Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why Things Become Popular, with Chuck Klosterman

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

What makes a hit a hit? Why do some bands make it while others fade into obscurity? Chuck Klosterman’s new book imagines an alternate history of 20th century music and uses it to explore why some things become popular and just how much culture depends on chance. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here:https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Chuck KlostermanProducer: Devon BaroldiAdditional Production Support: Ben Glicksman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, Chuck Closterman. In his latest book, Rock, Closterman writes an alternative history of 20th century music. He imagines a world in which the Velvet Underground becomes the biggest mainstream rock band in history. The Beatles fade into obscurity, the Rolling Stones call it quits early, and Led Zeppelin also collapses. On today's show, Chuck and I talk about his alternative history book, his thoughts on music, culture, contingency, why things become popular and the decline of reading. I thought about writing a big, messy open for today, but honestly, when you've got Chuck, I think the best plan is always just let Chuck cook. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. This episode is brought to by Uber Eats. You can get almost anything delivered

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that put safety at every turn. Learn more at uber.com slash safety. Annual driving history reruns do not apply in New York City. Chuck Closteman, welcome back to the show. Great to be here there, Derek. So your new book is Rock with an asterisk because it is an alternative history of pop music. Where did this crazy idea of writing an alternative, which is to say, fictional, history of music come from? You know, I don't think there is any singular inception point.

it was just the kind of thing for 25 years that me and various friends of mine have often joked about where we talked about music so much that at some point you have to start talking about things that didn't happen or could have happened and I it was I don't I can't really answer the question because I think that the question almost suggests like there's something I'm trying to really prove with this and what I'm mainly trying to do is just make a book that is entertaining and funny for people who've spent a lot of time thinking about music and maybe have run out of ways to think about it in a way. You know, it's like, it's just, it's, it's, it was just like a fun thing that I was compelled

to do and I don't really know why. There are all sorts of alternative histories that you could have written here. You could have elevated any number of bands of sub-Beatles fame to super Beatles fame and said that they're going to be the new sun around which the solar system of the music world revolves. Why did you choose Velvet Underground and Nika that album? Well, see, I don't think there was a bunch I could have chosen. I think it had to almost be this one. Because in my view, the Velvet Underground are kind of ground zero for the idea that there are critics' bands and bands for serious music inside people.

And then there are commercial bands for the world at large. And there's this chasm. And that has over the last 20 years has actually seen. sort of come together. You see less of that now. But through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, there was, like, this dissidence between sort of the meaning of things that were very popular and things that seem to be more avant-garde or art-based or almost consciously cultic. So I think it really had to be them. I don't think it, I mean, you could argue this book doesn't work as it is, but it wouldn't have worked with anybody else. It had to be them.

Why do you think that chasm closed? I know where you're going with this, but I'd love to hear you and spool this a little bit, this idea that there used to be a valley between the critics bands and the commercial bands, and over time the tectonic plates have moves that that valley has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and now it's just one big, you know, pop-domist plane.

Why did this happen? I think that it probably had to do sort of with the decline of the traditional music industry or what we talk about as the music industry, the idea of going back to a singles-based world as opposed to an albums-based world. It's just very clear now that the bands that a critic is going to write about is most likely the biggest band possible.

Like, that is just, I think we can all recall a time when the idea is like, well, you would not take, you know, fog hat as seriously as some artists from the 70s, you know, Lornair, or somebody who's doing these, like, sort of supposedly more meaningful work. And that doesn't really not, like, they would, the New York Times is much more likely to write about Taylor Swift or Beyonce or something than the idea that there is this music that you might not be hearing about that's real important. They're almost more talking about the cultural impact of things as opposed to the thing that it actually is. Yeah.

One more cut there, because you and I have talked a little bit about this, the fact that you think there's something very interesting about when a new Taylor Swift album comes out or Beyonce album comes out. And the New York Times and other cultural taste makers won't just review the album. There will be essays about the album. There will be multiple essays trying to make people realize the significance of the album. And this idea now that music critics are more likely to try to make people understand the significance of commercial work rather than to cover critical darlings at the expense of commercial work that seems to be a part of where music has gone in the last few decades. Can you go back there to that point that you made maybe just a few years in the show

because it's an interesting one? Well, okay, so I was a newspaper person right before I moved to New York in 2002. And when I was kind of coming up in newspapers, there was this built-in idea that you were almost adversarial with the things you were covered. That, you know, it's like that, that it was that your relationship as a music journalist to artists was the same ways the relationship would be if you were an auto reporter to the auto industry or whatever. Like, you weren't, somehow it was like your job was sort of to be on the other side of this. And so, you know, and then when I got to spin in 2002, and I started living in New York and kind of dealing with all, these other music writers. What I now realize is that we were all kind of part of the music

industry. We were all kind of sort of working on the same team. Even the negative reviews, even the idea of giving an artist a negative review in a sense is positioning them to have a certain kind of meaning. It's, you know, it just doesn't, it feels differently to me. Now, it's possible this is how it always was, and I just didn't realize it until I got there. It now does appear as though writing about music in any way is sort of a, almost an extension of public relations, sort of. At one level, this is a book about the Velvet Underground and this alternative way in which the release of this book changes history.

And it's extremely funny and extremely entertaining because it is written as a straight history. I mean, the prose is that of a music historian. but some of the facts are real facts and some of the facts are invented. And so it's like reading a kind of journalistic document about an imagined world. And reading it this weekend, I felt like the book was very clearly

not only about this question of what would the world have looked like if the Velvet Underground were the Beatles, but also this meta question of why do things happen the way they happen? And in particular in culture, like why do things become popular? And before we tiptoe a little bit further down that path,

I do want to just gut check. Like was one of the driving motivations of this book sort of working out this question of why do things become popular? It certainly examines that idea. I think it also sort of accepts that in many ways that's an impossible question, you know? Like it's a question that's definitely worth

discussing and sort of debating and arguing about, I don't know if it's something that can really be answered. You know, I do find it interesting. You know, when I wrote my early books in my career, I thought they were just chock full of ideas. And the response was always like, oh, but they're really funny. And now I wrote a book with a main goal was to be funny. That is the main thing, entertain people.

And people who are like, what are the ideas in it? Like, what's the reality? Because certainly there are some, you know? I mean, it is, I've said this a few other places, but I have. always think that in music criticism, so much of it is fundamentally based around two questions. One question is, is Bob Dylan a great singer or a terrible singer? The other is, did it have to be the Beatles, or was it going to be somebody? You know, like, was the world going to transform in 1963 and 1964 and somebody in the world of rock was going to be sort of that lever? Or did it have

to be that? Did it have to specifically be them? So, I mean, that issue is definitely in, you know, in this. I'm not sure if that answers your question, but yeah. It gets at it. I mean, I was going to jump to the question of why things become popular, because I did feel like it was a preoccupation of this book, and it was the literal, not subtextual, but textual preoccupation of my first book, Hit Makers. So I want to talk about this question of why things become popular. But maybe that's actually put it to the side for a second, because you said a few things

that made me think about the state of the book industry. I remember when Ezra and I were first starting our book tour around abundance, I had this feeling that we kept coming across people who clearly had not read any word of the book, but had read many reviews of the book, or maybe had seen a tweet of a review of the book, and we're therefore participating

in the discourse around the book. And I said this, I don't remember if it was to Ezra or my wife or some other friend the first time, but I said it's almost as if books these days, like the primary product of the book, is not to be a book. It's to be an invitation to talk on a lot of podcasts about the book. And for every, like, one person who reads the book,

there's going to be maybe 10 or 100 people whose interaction with this book is basically just to hear other people, talk on podcasts about it. So it's like the book essentially punches your ticket into a conversation around the themes explored inside of the book. And so when you said, you know, I spent all this time writing books to explore big ideas, but then people found it funny. And now I wrote a book about, I wrote a funny alternative history of music and people just want to explore the ideas. I think a part of that is that more the life cycle of the book has moved toward podcasts. And therefore,

has moved toward this world in which, like, it's about, it's about talking about books. It's about talking, therefore, about ideas contained within books. And so I guess I wonder, since you've been writing nonfiction books now for decades, whether you feel like books have a different, whether the conversation about books once they're published has changed significantly in the last 20, 25 years. Well, yes. And I think in a way that very few nonfiction writers, would be happy about.

