The Bill Simmons Podcast - The Future of Everything 2023 Edition With Derek Thompson

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Derek Thompson to discuss some of the biggest incorrect predictions for 2022 (2:33) before they make their predictions for the future of tech, food, entertainment, sports, and culture (22:44). Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Derek Thompson Producer: Kyle Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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that I still haven't watched. Everybody loves it. Everybody's telling me I should watch it. Can't quite get there yet. Hey, here's where we're getting for this podcast. We're taking a break from football. We're taking a break from basketball. We're going to talk about the future of absolutely everything

with our guy, Derek Thompson. It is all next. First, our friends from Pearl Jam. All right, Derek Thompson is here. He writes for The Atlantic. He hosts a great podcast for us called Plain English. And every once in a while, he comes on this podcast. We talk about the future. We talk about where things are going. That is a big obsession of yours. When did you become a where things are going guy?

Like what age? At what age? I'm not sure I can pinpoint an age. I feel like, you know, aren't we all kind of where things are going people? I feel like the future of whatever industry you're in or whatever industry you're interested in, I think it's inherently interesting.

I've always found, definitely since I became a journalist, that if you can write about the present, that's great, that's inherently interesting. I've always found, definitely since I became a journalist, that if you can write about the present, that's great, that's good reporting. But audiences really want to hear about the edge of the present. Not like the far-off future. That gets a little bit make-believe. But if you can tell them the next click of the dial,

what's coming next, I just find that the audience is bigger. And so I try to imagine ways that the reporting that I do can point to different kinds of futures that could unfold from it. So you weren't in like third grade going, geometry, where's this going?

What's the future of Euclidean geometry, man? No, that was not a thought in third grade. It's not a thought I don't think I've ever had until about two and a half seconds ago. Yeah, more of a journalist thing, I suppose, joining the Atlantic. So before we do where we think things are going in 2023, we should go backwards to the beginning of 2022, where we thought things were going. I didn't prep you for this part, but what did we get wrong about 2022? What was our biggest mistake? I mean, you've done

some great stuff. You had a whole podcast recently about how the fake meat rise and fall of that whole era and all the reasons for that. But I don't think people going into 2022 were like, here's the year for fake meat. I think people worried about the housing and the real estate and stuff like that. What else and what got borne out versus what was overrated? Yeah. Well, let's start just before 2022. The first episode of Plain English, I brought on Kevin Roos, a reporter for the New York Times, and we wanted to talk about the weird future in tech. So what do we focus on? We focused on crypto and the metaverse. Remember the metaverse, Bill? Remember when people were talking about that? Crypto is the sort of thing where because of the rise in interest rates, because of inflation, you can point to basically last year's Super Bowl as the peak.

I mean, last year's Super Bowl, we called it the crypto bowl because there were so many crypto advertisements. There were exactly zero crypto advertisements in this year's Super Bowl. And that is so reminiscent of the dotcom bubble. You had the little sock puppet from pets.com and the 2000 Super Bowl. I think there were like 14 different dot-com companies that advertised the 2000 Super Bowl. One year later, they were all wiped out. I mean, some of them got bought up, but I think half of them went defunct. So to a certain extent, I would say that's one of the biggest things that we missed is that crypto was thought of, especially Bitcoin was thought of as a hedge against inflation. Crypto will go up if inflation goes up. The exact opposite happened.

Crypto acted just like a growth stock. It fell like every other growth stock. And so that's something that I think the tech community got broadly wrong was the resiliency of crypto. So you've done podcasts about this and I don't want to just retread things you've already done, but it seems like the big thing we got wrong with crypto was the lawlessness of it. That I think people were kind of having their fingers crossed that it would be okay and it just wasn't. And that's what we got wrong. And you think like whatever we say about the financial institutions we have now, there's been a lot of trial and error and a lot of checks and balances that are in place. This world did not have those checks and balances. That was one way

it went wrong. Any other big reasons that this didn't work? I think there's two vectors along which crypto failed. The first vector you pointed to, the fact that it is so rife with fraud. And it was always rife with fraud. But I think a lot of people were surprised that a company like FTX, led by Sam Bankman-Fried, who was sometimes analogized to JP Morgan or Warren Buffett, they considered him, even though he's only 30 years old and never wore a suit, they thought that he was going to be, he was like the grownup in the room in the world of crypto. And the fact that he's turned out to be more like the Elizabeth Holmes of crypto, I think has really shocked a lot of institutional investors, a lot of people that would put money in a venture capital firm that would then give that money to

crypto funds. So I think the implosion of FTX has just been an absolute asteroid crashing into the earth for crypto. The other is, and we'll talk a little bit more about the issue of use cases, I think, in one of the predictions we might make. But I mean, crypto had a long, long time to spend billions and billions of dollars to create an actual consumer use case outside of betting on dollars to go up. I mean, that's really the use case for crypto, right? It's an opportunity for people to gamble. You can gamble on the line of the Celtics game and you can gamble on the line of on the future appreciation of Dogecoin. It's the exact same thing. That's not a use case. That's not like Uber. That's not Venmo. That's not something like Twitter. And crypto really struggled to build a use case, a utility outside of just gambling on numbers to go up.

What was the last thing that started from scratch that became a massive thing? How far do we have to go back? Because even like Twitter is 2007. So what, you know, out of like the last 10 years, like what is the most recent Snapchat?

What is the most recent Twitter? What is the most recent Twitter? What is the most recent what FTX was trying to do? Have we had one in the last six, seven years? It's ChatGPT, I think. It's ChatGPT, which is the new technology from OpenAI. It's an AI that responds to text prompts. It can write parody. It can answer questions. It often hallucinates wrong answers. But it's this astonishing toy that is fascinating because on the one hand, I don't know if you've used ChatGPT, but it's like kind of a shit product. It lies all the time. It makes mistakes. It's extremely bare bones. It doesn't look very good. Bill, it also has 100 million users around the world. OpenAI does no marketing.

It does no advertising. This thing went naturally viral to get 100 million users around the world for a shit product. And that kind of reminds me of these sort of products that in the past were the minimum viable product already succeeded way past people's anticipation. That is something a little bit

like the iPhone. I mean, when the iPhone came out 2007, January 2007, people made fun of how expensive it was, $500 unsubsidized. They made fun of how terrible the call quality was with AT&T. You couldn't use any kind of app store. That was still 16 months away. But still, there were enough early users, early adopters who said, there's something here. It just seems like this might be a kind of future. Now, I'm not trying to say that ChatGPT is the next iPhone, but I'm saying that when something this obviously flawed, nonetheless, gets 100 million people trying to use it, that's when you know you've got something special. Oh, that's interesting. I mean, part of this is sometimes when we're being hit over the head, that something is going to become a thing or you should do this or you should try this or just

wait, this is the next thing. A lot of times either people who want it to become the next thing because they invested in it in some way, like they're pushing it. Or you see people kind of zag against it just because they don't like being told what to do. Right. So I always think about like 3d glasses of movie theaters and what, what was that 10, 12, 13 years ago. And I was like, no, this is the next thing. And it just wasn't. And a lot of people didn't like it. It hurt their head. They couldn't look at their phone. They just didn't like to wear glasses, the movie theater. And then that kind of came and went. Going back to the beginning of last year,

the metaverse felt like that to me, where you had just people going, no, this is it, man. Facebook, they're gearing their whole company around this. And it's like, well, what if Mark Zuckerberg is just wrong on this? What if he just made a lot of money and he's bored and he's convinced this is the next

thing and it's just not. And it feels like we're heading toward, it's just not. Last time I was on the show, we talked about how it seemed like the tech industry had sort of exhausted itself. It was like running on fumes. The stocks from the toilet, you were just getting into this wave of layoffs. You've had tens of thousands of employees let go from Amazon and Google and Meta. And that era of consumer technology that dominated in the 2010s, you started after the Great Recession, and you have this rise of consumer apps with smartphones that seem to thrive in an era of low interest rates. It's Uber and it's DoorDash. All of that seemed to be coming to a close. And you and I said,

what's the next mountain? What's the next frontier for tech? What are they going to give us next? It doesn't seem like the metaverse is the next mountain. It now doesn't seem like crypto is the next mountain. And I think I told you, I said, you know, I see all these interesting new AI tools coming out, GPT-3 and DALI, they're really interesting.

