The Bill Simmons Podcast - The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson, Plus Olympics Hoops Bets With Joe House

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Joe House to discuss their gambling strategy for Olympic basketball. They find some value in gold medal odds as well as their favorite Team USA prop bets (2:17). Next, Bill is joined by Derek Thompson for another edition of The Future of Everything, where they discuss their predictions for the future of politics (28:41), tech (40:58), sports (1:11:17), and culture (1:31:34). Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Joe House and Derek Thompson Producer: Kyle Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join me, Danny Kelly, along with Danny Heifetz and Craig Horlbeck every week on the Ringer Fantasy Football Show as we prepare for the 2024 fantasy football season. We'll cover all the biggest news and topics across the league, as well as whatever weird topics our listeners email us about. That's the Ringer Fantasy Football Show on Spotify. This episode is brought to you by my old friend, Miller Lite. I've been a big fan of Miller Lite, man, since college days when I was allowed to have beer. I think nephew Kyle is a fan too. Miller Lite keeps it simple for us. Undebatable quality, great taste. Picture this, it's game day, all the gang's here.

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And it's a really good movie. I'll just tell you that. So that's going up Sunday night. On this podcast, our old friend Derek Thompson is coming on to talk about the future of everything. Oh yeah, of everything.

And then Joe House. I had to have him on. I'm like Wayne Groh. I had to get it on, man. I had to get it on. Olympics coming. All we care about is Olympics basketball. Whatever.

There's sprinters. There's, whatever. There's sprinters, there's swimmers, there's all kinds of sports. Great. I care about the basketball at this point. And we have a bunch of bets. FanDuel has a bunch of stuff on there and Joe Hassan and I have some opinions. So we're going to talk about that. Maybe a little NFL as well. So this is a big mega podcast because I'm going to be gone for probably until a week from Sunday. So just an FYI, but we'll have some rewatchables coming next week as well.

All right, here we go. First, our friends from ProJamp. All right, we had to do this. The Olympics are starting this weekend. Joe House is here. 20 years ago, before podcasts, I think were invented, Joe House and I bet on Argentina to win the gold medal at the 2004 basketball part of the Olympics. They were 10 to 1 odds. We did not put a small amount on it, and they won, and we rooted against our country. But that's how strongly we felt about the team

they put together. House, all bets are off with us from a patriotism standpoint. Our patriotism, our flag is just green. We wave a green flag and that's it. And I'm not ashamed to admit it. We're capitalists. I mean, I think it is patriotic. We believe in capitalism. And yet, I think the USA team will win.

Yes. I don't feel awesome about betting against them, but we might have done a couple hedges. So let's just go through it. We're going to talk about Olympic basketball only. That's the only thing we know about and some of the value we see. So gold medal, USA minus 750, Canada's 10 to 1, France 15 to 1, Serbia 15 to 1, Germany 28 to 1. We dabbled on France at 15 to one, make the case. Well, the defense that they are going to be able to bring the table, both in terms of rim protection, but more importantly, in terms of the perimeter. And it's not just the notion of Gobert as rim protector and Wemby covering side to side,

playing free safety. Koulibaly is a badass defender, a badass perimeter defender. And so the theory is that it'll be super hard to score against France. They're going to have the home cooking and anything that goes weird

will go in their favor. Now, it's not awesome that they lost a bunch. What do you mean goes weird? Do you mean like shady calls because the France crowd is going nuts? I mean, did you watch the Moroccans run onto the field in the Morocco soccer game earlier this week? Stuff goes weird. Stuff is going to happen. Interesting.

Anyway. So the France piece, I watched every minute of all the friendlies that the US team played. And they made the decision to give the car keys to LeBron, it seems like, for the Olympics. France is going to be a hard team from the size to just basically try to drive. The type of team that I thought we're going to have, which was a little more drive and kick and a little more guard-friendly outside shooting. USA was playing way more power stuff than I was expecting.

There was a lot of post-ups of Embiid. There was post-ups with LeBron. I'm not sure that's going to work against France when it seems like France's guards are so bad. That would be our big advantage. I don't know. That matchup worries me, but I think they're going to beat France.

The team that worries me for us is Germany. Yes. We're on the same page. We didn't even compare notes on this. Germany is 28 to 1. They could not be less afraid of the US. Schroeder, for some reason, and this goes back to a couple years ago,

the Warriors-Lakers series. Schroeder loves playing against Curry. I would say Schroeder's the number one guy against Curry. So if Curry's going to be a crunch time guy, Schroeder's like, that kills them. I think this is Obst. Sure. That's his name, right? The guy who murdered them in the World Championships. And I don't know. I just kind of like the team. They had size. Danny Tice. Danny Tice. Yeah, still some bulk in the middle. They have that nice complement.

So the FIBA basketball style, you have to have some size, which is why you look at somebody like Canada, you're like, ah, tender one. Are we getting enough juice? They don't really have that great inside. You better have some inside presence. And that's part of the thesis for France. Their guards are terrible, but Germany has size. I'm not worried about size with Germany. Germany has size and guys that have played together for a while. They, what are they like a seven, eight man rotation? Yes.

And they're really comfortable with each other. And they have like the prototype of these teams that succeed in these international stuff where Schroeder just doesn't come out. He plays the whole game. Wagner slashed in the rim. They have rebounders. They have offensive rebounders. They have guys who know how to bat the ball off the rim the moment it gets there.

And they have a couple shooters. I didn't actually think USA played that bad in the Germany game. I just thought Germany was really comfortable and played really well against them. And USA is, my fear with them, we have not talked about this at all. I haven't even talked to you on the phone

in a couple of weeks. They moved away from kind of what they thought this USA team was going to be. There's a lot of guys who are like, yeah, maybe I should be playing crunch time. You know, there there's, I'm just,

there's some alpha stuff. I'm just concerned about, there's a lot of guys who seem like they're not being used exactly how they get used during the NBA season. And I'm not sure it's the best version. I'm like, Tatum was bad in the exhibition games. I thought he didn't have the ball a lot and he just didn't seem

comfortable. We have a threshold question. Is Katie playing? Is Katie definitely playing? Because let's, you know, we're going to start playing basketball. The U S is first game is Sunday and he hasn't played with this team at

all. That doesn't matter? He's potentially the greatest Olympian in the history of the United States competing in Olympic basketball if he gets his fourth gold medal and he's a crucial player in previous gold medal runs

but like we have a chemistry experiment going on here an ongoing chemistry experiment which is why south sudan was competitive and why germany was competitive and your question is exactly the right question who is the crunch time five and and who is going to feel comfortable with having their minutes diminished and be able to come in and still make an impact because i you know we're looking at the props for players and i sort of put in our thread,

what about this player or that player? But the biggest question is, who's getting minutes and who's getting crunch time minutes? So how do you allocate that? I think they're a little bit susceptible, right? A little bit susceptible, which is why you and I both have some exposure

to a handful of countries that are not the United States of America. Yeah, I did the minutes thing on Sunday because I just think people kind of forget every four years how few minutes there are and how you're basically looking at four guys playing between 25, 28 minutes a game, and then maybe three to four guys as the bench dudes. And that's it. Edwards and Booker, one of those guys is going to lose. If KD plays, I think Tatum's going to lose.

I think Tatum's going to lose minutes. And I thought Tatum was going to be the guaranteed mellow Wade six man spot, but he doesn't seem totally comfortable with it. They have a lot of guys who are used to having the ball all the time. And they made the decision to give the car keys to LeBron. And he looked good in those last two games. But on the other hand, he had the ball a lot.

They barely beat South Sudan and they barely beat Germany and nobody else really looked that good. So I think they're kind of stuck because I think they've made LeBron the point forward. I don't like the way he looks with Embiid together. I think they look too slow. It's exactly the type of team, you know,

they just, they're not playing with the right kind of pace. And Kerr said this after the last game. He's like, I don't like the way we're playing. We don't have the same kind of pace that I thought we're going to play with because LeBron and Embiid don't want to play that way. So there's versions, five-man versions that I watch where I'm like, that's it. That's how they should be playing. And I just don't know if they're going to be able to find the combinations in time. So are they going to win? I would say

almost definitely. Are they susceptible? I think they are. Fundamentally, they don't know who their nine-man rotation is. And I'm not sure they know who the final five are. Do you feel like they know who the last five got? Let's say they're playing Germany

and they're down three with four minutes left. Who's out there? Definitely LeBron. Definitely LeBron. Definitely Anthony Davis. But now you're sitting Embiid, which they were really hesitant. They kept Embiid in that last game until there was like two

minutes left and it was clear they needed to bring Davis in. Yeah, so I mean my guess would be LeBron and Davis. Steph? Steph. Edwards? No, I think Drew's in there.