I mean, it does now seem like you put a book out or like you or me or whoever puts a book out. You go on podcasts about it. Maybe people write about it on their substack. There is then, of course, like this, all this kind of whole world of Reddit where people sort of talk about the book, openly admitting they haven't read the book but projecting what they think it is. And then there's a conversation about that, which is its own kind of interesting thing.

Like there's people I've seen who, like, well, they'd like, Like, they assume that if I did this, it's like, I must be arguing that Cinderella is the greatest band of all time or whatever. Now, that's not part of the book at all, but somebody might think that. And then they have a conversation about that. I mean, it's, you know, it's just a, it's a complicated thing that I think we both understand. It's like, you know, a lot of nonfiction consumption was by, like, guys, right? Like, a guy wanted to learn about the Civil War or whatever. But now there's a podcast about a certain battle in the Civil War where two people who know a lot about the Civil War kind of give you everything you need to know. It's like that, you know, this idea that like I read the criticism, then I understand both the idea and the reaction to it. Like that's all it is now. That's the main thing it is. And is it disappointing as a writer? I guess a little bit, but I can't really control that. You know, I think for the person who buys the book and reads the book,

they may be having the same reaction that has always occurred, but the way it exists in the public is not the same. That's kind of what I guess we're talking about. The difference between the experience of reading as a kind of something that's like a public intellectual discourse type thing. That is very different now, you know? And it's, I don't know what to do about it. I mean, obviously book sales are going down on the nonfiction side in large part. because like you're talking about abundance, right?

It was, it's very possible that someone could feel like they read the book abundance, having not read it, if they've listened to podcasts and read a lot of media. Like they would feel like, well, these are the things that came up and these are the things that are expressed and here are sort of the points against it. It's like, you know, here must be the tone of it. Even more than that. I mean, we went on some podcasts like Lex Friedman. There were three, four hour conversations about the book.

The book is an audio product. is a seven to eight-hour product. And that's if you listen to it, I think, on one speed. So if you listen to it on like 1.5 speed, maybe it's like a six-hour product, a five-hour product, which means that the interview on Lex Friedman was almost as long as the actual audio experience

of listening to the book at like 1.75 speed. So I do think that one thing that happens as books essentially become invitations to do podcasts is that some podcasts end up serving as like Amu's Bouches for the book and enticing people to read it, but other podcasts essentially just like consume the entire animal.

You end up discussing like chapters like one through 13 and people come away thinking, I don't need to buy that book. Like I'll tell you right now. I'm not sure I'm supposed to say this. I think it's okay. If you looked at the Amazon sale charts after we did say some of these really long podcasts

like Lex Friedman, didn't really move that much. If you looked at the charts after we did a TV hit like Fareed Zakaria, where we spoke for like five minutes about the book, quite significant. And so it's like these old-fashioned, like TV interviews that are just serving you this like little tiny taste of the book to wet your appetite.

That actually moved physical book sales, whereas a lot of these other podcasts, precisely to your point, ended up essentially being people's experience of the book. They were like, I got it. Why don't need to listen to another five, eight hours of this? So, but to go back to me, how do you, how do you feel about that? I mean, like, how, how, I like, the way you're describing this now, are you saying this is like a disappointment to you?

Or I almost get the sense you're kind of delighted in some way by it. I mean, delay it might be the wrong word, but you're kind of excited by this idea. I'm excited about it. I'm excited to understand a phenomenon that's happening with the cultural product of books, which is that books, dad books, non-fiction books disproportionately read by men. I don't know the right term for this, but like history, big idea books. Something's happened to this cultural category

in the last 10 to 15 years, I think. These books, which used to be books, are now becoming either literal podcasts because people would prefer to listen to the rest is history, history, rather than read the book history of, say, World War II, but also even the books are now so disproportionately consumed as podcasts that it now really makes sense if what you're trying to do is like make an impact on the world is to think how will this

product ultimately be consumed? It will ultimately be consumed by most final consumers as a podcast. That's just an interesting shift to me. So I'm interested in that shift, but I'm not necessarily cheering it. Like I wouldn't spend a year of my life doing hand-to-hand combat on these sentences just in the hopes that no one would read the actual sentence because I would just talk about it on some podcast. Well, you know, I mean, in your book, is an interesting situation because you are trying to take an idea

and you want it out in the world. It's like the book's purpose is to get that idea out there. It's like, okay, what are the reasons people read books? Well, there's a myriad, but it's really too, right? It's like they're entertained by the experience of reading or they like the information they got from the book, okay? So there is a lot of people, I think, if you show them like, you know, if you show them the power broker or whatever, they see this

super thick book. And you said like, okay, here's the deal. I can download this into your mind right now. In five seconds, you'll have the whole book. You won't have the enjoyment of the experience of consuming it, but you'll just have it. Well, you know, with a nonfiction book, 99% of the time, I would pick that option. Okay. This is why fiction is still doing pretty well.

Fiction is more about the actual experience of the reading. You know, it's like, and that's, but for people who like, like, you know, they pick up a book because it's like, I want to know this. Like, I want to understand this more. It might be, much to my sort of chagrin, that books aren't the ideal medium for that. There might be other, you know, I fully know that like I can watch a two-hour documentary on something and it will resonate more with me. than reading a book for 12 hours. And, you know, sometimes, if you ever had this experience, like, you're reading, like, a really good, really dense book,

like, my internal monologue is actually like, remember this. Fucking remember this thing. This thing you just read, remember this. And I can feel it dissolving, like a dream I had from the night before as I've loved. I just, I know, like, these, this, all this, this thing that I was taking in. Like, you know, and somehow, though, when you got a documentary, you know, it's like, well, you're, someone's lecturing you just the most important parts.

And you're visually seeing it, you know? It's like, you know, reading is this two-way thing where you have to take the information in and then kind of project the reality back in your mind. But a lot of these other things, podcasts, movies, whatever, it's a one-way thing. It's just like they're giving you what the guy looks like. They're telling you what he's, you know, you just can take it straight in. So it is more efficient, you know? You know, I think that that's one thing that all these technological increases have done is they have not sort of. have given us more free time, which was sort of this mythical thing we thought in the 90s or

whatever, they just have put on this idea that, well, now you have more time to do more of the thing you were doing before in a small way. Now you can just spend your entire day eating this information and just taking it all in, you know, and maybe now you can do that while listening to a podcast while you're also working, while you're also doing something else. I mean, these are all kind of obvious things, but it's true, you know. When you're reading nonfiction or you're consuming some nonfiction thing, maybe you're listening to a podcast, you're reading a book, you're watching a documentary, how do you signal to yourself that this is something you should remember?

Do you write it down? Do you take a screenshot of the Kindle app on your phone? How do you keep a running list of the things that you find interesting as you're consuming stuff across the information landscape. I try to remember it. You know, super old fashion. Does it work? Yeah, I mean, I think so.

I mean, I obviously know some things. I had to learn somehow. I mean, I don't, I mean, it's kind of fascinating what you just said, because even this thing, I was like, I'm reading something and it's really interesting and I want to remember it. And your mind immediately goes to like, okay, what is the system to remember? Like, you're like, I must write it down. I'm not like that, okay?