And a few weeks later, I did not time this, OpenAI released ChatGPT. And I think that brings us to just last week. There was this amazing, fascinating split screen between two of the biggest tech companies in the world showing off their new AI-inflected search engines. Microsoft, which invested in the company that made ChatGPT, OpenAI,

they did a demo with Bing showing off how sophisticated their new AI-powered search was, and the reviews from tech reporters were really, really positive, especially considering where Bing is starting off in terms of its appraisal among tech users. And then Google showed off its own model, BARD, and it was kind of a mess. And so Microsoft stock goes up by 100 billion. Google stock goes down by $100 billion just because of AI-inflected search. So that's what tells me that like, it's kind of like- Well, shit, it even rose to BuzzFeed stock by a dollar. Right, yeah, but BuzzFeed stock increased by 15 cents or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. BuzzFeed now is doing AI-powered quizzes. Woo-hoo! I want to emphasize again, this tech isn't very good compared to the promises that people are making. And so to that extent, maybe, I know I just gave an analogy to the iPhone, maybe throw that out and say, it's a Sputnik moment. So 1957, Sputnik, the Russians launched the first satellite ever into space. The satellite sucks. Sputnik is terrible Russians launched the first satellite ever into space. The satellite sucks. Sputnik is terrible, like as a piece of technology. But it kicks off an international space race because America sees, holy shit, we can't let the Soviet Union own the skies.

And that kicks off the Apollo project. And the Apollo project has all of these incredible technologies that spin off from it. That, I think think is the kind of moment that we're in right now. We're in a Sputnik moment for AI where yes, you can look at the tech and say, it's not particularly sophisticated. It hallucinates. It gives me wrong answers. But so many people are looking at two numbers, Microsoft up a hundred billion, Google down a hundred billion and thinking we need to get into this race. We are going to go back to AI later when we do the predictions.

I think one other thing at the start of last year was the Ukraine felt like it was going to be this dominant thing that maybe took over the decade. And now at the end of the year, we're in a different place. I mean, you were doing an emergency podcast back then. And it obviously has not fizzled out, but it feels like it's transformed into something different. So where do we go with that? And what did we get wrong about that 12 months ago, 13 months ago? That's a great question. I want to be careful how I answer it, because I want to make a point about media coverage of news events. The war between Russia and Ukraine remains as important as it was a year ago when I

was doing, God, something like maybe 10 consecutive episodes on the Ukraine war. But it's entered into a war of attrition, which means that from a news standpoint, there's not a whole lot of action. Now, I want to be clear that I don't mean that the war doesn't matter anymore. But a part of news is like, has Ukraine surged into the Donbass and taken back this huge region? Has Russia launched a counteroffensive and crushed the Ukrainian army in the south? We're not seeing dramatic moves like that the way that we were a year ago. Instead, we're into this period of attrition. Now, that doesn't mean that in a few weeks, in a few months, the war could become

considerably bloodier and both sides could maybe step it up. I mean, certainly the U.S. has sent so much military material to Ukraine and so has many other European countries. It's still a really, really important story. But rather than be a sort of quick strike war where one side immediately wins, it's devolved into something that the people that I'm still talking to every week are saying, it could last in a phase like this for years, two years, three years from now. The situation on the ground could be basically what we have in mid-February 23. And in a scenario like that, even when it's an incredibly consequential story, it's not as compelling as a front page news story. And especially in America,

people are just looking at that in a lot of ways as is this going to lead to World War III? Is that the outcome? And now we've moved to Chinese spy balloons and UFOs are now the new things that people are talking about. By the way, I'm going to talk about UFOs in a second. And then the other thing I think that's changed from a year ago was, you know, you think about a year ago, Kyrie was refusing to play, um, without not

getting vaccinated and everybody was against him. Right. It does feel like there's been a shift on the vaccines and I can feel it anecdotally. And just in general, like some of the, some of the research has come out. Um, there's been some side effects and things like that. And, um, it just feels like there's more dialogue about it now versus where we were a effects and things like that. And, um, it just feels like there's more dialogue about it now versus where we were a year ago with Kyrie. And I'm not, I'm not excusing anything. I'm just pointing out a reality of where we are. I think in February, I think I do feel like anecdotally, a lot of people are like, would you get the vaccine the next time? Would you get the booster? Eh, I don't know. I don't know if I would do it the next time. It just

seems like the virus keeps changing. There's these new forms. What's the point of getting a booster versus 18 months ago, just blindly, oh, I got to get it. They're telling me to get it. Now it seems like there's a little resistance to that. I would say two things. One, you're clearly right that there is increased resistance to staying up to date with booster shots. The latest bivalent booster, the uptake, I think last I saw was in the depressing single digits, maybe in the low double digits. So clearly lots of people that got the first and second shot are not getting their booster shots now because their thinking is, I think, well, it seems like new variants come out every three months and I don't want to stick

a needle into my arm every three months. The deal that I made, this is me impersonating, trying to impersonate a hundred million people I don't know, so that's always difficult. But the deal I made is that you stick a needle into me once, maybe twice, and I'm done. And that decision in 21, 2021 was made before we had this cavalcade of variants that I think has scrambled people's sense of how much is too much. Well, and especially if you got the booster right before the Omicron virus kicked in and people who just got the booster got COVID anyway. And I think that was a little bit of a tipping moment, it felt like. I know it was for me. Yeah, that might be possible. I'll say this. If you look at the CDC's data for the share of Americans who are dying, who are vaccinated versus not vaccinated, and this goes back to the original

vaccination from Moderna or Pfizer, there has been consistently, every single month going back several years, a large gap in the mortality rate among the unvaccinated versus the vaccinated. So according to the best data that we have, the vaccines still are doing something. But I do think it's fair to say, because the first time I ever appeared in the show, I talked about the vaccines. And one of the things that was clearly being reported from both the Pfizer numbers and from the real world figures is that early on, the vaccines really did seem to protect against transmission of the disease. It was not just about protecting yourself from mortality.

It was also about stopping the train of infection. And what happened is we got the Delta variant and the Omicron variant. And now I think if I'm being honest, just about everyone I know, including myself who got vaccinated, then got the actual disease, got COVID. And, you know, I, I believe the CDC data and I believe the real world data and the clinical data that says that my mortality risk was reduced by the fact that I have kept up to date with my booster shots. But I, in the interest of meeting people where they are, understand the frustration that there was this implicit promise from the government and from these companies that if you get vaccinated, you won't get the disease. And what turned out to be the case, what turned out to be

true is that if you get vaccinated, your risk of dying, your risk of going to the hospital, your risk of getting extremely sick is significantly lowered. But the transmission promise, I think, was broken. Yeah, I would agree with that. Let's take a break and then we'll finally get to our predictions this episode is brought to you by Crown Royal it's an award winning whiskey it's of course a Canadian whiskey you probably saw the Super Bowl commercial Crown Royal took the time to thank Canada

for all the great stuff they've given us and they've given us a lot they invented hockey they invented basketball, lacrosse, football. Did you know they invented movie theaters and IMAX? I love all of those things. My son is even playing lacrosse this year. Hey, there are a lot of great things in the world

that you and I probably take for granted that we should thank Canada for. I know growing up, I loved hockey as much as I love basketball. And that's when I really fell in love with the tough but lovable Canadians. We had a few of them on the Bruins. Terry O'Reilly, Wayne Cashman, just tough, loyal dudes really taught me a lesson. Here's where it flips for me in Canada, though.

I'm officially worried. Canada's had, they invented all these things. They've had this huge impact. And yet basketball, we've always had the upper hand with them, right? They had Steve Nash, they had a couple other Canadians that succeeded.

But for the most part, it was always like, we always knew Olympics, any international competition, we're beating Canada. Well, look forward to 2024. They have Shea Gilgis Alexander,

who's one of the best 10 to 12 players in the league at this point. RJ Barrett, Jamal Murray, Andrew Wiggins, who was just the second best player on a title team and could guard anybody. Lou Dort, Dylan Brooks, Kelly Olenek, Ben Mathurin, Chris Boucher, Shaden Sharp,

Brandon Clark. They have that Brissette guy from the Pacers. They probably, there's two other Canadians I'm probably forgetting. Is Canada, are they going to take over basketball next? Is that what's going to happen? Well, regardless,

when you add up all that sports and entertainment that Canada has given us, it's pretty much a majority of what the shows of the Ringer Podcast Network have the privilege of talking about. So, thank you, Canada. And thank you, Crown Royal. Crown Royal, live generously and life will treat you royally.

