.

We don't really have a lot of earthquakes. We have some long tectonic shifts, but not a lot of earthquakes. And this is my long wind up to say that as big a deal as the Caitlin Clark phenomenon is, I wonder if 15 years from now, it'll be clear that we're actually systematically underrating what a big deal Caitlin Clarke's entry in the WNBA is. We're treating the story as if the WNBA is having a boomlet, as if this is the top. But what if it's the beginning? So I was doing some research on the differences between the WNBA and NBA rights deal that was just signed. In the new WNBA deal, the women's league gets about $20 million a year. And tell me if you think, if any of this is wrong, I'm not an expert on this. I just did the research. Wnba gets about $20 million a year. Nba deal is worth closer to $7 billion a year. That means the NBA is getting 35 times more money per year from the television networks than the WNBA, 35 times more. Is the NBA really, statistically, mathematically, 35 times more popular than the WNBA is right now?

The NCAA women's tournament beat the NCAA men's tournament, although it got like 99% less money. The typical NBA game on ESPN, ABC, gets 1.6 million viewers. In June, ESPN reported that WNBA games are averaging 1.3 million viewers, not 35 times less, 25 % less. Kaitlyn Clarke Angel Rees' games are averaging 2.3 million viewers, more than the typical NBA game. What if this is one of those once in a century earthquake moments in the sports space? What if the WNBA has crashed the gates. And rather than thinking, Oh, this is a nice story. This is a neat story. No, actually, maybe this is such a big story that the current deals just signed will be seen as laughably incoherent in five years. What if in a few years, the WNBA is right at par, if not getting more viewers per game than the NBA? That's not so crazy, considering it's only 25% less now. And again, the gap is 30, is a factor of 35 in terms of what they're making. So I am really interested in the possibility that as much attention as obviously is being brought to the WNBA, it's actually not nearly a enough, we're in a once in a century moment in American sports.

Yeah, you could feel with Kaitlyn because there were similarities to Tiger Woods and some other like, phenomenons that just felt like this is something that this isn't a fad. This isn't like a short term thing. This is something that feels different. It's tilted whatever the landscape was. So I asked people, I didn't understand why they didn't split the WMBA out of their deal. Right. And I think the reason, and I'm I'm not reporting this, and I'm not positive, but I think the reason is because the NBA basically funded the WMBA forever. They always shoehorned into their deals. The league was not popular, the league was not doing well, and they were basically force-feeding the networks to carry it at it like it was worth more than it probably was until you get through the mid-2010s. The league hit this point where Tarasi was the best player in the league and didn't even play one season because she could make more money elsewhere. So the first 20 years, they really put the time in and kept it alive and funded it and spent money on it. To me, the move should have been because they could see what was happening to pull the WMBA rights out and try to sell it for as much as they could.

But I feel like they were like, You know what? We spent all this money keeping this league alive and funding it since 1996, whenever it was, that we're going to shoehorn it into this deal because we want the benefits of it. Then 10, 11 years from now, if the WMBA keeps going the way it will go, then we'll shoehorn it out. It's almost like this was their tip on the restaurant bill for everything they did. I don't think they should have done it that way. I think they should have spun it out. Everybody wants rights. I think they could have gotten way more than whatever the number was assigned for. And it just felt greedy to me.

I didn't get The question is greedy on behalf of whom? It's greedy on behalf of the NBA, whose proceeds are going to the owners and the players. But it's not going to make any sense if 5 to 10 years from now, the WNBA has essentially the same ratings as the NBA.

It's going to lead to a labor strike is what's going to happen. That's exactly where I was going. That's where we're heading in the next two years.

No question. If there's a world where Calin Clarke and Angel Reece and Jay Wilson are all making 35 Five times less. Right now, they're making 600 times less than NBA players. If they're still making 30 times less than NBA players and they're getting the same TV ratings, of course, they're going to strike. Well, how about this?

What if there's an alternate league? I mean, this is how the ABA started. The NBA players underpaid, didn't make enough money, didn't really have some basic labor stuff in their favor until they unionized in '64. But then the ABA came in '67. And guess what? All All of a sudden, all this shit changed and salaries went up by four times. Then in the '70s, all of a sudden, NBA players were worth three times what they used to be worth. I think the thing that I think is going to happen is I think somebody's going to try to form an alternate league because it's not like all these WMBA players are tied to their teams forever. So you could start a league. You'd be like, You know what? We have more money over here. That would seem to be the move. I personally don't understand why the women's soccer franchises are worth... They just paid 250 million for the LA one, and the expansion ones for the WMBA were at 110 million. I don't understand why soccer is worth more than WMBA, because the TV ratings say the opposite. It's the opposite. The interest on social media and the interest even in the sports world just says the opposite.

So, yeah, I'm with you. So we both feel like something funky is going to happen over the next couple of years because of this deal.

It It doesn't make any sense. If I'm part of a company and I know that I am just as successful and just as lucrative as an employee at some other company who's making 35 times more than me, why in the world would I stick with that company? It doesn't make any sense. Of course, something is going to happen that has the potential to blow up the WNBA as the rights deal exists. And in that respect, I think, to take your tip analogy, this is just incredibly short-sighted. If you think you're essentially just saying, I'm taking the tip on all the benefits that I gave you for the last 20 years, this is your way of saying thank you. Okay, well, Kaitlyn Clarke, was she alive when the WNBA started?