Like I have never been that way. Like I have always been just sort of like, I mean, when I was writing more about popular culture, like really when I was really into it, you know, I do events and people would say like, do you feel like you have to follow things that like you don't even care about? Like, do you watch Gray's Anatomy just to know about it? And I was like, no, I never did that. I just live my life and then hope that the things that I find interesting if I somehow reinterpret them as writing other people will. But I don't do, like, I don't have a, I don't have a, I just try to remember things. I like, you know, it's. Yeah, it's so interesting.

So like with this book, for example, when, when like the members of Led Zeppelin all fall into like, you know, into bankruptcy and financial ruin, when you had that idea, maybe you're going on a walk in the shower or whatever. Like, there was no instinct to write it down. You were just like, okay, that's a major plot point of this book. I'm just going to remember it and commit it to page next time I'm sitting down to read it. To write it, excuse me. I guess. I don't know. Like with it, I mean, I will, I will say that of all the books I've done, in some ways, this was the most structurally complex. Because what I felt like I had to do was basically write an entire, like, imagine an actual nonfiction history of rock music from 1967 to 2002.

And then sort of reverse the polarity of everything and write a fictional. backwards version of it on top of it. But like I didn't, I didn't outline it, I guess. I mean, you know, that's the trouble with how I am, you know? It's like there's like I just, I just do it. I don't, I'm very untrained, you know? I like, I guess I do it in this kind of

autodidactic way. I don't know how you're supposed to do it, you know? No support, no supposed. I, um, I, I certainly was never like taught at a journalism school. When you have an idea, you have to send an email to yourself. Like that was, there was never any class from which I came away with that instruction. But I am a mess of notes to self. Like my Apple Notes app is just full of articles

that are 5% written that I will never complete, but might like merge into some article that will exist in the future. At 3am in the morning, I'm sending myself emails when I have an idea and I know I won't be able to fall asleep. I can, until I can just like get the idea outside of my head to exist somewhere else and then I'm like, aha, the idea is preserved and I can go back to sleep. So I'm just interesting to talk about process because I am just like an absolute mess of just constantly like, got to remember that, got to remember that, got to remember that. And then I just hope that someday I can write a book or essay or podcast where I can put the ingredients into a stew and mix it around. But like, that's my process. No, I mean, I do do that. Sometimes like I'll think

of something. I'll be in bed and I'll think of something and I will email it to myself to look at the next morning, but at the same time, usually by doing it, that makes you remember it, right? By, like, going through the process of typing it to yourself. And then very often you might look at the message and it's like something like Brian Eno is a moose. And I like, I don't even know what the fuck that meant when I came up with it. Like, now, you know, like if I don't, if I, so I don't, I, it's, I, I, I, I'm not sure. It's like, it is a, it is a, it is a, it is a, In some ways, it's like a mysterious thing. In some ways, it is the least mysterious thing.

It's just like blacksmithing or something. You just do it, you know. What does your feedback loop look like these days? How much do you care about sales, reviews, podcast interviews, insert some of the metric here? Like, as the industry has changed, has your, has what you, has what you, you've come to look for from a book's effect in the world changed? Hmm. You know, when you start, when you're first starting out, all you care about is that you'll

write a book and it will exist. That you will actually be a person, like when I was a young person, I never imagined that would ever write a book. That was never something I dreamed about, not because I didn't want it. I just, it didn't seem possible to me. So at first, you just want the thing to exist. And then once you're in the world, though, then you're sort of more interested maybe in how people are responding to it. It's very exciting.

Like, oh, you know, like in my, I got a bad review in the Chicago Tribune. But when you're young, that's exciting. It's like somebody cared about this or whatever, you know. Like you're very interested in kind of the response to it. But then after a while, the responses, they kind of, they're not, it's like people aren't getting it and they kind of don't like that. So then you're more interested in the sales because then somehow by having the sales, succeed that that like sort of negates any negative reviews or whatever. It's like, well, people like this, that's all that really matters, you know.

But then you get a little further and you start thinking like, well, what about, I want this book to be not just successful now, but like I want someone to read it 20 years from now. Then it kind of does matter how it's reviewed or how people receive it. And you kind of move in that way. And then you go a little further still and you realize, well, you can't control that anyways. and it doesn't really have the impact you think, and you're just back to wanting the book to exist. I will say that this book is...

This is probably the least I've ever been interested in sales and reviews on something I wrote. Because I understand that its commercial viability is limited. I also understand that the audience has to be... Like, it's not... I mean, I like writing in an accessible way, and there might be some stuff in this book that is less accessible to the average consumer rock or whatever.

So I understand a little, but it made me happy. It made me satisfied in a way that, I don't know, I feel good about it, but not. It's very difficult, I think, just in general, when you do any kind of creative endeavor. It doesn't matter if it's books, you know, movies, music, visual arts, whatever. it's hard not to think about your work due to external factors, the way other people think about it. Like, it doesn't matter how you feel about the thing you did, their response changes it. And, you know, and there is less of that this time. It is more, you know, internal and not external.

But, yeah. I find that's one of the hardest things about being a public writer is, um, I think it's basically impossible, as much as I tell myself, just do your best and trust the process. It's just impossible to fully extricate myself from external feedback. And it's especially hard because once you get a little bit of, once you get a compliment, right, you want to listen to the compliment.

You want to allow the compliment to make you feel good. Once you allow the compliment to make you feel good, you've opened yourself up to allowing the criticism to make you feel often like 10 times as bad. Oh, yeah, that's a huge mistake. You can't do that. Teach me how, Chuck. Well, I mean, everyone will tell you it's like, oh, don't listen to the haters or whatever. It's like, don't, you know, block that out.

Well, you can't then but say, I'm going to listen to the people who like it. I mean, the one thing you got to do is kind of give up on both sides. And that is hard. It is kind of isolating and alienating. but I think it's just an essential part of it because the people who are saying nice things to you are as fake and wrong as the people saying negative things. I mean, they are projecting something about themselves onto your work.

They're very rarely talking about the work itself. That, like, they are using the book or whatever, the work, to position themselves, you know, because they're doing this in public too. I mean, what's, that was, you know, one of the most interesting things about writing is that the way writing, is critiqued is also by writing.

Like, if I review a Van Halen record, I don't review a Van Halen record by writing a song. Or, you know, or it's like, I don't watch like, you know, a Quentin Tarantino movie and be like, okay, I'm going to make a short film to comment on this. Anybody who responds to a book through writing is using the same sort of medium that you are. So that is, so that's all, it's always going to be kind of a skewed thing. I don't review other people's books because I know myself. I know that any book that's better than mine, I will think to myself, this person is a genius. And any book that's 1% worse than something I would do, I will assume was written by an idiot.

Like, I have no ability to view anyone else's writing through a lens that is not my own experience. We talked a little bit about some podcasts I did earlier this year on the overall decline in reading. the fact that young people read fewer books, the fact that adult men in particular read fewer books, about the fact that among the decline or within the decline of book reading is happening significantly more in the nonfiction side. I believe I saw a statistic showing that

there were a handful of weeks this year where the first two books on the fiction list outsold the entire nonfiction list. How do you feel about this trend generally? Well, I mean, I don't feel great about it. I mean, the 90s that book I wrote came out in, you know, 2021, okay? And, you know, it was during the pandemic and I couldn't really promote it at all.

But it opened it number two on the best seller list. Well, earlier this year, I put the book football out. I did it like 26 podcasts for it. It, like, got a lot of attention or whatever. It also opened it number two on the list and sold. half as much. Wow. So that means all of nonfiction in five years,

you know, has essentially been cut in half. I don't, could it bounce back? Because when I first got into this, like when it was the turn of the century or whatever, the idea was that we're kind of in a nonfiction time now. It felt like nonfiction was sort of replacing the idea of people who read novels for fun, you know? So I guess it could kind of,

a swing back. A lot of this has to do with just like reaching the kind of people who want to buy the book you make. Okay, there's 330 million people in the country. There is probably an audience for virtually any subject. Like a book could succeed on virtually any subject if the sliver of people, you know, can hear about it. I mean, like, like, as a writer, you don't have to sell four million copies. You sell 100,000 copies. Like, you're successful as hands. You're. You're successful as Right? Just to stop there, I think most people would be absolutely shocked to recognize the difference in scale of popularity between something like books and film.