Wow. I think Edwards and Booker are out. And then I think KD, if he's healthy, is the fifth. I think it's KD and Drew and LeBron and Davis and Curry. That team could lose. If that's the crunch time, that team could definitely lose. I don't think you can not have Drew out there, though, because you either need him or White because of the defense.

One of those guys is going to have to chase Schroeder. Name an international point guard. It's going to have to be one of those two. SGA? SGA. So Canada, they're going to play Canada at some point potentially. And Canada's going to go small on them.

And Canada's going to be like, try to overpower us. Great. We'll give you baskets on that end. But we're going to try to race your dudes around. If you watch them bead really closely in the friendlies, he couldn't jump out on shooters

at all. And the announcers were just missing it. At one point, Germany just was... They got three straight threes right off him because they were just putting him in pick and rolls or trying to get him and they knew he couldn't run out in time. That's all Canada is going to do when they play him. They're just going to be like, how... But the problem for Canada is they're just too small. You mentioned it earlier. Like, I feel like LeBron and Embiid could just overpower those guys. Right. The Tatum piece, the Tatum part is going to be really fascinating because he, he might play way less than I think people realize.

I think that makes sense to be honest with you. It doesn't't you know he just played 110 games however many games it was the longest regular season comparable to the 2022 season for him it's a lot of basketball to go straight from that

into training camp for the Olympic team and the Olympics he's in good shape though the question for me is, LeBron was the point forward on an eight seed that won one playoff game. Tatum was basically the point forward on a team that went

81-20 and easily won the playoffs. Are we sure we should be marginalizing Tatum like this? What's your goal? They just have Tatum on the side. We're not giving LeBron's minutes to Tatum in this? Well, what's your goal? I mean, because they just have Tatum on the side. We're not giving LeBron's minutes to Tatum in the 2024 Olympics. Well, but that's the thing. They've made this

decision. They've made the decision to give the car keys to LeBron. And I'm not sure Tatum is a stand on the side guy because he's not a good three point shooter. So KD, I think, is going to get those minutes. Wow. KD, who... If he's healthy. Healthy? Yeah.

We really talked ourselves into this. I love this. Well, the other one who is not used to not having the ball is Edwards. Sure. You guys are just like, I'm just not used to standing over here hoping I get the ball. That's not how... I don't really... You watch when Derek White was out there. Derek White and Drew are so good at not having the ball and Derek White's like cutting, right? The defense is falling asleep.

All of a sudden he's doing back cuts and it's like, yeah, that's what you do when you're at the ball. I don't fully know if some of these guys know how to do that. So it was a lot of like LeBron just pounding the ball and people just kind of standing there waiting to see what he was going to do. And then there's the deferential piece because it's one of the greatest players of all time. So I can be like, hey, LeBron, let me take this one. The good stuff was the LeBron Curry stuff I thought was really promising.

I agree. Using LeBron as like the greatest Draymond ever. There was some LeBron Curry and B triangle stuff that I was like, whoa, what's that? There's times when Embiid just like, I'm just going to plant my ass down. Just get me the ball. It's a four footer. So it might, it might be fine. I guess is my point.

It should be fine. Of course we have the best players from, from top to bottom. Yeah. But you and I have known each other a long time. Yes. You can't just put a team of your 12 best dudes out there. They have to complement each other in some way.

And I'm not 100% confident they achieved that with this group they put together. There's versions of it. There's five-man versions, but ultimately like... I don't know. Well, the one thing I do know,

is it time to start talking some of these props? Yes, go. Because the thing that leaps off the page based on the entirety of our last eight minutes worth of... We did not discuss this. I think we have the same one. What is it?

Comparing notes, is LeBron James to be the top U.S. assist leader at plus 142? That's probably my favorite bet on the entire board, is LeBron to lead the U.S. team in assists at plus money.

That was my second favorite bet. I thought the odds, I blinked because I was like, why isn't that minus 142? He's going to have the ball all the time. And there's clearly, they want him to be the star of the Olympics. And I think everybody's either signed up for that

or maybe has begrudgingly signed up for it, depending on the player. I like that one. I love, that was my second favorite. My favorite was Anthony Davis' most rebounds on Team USA minus 110. I was shocked. I think he's going to win that comfortably.

Yeah. It's, it's right here. The other thing with Embiid, like, well, the other thing with Embiid, are we sure Embiid's going to be able to play in every game? All we've done is watch Joel Embiid when it becomes like, you know, playoff time, important game time, not be able to play. And by the way, he's still not in shape. And by the way, congrats to Philly for having, you know, a forced kind of training camp to put the dude through some kind of discipline in the summer post his injury. Yeah, Philly's the big winner.

Yeah, he's actually exercising. It's 100% right. He doesn't want to be embarrassed. I mean, the most important thing, I'll knock on wood. I mean, obviously, we're slightly disparaging Joel, but I want him to be healthy for this upcoming NBA season. Slightly? He's out of shape. As usual.

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

Joel Embiid. Exactly right. When they play Jokic, guess what? He's going to be really fired up to go against Jokic for whatever. But yeah, to me, I mean, this is such a good moment

for Anthony Davis. So here's, this is why I think the odds aren't better for most total rebounds on Team USA. Because it's Anthony Davis. What does that mean? Well, he could at any point just be rolling on the ground holding something. Oh, no, don't do that. No, I'm just saying. Don't do that.

He's not Cal Ripken Jr. He had a very good. I think that's why. Because he clearly should be a heavy favorite for most rebounds. But you have to factor in the... Very good in terms of playing the last two seasons. Who did you like for most points? Because I'll read the odds. It's LeBron's plus 320.

Curry is plus 340. Edwards plus 440. That's not happening. And Bede plus 650. It's conceivable. Even if 440. That's not happening. And Bede plus 650. It's conceivable. Even if he's playing 20 minutes a game, I can see him averaging 19 points a game in 20 minutes.

Durant plus 790. I don't see it with the calf. Davis plus 790. And then Tatum 13 to 1, which I really would have liked three weeks ago in that Wade, Melo off the bench, instant offense, lots of threes. I really would have liked three weeks ago in that Wade, um, mellow off the bench, instant offense,

lots of threes. But, um, so there was an early wave of props that came out a couple of weeks ago before, you know, FanDuel, God bless them.

They really gave us something. I mean, I spent nearly, uh, I don't want to say how many hours, but quite a bit of this morning down this olympics basketball hole on the site and doing the evaluation is just a glorious thing but um steph curry was the leading contender for me a couple weeks ago before we started seeing some

of these friendlies because i like the idea of steph in his very first olympics it's going to be his first and his last. I mean, you know, maybe he'll play in the next one. I don't think so. Right. Coming out with Steve Kerr as the coach. Coming out and being that scorer. And being on the world stage.

The problem is, LeBron, this is the going away present for LeBron. This tournament is about LeBron James. There is no question about that now. And so the odds for Curry have been wiped out. And I don't like Curry anymore. I mean, LeBron seems like a reasonable enough kind of bet. I'm surprised you dismissed Edwards so quickly. So here's the thing with Edwards for me. He, speaking of fearless, is not going to feel like he needs to defer. He's not going to feel like he needs to share the ball. He is going to try and go to the hole when it,

when it's crunch time, he had double digits in all five of the friendlies. He had double digits and, and you know, not even Steph Curry had double digits in all of those games. So Edwards at plus four 40 at that price is kind of attractive to me. Yeah. I just wonder, is he going to split minutes with Booker and is there going to be, So Edwards at plus 440 at that price is kind of attractive to me. Yeah.

I just wonder, is he going to split minutes with Booker? And is there going to be some Derek White moments where they actually just kind of need Derek White out there with Drew or Derek White separately than Drew? That would be my fear. Okay. I was looking back at in 2008, Dwayne Wade led the team in scoring in 2008, which is probably the most similar team to this team because that team was pretty deep. 16 points a game led the team in scoring. Sure. It's not going to be very many points. In 2012, Durant led the team at 19.5.

And then in 2016, Durant again at 19.4. But he's playing big minutes in both of those years. So then you get to 2021. I think Tatum led the team. Oh, it was Durant again, 20.7. Man, Durant, one of the great international. I mean, it's really like it should be in the first paragraph of his legacy.

So there's a Durant spot, a shooter who could make those short threes, It should be in the first paragraph of his legacy. So there's a Durant spot, a shooter who could make those short threes playing maybe 20 to 24 minutes a game. So that could be Edwards, but he would have to hit the threes. It's what I think. It's Edwards. It's a shorter three-point line,

and he can get the stroke going. I don't love the odds for any of those. That's fine. We don't have to bet on that one. At, at gunpoint, I would say Curry plus three 40, because I think he's going to play a lot of minutes.