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Sign up now. Just search Movember. All right, prediction time. I don't know where AI fits into this prediction. So why don't you go first? I asked you to make predictions about five different categories, tech, sports, Hollywood, food, culture, and I'll even give you a bonus if you had a sixth one you were itching to get off.

So you tell me where you want to start and I'll follow. Well, we can start with tech. We have already pretty much gone over my prediction or what I was going to predict for 2023 is that this is the year that by December, everyone is going to be talking about how every major company is getting into AI. Microsoft is going, is remaking itself as an AI first company. Google has for years announced it's an AI first company. These kinds of tools that are being built, these texts, these prompt to text tools, or these prompt to image tools like Dali, where you can say, you know, show me an image of a podcaster sitting on a couch in an impressionistic style. And in

seconds, it produces something that looks like, you know, like Monet painted the face I'm looking at right now. These tools are wondrous and they're going to be used in Hollywood. They're going to be used in video games. They're going to be used by kids. You know, one of my friends, Russ Anderson at the Atlantic said that one of the things that he does, um, or that he knows that some people do is when they have a dream that they can barely remember from the previous night, they, they enter that prompt into their computer and Dali or stable diffusion or one of these texts to image, um, technologies will draw them their dream that they can show to their kid or their spouse. The ability of these tools to act as dream amplifiers, I think, is absolutely fascinating. And my prediction, therefore, for tech in 23 is that this is unequivocally, without question,

the year of AI and the beginning of what's going to be, I think, a decade of AI. I really like it. I think you have to bring in some other pieces to this, like some cousins and some nephews. The deep faking stuff, I think they're just starting to perfect it more and more. I don't know if you saw Jimmy Kimmel's 20th anniversary show, but he had a conversation with himself from 2003 and they just took video of him and it was fucking creepy. Like it was like the guy that I worked with 20 years ago was now on the TV again. And I was talking to them about like, how hard was that? How you must've worked in that for months. I was like, no, not really. They have all the technology now. It's like, they do.

So just this whole world that we always kind of dreaded in some ways, that was a big part of movies dating back to like, you know, going back to the late 60s and just, oh, someday the computers are going to take over and watch out. And now it feels like it actually is realistic. It's the first time where like the plot of Terminator 1 and Terminator 2, and they're like laying out. And then the machines, once they got intelligence, that's when they decide. And that's my slight fear on this. I don't think we're going to have Terminator 1, Terminator 2, but it is kind of eerie that computers are now able to

make a video of me. That's not me. They're able to write somewhat like me. Maybe down the road, they'll be able to write exactly like me. We're going to have podcast ads that are done by my voice that I didn't do because they just measured my voice. This is this new world and it goes back to our crypto combo. I just hope we have some rules in place for some of this stuff. I hope it's not five years after we're like, oh shit, that went a little sideways. Man, we might need some rules. I would love to see us start thinking about some rules now. Would be nice. I could not agree more. I think the promise of this technology is incredible. And I think the risk is almost impossible to imagine the limit to. I mean, I know people at the State Department, for example, that are thinking about writing rules for ethical AI development in the US. So for example,

they don't want AI to lie to us. They want what is called AI alignment, right? We remain the boss of the AI and it can't trick us and do things that we don't want it to do. But let's say that we write those rules, that we delimit our AI based on certain ethical considerations. Well, maybe China won't do that. Maybe North Korea or the Soviet Union won't do that. So now other countries that can very easily build the same tools, but without those ethical considerations, do they have an edge now in the AI-inflected geopolitical warfare future? Maybe. I mean, these are the kind of weird, scary thoughts that come out of this AI decade that I'm predicting. And so I am not predicting something purely good,

to be clear. And maybe one analogy is, in 2010, if you and I were talking and I said, I think social media is really going to take off and it might define the 2010s. Well, it did in many ways. You know, Meta became one of the biggest companies in the world, Instagram, TikTok and all this. But there's no one I know who would say that social media was a pure unalloyed good. There are so many negative side effects, some of which I think we might talk about. And those side effects are in many ways psychological. The side effects from AI developed by our geopolitical adversaries that can lie to actors and essentially act as non-states, online terrorists. I mean, that is a terrifying possibility. And I am excited. It might not be the right word, but looking forward

to doing a lot of episodes about thinking, getting smarter about ethical AI. Well, think about the Cuban Missile Crisis six decades ago, where JFK basically has the two different, what were the telegrams? And he has to decide which one, which one he, which one he wants to kind of believe and respond to. And he just makes the decision, right? Now we're in a position where somebody could completely fabricate something that seems real in some way. And who knows what it is? It could be a video, it could be a communication. And then you're just adding this whole other layer of how to just be in charge of stuff that we can't even be in charge of the normal stuff. Now we're going to have to decide what's real, what's not of defined the 2010s. I started to wonder the more we get away from it, whether we look at it the same way we look at like the smoking in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s.

We're like, man, they just had Mickey Mantle just doing a cigarette ad and smoking, holding a baseball bat. It was fine. And they had no idea. Or the way we look at an old football game before 2010. Somebody just sent me a clip the other day of Ryan Clark just taking out Wes Welker, even though the pass was tipped at the line of scrimmage. He just basically beheads him. And I was like, whoa, remember football 15 years ago? And he's like, oh my God, why didn't we have rules for that stuff back then? And I really hope we don't look at social media that way from the 2010s, but I feel like we will. I think the further we get away, we're going to be like, wow, that caused a lot of damage to a lot of people, the conspiracy culture, teenage girls, all these different things.

The state of journalism, how afraid it made people to just write certain pieces. I just think we're going to be unpacking this 15 years from now. The analogy that makes the most sense to me isn't smoking because smoking, even though some people love it and it can be fun and social, it's pretty purely bad for you. It's basically destroying your lungs. Unless you're in Vegas, then I think it's all good. It's the only good thing.

What happens to your lungs in Vegas stays in Vegas. It's fine in Vegas. Anywhere else, Ben? I think it's more like attention alcohol. Because with alcohol, there's an understanding that this isn't purely good for you, but it can be fun. It can be extremely enjoyable with certain limits. And also we have rules about how certain people can't have access to alcohol, especially teenagers.

And in the same way, I think most of the most clearly harmful effects of things like Instagram have been on teenage girls through negative social comparison in particular, that it's increased distress and depression and social anxiety. And so with social media, where I have a complex relationship, on the one hand, it's incredibly useful for my, where I have a complex relationship, on the one hand, it's incredibly useful for my work that I have access to Twitter, but also sometimes I am aware of the capacity of all sorts of people to become addicted to it.

I think that is very similar to the dynamic that people have with alcohol. The difference between social media and alcohol, and this goes right to your point about how we find increasingly sophisticated ways to deal with something like head trauma. We know how to talk about alcohol addiction. We have had decades, centuries, maybe thousands of years to negotiate human beings' relationship to alcohol. We know what it's doing to us. Social media is 10, 15 years old. We don't yet fully understand what

it's doing to us. So we don't have the vocabulary around cutting people off. Like what's the equivalent of you should have a glass of water after every shot in a bar for social media. It's not a part of our vernacular. And so I think maybe in the next decade, we're going to build out that vocabulary. We're going to get more studies that show exactly what these algorithmic news feeds are doing to us. And then we'll develop a more sophisticated way of saying, if you are too deep or you have been looking at your screen too much, here's how to pull away in a way that still allows you

to get the best out of Twitter without cutting it off full-to-fee. The best out of Twitter. I mean, another analogy, it's kind of dark, but drunk driving up through, I would say, the 1990s, definitely Everybody, the penalties for the DUIs or a DUI car accident went way up and there was real deterrence. And by the time we got to the 2010s and then Uber comes in. And now I think if somebody, if you had a friend who was like,

man, I was so drunk last night when I drove home, you'd be like, what? That's the most insane thing I've ever heard. But in 1996, it wasn't. And I do think with social media, as we learn more and we're going to learn a lot more, it's not going to be great, which leads me to my prediction. I think this is the year TikTok gets banned in America. And I think there's a bunch of reasons for it. One is that you're talking about cigarettes and alcohol. TikTok is that it's, you're talking about like cigarettes and alcohol, like TikTok is one of the most addictive things that's ever been created. It is an absolute brain suck. I think it's horrible for kids and teenagers. So there's reasons for that. There's also people with vested interests and some power to get rid of it. And that's where I think you're talking about,

you have politicians that can make it a cause. You have competitors like Facebook, some of the big tech people who are like, let's get rid of this thing. There'll be more for us, more attention for us, more eyeballs for us, more money for us. And the China thing, which is, you know, is I think over the last couple of years,

they've increasingly become a threat. And you combine all that stuff with the election that's coming and somebody is going to make that one of their, one of their hallmark things. When I'm in charge, I'll get rid of TikTok. We'll reduce our reliance on blah, blah, blah. And I think it could be gone by the end of the year. I really do. I w if I was betting on it, I don't think it's even odds, but I think it could be gone by the end of the year. I really do. If I was betting on it, I don't think it's even odds, but I think it's probably like plus 200 TikTok is gone in America at the end of 2023. Let me tell you why I agree with much of that logic, but would take the other side of that bet every day.