Because if a book sells one million copies in a year, it is a hands-down, unequivocal bestseller. I mean, if you're a nonfiction book and you sell a million copies in a year, you spent probably half the year at number one. if you're a movie, even like a documentary that sells one million tickets, average ticket price, I don't know, $11, that's $11 million total. That's an absolute flop for a movie. So like, the difference in the show is enormous.

It's even worse, you know? You know, I mean, what's one of the upsides to writing is this sort of weird scale? I suppose in a way it would be the upside to being a poet where it's like, if I can sell 5,000 copies of this, you know, I'm like ever, it's, it's, it's, it's, it, it, it's, it, But, you know, you get it. But what I was saying is, like, there are, you know, it's a big country. There's a lot of people who probably would be interested in anything. But, like, how do they even know about the book?

I mean, like, you know, there's like this big, like, you know, spike in, like, kind of romance or like romancesy or whatever, you know, like Colleen Hoover or whatever. You know, these books sell like crazy. Well, I mean, the romance book industry knows how to reach its people. It's like those are people who get their news on TikTok. So they will see, you can give information about those books on TikTok. Those are people who go to stores that have a specialized romance section and they trust the bookseller. It's like there isn't anything like that for like sports. Like I'm trying, when I was trying to sell a book on football, like I can't buy a commercial during a football game, right?

You know, like there aren't there aren't a lot of bookstores that specialize in books about sports. There is like it's hard to reach those people. I would guess that there is a lot of people who would like that book. Not only have never heard of it, we'll never hear about it. Like, they'll just never come across it. So that's kind of the trick as well. I mean, it was easier in the past when people would go to bookstores without even the intention to necessarily buy a book. They're just going to browse around and kill time.

That's when they used to always say, like, your book cover is your greatest ad. Like the cover mattered because somebody might be going through a bookstore and just see it and they might buy that book. Now people don't care about book covers in the same way because that almost never happens. People only buy books they know about and buy consciously because they're generally buying them online. You're not going to stumble across books accidentally. And when I go into bookstores, they do not have the casual traffic that I remember. I mean, you know, people when it was like things like Barnes & Noble and Media Play were, new. And it was like, oh, we have couches here. And you can just kind of hang out in these places.

And maybe you'll meet someone here. And while you're there, you might buy two books randomly, maybe never read them, but just buy them. That does not happen now. It is very difficult to sell books now to people who won't read them, which was a big part of the book industry for a long time. That's why the pandemic was so good for authors. People had this idea that they were going to, oh, I'm trapped at home now. I better go on Amazon and buy all these books. That was sort of a return to people buying books they never read, that they just put on their start. and was like, oh, I have this. This episode is brought to you by Lincoln.

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Do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See Owner's Manual for Important Operating Instructions. Last point on books, I was just thinking to your last comment. And it seems that there are so many different ways that a person can get the gist of a nonfiction book. They can read a review. They can read an essay that also contains review.

They can listen to a podcast. maybe in some cases, especially for self-help books, if it's something like, you know, how do I lose weight, how do I add muscle mass, how to become happy? I think some of these questions are frankly being redirected to large language models. And I do wonder if large language models might be taking away some of the audience for some self-help books that just answer specific questions. But when you talk about like Colleen Hoover and Verity,

with these books like The Housekeeper or something, there's a degree to which, love him or hate him, those books are unsummerizable to the extent that a summary of a housekeeper having an affair with the married husband of the home she works for is not the same as the reading experience of feeling like a relationship is building between the housekeeper and the husband and feeling titillated by that relationship. There's something about that experience, that narrative that can't be easily summarized. And I wonder if... All of these forces of summary sort of descending on the nonfiction world has left the fiction world in a place of relative strength because the strength of storytelling can't be nibbled away by all of these sort of functions of summary.

Well, yeah, fiction is hard to summarize in that way in all regards. I mean, you know, it's like genre fiction, most of those stories, if you described in a paragraph, would seem the same. People still like the experience of that. Like they like the experience of consuming it. It's tough to write nonfiction in a way that someone's like, I just like the experience of reading this. I might not even agree with it, but I like how it feels. I think a lot of people are like, I just want to know. I want to know what the thing is.

Like what is the point? Like what is the point of this because they kind of view their time is very valuable? And they can't waste it with someone just trying to sort of amuse them or what. whatever. But as a writer, that's kind of what I'm trying to do. I mean, like this book, my hope is that when people read it for how many hours it takes, I don't know how long it will take them to read it, but that they would say like, well, that was fun. Like it was funny and maybe I didn't laugh, but I thought to myself that was funny. Like that's kind of what the goal of this is. And that's very different than if I was writing a book trying to persuade people to actually believe that this is

what the history of rock means. You know what I'm saying? It's a strange book to describe in any context because it's okay, so it's a fiction book with non-fictional characters. So, you know, dealing with situations that don't seem radically different from the world in which we live in. So you or anyone else talking to me sort of wants to talk about it like it's a non-fiction book. And it's hard for me not to describe it almost as that way because I'm not talking about characters I just made up. You know, I'm talking about Gigi Allen or I'm talking about Madonna. I'm talking about these real people. But, you know, you just can only do what you're compelled to do.

Like I, like, I, like, I, you, someone asked, like, why did you write this book? There's very long answers I would give for podcasts or for newspaper articles. But the real answer is short, which is like, I don't know. Like, it just happened. Like, you can only do what you want to do. Like, you know. Well, so turning the page a bit. A question that, from my perspective, seem to haunt this book, is a question that was the explicit subject of my first book hit makers, which is, why do things become popular?

Why the Beatles and not the Velvet Underground? Or in your book, Why the Velvet Underground and not the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin? Well, I mean, in my book, the Beatles are successful. They just get you searched. They just have a bit of an early stage collapse. I don't even know how to begin this conversation because it's, it's, it's, it's. It's so big. I'm just interested in your general schematic to approach to the question.

Where should we begin to answer the question why do things become popular? Okay, I think maybe I can kind of answer it in this way. Okay, there's a part of this book where a rock historian essentially is trying to explain why this first Velvet Underground record, Velvet Underground Nico, is, you know, 10 times bigger than thriller or anything,

like why it's such this huge, massive thing. And I sort of say like, well, you know, there's kind of three theories as what this could be. Well, the joke sort of is that the three things I propose are the only way anything can be popular. The first is that, well, it has to be the structure of the thing, almost the math of the thing, the tempo of the song, the instruments used. How long the verses, how long the choruses, the interplay between the harmonies, all the mechanical things that make a song. You know, it's sort of like, you know, that if, you know, the choices that the artist makes, that this is actually, you know, almost like a recipe or a formula. And when the alchemy is perfect, it has this thing people like.

Second idea is sort of like kind of like, it kind of comes from this thing, Adorno once wrote, basically. It's like it's the most intangible thing. It's a magical unknown thing. Things that seem exactly the same on paper, if described, will have a completely different sort of relationship to the world at large. If you talk to a musician, they'll often talk about music in this way. That it's like there isn't just like some sort of formula you can apply and all of a sudden

you have a hit. It's like, you know, maybe Max Martin or something might kind of imply that. But even he would say that the difference between the songs of his that are successful and the songs that have failed, it transcends almost the kind of normal understanding. It's something that's in the deepest part of us because, art is a way for to take, you know, take something inside of you and give it to someone else in this shared way. And then the third idea is that it's completely arbitrary and it's capricious.