And if, especially if LeBron is point forward, you know, look more of a facilitator and less of a drive to the basket guy. I'm with you. LeBron plus one 42 for assist is an amazing bet. We love it. Sign me up. And then

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

I don't know. We can look it up. Well, LeBron is the favorite at plus 320. Curry's plus 680. Edwards is 8-1. Davis at 9-1 caught my attention. Especially if Embiid has to miss a game or two with some neat thing,

and Davis is suddenly playing 30 a game, putting up like 15 and 11 every game. You beat me to it. He would have to average a double-double. I mean, think about what he'd have to do to jump over LeBron for that. LeBron at plus 320 is fine. I think those are fine odds. Those are like Mahomes NFL MVP odds.

Just like, yeah, not great value, but they're clearly gearing the team around him, so it's the safest bet. Then you go to the other countries. Shea is 13 to one. Jokic is 14 to one. Wemby, 15 to one.

What a story that would be. And then, uh, Schroeder at 30 to one, I thought was interesting. That would mean, so you bet on Germany 28 to one to win the thing, or you bet on Schroeder 30 to one. I would rather just have the Germany 28 to one bet. Giannis is 35 to one.

There's really not a lot of MVP value. You know what's really happening, House? They've just ruined our future bets. They just remove all the value from all of them. Really, the only way you can win on a future anymore in a real way is if you bet like the Patriots to win the AFC East at 50-1 and they actually do it. Other than that, they remove all the value. Like even the Bucs, who I think are really kind of the stealth

contender for the NBA this upcoming season. Are you talking about the Milwaukee Bucs? I'm talking about the Milwaukee Bucs. They're 15-1. They're not even good odds. They're not even good odds. They're not good odds and they're not good. So there you go. It's a stay away. It makes it easy. Your favorite under was the under for the Celtics for the season, right? Well, I mentioned it on Monday's East Coast bias with Raheem and JJ just because 58 wins is very likely.

I know, but 58 wins the East, right? Like 58 is still a great season. And it's respectful. And it's reflective of how committed they are to the regular season. It's just they don't have Porzingis. I agree with you. At least until the All-Star break. Yeah, February.

And, you know, it's just that fatigue. Like, it doesn't make sense. They don't have to go full pedal to the metal the first part of the season. They're going to win their share of games. I mean, you know, 58 wins translates into whatever the win percentage is. It's still very high.

I just felt like 58 and a half. You don't need to, they don't need to win 60 games and I don't think they're going to. I don't think anyone wins 60 games in the East. No argument. No argument.

I think if we get a 60 win team, it comes out of the West and it could be a team like OKC. Like I could see them being six, seven wins better just because they got deeper and better and their guys are a year older.

I love they're over. All right, so our recommendations. USA minus 750, we don't like the odds. France 15 to 1. Germany 28 to 1 as long shot bets. Pretty good odds. Just a little bit. Just a little taste.

Yeah, like a sprinkle. You can still feel patriotic and root for USA. And then we both love LeBron for best assists at plus 142. That's right. Now, let me we'll part. Jock Landale, catch your attention at all

for Australia. Top rebounder for Australia, Jock Landale at plus 128. They have no other size. They have Duop Reef. I believe that's how you pronounce his name. I didn't realize that was something you could bet on. I didn't get to the, on Fando,

I didn't get to the Jack Landale section of the sportsbook. You didn't go all the way down to Australia? I obviously didn't go all the way down, but I didn't realize. Because Giddy is available at minus 290 to lead Australia in assists. That's fine. You just have to lay the juice. That doesn't feel like a bad bet.

But Jock Landale available, plus 128, plus money for Landale to lead in rebounds. That's my other favorite bet on the board. That's really good. Most points for them, Giddey's plus 184. I saw one of the Australia games, and I thought Giddey, you could just see it. He's going to be good in Chicago. I feel pretty confident.

That's a perfect situation for him. Yeah. Guess what? He needs the ball all the time, which puts something in common with him and half the guys on Team USA. We'll see how it goes. I'm sure there's going to be some drama. There's going to be a game in the first four where they look like shit, and they're losing at halftime. I still think there's going to be some drama. There's going to be a game in the first four where they look like shit and they're

losing at halftime. I still think they're going to win. I think the LeBron MVP bet is the smart thing too because he's going to bring the flag out at the beginning of the Olympics. It just feels like this is the LeBron thing. It's an interesting spot for Curry, by the way.

Because I think Curry was like, I thought this was going to be my Olympics. I've never been on the Olympic team. I agree. What happened to the Steph Curry Olympics? This is going to be the LeBron going away present. This whole year, he gets Bronny. I mean, I would surprise you if he plays this year,

gets all this stuff with Bronny, then retires at the end of the season. He gets Zach Levine. That's the Celtic hater in you. Just trying to talk some shit into existence. I don't know what moves are available for them. They haven't made a move. They haven't even signed

free agents. That's great. They're a play-in team. What do you want to say? The Lakers are a play-in team. You think they're even a play-in team? What was their over-under on FanDuel? 43.5. Lakers. a play-in team. You think they're even a play-in team? What was their over-under on FanDuel? 43.5. Lakers. Oh, my God.

Warriors. 43.5. Houston. These three teams. Which one of these doesn't belong? Houston, 43.5. Lakers, 43.5. Warriors, 43.5.

It's awesome. So good. I'm so excited. This West, where we only know that Portland and Utah are going to suck. Even San Antonio, I'm not 100% convinced is going to suck. And then you quickly move into the Houston Clippers, Kings, Warriors, Pelicans, Lakers. Like who the fuck knows? It's great.

So good. I can't wait. It's going to be a fun season, but we are way more excited about NFL. I know you've been doing prep. Oh, the prep. Yes. I'm going to be deep d wait. It's going to be a fun season, but we are way more excited about NFL. I know you've been doing prep. Oh, the prep, yes. I'm going to be. We're thinking of deep dives. I'm going to be diving in.

All right. Good to see you, House. Always a pleasure, BS. This episode is brought to you by Movember. The mustache is back with a vengeance. Look at Travis Kelsey. Before he rocked that Super Bowl ring, he rocked that super soup strainer. Grow a mustache for Movember. You'll do great things too. You won't win the

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today at Popeye's before it ghosts you for another year. All right, we basically do this twice a year. Derek Thompson is here. He hosts the excellent Plain English podcast for The Ringer. He also writes for The Atlantic. He's one of the best people in the business. And twice a year, we try to figure out the future of everything. And we separate it into four categories, sports, culture, tech. And I think we did science last time. We might switch it to politics, but you can drive it. And what we do is we don't tell each other what we think is the future of whatever, and we just kind of do it. And if we overlap and have the same thing, so be it. But first of all, good to see you. How's the summer going? It's great. Just moved to North Carolina. I really loved it. I'll be here for the next year.

My wife is doing, finishing her PhD in clinical psychology. So we moved here for her internship. And I've had a blast living in Chapel Hill. Can the Hornets pull you in maybe to do some advisory stuff for the team? Maybe some VP of common sense stuff? I don't know. You should throw it out there. I'm happy to consult for the Hornets

or anybody else in the area. I don't know that much about being- The Panthers probably need it the most. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, there seems to be a lot of need in this particular state. I'm not sure if I'm the best person

to give counsel, but at this point, how much worse could things possibly get? You start us off. I don't know what vertical you want to hit, but you go. You have first pick. You do whatever you want. You can go anywhere, any of the verticals. I want to save the most fun stuff

for later. Culture, sports. Let's start with politics. It's been probably the craziest month in political news that I can remember. So it's a little bit funny to talk about the future of politics when the recent past of politics is so insane. I want to talk about something that I'm writing about right now that I've been thinking about a lot in the last few months, which is people talk about polarization in the U.S. electorate. You know, people are polarized by race. They're polarized by education. I've become very interested in how America is polarized by gender and the possibility that the U.S. is more polarized by gender than any time

in American history. So as a general rule, women vote for Democrats and men vote for Republicans. This has been true for 50 years. Democrats have not won a majority of the male vote since 1976. But there's some data that suggests that men and women are pulling further apart today. According to Gallup polling, the political gap between young men and women is the highest in history. Men under 30 are leaning toward the Republican Party more than any time this century. Alice Evans called The Gender War Within Gen Z. And people can look that up. It's plain English, The Gender War Within Gen Z. And I talked to a lot of political scientists after that show, and some of them took issue with my framing. They said, you know, the thing we know for certain isn't so much that gender polarization is growing. Rather, it's the way we talk about gender that's polarized. There is now a Republican way of talking about masculinity that is very distinct from the Democratic way of talking about men. There's a Democratic way

of talking about women, and there's a Republican way of talking about women. So it's not so much like men are from Mars, women are from Venus. It's more like Republican men and women are from Mars, and Democratic men and women are from Venus. So my future of everything prediction on this subject is that number one, especially now that the election is almost certainly going to be a Republican guy against a Democratic woman, I think we're going to see a year of extraordinary gender polarization in the way this election is fought. And I think November could be the largest gender gap in American history, the largest gap in the way that women and men vote. And so my eyes are fully on this being

maybe the edge of the present, the near future in politics. So how much of this do you think has to do with all the stuff that's happened with Roe v. Wade and women's the right to control what happens to your body? Because anecdotally, people in my life, especially my wife and daughter, this is their number one thing they care about. I think it's absolutely huge. If you look at Gallup polling and you ask men and women, are you pro-choice or pro-life? Historically, and this surprised me when I saw this, men and women are pretty similar in identifying as pro-choice and pro-life until, until about 2020. And then women got much more liberal,