What's going to happen, I think, is that all the ingredients that you mentioned are going to come into play. Democrats are moving against China in terms of economic trade. Republicans are against China in terms of geopolitics. There's all sorts of agitation on Capitol Hill, I think, to do something against China. And TikTok is clearly in the crosshairs. But before any law is passed and signed by President Biden to officially ban TikTok, what's going to happen is ByteDance,

the parent company of TikTok, is going to say, we cannot lose the North American market of TikTok. We can't allow other countries to get the idea in their head that banning TikTok is something that they could do. Our company, whatever, however many billion dollar company they have, our company could die in a year if this becomes a social contagion among global regulators. We're going to sell. And they're going to find some way to sell American TikTok to a US tech company with the promise of some kind of data firewall such that the Chinese Communist Party doesn't have any kind of direct oversight on the actual stuff that's going on on the content that's happening inside of TikTok. And so everything you

said up to the very end, all of this pressure suggesting the inevitability of a TikTok ban will actually accelerate a sale of American TikTok to a U.S. company. And that, I think, could absolutely happen in the next 12 to 18 months. A prediction off my prediction. That's right. This is great. I like this. I can see Zuckerberg doing that. All right. What do you got for a next category you pick? Let's do Hollywood. Okay. I got two predictions. Let me start with movie theaters. I'm pretty concerned about movie theaters. And I know this is something that anyone could have said for the last two years, three years, 10 years, arguably 70 years going back to like the peak

in tickets bought per capita. But something's happening into the domestic movie theater market that I think is really, really interesting and worth just pausing to look at a couple numbers. In 2002, Spider-Man sold 69 million tickets and 44 other movies sold 10 million tickets. That's like the middle class of film. 20 years later, last year, Top Gun sold 78 million tickets, more than the biggest film of

2002. But in the middle class of movies selling 10 million tickets, it wasn't 44, it wasn't 34, it was 19. The middle class of films in America is dying out in movie theaters, even though the smash hits are as big as ever. One more cut of that data. In 2000, 2001, and 2002, the top 10 movies accounted for about 22% of the total box office. Last year, the top 10 movies were 50% of the total box office. This is a market where there is no expectation of a growing middle class. All of the money is going to the top 10 movies. So what are these top 10 movies that are coming out in 2023? This Marvel phase is bad. The audience reviews are not nearly as positive

as the first phase. There's no Avatar. There's no Top Gun sequel. Some of the biggest movies that I'm most excited about, like Oppenheimer or Dune II, these are not films that are gonna make $500 million or a billion dollars. They're gonna make maybe 300 million.

You put it all together, that movie theaters are overwhelmingly more dependent on the big hits, plus the fact that I think this year's hits are going to be a little bit smaller. That spells a bad time for movie theaters. And as a result, my falsifiable prediction is that movie theaters are going to become a luxury business. The only way to save these theaters is for prices to go up and their footprint to go down. Theaters are going to become a little bit more like Broadway. The prices of the tickets are going to go up in order to capture more revenue from the many, but not enough, people who really do still love going to the movies five, 10, 15 times a year. Creed 3 will be an interesting one for this. Now, granted a sequel,

but that's a movie that 10 years ago when Creed came out, it was like, oh man, seeing that. Now it's like, I want to see it. Do I just wait until it's on Amazon in three weeks or four weeks or whatever streamer is carrying it? I did

that with, I didn't see Plane or Megan in the theater. And I really wanted to see both of those movies, obviously on the target audience for Plane. I mean, literally they must've been in the writer's room. Like, hey, we got to make one for Simmons here. I really like Plane. I didn't see it in the theater. I just waited. Went on Amazon. It was $24.99 to buy it and $19.99 to rent it. I bought it. Guess what? I've watched it twice. But I didn't need to go to the theater for that. So I think they're undercutting the middle class from this pandemic thing that happened where they were just getting the movies faster and faster on streaming. But in the same way, it's reduced my interest to go to

the theater. My prediction off your prediction. So Santa Monica right now, they're showing Boogie Nights on this theater that's on Montana Avenue. Sold out every night. They did like two week run, sold out, no tickets, like sold out right away. It's kind of a thing out in LA. And I'm wondering maybe movie theaters start to get a little more creative. Maybe there's some retro stuff. Maybe they tap into the nostalgia craze. And instead of having a 20-screen movie theater, maybe we're heading toward there's three or four, and they have the two or three biggest movies, and then you're a nostalgia movie. And we move toward... Have you been to the Alamo Draft House in Austin? Yeah. Or not, not in LA. It's great. They have food, they bring it. It's a cool screen. The seats are comfortable. And that goes back to your luxury

prediction. Maybe, maybe the days of the 20 theater complex is coming to an end, but I, I'm still in on movie theaters to some degree. I'll say this for movie theaters as an industry. It is one of the most resilient industries of the last a hundred years. And if you look at a graph of movie tickets bought per person in the U S it basically peaked in the 1940s. Like from a ticket spot per person standpoint, movies have been, the movie theater industry has been in a recession for 80 years. It doesn't feel like that. Movie theaters still have felt thriving up until the 90s, 2000s, 2010. So I am not betting against movie theaters. I'm observing that the middle class of film seems to be eroding for precisely the reasons that you mentioned, that people say, well, I kind of want to watch, you know, Tar. I kind of want to watch Creed 3.

But you know what? I can watch that in three weeks. I can rent it from Amazon Prime in three weeks. So I'll just wait the three weeks. That's really hurting that middle class of film. And theaters are going to have to find some way to adapt. I think it's really interesting that the Boogie Nights solution, again, makes movie theaters a little bit more like Broadway.

Broadway is not- Think outside the box, movie theaters. Don't just be like, oh, next Marvel movie's out. Yeah, but Broadway is not about, oh, we have a new playwright, a new show. No, Broadway is about, we're doing Death of a Salesman for the 19th time. We're bringing back Phantom for the 19th time.

We're allowing people to see familiar fare in a new way. And it's possible that movie theaters find that even as familiarity is conquering Hollywood in so many ways with the rise of sequels, adaptations and reboots, maybe just bringing back, you know, Godfather Part II and just a beautiful big theater where people can get martinis.

Tell me where, I'm in. Yeah, maybe that's the future. I also think the TVs just continue to get nicer and nicer. And when you're talking about middle-class, even like middle-class and slightly upper middle-class, then upper class can all get these movies on these really nice TVs and have basically the same experience where they don't. One thing you didn't mention, one reason, one strike against movie theaters that I just don't think they've solved is the behavior in the movie theaters, which people have become less and less tolerant of because we're not around

people enough anymore, especially post pandemic where it's like, you're in the same row with somebody and they're on their phone and the light shining from the phone. And it's 80 times more frustrating than it was four years ago, because you don't have that kind of that give and take with humanity anymore. Cause you're so used to have everything your way. So it's like, fuck it. Stay at home.

I'll rent Megan on Amazon prime. And you just do it that way. Uh, my, uh, my Hollywood prediction. I think this writer's strike, I I'm a big,

I'm a big history repeats itself person. And there's going to be a writer's strike this year in Hollywood. It's coming. And it's going to allow Hollywood to reset a lot of the things that aren't working anymore the same way they did in 2007 and 2008 after that strike ended when it was like, oh, you know what we shouldn't do is give everybody and their brother a development deal. Let's stop doing that. Hey, maybe we don't have to film 100 pilots. We'll just do 20. This time around, the rhetoric is, you can see it from Iger in his Disney earnings call

and all across the board, people are like, hey, we thought this streaming thing was a really good idea. It's actually not a great business. Iger came out and said it. He's like, hey, streaming's a bad business so far. We're doing this wrong. We're spending way too much money on content. We don't make enough back.