Something has to be popular at all times. There has to be a number one song in America at all times. It's all basically reverse engineering. It's like rolling a die and getting a five and saying five is what we want. That all this, all their conversation about its merits or its sort of kind of profundity, it's really just a practice of the fact that, you know, there is, it's so random that like, it really isn't even a question to answer. Now, the reality is when something is successful, it is part of all three of those things.

All three of those things are always in play. It's always the construction of the thing. It's always this intangible, magical thing. And it's always this sort of arbitrary capricious thing. But when someone describes a piece of music or they describe a, film or whatever the case may be, they describe a book, almost always they kind of lean in to one of those three. Like they, it's a combination of those things, but in some way, the driving fact, they tend

to see to be one of these three things. It's actual structure, it's magical structure, or the fact that it just had to be something. And what is I find very interesting about criticism is that someone's value as a critic tends to be how consistently they meter out those three categories. to everything, that if they have a real sort of critical, like, perspective, it's because they definitely see one of those three things as the most meaningful, and they have to describe everything through that prism. I love that breakdown of three categories.

There's merit that we can describe. There's merit that's ineffable. We struggle to describe it. And then there's luck. I almost never read journalism or criticism. that ascribes important phenomena to luck. I feel like I almost never read it. Like if I think about not just something like Taylor Swift or Beyonce,

but something like Donald Trump, I mean, how many of the millions of essays that I've read or you've read, listeners have read about Donald Trump, how many of them essentially say it's quantum randomness? It's inexplicable quantum randomness that Donald Trump won the 2016 election, there's actually a multiverse playing out because of quantum gravity

and there's 10 million different realities and Donald Trump only won in one of them and your consciousness just happens to flow through that one world and so that's why Donald Trump is president. Like practically nobody said that. In fact, I agree with the categories, but I feel like almost always it's category one that is employed by journalists

that what happened is an inevitability. and therefore let's describe why it had to happen, which is why I so appreciate alternative histories because I think I agree with you that luck plays a much bigger role in all sorts of social phenomena, musical, political, et cetera, than most writers actually ascribe in their analysis.

Well, it's disappointing. It's disappointing to me to realize that the biggest factor in my career has been Chance. Certainly had some talent, I guess, I think I worked hard, all these things. But Chance was the biggest factor. Here's what I would disagree with you about, though.

You say, like, you never hear writers say this. Well, not in the terms that you described, not in that explicit language, but any time they discount the first two categories, they're essentially taking the third as the explanation. If somebody's like, I don't understand why Nickelback is popular, these songs are terrible.

There's nothing profound. or deep and artistic in it, what they're saying is that sort of the way culture worked out just elevated something and they got picked. So any time someone's not making an argument for category one or category two, they are arguing for category three because, you know, the idea of arbitrary and capriciousness, luck, as you were saying, that encapsulates everything that doesn't have an explanation. But, you know, I think that when a music writer is writing, they're typically going to use the first category.

They're typically going to try to describe to you what it is about this song that makes it different than other songs or what it really does so well or like what tradition it takes and really kind of gets down to the root of it or whatever. That second category is more of the artist's perspective, that they can't just go into the studio and just like hammer it out. Like sometimes you'll hear something like Rivers Cuomo or like really try to do that. Todd Rungren will sometimes do this or whatever. Like, there are these guys that are, and women too, who are, you know, that they're very skilled and they kind of look at the craft of what they were doing. You know, Jeff Tweedy in a way is somebody who will talk about the magicalness of music. But then as he describes it, it starts going back into the mathematical side almost. You know, it's an interesting deal.

But that third category is kind of the default thing for when another explanation doesn't set. satisfied, you know? Like, okay, so my, my favorite song, my favorite new song from last year was this song called Lover Girl by this Icelandic performer. Her name is like Lofi, it's hard to pronounce. It looks like L-A-U-F-E-Y. It's low-I. Maybe I can't, I don't, I'm not Icelandic.

But, you know, so I love that song, okay? Now that song sounds like a Rosemary Clooney song, right? It sounds like it should have came from the 1940s. Anybody who knows this song, it's like it has absolutely no relationship to what's happening in pop music now or what has been happening in pop music for a while? I mean, in some ways it kind of reaches back to like Pitsichotto 5 a little bit, but that wasn't that big of a deal. So how do I explain that?

Well, can I say that she did such an amazing job that her voice and all these choices she made? Well, you know, maybe. Is it something deep and profound in it that I'm hearing that I didn't hear in other songs? I would like to think that is the case because that's how it certainly feels. but the third category would be what an outsider would use to explain it. That it's like there was, you know, there couldn't be a hundred songs like this. There couldn't be a hundred songs that sound like they're from the 1940s on top 40 radio. But this is the one.

You know, this is the one that got through, you know? Yeah. Yeah. The, um, in, in hitmakers, the, the book is basically split between what I would call category one and category three. Um, a lot of the book is about this principle I call, the law of familiar surprises that across the cultural landscape

we find that people tend to like new products that remind them of old products. So Star Wars being pastiche of a lot of familiar, Joseph Campbell, meta stories, and other elements of Western and Eastern culture. The songs that we tend to like

often have chord structures or timber that's similar to the songs that we've previously heard and liked. There's something called a mere exposure effect, which means that certain ideas and textures that we're familiar with tend to be fluent cognitively to us,

and so therefore we like them more than things that are more disfluent. So there was all sorts of psychology stuff in the first half of the book. But the part of the book I enjoyed writing the most was the part about luck. And the story that I liked the most in the book, which is basically really struggled to talk about it

on whatever the equivalent to the podcast tour was in 2017, was I tried so hard to think of, is there a story from pop culture history that actually proves this lesson that the same song can be a failure and a success in the same reality, right? No access to like, you know, Earth 2 where Velvet Underground beats the Beatles, but like on Earth 1. And the one that I settled on was Rock Around the Clock.

And I don't know, are you familiar with sort of lore around Rock Around the Clock? It appears a few times in your book. But basically, Rock Round the Clock by Bill Haley in his comments, comes out in 1954. And it is a disappointment. it is clearly not the biggest song that they've recorded, certainly in the last few years. And it seems like it's basically relegated to the dustbin of history.

But one of the 60,000 or so people who buy the record that contains Rock Run on the Clock is this boy named, I believe it was Peter Ford. Yeah, Peter Ford. Peter Ford's dad's name is Glenn Ford. Glenn Ford is an actor. And he was in a 1955 movie called Blackboard Jungle. And one day, in 1955, the director of Blackboard Jungle, Richard Brooks, goes over to Glenn Ford's house and says, I'm looking for some songs to animate or be the soundtrack for this movie about juvenile delinquents in the 1950s, which was a huge and very pressing problem of the time.

And Glenn Ford says, I don't really like this new race music. I'm much more into like Hawaiian folk, but my son, Pedy Ford, listens to all sorts of stuff, the Orioles and whatever else. And Peter Ford hands Richard Brooks, a stack of vinyl records. one of which is or contains Rock Ground the Clock by Bill Haley and his Comets. And Rock Round the Clock plays at the beginning of Blackboard Jungle, in the middle and at the end of Blackboard Jungle,

and only then in the summer of 1955, the year after it was a disappointment, does Rock Around the Clock become the biggest song of the year, I think one of the best-selling rock-and-roll songs of all time. I think you and your book say something like it's the first rock-and-roll song that mattered on its own terms or something like that, I think was your terminology.

I think it's a very defining song and the history of pop music. I mean, and both for a lot, like just the title alone. It's like a lot of these things that were adopted, yes. Okay.

So I love this story because here we actually have within one reality, the same song, being a disappointment, and then being one of the biggest hits of the century. Yes, and the distribution is different.

The context is different, film versus radio. But I love that story because at the very least, it's about this element of contingency that I feel like you're putting your finger on with the very concept of alternative history implies a powerful role for contingency. And so I wanted to make sure that I gave you that. That's where I rock around the clock. Yeah. Okay. I mean, there, that's a great story.