She was she six months old? They could have put it in where it's like, it's a four-year, four of the 11 years, and then we'll revisit the WMBA side as an out-cause. She had done something like that. All right, we're aligned. I'll make this quick because we got to go. My My future of everything. I think we're in peak athlete hageography era. This is it. We have player pods where people just get to say whatever they want. Nobody challenges them. Nobody asks questions. They just get to be like, Yeah, we would have won the title that year. There's no facts brought in. We have these infomercial documentaries in the All Access shows that usually somebody involved as an executive producer, their production company is. We have these biopics about celebrities that I'm sure are coming for athletes, too. Then we have these social media clips from the pods where these things are spat out in 90 second clips where it's like, Joel and Bede saying stuff like, Jason Tatum has a super team. If I went five for 20, we lose every game. And nobody sitting with them could be like, But, Joel, you've only played 433 games in 10 years.

Jason has beaten you three times in the playoffs. How can you say that? Nobody challenges everything. And we're just in haggriography mode now. And everybody's going to have their own long documentary series that spins whatever their career is. Even the people that weren't that successful now have these pods where they talk about themselves. They were these major amazing things. Just the inability for anyone to challenge some of this stuff feels like we're just creating this alternate version of sports history that's just happening over here. And I hope people see it.

Why do you think this trend is going to end?

It's not. It's going to get worse.

I thought you said it was peak hageography. Yeah, I think we are. This is it. We've moved into another- The way I feel about hageography is how I feel But conspiracy theories. It's just going to keep happening because all of the incentives push for it. I was watching Love Island USA with my wife, and there were some accusations that flew around on this show, like on every reality show, dating show, that some people are just in it to become influencers. But if you think about it, athletes are in a perfect situation to become influencers. They've already won the lottery of Fame. People talk about them on ESPN. People talk about them on podcast. They're already famous. And so if everyone sees Fame as a road to becoming an influencer, then every NBA star in Gen Z and Gen Alpha, whatever is coming next, are also going to see that their NBA Fame buys them a ticket that they can enter into the lottery of potentially becoming a cultural influencer that you can get a bunch of extra money from. So as I see it, there's a way in which if you were a manager or an agent for some young, smart, funny, articulate athlete, 22, 23, who cares if they're famous?

Tell them to start a podcast. The worst thing that happens is that you stop recording. The best thing that happens is that you become famous. So I think everything is pushing towards this. I think that you're going to see more. It's funny to think that in the 1980s, I think close to me and you have probably had this conversation many times, but the 1970s, 1970s, selling out was considered a bad thing. Today, it's entirely flipped. Selling out is a good thing. Making a merchandising yourself, making a brand of yourself is just what everybody does. So this world of if you're a sports star, you can also be an influencer, this is just the start.

Well, we had in the '40s and '50s, they would have autobiographies. And then in the '50s and '60s and '70s, like Sports Illustrated, Sport magazine, some of these places, they would write these first-person essays. And they were always... Will Chamberlain had some great ones. I remember when I was researching my book, Will Chamberlain, he basically created what the player podcast or now. He's like, I should have eight titles. My teammates let me down. He would just say crazy shit, and it was like nobody checking him because it was his first-person essay. But in probably mid '70s on through the '90s, There was a balance to all this stuff. And that balance is now gone. And the reason I mentioned this is like, think about how crazy it is to produce documentaries about yourself. We wouldn't blink if it's an autobiography. It's like, I wrote this autobiography. You're reading it and you're like, All right, I'm going to take this with a grain of salt. It's an autobiography. But now people are producing documentaries about themselves and there's no grain of salt. And you really saw this with the Patriots one. It's like, It's the history of the Patriots.

It's our story. And it's like, No, this is Bob Kraft's version of the story. This isn't a documentary that's balanced and does all these different things. Can you imagine if you're like, Hey, I have an announcement to make. I'm doing a four-part documentary about myself. It's produced by my new company, Derek Thompson Productions. It's a four-part documentary about the impact that I've had on journalism. People would be like, What the fuck is going on? You're producing it yourself? That's insane. But that's where we've landed with sports and culture. That's where we've landed with these biopics about Bob Marley, Elton John. It's like, What are we doing? None of this stuff has any real merit. I don't know. I hate all of it.

I'm not sure I like it either. I do think it's interesting to think about self-produced documentaries as really just being the 21st century version of autobiographies. I'd never That's what I thought about that. It is. But we don't really have a moral issue with people writing autobiographies. And yet we do. I think you're right. It does feel something icky about a self-produced documentary about yourself.

But maybe there isn't anything icky. You're seeing all these all-access shows that are going to happen? There's 17 camera crews following all the Olympic teams. It's like, are we really going to get the authentic? What happens if Joel Embiid gets benched in the last two games of the Olympics? Are we going to be covering that in our All Access on the USA Olympathy? No. I just hope people understand the difference between content where somebody can at least... There might be a tiny bit of journalism there or stuff that's just all access infomercial stuff, which is where we're heading with basically everything.

Yeah, it's marketing.

Might be time for me to go. It's just in general. This is where I might be out. All right, Derek, you got some Atlantic stuff coming. Plane English. This is Going to be one of the most interesting times we've had in America, probably since I've been alive these next four or five months. So I know you'll be chronicling all of it and just try to get some sleep. Hope you have some good coffee in North Carolina.

We got great coffee. Yeah, no, trade coffee and counterculture. I'm doing great.

The future of everything. We did it. Summer edition. I will see you in the winter for the next edition.

Thank you.

All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Derek Thompson. Thanks to Joe House. Thanks to Kyle Creighton. And don't forget, new rewatchable is coming on Sunday night. I will not have a podcast on Sunday. You probably won't see me on this feed until a week from Sunday unless something crazy happens. So stay happens. Stay cool, everybody. I'll see you in a few days..