I suppose you could say, more likely to say they were pro-choice, such that now the gender gap on this issue of abortion is the highest that it's ever been. So yeah, I think a lot of this has to do with Dobbs. I think a lot of it has to do with the salience of abortion, which is also obviously the salience of how much power do we want to give, you know, government, which is disproportionately male, how much power do we want to give them in terms of telling women what they can do with their bodies? Absolutely a huge part of the rising gender gap as I see it.

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

No, I don't think it's necessarily too reductive. One shift that I'm really interested in is there's this political scientist named Ronald Englehart who came up with this theory that politics has shifted from materialism to post-materialism. So what that means, materialism is like your bread and butter policy issues, taxing and spending and insurance and regulations.

That's materialism. That's economics. And he said, once a country becomes rich enough, they actually stop caring so much about economic policy. They want to just have culture wars. That's post materialism. And I do think that politics has become more about culture wars, post-material fights, not what policies do you support, but who are you? And that goes directly to my future of politics prediction, that this question of what do you think is the proper role of men and women in society? Do you think women should work or should they stay home? Do you think women should have the choice to have an abortion or not? These cultural issues, identity issues, weigh so much more in politics than they did 60 or 70 years ago.

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

but it was really interesting that it circulated. It resurfaced in a way that seemed aggressive. And then Tim Waltz had an interesting quote when he was on MSNBC. I have it right here. He said that when you look at the Trump-Vance ticket, it looks like a he-man-woman-haters club. And that right there is such an interesting, stark contrast. You have the Republican vice president saying that the Democrats are just a, quote,

bunch of childless cat ladies. And you have a Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, saying the Republican Party is a bunch of he-man-women-haters. That, again, is my point, that we are becoming polarized in the way we talk about gender. And I don't think that was necessarily as true in the past. Yeah, it's weird because it feels like we've made all these incredible strides all over the place. So you would think that would make it less polarizing, but instead it went the other way. I like what you're thinking because it does feel like this is going to be, especially as we get closer to the election and we have the possibility of a female president.

And we saw some of this in 2016, but in general, now that we have the Supreme Court shifting like it did, and it just feels like it's going to be the dominant thing. All right, that was a good start. Here is my politics future of everything. And it's really the short-term future. I would say it's the next six months.

We've been heading this way for a long time. We've been heading this way since the days of Oliver Stone and the early JFK assassination stuff. And then we move into the internet era and early days of the internet message boards. And then it really starts rounding into shape after 9-11 and this conspiracy culture comes into play. And that's the last 20 years. And we've seen it in all these different ways. And it's just getting worse and worse. And I feel like right now, I don't want to call it the apex. It's more like the nadir. This is nadir mountain.

It feels like right now is the worst the conspiracy stuff will be in our lifetime. And you just think of all the things that happened recently. Trump, his almost assassination, and immediately there's this whole separate dialogue about, well, what happened? Who tried to kill him? Did the bullet hit him? 19 different storylines come out of that. Almost seemed to take precedent over the fact that somebody died, other people were shot. It was just, what happened? How did this... We're having a hearing with the Secret Service right away. People just, they moved to conspiracy mode immediately. Then Biden gets pushed out of the race. There was a real thing for a couple of days. He's not alive anymore.

He's dead. He's died. They're covering it up. This is now the movie Dave. We're now living in real life. It's like, well, what? So then he finally gives the speech on Wednesday and it's like his watch was at the wrong time. People are just fucking nuts. Now people think the Democrats tried to kill Trump. That's out there. You have the Epstein logs, which nobody, everyone wants answers for that. Who was on there is the whole Epstein culture, all the people who are tied to Epstein. And then the Obama piece of it,

where he hasn't, we're taping this on a Thursday, where he hasn't come out and directly said who he wants. It's like, well, he wants Michelle in there. And it just feels like this is the dialogue now. It's insane. You go to the subreddit for the conspiracy and it's the all time most insane it's ever been. And I just wonder, is that who we are now? So my future of everything is like, well, 2024, is this the culmination of a 35-year journey to get to this point

where people are now just insane and now you're bringing in AI and the ability to tweak video, to tweak audio, and we're going to start to lose the sense of what's real and not real. What happens the first time somebody tweaks a video of Kamala saying or doing something that she didn't do?

I think this is going to be the worst part of the election. And that's saying something because there's going to be a lot of worst parts. So that's my prediction. Next five months, we'll go to hell. Next five months, we'll go to hell. But you said earlier, this could be the worst that the conspiracy theorizing of America gets. I almost feel like I want to be like Homer Simpson when Bart's like, this is the worst day of my life. And Homer says, the worst day of your life so far. That's how I feel. This is going to be the worst year of conspiracy theories so far. There's no reason to think it's ever going to get better. And the answer, this is a slight preview of my tech future of everything. One answer is AI. It's going to be so much easier to lie, to do deep fakes

and with the presence of and possibility of deep fakes, you have an audience that just doesn't believe anything. If it's a true video, they say, I think it was a deep fake. If it's a deep fake, they can say, I think it was a true video. If it's a deep fake, they can say, I think it was a true video. I also think something that happens that makes it easier to become a conspiracy theorist is that it's just easier to forget what people said last week. I remember getting, you get so upset about something you see online. Someone has a terrible opinion. You get so upset about it. And then if you like make a calendar event for like one month in the future

and you're like, what were you so upset about one month ago? It's so hard to remember what that one thing was in a world like that, where there's so little accountability and where our memories are all like goldfish. It actually, it's weirdly rational for people who only care about getting attention to throw around conspiracy theories all the time

because no one can remember all the times that they were wrong. They just can maybe remember the one time they were right. So I feel like all of the incentives and all the technology is pointing toward a political media environment that's going to be more conspiratorial with every passing year. It's actually very difficult for me to think of a really compelling reason why conspiracy theories would crest, right? Why the apex, the peak would be in our near future. I think conspiracy theories are very likely to have a really, really long runway, especially as AI slop takes over so much of the internet.

So maybe I should have tweaked my theory too. This is going to be the pre-AI nadir of conspiracy culture. But now we're going to move into this whole new world, especially as people are going to be able to... I noticed this this week, actually, where somebody had... Because I went to the conspiracy because I was like, I wonder what these people are talking about. And somebody had Biden, his audio, and they were like, it's a 92% chance this isn't the audio. And I was like, wait, AI can do that already? They can determine, you know, that basically an AI shit detector for what's real and not.

So if we have that combined with like people being, taking liberties to do crazy shit. Yeah, it's gonna, something will happen over the next four months with AI that threatens to swing the election, or it's going to have to be like this national awakening of like, Hey, this didn't actually happen. This thing that was in your Twitter feed and your Reddit and Snapchat, everything else, this, this didn't exist. This was made up, this was created and that's probably going to happen the next three weeks, right? a pessimist when it comes to most things that involve truth and media. I just think that the internet, by rewarding negativity and rewarding high arousal stories and rewarding just the most

dramatic story you can possibly give to a set of events, all of these things are just absolute catnip for conspiracy theorists. So I think you're absolutely right. I think it's a fascinating prediction. And I wonder, maybe it gives me an idea, maybe I should talk to someone in the space of social media about whether or not there's any way to really fight back against this stuff. Is there a betting process? Yeah. Yeah. Because I would expect that you're going to have this race in the AI front between the ability to create AI and the ability to test AI, right? And then we can create a little bit more sophisticated AI, and then maybe AI testing gets a little bit better, the bullshit detecting. But that's a race that's going to go on for a long while.