You say like you were, it's interesting, you wanted to prove this. You wanted to prove that this could happen, you know. I don't know if it proves it because there are, I guess, other examples of it. I mean, like, appetite for destruction comes out in 1987. It doesn't really do anything until 1988 and becomes this huge record. The world was not that different from 87 to 88. It did just have, like, something, it's sort of had to sort of get at the attention, that the attention could then spread. I mean, like, I think the harder question is when it's like,

say there are two things that are on. some fundamental nature identical, but for a variety of reasons are consumed in totally different ways. This was a big deal like in the 90s and in the 80s too where there would be sort of like this idea that well like, why isn't this song a hit? Like why isn't this song by the Eels a huge hit as opposed to a song by Dexie's Midnight Runners or whatever? Like what is the difference here? That's when you get in this whole idea of when people are like, oh, industry plants or it's all, anytime anybody's talking about industry plants, they're in some way talking about that third category. That something got elevated into this position because something has to be popular.

I think this is happening with this song, you know, choosing Texas now or whatever. There's this bizarre debate over whether or not this incredibly popular song is actually being heard by people, which I just... A question about choosing Texas is in my... notes. So feel free to do a diatribe about that meta-commentary. It's a weird one. I mean, okay, so first there's this idea sort of that, that, oh, you know, I felt like there were people saying, this is an illustration of how we've kind of lost the monoculture again. Here's this song that's been number one for like 17 weeks, and I haven't heard it. But then the response to that was like, well, that's on you. That's your fault. It actually is everywhere. It has to do

with your prejudice against country or your prejudice against women or something like it's kind of a roguest idea to not all these things um but then it's it's more but like okay so it's understandable in a sense that there isn't a mechanism like mtv now that's going to nationalize the experience my kids listen to hits one all the time i heard that song every fucking day for i mean it's like it didn't seem like it wasn't around uh It's like people can't, it's like there's just real confusion over this now because we have, there's just not this shared reality. And it's, you know, and we've never had a totally shared reality, but I think we've probably, this is maybe the main thing you and I have talked about over time. It's like the way that's, you know, the proliferation of everything and the way everything is split into its own kind of separate worlds and the monocultures con and all that.

Like it's, it's not that surprising now that there can be, uh, like, a, a. real huge song that the majority of people have never heard at all. I mean, that act, I remember one time there was like a, there was like a huge bone thugs and harmony song that had broken a whole bunch of records. And I think I was working as a music critic at the time.

And I was like, I don't know this song. Like, I just, like, it's, it's possible to completely miss things that are huge in a world as big as the one we inhabit.

I, I agree with so much of that. I wonder how you think about this theory. Um, I feel like, hits, music hits, used to be more manufactured, were more the result of phenomena that could be briefly named and identified.

So if you're looking for like, when did the Beatles really break out? Like, what was their first hockey stick moment? It's the Ed Sullivan Show, I would say, right? I mean, a moment of one to 50 million, 60 million exposure. Paola existed, the power of the music labels to push certain songs. and certain artists on the radio,

which was the most important distribution mechanism, certainly through the 70s 80s, that existed. Labels had power. Records store owners had their own power, especially when it came to building the Billboard charts, because they would often call the record store owners. What's selling? Suddenly, it was the record store owners

that could just tell Billboard what to put number one. That's different now. It's not just that, you're totally right, that the monoculture is frayed. It's also that power, I think, has dispersed. that like, it's not that hits a random, but more like their popularity is harder to trace. There is no one to 60 million

Ed Sullivan-style broadcast that basically hits 60% of households at once. The labels, I think, when you talk to them, say we have much less power than we used to. I mean, the TikTok algorithm, I think they all believe is significantly more powerful than any individual label. And so I do think that the choose in Texas discussion, which I'm only vaguely aware of, but I'm aware of the broad strokes.

It's been the most popular song for half the year and half the country feels like they haven't heard it and therefore thinks it's a conspiracy theory. There is something, I think, to this idea that there's more of a where the hell did that come fromness with hits now because we've lost these really easily identifiable broadcast nodes. I wonder how you feel about that. Well, I think that's probably true, although the thing you're describing, I feel like, has always been something people discussed because every year of my life, there was one song that was like mysteriously popular. Like when Informer by Snow was a huge song, people were like, why is a Canadian reggae song number one?

Like it made no sense. It came out of nowhere, you know? Or like, just just, just old. over and over this happens. Now, it does seem to be that, like, there is, I mean, there's, like, an expectation that when Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter comes up with a new record, well, the first single is going to go to number one. And it's almost the idea that's not even really like, because people like it or not, that's just going to kind of happen now. The other things that break through are coming in these different, you know, these seemingly invisible ways that, like, all these kids are listening to this on YouTube and it wasn't even on a label. and now it is. I mean, it's, the idea charts in general are strange. Okay,

people talking about this, this Choose in Texas song. It's been number one for 17 weeks and they never heard it. Okay. Okay, so Smelfly Teen Spirit never got higher than number six.

But it feels like that song was everywhere. Now, was it everywhere? I mean, I was there, and maybe I would claim that it was, but it probably, now it's almost like,

you remember 1990, you know, Christmas of 1991 or something and like smells like teen spirit is behind the Christmas tree or whatever. I, I, I, the charts are like when sound scan came in and we can see exactly what the records were selling. That was one thing, okay, with singles, because people didn't buy singles for a very long time, I mean, you could buy a Kassingle or whatever, like I bought the Love Shack Kassingle or whatever. I, but that wasn't, it was always this kind of mysterious thing, you know. There'd be videos on MTV where the song was not that successful, but the video was huge. And because people saw it as they were hearing it, you know, they're kind of listening with their eyes, they remember it more and feel like it's ubiquitous.

Like if, I was surprised to hear that this song was, had been like number one for that. many weeks that does seem bizarre to me like seven i think if it the number was 17 weeks that seems like you know it does seem like that should be almost like like if you i think if you told someone like in you know next year there's going to be a song it's going to be number one for you know for five months or whatever we would assume it must be transformative in some way there must be something transformative about and actually it can happen and not mean that much you know as a matter of fact, Ella Langley's choose in Texas has now spent 23 weeks, number one

on the Billboard Hot 100, which means it's past the previous record of 22 held by Mariah Carey. All I went for Christmas is you. It's a total phenomenon, and I do think that, I do think there's something to this idea that not only are windows under culture

fragmented, but also I think the means by which what arrives at our eyes and ears actually gets there has become slightly more mysterious because it's more, it lives more in that black box of algorithms rather than exists between identifiable people. I mean, you know, when music is playing on the radio and there's a DJ and there's a label and there's an artist, that that connection is easier, I think,

to put together rather than it appeared on my TikTok because of something that I clicked earlier because of something that lives inside of the black box algorithm of TikTok. I think that there's There is something about the sort of spooky mystery of how ideas arrive at our faces that ask to this. Two last questions. Well, I just want to say one thing on this, though. It's like, you know, that what you're describing, though, that is the manifestation of what we supposedly want it.

I mean, that was, you go back and you go back in time. People would be like, well, shouldn't it be not some gatekeeper deciding this? Shouldn't it be just people find the song? and that the measurement is just what actually people like. But of course, when that happens, we're all like, this is weird. It doesn't make any sense because it basically takes reality and says, like, what if it is just random? Like, you know, we always think that if we democratize these things, we love that word, democracy so much, that if we democratize these things, that of course it's going to be better.

But in some weird way, the limitations of life is what gives it sort of, our ability to sort of, understand what's happening. And what happens now with music is just kind of a Wild West scenario. It's like anything can be successful. Any genre does not really matter that much. You don't have to be part of a subculture. There's all the, you know, it's like this. And in the past, we would have said like, that sounds better.