So in a lot of ways, it's like the same philosophy of some of the startup companies that people had in the 2010s, where it's like, even if we spend way more than we make, somebody will buy us because they'll look at our revenue number and it's like, oh, cool. Well, you lost hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but you made a couple hundred and then they buy the company. It's like, oh, you guys don't make any

money. It's like, yeah, you could have studied the books and found out immediately that we didn't make money. And I think it's the same thing with this streaming seesaw, where it was this arms race to spend so much money on content and all of them at the same time are realizing that didn't work. And now they have a chance to just reset it. It's like the amnesty clause in the NBA for an entire industry. And I think it's going to go badly. I think we're going to have way less produced shows just going forward. Way less produced shows, way less produced movies,

just way less is what's going to happen the next five years. I absolutely agree with this prediction. And I spin it a little bit further. I would say not only are we going to see peak TV in terms of the number of original scripted shows being made, we're already seeing it, by the way. We're seeing it in the UK. We're seeing it in the US. The peak was definitely in the late 2010s, early 2020s. I think you're going to see an age of consolidation in streaming. You have to, because streaming isn't a good business. And so in a weird way, pivoting off of your, you know, eternal recurrence, history always repeating itself idea, we're going to edge our

way back toward a cable bundle. There's just too many streaming sites. I feel like we're almost already there. Yeah. I mean, Showtime and Paramount Plus are combining. We're now looking at Comcast and Disney are having a showdown over Hulu. I think it makes a lot of sense for them to come together. Disney needs clarity strategically. It needs cash because it's burning it on Disney Plus. Comcast needs to salvage Peacock. It makes sense for Comcast to swallow up Hulu, Disney to get the money that it can amortize over several years, which will make its earning statements look a little bit better. And right there, you're edging your way back toward cable bundles competing against each other rather than individual streaming networks

competing against each other. It goes back to, I don't remember who said it, but one of my favorite lines in business, there's only two ways to make money, bundling and unbundling. All right, we've come to the end of the era of unbundling. It's done. You cannot unbundle anymore. There's only one path forward to make money. It's bundling. And I agree, this is the year we're going to start to see it. There's going to be some people who suffer. Everybody who has an idea for a horror movie where there's something wrong with the house or a little girl got touched by something and might be possessed.

Those people are in a lot of trouble. Everybody with a terrible idea for a rom-com where somebody whose life isn't going that great goes back to their old hometown and sees their old boyfriend and it's like a chainsaw and it just goes crazy. And then she has to leave and their life goes bad. But she learned something. That movie's done. All of those tropes are going to be out the window. We've made these same movies

a hundred different ways. I think there's fatigue with that too. You go to Netflix, just click on the horror and just go through. And there's just pictures of houses. It's like looking at fucking Redfin. All of this is ending. We're going to take one more break and then hit the other categories. When you ride transit, please be safe. Yeah, be safe. Because what you do, others will do too.

Others will do it too. So don't take shortcuts across tracks. Don't do that. In fact, just don't walk on tracks at all. Not at all. Trains move quietly so you won't hear them coming. You won't hear them coming. See, safe riding sets an example.

Yeah, an example for me. Because safety is learned. It's learned. Okay, give it up. Give what up? Really? Really, really. Ugh.

This message is brought to you by Metrolinks. After decades of shaky hands caused by debilitating tremors, Sunnybrook was the only hospital in Canada who could provide Andy with something special. Three neurosurgeons. Two scientists. One movement disorders coordinator. 58 answered questions. Two focused ultrasound procedures.

One specially developed helmet. Thousands of high-intensity focused ultrasound waves. Zero incisions. All right, coming back. We have three categories left. We have sports, we have food, and we have culture. I'll let you, if you want to glom onto your, the fake meat era is over. If you want that to just be your prediction, I'll allow it, or you could come up with another food prediction.

It is my food prediction. So I'll just gloss it quickly and then you can make your food prediction. So the prediction is, the headline is, it's a vegetarian and vegan winter. Like these, we think about the momentum that you had for meat alternatives and grocery stores and fast food places, even at fine dining restaurants. We had Beyond and Impossible Growing, this Impossible Burger, and Dunkin' and McDonald's were experimenting with plant-based meat.

Eleven Madison Park, one of the most famous restaurants in the world, announced it was going with a full vegan menu. The reviews have been, at least for an upscale three Michelin star restaurant, kind of disastrous. So I think all of this is coming to a pause. It's coming to a hiatus. I'm not predicting at all that like, you know, the fact that a hoity-toity restaurant in Manhattan had a bad year and that means the world is going to change. I'm saying you put all of this together. And there's, I just see a vibe shift in meat

where we had this period where it really seemed like there was going to be peak meat, that Americans were going to become more vegetarian, more vegan, eating more of the plant-based stuff. I made this prediction in the Atlantic. I was wrong. When I just pay close attention with open eyes, the numbers that are right in front of me in the news, it's a vegetarian and vegan winter. And 2023 is going to be a year where meat makes a comeback. Not that it needs a comeback. It's already a huge part of American culture. But it's going to make even more of an acceleration.

So I listened to your podcast that you did with the Why Don't Diets Work guy. Or why is everybody's concept of a diet different? And why can't we just settle on a diet that actually works? And the reason we can is there is no diet that works. And every human being is different. So my daughter and I listened to that together. And it really made her think a lot about, even though she was really, really healthy eater, but just food choices. And my food prediction coming off that podcast, because my wheels have been turning, I think we're going to enter a portion era.

I think portions are going to be the new thing that people talk about when they talk about dieting. Because the bottom line is, as you covered in that pod, and as a lot of people have written about, all this low fat stuff or, oh, I got gluten-free potato chips instead of real potato chips. It's like, well, they just have more sugar in them. You're just pouring more sugar in your body. All the stuff that is seemingly healthier

or it's like, oh, that's less calories. It's like, okay, well, what's the fat then? All this stuff really comes back to are you eating too much or not? And if you're eating and it's like, oh, I just put down a bag of potato chips, I'm eating dinner in two hours, then I'm going to the movie

and I'm going to have popcorn M&Ms and it's my cheat day. It's like, no, it's actually like you're having too many portions and eating too much day. And I think there's going to be a new wave of, and they have some of the apps already where you can keep track of what you eat. But I think the big thing heading forward is going to

be, it's fine to eat a bunch of times, just don't eat a lot because your stomach's going to grow there. And there's just going to be all this science that comes with it. Do I sound like a madman? No, you don't sound like a madman at all. It sounds like the revenge of common sense in food. To a certain extent, it's like, you know, the energy balance model of food has to be true to a certain extent. Like if you eat a certain number of calories and you burn more than that number of calories, then overall, it seems difficult to imagine that you are going to be gaining that much weight. And that's fundamentally what you're talking about. If you put the cap on the calories that are coming in and just basic logic dictates that if you exercise enough, then you can't possibly gain weight. Don't eat too late. There's basic

things. We just have to get back to the basics. Yeah. It's like Belichick, just do your job. Make plays, do your job. This is my thing about diet and nutrition science overall is that my pet theory, and I forget if I said this in the podcast, is that we all know deep down in our bones what's good for us, what's bad for us, and what to do. Like as a theory, we know what to do. But living out that theory is hard because the willpower stuff is really hard. And a lot of that is genetic. Some people just get hungry much easier than other people. For some people, the fact of hunger

weighs more in their consciousness than for other people. I know people who they're hungry, but they can forget about it. They're like, yeah, I'm hungry. One of my best friends in the world, he's hungry. It's like he's got blinders on. He can't do anything else. He's like, I have to solve this problem of hunger immediately before I do anything else. So people are really different, but the fundamental basics of diet don't seem that complicated. Don't eat too much. Don't eat too much sugar. My question for you is that the episode that we did just after that pod we talked about with David Ludwig, was about this revolution in anti-obesity medication, semaglutide, ozempic.

What about that shot? The moment you stop taking the shot, you gain the weight back. So you just have to take it for the rest of your life. But I know multiple people that are taking that shot. That was my question. I wanted to know because some people reached out to me from Los Angeles and they said, it's not talked about so much yet, but among my close friends,

a lot of people are on this anti-diabetes shot, which just to catch people up, has just shown extraordinary effects for weight loss, provided that you stay on it. Makes me nervous. Yeah, there's a bunch of things that make me nervous.