There's no way to invent tomorrow an AI bullshit detector that can detect AI bullshit that's invented two years later. It's going to be a race that continues. It's a bittersweet time for conspiracy, Bill. I got to be honest. Once upon a time, conspiracies were fun where we just had like, hey, did David Stern freeze the envelope or not? Did Michael Jordan get suspended for gambling or did he not? You know, and we had, did, did David Stern pull the Sonics out of Seattle and put them in Oklahoma city because he then wanted to threaten all the other teams to build arenas so they could lose their team next. Did Roger Goodell keep LA free of NFL teams? Cause he wanted them to basically be the extortion city for all the

other teams to build arenas. That stuff was fun. It felt like 9-11, which was probably the most horrible event of my lifetime for so many different reasons. But then also the conspiracy culture that came out of it where people are like, no, the planes actually didn't hit the buildings. The planes were exploded before. And it was just like, wow, this is insane. What are we doing? And then everything leads to Sandy Hook, which was, that was the darkest moment of all this. And I thought it would get better. And maybe people like, yo, but it's not. It went the other way. And you could feel it with the Trump assassination, because one of the best things that's about conspiracy stuff, if you like it, is sometimes there's pieces of things where you go, yeah,

that is a little weird. And you could see it with the Trump near assassination. It's like, well, why was that guy in the building for 25 minutes? Why was he flying a drone around two hours before? Why didn't they have that part of the thing secured when it was close enough that anybody who was a decent shot probably... And so I get it, but I just feel like this is where we're heading now. Everything is questioned.

Nothing seems real. What are we doing? I think maybe an important skill for the future as an audience member, as a reader, as a watcher, is having good taste in conspiracy theories. Because if every day you're waking up to this infinite buffet of conspiracy theories about the world, whether it's Trump, the Celtics, it's important to have good taste. What kind of conspiracy theories are more likely to be true? And I'll give you my top principle for conspiracy theories. I'm not a very conspiratorial person, even though I enjoy listening to conspiracy bill.

I think groups are very bad at keeping secrets, but individuals can be very good at keeping secrets because there's no one for that secret to be shared with. So I tend to believe conspiracy theories that involve one person and disbelieve conspiracy theories that involve one person and disbelief conspiracy theories that involve hundreds of people. So when there's a conspiracy theory about 9-11, that the entire US government or the whole Bush administration was in on this thing, I think you're telling me a hundred to a thousand people are behind a conspiracy to bomb the largest building in New York and none of them have slipped the secret to anybody. that's not human nature.

People talk, they share secrets. But if it's just one person, if it's just a lone gunman, right? Or it's just David Stern, and it's basically him and whoever else can freeze the envelope, right? It's a secret share between two people. The fewer number of people that are in the conspiracy, the more likely I am to at least give some time

to that conspiracy. Well, I wrote about this in my basketball book, this thing that I know happened because it literally happened to me. Before I became a columnist that any person would recognize, I'm sitting at a Celtics Sixers game and sitting behind me is this guy, Pat Croce, who used to run the Sixers for a couple years and it was right after iverson that year when he released the music album and it had like bad lyrics in it and stern was fucking pissed and he's telling the story to the person next to him stern called iverson in and he's like this fucking happens again i'm gonna suspend you for a year like i fucking suspended Jordan

and like threaten him with that. And I was just sitting in front like, whoa, it was one of the, and I had already thought that Jordan thing was fishy. So did Stern say that to Iverson because it was just a way to threaten him? Did he actually suspend Jordan and just like reinforce, but those were the fun days of conspiracy. Like now, if that had happened to me in 2024, I'm immediately on some Reddit board, right? I was sitting, sitting in front of, so I don't know. It's just, it was, it was sweeter, more innocent time. And now we've lost our minds, but you know, the best conspiracies are always like, yeah, that is a little weird. And the JFK one's the best one of all of them because they didn't realize all this stuff was coming.

They didn't realize the internet was coming. They didn't realize the fascination with this stuff. And they just felt like they could get away with it. You even go to the autopsy. There's so many indications that something truly sinister happened. That's the only one when you mentioned how hundreds of people needed to pull it off.

That's the only one when you mentioned like how hundreds of people needed to pull it off. That's the only one where it really feels like something happened, right? I'll say that that might be the only exception to my rule. We did a podcast episode on this too, where I talked to some guys who host a podcast about conspiracy theories, stuff they don't want you to know. And we talked about the Kennedy assassination. And I think I revealed there that I am, I am basically an anti-conspiratorial person. My taste is to disbelieve every conspiracy theory that involves more than two people, except for JFK. I'm not entirely sure I believe the official story on JFK.

There's just too many little details that are a little weird. Even if you see the video, when the shots happen, they're all pointing to one part, right? They're pointing like the grassy knoll. And it reminded me, they're in the near assassination of Trump. The shots happen and they're all looking at the same spot because they know where the shots are coming from. I'm like, that's our belated more proof on the JFK thing. Anyway. All right. We're going to take a break and then we'll do tech. It's really not important to me to have a lot of things to show off. Fancy cars, you know, a giant home. Those things are just

not part of who I am. But I've been coached and I've learned through my advisor that it's not one size fits all. Everyone has their own preferences. Everything that I do with Edward Jones is tailored to who I am. Edward Jones, we do money differently. Visit edwardjones.ca slash different.

Do you see it? It just stares at me smiling on october 18 discover what hides behind the smile all right coming back future everything you want to do tech which ties into the conspiracy stuff i guess so go uh it ties more into ai uh which again, tied into conspiracy. So I don't think this is a flip-flop necessarily. I think artificial intelligence and generative AI is really fascinating. I also think it's way, way too soon to call the AI boom a bubble. But I think at some point in the next six months, people are going to be opening up the newspaper, they're going to be opening up the front page of whatever news site they rely on, maybe Twitter, Instagram.

And the phrase AI bubble is going to be all over the news because the big tech companies are spending so, so much on chips, GPUs, and so much on data centers, the infrastructure, that spending is running way ahead of revenue. So a couple of data points. One, the information reports that OpenAI is projected to lose $5 billion this year. Meta and Google are spending tens of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure. That's both the chips and the data centers. And if you listen to what the CEOs are saying, they are practically telegraphing that they are spending, quote, too much on AI for the time being. Here's Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, quote, one way to think about it is when you go through a curve like this, the risk of

under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing, end quote. Mark Zuckerberg, quote, I'd much rather over-invest in AI and pay for that outcome, then save money by developing more slowly, end quote. What these guys are saying is, hey, investors, don't punish us for spending too much money on AI. Please don't punish us. We are trying to spend too much. We are trying to overinvest. Overinvesting AI is good for technology. It's good for pulling the future forward. So I think we are in the early innings of something that will reveal itself to be a kind of AI bubble. It doesn't mean that AI is a joke. It doesn't mean that generative AI can't do stuff. I think it's more like if crypto was money in search of a use case, people are going to say

in the next few months that AI is like a use case in search of money. We don't have a business model yet that we can match to the promise of artificial intelligence. And as a result, I think we're going to be talking a lot more about the potential bubble of AI, the bubble of AI spending.

And that's going to have some really interesting implications for the big tech giants, NVIDIA and Meta and Amazon, OpenAI, Microsoft. And it could also have really big implications for the stock market as well, because really in the last few months, the stock market has basically depended on these big AI spending companies in order to move forward. What happens when all those companies draw back? We might be beginning to see the answer to that question. So on a scale of one to NFT, how high is the concern level?

So again, I want to distinguish between NFTs, which I was sort of academically interested in, but I kind of thought were a joke that wouldn't do anything and would entirely crash and burn. Which is what happened. Which I think is a semi-objective way of describing what happened. Whereas with AI, I think it's more like when you think about the NASDAQ bubble of the late 90s, early 2000s, the NASDAQ declined by at some point like 60, 70, 80%, maybe more in the early 2000s than the dot-com bubble.

That didn't mean that dot-com was a bubble. The internet ate the world. Software ate the world. All of these ideas, like pets you know, I rely on delivery of everything involving my dog, whether it's the food or the toys. I get all of that stuff from, you know, Amazon and, and, and other, you know, pet delivery services. So it's not as if these ideas were NFT like failures rather in a way they were ahead of their time and you needed a bubble and a crash before you had an infrastructure built to really grow the market. I think it's much more likely that something like that is what we see. I'm not predicting anything like the dot-com crash, by the way, which entirely wiped out the NASDAQ. I think it's more that we've seen this enormous

swarm of enthusiasm into artificial intelligence, that there's going to be a significant correction between right now, I think it's already happening now, and the next 12 months. And then the real AI boom, like the real software boom between say 2007 and 2020, is going to come in the next few years. Everything you laid out before you said that last part reminded me of that early 2000s internet thing because I was there for that. And it was exactly the same, where it was clearly this life-changing thing is coming.