But it sure feels worse to most people who experience the old one, you know. I like that point. As I was doing research for this piece and thinking about this idea of artists who don't quite hit their moment but then years or decades later become canonical. I had the feeling that this sort of thing happens all the time in say visual art history.

Like Van Gogh dies of failure and then 100 years later all of his stuff is worth tens of millions of dollars. I think the same is true of Vermeer, some of the Impressionists, This is also said about some book authors. Like, I think Moby Dick was not particularly important when Melville wrote it. I think it wasn't even like in some of his obituaries didn't even mention it.

And now, you know, whatever, 140 years later, 160 years later, it's considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest book written in American history. Does anything like that happen for musical artists, for pop rock artists? where not that they have the Velvet Underground experience where the album comes out, it charts nowhere higher than like 177, but it becomes influential over time. I mean like the Van Gogh experience of like an artist making a bunch of music in the 1960s

that like no one listens to for the next five years, but 60 years later they're considered like in the pantheon of commercial artistic fame. Does that ever happen in music? Well, you know, in some ways, that is the strange thing that like a music critic can actually do. It's actually very difficult for a music critic

to impact the popularity of present tense music. But it can pull things from the past. That, you know, that, that, and that happened, I feel like that happens quite often. Maybe the Van Gogh example, that's kind of, like, that's a pretty kind of extreme thing. Like, more time, maybe more time has to pass. Like, I don't know how long it was. I don't know how long it was before, like, like the reconsideration of Van Gogh happened

after his death. I don't know. Decades, not years, but decades, yeah. You know, so like, in a small, like, it's hard for something to be like, I mean, in, like, or, or either somewhere like, you know, like, you know, like. Kafka or something and be like essentially unknown while they were alive. You know, it's a little harder with that. Like in music, for example, that happened with Big Star in the 90s, you know,

to get mentioned in a counting crow song or whatever, but even kind of before that, there was this idea that this music was so great and nobody cared about it. And now it's sort of something most people who care about music know about, like, even a young person will be like, they probably think a band like Big Star was much more successful than they actually were. What happens probably more often in music, this happens all the time, that something is commercially huge, but completely critically discarded. And then later, they are sort of reimagined in the same way that their fans believed

that at the time, like Rush, this is absolutely the case with, Black Sabbath, that was the case with. where it's like there was not this idea at the time that this is that this is important or meaningful, and now they almost seem like mega important retroactively. That happens more that because there was this, you know, for, and I say this is, this is really kind of changed, but for a lot of my life, the idea of something being commercially huge was seen almost as an inherent detriment to how seriously you were supposed to, to take it. Like, you would not take Aba seriously in part because it was so commercial that some of the

music actually sounded like TV commercials or whatever. You know, you would, you would, the, the magnitude of something, the magnitude of Garth Brooks or whatever, was, was damaging to his reputation amongst serious consumers of country music. That, to me, when I say like things are different now, that seems to be gone. Like, it, like, it, like, I think somebody would look at Taylor Swift's success as proof that she's a great songwriter. That's not how songwriting used to be viewed. It was just not the case that because an album, you know, because like Frampton comes alive was a huge record.

It wasn't like, you see, Peter Frampton is actually a better writer than like Lou Reed or whatever. That's not how it was. That's not, you know. And now that, that's, that is different. And I'm not, and that, to me is, has, it's not even about. music, that is a, that is a social shift in that, like, if, if you, if you, if you want to talk about sort of, you know, what are some of the intangible downsides to the way our society deals with economics and

popularity and stuff like that, it would be this idea that now being successful at something is a way to sort of eliminate criticism. that success proves itself. Which is something in my first book, I kind of argue, and now I just didn't realize it would become so common for people to argue that. Yeah, this is a subject that I've been thinking about a lot for another show about how I think

that there's all sorts of ways in which our societies become more mathematical, more obsessed with quantification, and there's some ways in which that's obviously true, like more people wearing aura rings, for example. I'm not talking about it in what I hope is an obvious way. I mean, even something like the fact that music critics have come over time to think of measurable proofs of success as being evidence of merit rather than a reason to push back against the sort of commercial cheapness and tawdreness of an artist. Even that has an element of the worship of math.

How do we know if an artist is worthy of our coverage? we can count record sales, we can count downloads, we can count how much money they made from advertising deals last year. It's very hard to count the ineffable artistic worthiness of an artist that basically nobody listens to. And I think that even that is like a subtle part of the way in which even people that might talk about despising the quantification of the modern world are nonetheless like enmeshed in it.

It actually reminds me of the very last thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is, I don't know if we'll make it on the show, but it was going to be the subject of an article that I was going to write soon, so I actually wanted to get your mind on it. So if it doesn't make the show, at least this is like reporting.

I was thinking about MVP voting in baseball. I became a huge fan of baseball in 1990s. And if you go back to baseball reference, and you look at MVP votes the 1990s, they're all over the place. Like, Juan Gonzalez will win MVP in a year where five people will have, like, a better war than him, and the vote will be, like, totally dispersed

because some people value on base percentage and some people value home runs and some people value how many games the team they played for one. And voting every single year was a mess. And so people were voting on non-definitive numbers that they understood. Now, when I read, like, ESPN, Jeff Passon and his analysis of who should win Sayyung MVP, everyone agrees that whoever has the most, like, fan graph points is going to get the vote.

Whoever has the most war is going to get the vote. And in fact, the share of overall votes that have gone to the number one and number two vote getters for MVP, Sai Young, those are increasing in the last few years. is that people voting on MVP and these other awards are essentially just looking at not all the numbers and weighing them, but just one number. And a number that they sometimes don't even understand. Like, what is this fangraph number?

Like, what is war? How do I, how do we honestly know of Aaron Judge added 10.5 wins last year? Or, like, was it really 7.9? Like, I have no idea how to determine the difference. I just know that 10.5 is more than 7. Whatever. And so, therefore, I know how to vote Aaron Judge

over some other player. And I guess my last question for you, which is, again, just totally unrelated to a lot of what we talked about today, but still just very much in my mind, is how you think about this fact that, like, within baseball awards voting, definitive numbers that we don't understand have become more valuable, and less definitive numbers that we actually do understand have become less valuable. And so we've all essentially, like, worshipped this analytic that we can't even really explain. Like, have you. Have you thought about this at all? Does it like work the Chuck brain at all? Well, I mean, it's just people feel better being able to explain their reasoning by just pointing at a number or pointing at a chart and saying that's the obvious answer. It's almost in a way it's taking the pressure off their own judgment. They're saying like the numbers suggest this it must be true. You know, it wasn't that long ago when it was very common for the voting for the Heisman trophy for people to be like, well, you know, it's going to be real tough for Christian

McCaffrey to win the Heisman trophy. He played. for Stanford, that's on the West Coast, people aren't even going to see him play. They're going to miss those games. Now the expectation is if you're the kind of person who votes for the Heisman trophy, you have to watch every game that happens. You have to watch them all.

You have to take, you know, like, it used to be if you, maybe the voter for that was a guy who covered Old Miss. So he'd be at the Old Miss game. You know, he wouldn't be, it's obviously see any of the games within that same window of time. Because of the time change,

he might not see the West Coast. He had to use kind of all these other things. It's like, you know, you'd read about things. You'd hear other people say things. You'd watch highlights. Now, it certainly seems idiotic to say, well, isn't it better to have someone who's watched everything, you know? I think in truth, it's better about half the time. That's great.

Like, about half the time it does work and about half the time it doesn't. It's not that different. And it was also, you know, I mean, I guess this is a different argument, to tell you about, like, how important these things are. Now, in some ways, especially at the pro level, you know, the amount of bonuses and the way, like, it's millions and millions of dollars between winning the MVP and placing second in the MVP in baseball and all like, you know. But it's, it's like a, we're already starting from a flawed premise with the phrase most valuable player. We're already using a word that sort of can mean a lot of different things, like valuable to what? valuable to your team, valuable to like your team succeeding at the highest possible level.