It's like something like Rogaine, right? You stop using it and the effect immediately goes away. But what is your take on this craze around semaglutide and ozempic? Well, as you know, I always like to wait a couple years and watch what happens

before I dive into something like that. So I never want to be in the first wave, just in general with anything. I never want to buy like, oh, Apple's created this new product. I'm like, cool, I'll get the second year of it. I'm not getting the first one. So I kind of want to wait on that. I do think we're hitting this weird era. It's not a weird era. We're hitting this era where people are starting to realize because we have now 40, 50 years of evidence that these stopgap diets or these different little, oh, I'm trying this or I did this, that there turns out to be a flaw in all of them. And so people are getting smarter and savvier just in general with all these little stopgap things. I was thinking about this because I was watching, my daughter's been ripping through Seinfeld and I watched the frozen yogurt episode with her where they think they're eating this amazing, I forget it's no sugar or low-cal yogurt,

but they're all putting on weight. And Jerry's going, I've gained four pounds. And it turns out they find out that it actually had sugar in it. But this goes back to the 80s of people just trying to do these shortcuts or trying to, oh, find this or, oh, you got to try these chips. They're only 50 calories. And I think in 2023, people are starting to realize it's all bullshit. I have a friend who's been saying this forever, like just drink real milk. Forget all this low fat, nonfat, 2%. have a friend who's been saying this forever, like just drink real milk, forget all this low fat, nonfat 2%, like go back, look at the pictures of the people in the 50s and 60s. They look great. And it's like kind of semi hard to refute. I don't know. I, I think that everyone, everyone knows what's good for them and they want a shortcut. I mean,

that right there is, that's the diet book industry want a shortcut. I mean, that right there is the diet. That's the diet book industry in a nutshell. People know fundamentally what is true and what is false, but no one wants to go by the basics of eat less, eat more fruits and vegetables, whatever Michael Pollan said, eat not too much, mostly plants. That is not fun. Don't eat red meat every day. People want a fun shortcut. Yes, they want the Jordan Peterson lion diet where they only eat like elk, or they want to find the Atkins shortcut where they can eat as much bacon as they want, provided they never have a single piece of bread for the rest of their life, or otherwise it'll

blow up like a balloon. People want these shortcuts. But I do think that fundamentally, if you truth serumed a thousand people, they would all tell you the same basics about nutrition. We know, but we don't want to believe what we know. We want to believe in the possibility that there's a shortcut to get the body of our dreams. Yeah. And also do what's best for you. Like I don't eat a lot of bread. I was gluten free for a while just because I was trying to get rid of bread because I always felt like it made me tired. But I can eat bread and I'm fine. Like whatever. I just, people have to, excess is the murder. There's no shortcut other than avoid excess. Don't eat late at night. Anyway. All right. Go to your next, uh, we have two left. What's your next one? Well, my next one is sports.

Um, and I was thinking here, like, you know, there's a couple of interesting things that have happened with with ratings. I'm not going to go in. I'm not going to do a ratings thing. But there was this graph that went viral of the most popular hours of television for the last 12 months. You saw that? All football. Yeah. It's ridiculous. I think 82 of those popular hours were NFL. Another maybe five were college football.

The rest were sports, except for the Academy Awards, the election, and I think the Thanksgiving Zay Parade. So like linear TV, traditional television right now, it's still all, it's all sports and everything else is in decline. There's no prediction to make there. That's been sort of the status quo for several years.

But I do think that's going to continue. I was thinking about like, what are the predictions that I could have made a year ago that would have turned out accurate? And I was thinking like, if I came on the show and, you know, I didn't know anything. I basically knew very little about sports. And I was like, you know what? Let's start with football. Well, Patrick Mahomes is pretty good. I bet he wins MVP and Super Bowl MVP and the Super Bowl.

Let's go to baseball. I don't know. Who's the most dominant team in the last five years? The Houston Astros? Yeah, let's pencil them in for the championship. In basketball, you know, there's all these incredible players. You got Giannis and Luka and Embiid. I don't know who stands out. I'll just cry uncle and give it to whoever won it last year, Jokic. You, you go to the NBA, you say, who's the dynasty? Who's, who's been the most successful team in the last six years? Uh, that was obviously the golden state warriors. I don't know much about basketball. I'll just say the golden state warriors when they're fourth as a core, that all happened. Like it's been a great year for sports. I don't want to make it sound like I'm endorsing the, it's all a script, um, uh, conspiracy theories, but it's all a script conspiracy theories. I like some of my favorites. It's an amazing theory.

We really are in an age of dynasties across the board. And by the way, I think that's good. I think dynasties in sports are really, are fun. Like an untested theory of sports popularity that I have is that despite the fact that the leagues are designed for parody, national audiences do not want parody. We don't want randomness. We love dynasties.

That's narratives. That's clear villains. It's clear heroes. That's what we like. And so in that spirit, I'm going to predict that the era of dynasties continues. I'm going to say that 2023 is going to be the same finals as 2021. I think it's going to be Suns-Bucks, New Look Suns. I think we might get, I'll predict our first ever, maybe not first ever, but first in a while, Super Bowl repeat.

I think we're going to get Eagles-Chiefs again. We'll see what happens with Jalen Hurd's rookie contract. I think we're going to find a lot of repeat narratives in 2023 as we are firmly situated in this age of dynasties. I like it. I actually like when it's a little more static, but I'm a great team fan.

I like when teams have a little run. I'm glad even though I'm a Pats fan and the Chiefs are in the conference, I like that there's a mountain to climb now, the way the Pats were for a long time. Now it's like, all right, you got to get by the Chiefs. That's our marker now. I like having the markers in sports. Otherwise, it just feels like, you know, shaking a snow globe. My prediction is NBA related. And I haven't really talked about this yet on a pod,

but I'll just make it quick. I think this is going to be like a seminal year for the league for what the next 10 years look like. Because they have all this network and streaming money that they're trying to figure out their new deal. They have the CBA kind of looming.

They have to figure out all this stuff with how much should the max salary be? What's the rookie scale look like? What are the bonuses for all NBA? And there's going to be way more money in the league, way more money. And we're going to have right now, we have guys who like somebody like Devin Booker

or Dame Lillard in like the last year of their extension, they can make like 60 million. Carl Towns is another one. It's like 60 million. It's a lot of money, right? That the max, if all the money that comes in correlates to where it is now, you could be talking about like 85, $90 million guys.

So now you have that, you have just insane amounts of money per year, which is great. Congratulations to all those people. We also have fans who are now watching where anytime somebody is remotely unhappy, they just push a trade to another team, right? Or they, I don't like it anymore.

Basically, the NBA has turned into like a class of eighth grade girls, where it's like, I don't like Jenny anymore. I'm now friends with Olivia. And what happened to Jenny? She just slept over. Now she sucks. She's a bitch. I hate her.

That's the NBA. So how do they govern this? How do they have a competitive league? How do they keep the connection with the fans? And how does this not spiral out of control? I think there's going to be a lot of give and take over these next nine months. Because if you remember,

we had a very junior version of this in 2016. The cap exploded. And it was the Joaquin Noah, Luau Dang, Evan Turner, Alan Crabb, guys making $60 million. It was like, whoa, that was weird. It allowed Durant to go to the Warriors. But this is so much money concentrated to such a few, such a small group of stars, maybe 35, 40 and all, who now have this inordinate sense of power that now threatens how the league would operate year to year. I'm not saying this is an anti-player empowerment thing. This is just like a competitive thing. Do you want to have a league where just

every time somebody is unhappy, they can be like, trade me, I'm out. How do they fix that? How do they put rules in place on that that are fair to everybody? I think it's going to be like landing the fucking, you know, Gerard Butler landing the plane in the jungle. It's going to be impossible. It's like, oh, there's a tiny strip. I don't know how they're going to do it. You have so many people with so many vested interests and how they should turn out that oppose each other. I don't know how it plays out. And everybody I've talked to is like, I don't know how it plays out. And everybody I've talked to is like, I don't know how it plays out.