All these big companies are spending a bunch of money trying to get in there. And it's a cart before the horse classic. But the pets.com is the perfect analogy. and it's a cart before the horse classic, you know, but yeah, the pets.com is the perfect analogy. It was a great idea. It's just the world and the internet wasn't ready for the idea yet, but the idea was the right idea.

I remember when I had my old sports guy column before I went to ESPN and I was writing for Digital City Boston, right? And it was, AOL had all these digital cities and they were like, we're going to be the first digital news place. And it needs to say it didn't work. It was a good idea. It's just the internet wasn't ready. You had to go through AOL, but like fundamentally you think like, what is Apple news right now? Apple news is probably like 20 years, 25 years later, whatever the digital cities were trying to do.

They're just trying to get people to come in through the door and read news that was either localized or customized. They just didn't know how to do it yet. And I would say there's kind of three phases of the internet, at least for content. The mid-2000s was when it was people like my dad knew how to find my column and people like my stepmother. So it was like by around 2004, the internet didn't feel like, hey, what's that? I would tell people I wrote on a digital sports column and

they'd be like, how do I get that? It's like a lot of that. By 04, everyone was like, yeah, I know what ESPN.com is. And you could just feel something shift. And then the second shift was that kind of 06 to 2010 with video, right? Where YouTube comes in. Still not perfect, but it's getting better. But I remember we tried to do Main Street, that Kenny Mayne comedy show. We tried to do that on video on ESPN.com. We tried to do the Grantland 30 for 30 shorts in 2012.

When we relaunched 30 for 30, after they tried to kill it for two years, we relaunched it and we were doing videos. And the video part still didn't totally work. And this is ESPN. We have the most money out of anyone. We have the best infrastructure out of anyone. And the videos would stall and stop, right?

So that 06 to 12 is like another weird era. And then when the videos finally get going in 13 and on, so you think like there's four or five eras. So what are the four or five eras of AI look like to you? Or is it too early to predict? I think it's probably too early to predict, but I'll give it a shot. I think right now, you know,

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

LSAT. Because right now, they're just sort of incredibly neat things that pass the LSAT. That's going to change. I mean, and certainly what's happening in drug discovery is really, really interesting and complicated. And I want to do a lot of shows about that. But I think the implications could be vast. And it's probably difficult even right now to really guess which failed business models are going to be the business model of like 10 years from now. I was just looking up the fact that, remember Webvan?

So Webvan was one of these the fact that, remember Webvan? So Webvan was one of these online companies that failed in 2001, declared bankruptcy in 2001. They had a business model of online grocery delivery. So if you were a smart guy in 2001, looking at the bankruptcy of Webvan, you'd say, well, this thing of online grocery delivery obviously doesn't work. No one's going to get their groceries delivered online in the future. I mean, how does that, how are you going to keep it cold? Number one, now online grocery delivery is a massive tens of billions of dollar business. You know, it's a huge part of Whole Foods bottom line. So I think a lot of things in the world of AI that might even look like abject, obvious failures today are going to be big business models in the future. I just think the entire industry might go through a bit of a dot-com bust phase,

hopefully a small version of that, but a bit of a bust phase before we actually reach that promise land. I like it more than most people. I think some people are a little scared and freaked out by it, but I just, I look at it from like, try to do glass half full. We've talked in the past about like, in a year from now, can somebody take my voice and do this podcast, take your voice and my voice. And now somebody in Germany gets to listen to us or somebody in China, right? Could we put it in Portuguese? And is that threatening? And to me, it's like, that doesn't sound threatening at all. I think if the more listeners we could have that, that, you know, that just AI being able to pump out premises, which Hollywood is already so freaking robotic with how they think about almost everything. I really worry about that side of it.

I guess my question there would be, I mean, it's possible that AI is really freaky for Hollywood creatives, but what would be so scary about using ChatGPT to spit out premises? So let's say, for example, you're a writer in a room on a CBS procedural, right? And CBS procedural. And you give ChatGPT the last 75 episodes of your show, right? The description you might find on like IMDB or Wikipedia, right? Just a really simple plot summary of each of these episodes. You say, come up with 30 more ideas. I mean, number one, how different is that work really than just going to a whiteboard

and filling out 30 ideas with a room full of people? Like fundamentally, both the humans and the AI are just taking what you've done in the past and iterating on it to create future ideas. with a room full of people. Like fundamentally, both the humans and the AI are just taking what you've done in the past and iterating on it to create future ideas. And second, someone has to write that screenplay, right? Writers ultimately are going to be paid based on the dialogue. I guess the thing that would scare me

is cementing the sameness of stuff, I think scares me because you can already feel it in movies and TV, just in general. There's a sameness to a lot of the stuff and a safeness that I just think is concerning. I find myself more bored by the new... Well, I don't want to step on the culture thing. I was going to say, this sounds like your culture future and everything.

I had a thing on this. All right, I'm going to do mine. I really thought you might have this one, but what you did, I think, was better than mine. But mine's good. So my kids are old enough where we let them Uber around, and you kind for Waymo, didn't tell us. And there was some sort of waiting list. And for some reason he got picked and it was cheaper than Uber. And he didn't tell us, didn't clear it with us, but he's like, oh, I got the Waymo list. I'm like, what the fuck is that? A week later, I'm in traffic and I'm at a stoplight and I look over and there's a white car and nobody's driving it. It's completely empty in the front. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on? And I look and there's somebody in the back on their phone and I look and it says Waymo. So I come home and I say to my son, this Waymo thing, this is driverless? I thought it was like an Uber competitor. And he's been taking it for the last two months and he loves it because there's no driver. And he's just in the back. He's on FaceTime. He's talking to his friends. He doesn't have to worry about people listening. He just kind of likes it. And I've noticed, because obviously I do a lot of walking around weird parts of LA, but I've just noticed more and more Waymos and then what Tesla has, the

robo-taxi. And it feels like something's happening. And I have two questions. One, how many Americans are going to get over the hump of like, I'm climbing into a car and there's no driver, right? My son is already way over the hump. He loves it. He puts a seatbelt on. He says he's never even had one concern, whatever. The second thing is, what does this do to the workforce? Potentially all these people that have gotten jobs on Uber and Lyft and wherever else, do they just get replaced by non-human beings? And then the third question for me is, because Uber's involved in Waymo and they have some sort of partnership, does this somehow make Uber stronger? What do the next five years look like? This is a company that we thought

was one of the most powerful companies of the last 15 years. Is this the next iteration of it? Now they're basically removing humans. They have these self-driving cars and they're removing all the variables that could happen with some sort of crime that happens with a driver or people flaking or whatever.

And now they're just out of humans, just transporting humans around. What happens? Well, the first thing I want to say in response to this is that I love this as an observation because I've been so interested in the self-driving revolution for a long time. I was lucky enough to ride in a Waymo back in 2015, I think, when I wrote a cover story for The Atlantic on Google X, which is the research and development technology

division of Alphabet, which spun out self-driving technology, spun out Remo. I've been in these cars. They're fascinating. They're fun. This is a great example of how technology works. Because I remember in like 2015, 2016, people were saying, self-driving cars are going to take over the road in three, four years. And it didn't happen. And everyone laughed. It seemed insane. We were like, nah, that's never happening. I'm never getting one of those. This is ridiculous. It, it's 2021 now. Everyone predicted that we would be driving around

in self-driving cars. They're nowhere to be seen. Tech was wrong. And then you fast forward three months and slowly but surely these cars are becoming more common on the roads. They're in DC. They're in Los Angeles.

They're certainly in Phoenix where I think the first pilot was. They're in San Francisco. I think it remains to be seen how big a deal this is for Uber's bottom line. But I remember when I was reporting on this a decade ago, driving is the most common occupation among American men. And so if this technology took off, the disruption potential for American male employment would be really, really interesting to look at. I'm not trying to make some dystopian prediction here, but the possibility of disruption there is huge. So I think we are in, it's weird because

it's not really an early inning in self-driving cars. We've been hearing about this now for over a decade, but it is so interesting that all eyes were on this technology when people predicted that it was the future. And now that it's actually here and people like your son are riding around in them, they're weirdly under the radar. So it's just weird sometimes when technology stories work out like that. Yeah.