I remember talking with Simmons one time when it was the, when it was the Russell Westbrook and James Hardin here for the NBA voting for MVP. And I still, I still say this. I mean, it was like Russell Westbrook was the most valuable player for the league. Like, because every morning I would wake up to see if he got a triple double because he was trying to do this. for the first time. It was like, it was the most valuable thing for the experience of watching and following pro basketball.

Now, a lot of people hear that, and they're like, that's insane. It's supposed to be how valuable you are to, like, winning a champion. It's like, I don't know. Where does it say that? It's like, I mean, it's like most, you know, it's, I find it very interesting that in the NCAA basketball tournament, it's the MOP. It's the most outstanding player. in some ways that is like significantly more specific because it be sort of like you don't got to be on the winning team you have to be the most out you have to stand apart the most um

baseball has i mean in terms of the way it is covered and discussed by people who care it has totally surrendered to the analytical paradigm that is the whole thing you just like it you know and every other sport is kind of taking half measures and half steps toward that. So baseball is in kind of a, like, I think, you know, baseball's advantage for a long time was that it was the only sport where you could really compare modern players from players from the past. And it wasn't like, well, okay, we got a factor in all these other things. Like, you could sort of imagine, you know, Joe DiMaggio playing in the 80s or whatever. And it was like, what, but now that has changed too.

That's totally different now. I mean, the way the guys throw and the way the guys look, they've kind of like taken all the other sports where you could only measure against who they are playing with in this specific era. And by going solely by the numbers, because in baseball, they're so measurable. I mean, it's just a series of one-on-one events, you know,

pitcher against hitter and then the ball's in play, so it's fielder against ball. It's like, I'm not surprised that that has happened. I don't, I have, no idea why that is preferable, but I'm not that big of a baseball fan. But, like, I have no idea why people would prefer the idea that this can be more accurately explained and proven. Because we all know that when it comes down to the last game of the World Series or the

NCLS returns, like, you have to throw all those things away. It's like, you know, like the past performance is no indication of future returns, at least for this at bat. So I don't know. Again, I'm not sure if I answered the question. Now, you were just saying, like, what do I think about? That's what I think, you know? No, I think that's great.

I mean, I wrote a piece of while back called The Dark Side of Moneyball, where I talked about how, you know, baseball by, as you said, buying into the analytics paradigm, solved itself like a math problem. And now I think the commissioner's office is trying to unsolve it by adding inefficiencies to make the game more interesting. And I think to a certain extent, you know, Mori ball and basketball, obviously, this has been talked about a lot. in a lot of Simmons podcasts and a thousand podcasts,

but, you know, the Rise and threes, I think similarly represents basketball trying to solve itself like a math problem. And I'm interested in how, and by the way, I should say, I think folks at Netflix and Disney hire way more people in analytics departments than they had in the 1970s, 1980s,

and they are also pouring over demographic data, international data, and preference data, and trying to solve their own problems like a math problem. And I am interested in this question of what is gained and what is lost when we turn more human problems into math problems. And obviously I think that there's connections to what's going on with artificial intelligence, with more people essentially relying on inscrutable black boxes of algorithms to solve problems in their own life, whether it's professional problems or personal, interpersonal

problems. And in trying to sort of like wrestle down this big idea of like what is one and what is lost when we turn over more of our decision-making power to mathematical systems that we only partly understand in trying to find, like, what is a nugget that I could begin this essay with

to help people try to see the thing that I am seeing? I thought, you know, it's kind of funny that when I read these articles about who should win MVP, they all say, well, the war number on fan graphs says 10.7, so the answer is the person with the 10.7. Then I think, I don't know what the fuck that means.

I don't know what 10.7 war actually means. I do know what a home run is. And I know what a batting average is. I know what an RBI is. But and I assume that those numbers are being fed into this final like war number. But I, the numbers I understand weigh less and less and less in MVP voting. And the numbers I don't understand weigh more and more to the point that, as you said, they become determinative.

Every voter just seems to like pull up the same webpage to sort the wars. and then votes for the person at the top, and then everyone agrees now on who the MVP is. And so in a way you could say, MVP voting has gotten better because we're no longer making the mistake of like awarding someone with a two war over someone who has an 11 war.

So maybe voting is getting better. But there's also something interesting happening where we are reaching a consensus by relying on a number that the individual voters themselves don't understand. And isn't that like kind of weird and interesting? And so I'm just interested in this larger question of like, what happens as we turn

more of human decision-making over to mathematical systems that we trust to be correct, even though we don't understand what they are in the first place. I mean, I suppose the counter that somebody would be like, well, learn what these numbers mean. And if you learn, you will believe that you'll see what, and maybe that is the case. But, I mean, I generally agree.

Like the Netflix, Netflix example, that's very easy to understand why that is only good for like the shareholder of Netflix. I mean, it's like this. Okay. So one thing that I always bothered me, it's going to seem like a weird analogy, but I think they're the same.

I would hear people who went to say like, oh, creative writing programs or writing workshops, and they would workshop their writing work. And there was this idea that when somebody read a story, the other people would respond. And everybody kind of had to respond with something. And what seemed to always happen is people would respond either, you know, with like,

to whatever was the most outside of the expectation. Like they'd be like whatever was the thing about the writing that was sort of stood out to them, you know, the voice or maybe a detail or something like that they would be like kind of like they would kind of sand those off. It would be all these people sort of noticing the things that kind of go outside of, coloring outside the lines or whatever. They'd say, I noticed this. And as a consequence, what the end of product ends up being is sort of like, like, something that has lost all the things that made it different, you know.

The Netflix algorithm is like that. Figuring out what people want and all these things, it's like, it's just, it is figuring out what the highest number of people will find acceptable or to watch or whatever, but that's going to decrease the likelihood that something we didn't, strange, is going to come through. I mean, how it applies to baseball, I don't really know. I mean, that way, I guess, because the game is just happening and this, you know, this is just sort of like looking at the statistics and making a decision based on this. But I, I, I'm intrigued by sort of the, when I was a little kid, for example, and you'd watch a game on television.

And the color announcer was always like talking about the guy's grit and like, who wants it more and all that. And I'd be like, they should actually be following statistics more. Like James Wilder of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he's not a very famous running back, but actually you should maybe give him more attention than Tony Dorset because look at, you know, and as a kid I was like this, I was like I wanted to pour through the sporting news

and sort of see these like the reality of what was happening. But then as time moved on, it's like it went too far in that direction to the thing where it's like all these other kind of intangible things, which is the draw to sports, they're gone and like what's on the paper only matters and now it just seems it just seems strange to me it seems like i it almost seems like you'd be a more informed sports fan if you never watched a game if you only read the results that you would actually be in a better position to vote for MVP than somebody who watches baseball all day

every day and that makes no sense like and i think you know exactly i think you agree with me that I think that for you know that you would actually like like you know because that's how it is like if you if you play fantasy football out there you're way better off not watching any games if you want to win at fantasy football if you're listening to this right now and you're like I want to win on my fantasy football team never watch games again only read what the results are the game is only going to confuse you but of course that's not what you want right I mean you want to be confused in this way It's funny how in a way, without my planning for it in the slightest, we've somewhat returned to a distinction between the nonfiction and fiction books, that there's something about certain nonfiction books that exist to be summarizable. What happened in World War II?

How do I lose weight? What is the secret to living a life of good habits? And there's other titles that can't be summarized that have to be experienced the way you experience a football game. And so it's funny that, yeah, there's something about this theme that I want to do more on, about the distinction between the parts of life that need to be experienced and the parts of life

that are susceptible to these technologies of summary. That's a cool distinction. So maybe for next time, Chuck. Thank you very much. This is a lot of fun. Thank you very much.