So my prediction is this is going to be a mess. That's really interesting. I have a question back to you about the economics of the NBA. Yeah. It doesn't seem clear from a rating standpoint that the NBA's audience is growing, at least domestically. I know the

international audience is massive. The game audience is way down. Game audience is down. Yeah. So by certain metrics, whether it's average rating for an in-season game or in-game attendance, by certain metrics, the NBA seems to be sort of plotting along or maybe, you know, dipping a little bit. But then you're talking about the fact that stars, the NBA, because of new rights deals can maybe expect to earn 40, 50% more than the max salary today. How does that match up? How does that match up? And is there any limit to that logic? Like salaries can't go up and up forever if the audience flatlines forever. Well, but think about it this way. So I remember Inside Sports, one of the great magazines ever, they had, I think, I'm going to say like 1980, they had

Nolan Ryan on the cover and it was like the most expensive athlete in the league. It was one of those, like the first million dollar guy or whatever. Or they had all the guys who made a million dollars total for the year. And I was like, oh my God, like 40 guys making a million dollars. Seemed like so much. Now the guys make 40, 50 times more than that. So to think like there's no limit or that there is a limit on this, I think is unrealistic because the way the CBA has done,

it's 50-50. Owners get half, players get half. So if you're just putting 40% more money into the salary cap, guess who gets half of it? The players. So I do think we're going to have $85, $90 million a year guys.

And I don't think the public realizes that yet. The teams realize it. Everybody kind of behind the scenes is talking about it. But what do you do? It's not like football. Football has an incredible amount of money, right? But they have 53 guys on each roster. So it's dispersed in a totally different way. So Mahomes makes 40, 45 million. I mean, if Mahomes was a basketball player, he'd be worth 90 million. So I just, I think it's going to be contentious and I'm not positive. We, Adam Silver, who I really like as a guy, I think he's a nice person. It'll be interesting if he's a peacetime

conciliary or a wartime conciliary to borrow the old godfather thing, because I think that we're headed to a wartime conciliary time with this thing. They're going to have to put in real rules and they're going to have to make it so like, hey, if you sign one of these Giants extensions, you got to stay with this team for like three years. There is no trade. You cannot be, it's like part of that

is a no trade clause for three years. That's the stuff they're talking about behind the scenes, but it hasn't manifested itself yet. So anyway, we're going to watch the CBA basically get rewritten in a way that we'd never seen before with whatever this next deal is, is my prediction. Last question, the NBA, what are the odds of a franchise tag equivalent in the new NBA contract? Because that clearly has been used in football to keep someone like Lamar from leading the Ravens. You're striking now.

That's a strike. I think you have a more realistic, if you sign a giant max extension, you have to stay on that team for two years or you don't get paid one of those type of things. You're just basically off the table as a trade candidate. So KD signed that big extension, cannot be traded for two years from that point on. I think they want stability.

I don't think they like guys jumping around like this. That's not good. It's fun for the players. It's fun for people like me to have stuff talk about a podcast, but you know, is it, is it, was it fun for the people in Brooklyn who just bought all those jerseys and went through the, now they just have a completely different team. I don't know if that's a good thing. You know, you want, you want, you want your players to have relationships with cities. Yeah. And I don't know. From an entertainment standpoint, it's dramatic as hell. I mean, look, Superbowl week, I listened to maybe eight hours of podcasts. I would say that seven and a half hours of those podcasts were about the KD trade and three minutes of those podcasts were about the Superbowl. It's

just remarkable that like, you know, from a rating standpoint, like these NBA games are getting like what a million people watching concurrently. Super Bowl is getting 100 million, 100 X. But all of the podcast energy, all the cable news or cable news, the sports news energy seems based around NBA drama. I find that discrepancy just incredibly fascinating that the NBA was almost like it was like a black swan event with the which is the trade deadline and then the KD trade during Super Bowl week. Because we'd never had Super Bowl week and the trade deadline at the same time, I don't think. I think that was the first time. All right, last prediction. Culture is the only one left. Do you have a culture prediction? I do. I hope this counts as a cultural prediction because it's the story that I'm writing right now for The Atlantic. I'll absolutely do a podcast on it for Plain English. And I think it's one of the most important stories in the country. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey is a CDC survey that is the gold standard for measuring the state of teen behavior and teen mental health. And it just came out this week, the latest numbers. Between 2011 and 2021, the share of teenage

girls who say they experience, quote, persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased from 36% in 2011 to 57% in 2021. So nearly six in 10 teenage girls today say they feel persistent sadness or hopelessness. The share of girls who say they've contemplated suicide has increased 50% in the last decade. This is just an astonishingly important thing. I mean, I can't emphasize enough how striking the statistic is and how strange it is in the context of other numbers. This is the richest country in the history of the world. This is a period of peace. It's a period of economic growth. We have the lowest unemployment rate since the 1960s. We have nearly the lowest poverty rate on record. Child food insecurity has

been declining for decades. This is not a situation where you can easily point to some material condition in the US and say, well, of course, teen anxiety is spiking. They're more concerned than ever about their parents finding a job or about where the next meal is coming from. You can't point to that. And then you look at teen behavior. Bullying is not increasing. Teens are smoking less. They are drinking less. They're doing fewer drugs. That's even true if you include vaping. So you've got this just unbelievably fascinating mystery.

Teen anxiety is rising exponentially, but all of these subjects you might look at, you're ruling out. So of course, what do you rule in? Well, you rule in smartphones. You rule in social media. Maybe you rule in parenting styles. This is such an important question and

there's not really a national conversation about it. So, you know, a congressional committee or some kind of blue ribbon commission is not necessarily an exciting prediction for 2023 in culture, but this is going to enter the mainstream in a real way. We're going to have a more salient national conversation around teen anxiety in a way that by the end of this year, I'd predict it's going to be impossible to say, I don't know about this statistic. Everyone is going to know about this statistic because it is both so important and in a certain light, so mysterious. So my daughter came on my podcast right after Labor Day. It was the last time she came on. And one of the things

we talked about in detail was basically this. And that she was feeling a little bit sad for the first time. She's a happy person. She has a lot going on. It was the first time she kind of seemed like in a funk. And we tied a lot of it to the phone use. And that was when we put limits on, but it was a combination of just being on the phone too much, lying in bed, like doing different things or, you know, going on Instagram and what are the things she's following? Like she's following either people

who are looking their best or she's following these different food sites. And then she's like, it's 9.30 net, I'm hungry. And she gets upset, she's hungry. And then it's all these different rabbit holes mentally that you go down and guess how we fixed it? She's not on her phone as much. You know, we put limits on there

and we did things like that. I think so much of it is tied to the phone use with teenage girls. You know, my daughter's gonna be 18 in three months and I have a lot of anecdotal evidence from a lot of different people, obviously. And it seems like the phone is one of the common denominators

on top of all the other reasons it's messed up to be a teenage girl. This ties into my prediction though. So we're not 100% out of the pandemic, but we're mostly out of the pandemic. But we have some distance from it finally. And I think we're going to really start to put the pandemic in to have their 20s and they just got robbed for two, three years. And then I think it's older people who were by themselves just how damaging and scary that was for those people and how stressful it was and that they're not out of it yet. Even though we're kind of out of it, they're not. They've been changed because I know anecdotally, I know just from talking to different people,

it just felt like it had a profound effect on multiple demos that we're still kind of unpacking because it was in the moment. So we're not thinking about a big picture, but now this will be the year we start being like, holy shit, look at this. I mean, my daughter, she was in ninth grade during the pandemic in March. Didn't really get back to school without a mask until last September. That was her high school. I think for somebody like her, she's just like, what just happened? I'm about to go to college. I barely feel like I was in high school. So I just think a lot of stuff's going to come out about that. And on top of that, we live in this culture where there's a lot of like think pieces. There's a lot of stuff shared

on social media about this is this either bad thing that happened to me, or I feel bad about this. And I just feel like there's going to be an awareness this year that we didn't have before. Anyway, I don't know if that's a prediction, but it's something. No, it's definitely already happening. It's something that's already happening. And the same way that I wanted to be careful

about my reappraisal of the vaccines, where I think they clearly had a positive effect in terms of reducing mortality, but they were disappointing to a lot of people in their inability to reduce transmission. I think that we're going to have a similar reevaluation about the relationship between COVID, lockdown, and schools. I know there's a lot of policymakers and a lot of writers that are looking around the world, and they're saying not every country reacted to the pandemic the same way the U.S. did in terms of closing schools as a first order reaction. Lots of other countries seem to have kept schools open. Maybe they did it

with masks. Maybe they did it with more universal health care. But they kept schools open. And it's not obvious that their rates of infection or their rates of COVID death were higher. So it might be the fact that in a disease that has the age stratification that COVID has, where it's incredibly dangerous to get it if you're in your 80s, very dangerous in your 70s, a little less dangerous in your 60s. But starting around middle age, the mortality rates really start to come down. How do we react when it comes to the treatment of teenagers who, thank God, were not the most affected in terms of mortality by this disease, but who still have relationships with their grandparents and still have relationships with older teachers? I do think that it's so unfortunate that the conversation around COVID has become so