And I wonder, like, there's so many variables to this that could go bad, right? Like, what if two people climb in a Waymo and they just start filming like a porn video? What if somebody just attacks the cameras or try, you know, like, I'm sure there's some stuff to figure out, but I haven't heard anecdotally of any super bad thing. But the thing that's the most fascinating to me is what you just said. We heard about this forever, right? It was like when I was a kid, and I don't know if it was because the Jetsons was still like the residue of the Jetsons, but like someday there's going to be flying cars. And when I was a kid,

I just assumed someday cars would fly. That's where we're heading, right? Which now seems insane in 2024. But a lot of the movies from back then, you would see cars, like the sci-fi movies, cars zipping around. And it's like, wow, we'll head there someday. And now the self-driving cars, the last 10 years, where they're like, these are coming.

And I'm like, all right, yeah, that's like the flying cars. But now they're actually here. So I'm like, will we have flying cars someday? Is that now in play? To me, the ceiling is now off. Well, if you want, we have flying cars someday. Is that now in play? To me, the ceiling is now off. Well, if you want to know if flying cars are finally here, on May 7th, we did an interview with Gideon Lewis-Craws about the future of flying cars. And what I thought was the most interesting part of that interview is that he made the point that the Jetsons didn't really

use flying cars to do anything that interesting. George Jetson just flew to work. And if you think what's a technology that we use in order to be at our house and then instantaneously be at work, that exists. It's called the laptop. It's called remote work. The laptop essentially does for a podcaster exactly what the flying car did for George Jetson. It's just a means of taking a person instantaneously from house to work.

But back to self-driving cars, I think over the next decade, as this technology really proliferates, we're going to get a lot more stories about the anxiety of its potential to displace male drivers that especially will come down the pike when, so to displace male drivers that especially will come down the pike when, so to speak, when we have self-driving trucks, because it's really not just in taxi services, but also in trucking where you have full-time employees that are dedicated to driving all day long and all week long. So that's a really interesting place to look, especially when you think about the economic impact, right? What happens when the driver of your truck fleet never has to sleep, never has to eat? You simply press start and the person starts driving from San Francisco to

Boston. So there's a lot of really interesting implications in a world where self-driving technology really begins to take off. And right now it seems mostly to be a bit of a peripheral player in the zone of taxis. I'll tell you what one thing is going to happen that is going to be interesting is the first horror movie about a Waymo. Yeah. The self-driving car you can't get out of.

That's probably coming in the next year. Yeah. I, uh, I can't believe the day is here. I gotta be honest. Are you going to do it? Do you want to do it?

Yeah, probably. My son's done like probably 15, 20 at this point. And they are, they are cheaper. Like there is no, like you,

they're probably like, I don't know, 10, if it's like a normally like a $35 Uber, now it's like a $22 Uber, but he's about to get his driver's license.

So I think, I don't know how much Waymo is going to be in his future, but yeah, I'm not against it. All right, we're going to take another break and then we got sports and culture.

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All right, we have two verticals left. Where do you want to go? Let's do culture. Yeah. I wonder if we have the same thing on culture, but I'll tell you this. I just finished Presumed Innocent. Loved it.

I did as well. Thought it was at least two episodes too long. There was padding in the middle that didn't forward the story at all. It was just like, you know, miniseries, television shows should be six to eight episodes too long. There was padding in the middle that didn't forward the story at all. It was just like, you know, miniseries, television shows shouldn't be six to eight episodes these days. We're just going to have two episodes

that don't really move the characters of the plot forward at all to get us to eight. It's a fake heart attack. Oh no, he's fine. Fake heart attack, nope. He's better than ever. Yeah.

And that made me think, is everything too long? Presumed Innocent was too long. Dark Matter on Apple, also absolutely too long. The Bear, everyone's complaining that the season wasn't even necessary. Too long. True Detective, Night Country, Lord of Mercy, definitely too long. The Curse, brilliant. Frankly, could have been 25% shorter at least. Fall of the House of Usher, Mike Flanagan, absolute genius. That show was too long. Almost all of his shows are at least one episode too long.

We're in a situation right now with television where there is no reason why anything should be a certain length, right? It's not linear TV where everything has to be half an hour or an hour. We don't have any commercial obligations to fill. Everything can just be as long as it needs to be, and yet literally everything is too

long. I think there's a few things happening here. I think the fact that subscription culture is taking over from ticket culture means that these networks assume that the longer something is, the more you are stuck to that service, which means that unlike a ticket, right? Where a movie that's four hours long costs the right, where a movie that's four hours long costs the exact same as a movie that's 90 minutes long. Instead, now that it's subscription culture, they really want people to stick around the service longer and longer and longer. So everything is longer. More content now means fewer editors per content. There's less high touch on particular shows, particular movies that go straight to streaming. And as a result, I think there's less high touch on particular shows, particular movies that go straight to streaming.

And as a result, I think there's just like a lot of padding and things just sort of billow and billow. And it made me think that like, there's actually a bigger theme here than everything being too long. It's also that nobody knows when anything should stop. Like this isn't just Netflix. This is Joe Biden. Joe Biden didn't know when his presidency should stop. The Marvel comic universe doesn't know when it should stop. Literally every single prestige TV show is too Biden. Joe Biden didn't know when his presidency should stop. The Marvel comic universe doesn't know when it should stop. Literally every single prestige TV show is too long. Literally every single one. Boomers are holding on to power across industry. You know, the mics or the bobs

that Disney don't know when to retire. That is my future of everything, extremely broad theme of the moment. Sports owners. You left out sports owners. Sports owners. Nobody knows out sports owners. Nobody knows when anything should stop. Everything is too long.

I like it. You left out one key part for the script and for documentaries. Obviously, I have some first-hand experience with this one, just watching the market and being in it. You make more money if it's more parts. That has fundamentally changed the quality of documentaries because if people can make an eight part something or a nine part something when it should be six parts, they don't care

because you just get paid more because it's more content. And that changed, I would say five, six years ago and has completely upended all this stuff. You just get, if you're doing eight episodes of presumed innocent, you get more money than if you did six and that's it. It's I, I hate to be cynical about it, but I think that's 90% of it. And it's one of the things like with, especially in the documentary front, like I I'm involved in two big projects right now. And one of the things that I'm passionate about is just like,

I want them to be the right length. They're both multi-parts, but it's like, I want all the parts to make sense and not be like, oh, we added two extra episodes because I don't know. That gets really dangerous

when you start doing that. So the Presumed Innocent is a good example. It should have been a six episode show. And the episodes were like 45 minutes a pop, right? So they move fast. But ultimately 45 minutes a pop, 90 minutes, six episodes, we're at 270,

which is a four and a half hour movie. It's probably what it should have been. Everything else is padding. I still liked it. It ties into the culture thing I wanted to do. But from a staying around too long standpoint, this seems to be something that the super rich people, the number one thing they're the most interested in. This would have been a good one for the tech thing. Rich people, all they care about is longevity because they're

really thinking about themselves. How do I stay operating at the best possible level when I'm in my 70s, 80s, maybe even my 90s, which means I get to keep making money and I get to stay in power. So if you think about a lot of the science and a lot of the stuff people are funding and they're interested in who have money well it makes sense it's like they want to be involved in this stuff that might actually keep them in power longer right so we also have people can operate at a high level of uh success at a later age probably more than any other time in history. You think like when I was a kid, Wilford Brimley was 46. He seemed like he was 100. Now people take care of themselves. There's different things you can do to stay a little sharper. There's more awareness of when

something's wrong with you. So to me, the Biden trying to hang on forever like that, I just think that's where we're going. Don't you? I don't think this is a fad. I think it's absolutely where we're going. By the way, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's another one. Absolutely. They had to basically pull her out at the last minute and she actually really hurt the country that she stayed so long. And she specifically hurt her own cause. No question. I like the way that Ezra Klein put it, which is that there's no decision that she wrote that was more important than the decision that she made to stay in power and then die under a Republican president so that she could be replaced by someone significantly to her right.

That is a huge part of her legacy. I mean, I'm being a little bit flipped by saying that, you know, the overlongness of, you know, Apple TV shows is similar to or related to politics. But I do actually think that an important thing here is that it's been lost on people, and maybe specifically on the boomer generation that has amassed so much power in this country that a really important part of leadership is understanding when to stop being a leader. That succession is a really important part of leadership is your legacy. And your legacy is contingent on the people who come after you and the talent that you help to build that can carry your legacy forward into the future when you're no longer there. And so I think it's hard. I don't think it's easier to talk about than it is to do.