ludicrously and impossibly polarized by ideology. People really, really have dug in. But I would love a more comprehensive appraisal of what the US policy was, city by city, state by state, for shutting schools, what the policies were overseas, and some kind of effort

to pull out from all of that data what is the best policy. What was the right thing to do? Yeah. If we get SARS-3, if we get COVID-2, right, what do we do when we have this kind of a stratification of disease? Does it still make sense to force kindergartners to have remote learning with the understanding that remote learning when you're five years old is kind of fundamentally impossible. That was another demo I didn't even mention was the five to eight-year-olds

who that was when they're supposed to be socially indoctrinated and they couldn't be. It's a really hard question. It's a profoundly important point. It's an issue where people are incredibly dug in. And I know that the CDC has really taken taken on the chin in terms of their reputation. But something like the CDC, you know, like some big research policy or project from Harvard or Yale, some trust institution, I think, really needs to do this work because this

is not going to be the last pandemic of the 21st century. And we clearly have to do better, not only for the people most affected by the disease, in this case, seniors, but also for people who are suffering from the spillover effects of our reaction to the disease, like children in this country who clearly have suffered in terms of their learning loss and maybe their social acculturation as well. Yeah, this will be the COVID decade, even though COVID's basically was done last year for all intents and purposes, but the after effects of it will shape the decade.

The same way 2010s was a social media decade and you just go back. 2000s was the internet decade. You can keep going backwards. Everything you kind of remember a decade by one thing or two things.

And this will be, I think that will be the number one thing. Before we go, I kept you way too long. You did a podcast with Rosillo about records. Mm-hmm. I think that will be the number one thing. Before we go, I kept you way too long. You did a podcast with, uh,

we're still about records. My favorite record based on that. It kind of spans different generations and it doesn't like, you know, Wilts hundred points.

We actually might see that again at some point or it'll just be somebody makes 23s or you can name all these different things. The Lakers 33 game winning streak in 1972 is my favorite record because it doesn't matter what's going on in basketball. It doesn't matter what the rules are.

It doesn't matter what evolution we have, what phase we're in, whether Victor Wembynjama is now the dominant guy, whether we're having a hype boom, whether we're having a shooting boom, whatever. It's just really fucking hard to win 33 basketball games in a row. It just is.

And when Miami got to like 25, that was super exciting. The when Miami got to like 25, that was super exciting. I had the Golden State got to 25. Miami, they lost it at 27. They still had six to go. That's my favorite one. I think anytime somebody gets within 10 of that, that's going to be the most exciting non-Boston sports thing that can happen for me. I don't really care about the home run record. Even LeBron's points record, I didn't even know what the actual number was. It was like, oh, he's going to pass Kareem. Nobody actually knew what the number was. You go on down the line.

But I think that 33 games is a really cool one. So anyway, I wanted to mention that. No, it's great. Yeah, and for those who want to look it up, yeah, Russillo and I talked about the most awesome stats in U.S. sports history. And we broke down our favorite statistics in football

and basketball and Olympics and baseball. So the rule that I had to find some way to compare records across sports is what I called the 50% rule. And I said, are there records where number one is more than 50% ahead of number two. And it turns out you can find this in many, many sports, whether it's Barry Bonds' walking records or Simone Biles' championships or Bill Russell's eight straight championships. No other team, I think, has ever won five in a row.

Yeah, right. That one's not going down probably either. Right. So with the winning streaks in basketball, won five in a row. Yeah, that one's not going down probably either. Right. So with the winning streaks in basketball, we have the Lakers at 33, the Golden State Warriors, looks like they hit 28,

Heat hit 27 in 2012, 2013. So those don't necessarily surpass my 50% rule. I mean, 33 wins in a row is freaking ridiculous. I thought the Warriors were 25 because they went 25-0. I don't think they got to 28. So maybe with the 50% rule, maybe it's like, all right, so it's easy to get to like

16, 17, 18. A lot of teams do that. But after maybe the 18, it's still not 50% better than the 27. With the Golden State, I was cheating. It turns out at the end of the 15 season, they won their last four games. Yeah, I don't count that. That's not counting.

No, nobody was counting that. It's the heat at 27 that is the next closest to 33. So that still doesn't count the 50% rule. It's impossible because every game becomes a playoff game around like number 22. So you then have to win 11 straight playoff games in a row with incredible media attention. And then you have to win the 33rd game to get to 34. And then you, you know, I just don't see anyone ever doing it again. I honestly believe 100 points in a game is more realistic than somebody doing a 34 game winning streak in the NBA.

Interesting. Well, especially with the way that they rest stars today, that might make the 33 straight especially difficult. I'll say this. My favorite record, and this also, I believe, was Russello's pick, my favorite record in the history of North American sports, it's Wayne Gretzky. He is the NHL's all-time leader in goals.

He is the all-time leader in assists. He's therefore, obviously, the all-time leader in points. He is the all-time leader in assists. He's therefore obviously the all-time leader in points, which are awarded for both goals and assists. The crazy thing is that Gretzky had so many assists that if he had never scored a goal in his entire professional career, he would still be the NHL's all-time leader in points. And that's just ridiculous.

It's a great one. You can't even contemplate it. Yeah. So that still gets never won with a bullet from me, but yeah, it was, it was a fun record and it was an incredibly fun excuse to spelunk through baseball reference and pro football reference and all these places to figure out the coolest records in the history of sports. I mean, part of the problem with the longevity era is it's kind of ruined some of these records, right? Like, you know, just LeBron being able to still keep his body in shape 20 years into the NBA, which was like an impossibility before maybe 10, 15 years ago. And then you think, all right, well, what does this look like 10 years from now?

Could somebody play for 30 years? You know, like Brady was the one that really screwed it up. Where you think like in the old days, John Elway just playing 15 years was like, whoa, man, he took so many hits. That's amazing. He played that long. And now Brady, you know, basically had to tell Brady to go home. I think he would have played again if he found a team. He's going to be 46 next year.

Yeah. Before we go, can I show you my favorite Brady stat that I uncovered during the reporting for this piece and podcast? This comes from the Boston sports radio host, Alex Barth. He said the NFL career, the NFL record for career completions is 67.8%. Tom Brady has made the conference championship. This was last year, 73.7% of the seasons. He's been the primary starter prior to 2022. That means that Brady makes the conference championship at a higher rate than any QB completes passes. That might also be true of Mahomes. I mean, Mahomes lasts for 21 years or something. We'll see about that.

But I mean, I find that a particularly incredible stat. See, I think there's a better Brady one. There was one, because I remember I did this in a column and I don't know what the final number is, but he's by far the most playoff wins, right right I think he had like 34 or 35 playoff wins that's right 35 but he also had I'm gonna say like 13 buys or 14 buys so if you count the buys as a playoff win where it's just like basically you've said who's advanced in the most playoff rounds in the history with the Super Bowl being the final advancement.

He would have advanced like 49 times and the next guy is like 22, 23, something like that. So I always thought that was a good one. Because I like, why should he get penalized with the buys? That should count. Or we should include the buys. It's like he won 35 playoff games and he also had 13 buys. Same thing for Mahomes. I don't know what Mahomes is up to for playoff wins, but he also has three buys. It's like he won 35 playoff games and he also had 13 buys. Same thing for Mahomes. I don't know what Mahomes is up to

for playoff wins, but he also has three buys and that should be part of the record. It's hard to get a fucking buy. Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. Yeah, the Brady postseason stats, it's basically if it's games or yards or completions, he's got them all. Can I be, when you

do the sequel to that pod with Rosillo of most overrated records, can I be invited on that? Can we do that pod with Rosillo Of most overrated records Can I be invited on that? Can we do that threesome? Yeah Overrated records I love it Okay

Most overrated records Would be a good one Alright Derek Thompson I love reading you In the Atlantic I love listening to your podcast Plain English

Can't wait to see What you have in store for us For 2023 It was great to see you Thanks for coming on Thank you Bill Alright That's it for the podcast Thanks to Derek was great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Bill. All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Derek Thompson. Thanks to Kyle Creighton for producing. Thanks to Steve Cerruti as well. And I will almost definitely see you on Thursday.

99% chance. Who knows? Maybe it's Sunday. Could be Thursday. Probably Thursday. 99% chance. See you Thursday. I don't have a few years left in me. On the wayside On the first

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