But this is a really important aspect of the nobody knows when anything should stop theme of culture, I think. Iger is the best example of this. And I like him. I've done a podcast with him. But he played it perfectly and he got out at the right time. And he probably got out a tiny bit too early rather than a tiny bit too late. And what happened? He kind of groomed the wrong people or people that obviously, and I don't know how much he undermined them when they were in the

seat. There's been a lot written about that, but ultimately just kind of missed being in the mix of stuff. And eventually now he comes back. And I think it did hurt his legacy because part of your, like what you said, part of your legacy, this is David Stern, however you feel about the last like six, seven years of when he ran the NBA. The best thing he did was put Adam in a position to succeed when Adam Silver took over, right? And maybe Adam should have taken over two years, three years earlier than he did. I remember, so my dad was a superintendent for a long time and he retired when he was 60. I think he was 60 or 62. And we talked about it and I was like, I feel like you still have your

fastball. I don't know why you're doing it. And this is what he said was what you're talking about. He's like, I'd rather leave a year and a half, two years early than a year too late. And I ha I can set this up. The next person's coming in. Everything's in good shape right now. It's, I, this seems like the right time to leave now. And I don't think a lot of people think that way. I didn't get it in the moment.

I was like, you could still do this. Why wouldn't the big question is, how do you just be like, all right, now I'm good. I mean, this is basically what succession was about, right? This was Logan Wright. So specifically on the issue of work and, you know, people, you know, staying in their jobs forever and ever, it relates, I think very much to a piece that I wrote a few years ago about an idea called workism, which is a theory that in an age of declining religiosity, work does for many people that which organized religion used to do. It provides meaning, it provides a schedule, it gives rituals, it provides the possibility of transcendence and self-actualization. And in a world where work is for many people their religion, why would you stop? People don't stop believing in

God when they're 75. Why would you stop working? And now that work is much more physically easy, it's much less physically demanding than it used to be. This isn't the 1870s. We're not working on Moby Dick ships and hunting sperm whales and cracking open their skulls to get their bladder to light our lamps. We have physically easy jobs. We sit in chairs and we tap on keyboards. And in a world where that's work, why not do it until 75? Why not do it until 85? But it creates this dilemma, which is, is the company I work for, is the institution I represent, are the people who are under me better served with me clacking away at 87 or with me having a succession plan? And I think this is going to be a really, really interesting dynamic because there's no way that Joe Biden, poor Bob Iger, I like Bob Iger too, but there's no way that Joe Biden, let's say, is going to be the last really significant succession story of

our times. We just saw a front page, Rupert Murdoch's trying to change his irrevocable trust. Didn't even realize he could do that. He's trying to change his irrevocable trust. He didn't even realize he could do that. He's trying to change his irrevocable trust. This question of how is the historically wealthy boomer generation working in white-collar jobs that are not physically demanding going to actually finally pass the torch to Gen X and Gen Z? It just goes right back to this question. Do people know how to end things? Yeah. The problem with Biden was that was a failure of the people around him because he was clearly declining a little bit in some way. And that's when somebody like your wife has to be like, yo. But I think everybody around him had vested interests, whether it's staff, family, to kind of keep him in the mix. But all he had to do was compare the clips and, you know, it landed on the right place.

I think it gets a little dicier when you talk about owners, which is like just in sports, like what we've seen, or people that run these, you know, multi-billion media companies like Murdoch. They just, what are they going to do? I remember talking to a family member recently about this, who is still working in, you know, early eighties at this point. And he was saying to me, well, I still get energy from this. Like I look around a lot of people around me, they retire and then they die. They play golf for a couple of years, then they're done. And I don't want to be like that. The people that are still around are the people that still have something to get up every day. And you're like, ah, that's interesting. I don't know if there's a right answer or a wrong answer,

but I do feel like this is going to get worse because of what all this longevity stuff that everybody's working on and all these, the science of basically staying alive longer, but also being competent longer, it's going to make it worse. Um, my culture point is tied to presumed innocent as well. A show that I really liked, um, which I didn't love.

And then I really liked the last two episodes and I thought they landed the plane. I don't want to spoil it, but I thought they did a good job as somebody who read the book and saw the movie. A lot of people in my life anecdotally watched the show and enjoyed it, which is interesting because Apple TV is not exactly like setting the world on fire. I think it's getting killed by Roku and just in general, it's one of the ones that's losing the streaming wars. And they've only had a couple shows that people even kind of,

and this one was a belated one where anecdotally people started telling each other, you watch a presumed innocent, it's good. I don't think that's the reason the show succeeded. And I don't think it's because Jake Gyllenhaal is a famous person who was in it and it was well-cast and well-acted and Sarsga guard was tremendous.

It was a simple, well done show for a lot of people that was well executed and well done. And I wonder in TV, do we, do we just not have those anymore? Like presumed instant, it was good. Both of us thought it was two episodes too long. We both liked watching it. It was probably a B plus. But it stood out in this weird world of content we live in now where everything is niche. We're in the multiverse. We're in fantasy worlds. We're in alternate universes. We're in outer space.

We're in these crazy horror films. We're in science fiction crossed with something's wrong with the house. Did we just kind of lose the narrative? Maybe let's just make stories about people that everybody can relate to. By the way, murders, courtrooms, hospitals,

police stations, that shit's been working for 70 years. Maybe more of that stuff. Did we just overthink everything? One way this clicks into a thought I've had about the evolution years? Maybe more of that stuff. Did we just overthink everything? One way this clicks into a thought I've had about the evolution of streaming and television is that clearly streaming has become the new cable bundle. In a way, as you were talking, I was thinking, it's almost like you're saying presumed innocence is doing for us something very similar to what a lot of David E. Kelly shows the 1990s were doing for us. Really simple, meat and potatoes, legal drama shows.

Somebody died. I wonder who did it. People have different agendas. And then we get to be in a courtroom. It's like it's not fucking rocket science i'll say this when i my daughter was born about 11 12 months ago and for the first three months of her life when she was just sleeping terribly just basically never sleeping and i was up all night when my wife was in the other bedroom and so i'd be in the bedroom with the baby basically reconciling to myself to not sleeping that night. What would I do?

I would watch Law & Order. Not new Law & Order. I would watch old Law & Order from the early 1990s. I think I probably watched every single episode of the first like eight seasons of that show. And I don't know what it was doing right, but it was doing something very right at a kind of meat and potatoes level.

You had to use your brain, but you didn't totally have to use your brain. It was never trying to get across a political message. I do think that late law and order got a little political, like we're going to enter a political debate and expose the good guys and the bad guys. It wasn't doing that. It was telling straightforward dramas, really, really simply. And I loved it. I just absolutely ate it up. And it made me wonder, why isn't there an effort to recapture whatever the special sauce of early Law & Order was? And I agree, at a sort of archetypal level, That is exactly what Presumed Innocent did for me. How about ER? ER should just be back. What is NBC doing? Just bring back ER,

put more young people in a hospital in Chicago and who cares if, oh, it's kind of like the Doug Ross character. Nobody cares. Presumed Innocent. I read the book, saw the movie. Guess what? 30 years later, I watched the TV show. It's fine. You know, it's funny, Bill, that the creative tension here is 25 minutes ago, you and I were saying, we can't give screenwriters access to chat GPT because all they'll do is do the same thing over and over and over again. And then 25 minutes later, we reached ourselves to the position of, you know what television could use right now? ER2. Well, I think that's one of the reasons

White Lotus succeeded for HBO. It's, I'm on a vacation. I'm going somewhere. Some weird shit's going to happen. Right? It's like they're filming season three right now. I think it's in Thailand.

It's like, guess what? The resort's going to be great. There's going to be some actors I recognize. Some weird shit's going to happen. Someone's dead in the first 10 minutes. Yeah. Yeah.

It's, it's just, I like, if you look at every like three months, they'll release what succeeded the most on streaming and the shows. And it's like, guess what? The night agent was Netflix's Netflix's biggest show.

It's like, yeah, that was discount 24. I watched every episode. I really liked it. Amazon has like Bos yeah, that was discount 24. I watched every episode. I really liked it. Amazon has like Bosch and Jack Ryan and, uh, you know, or they'll have some rom-com where somebody has to go stop a wedding and some foreign location. It's like, yeah, some of this stuff's pretty easy. So maybe gravitate more toward that, the, the kind of easy stuff to watch. I don't know.

I just feel like that's why I presumed innocent work because there's just not a lot of shows like that right now. It's funny because- How about Suits? Suits was like the biggest show on Netflix for a year. It's like that show's not even that good. No, it's not. It was my airplane show for a long time.

I would only watch it when I was 35,000 feet in the air. It's funny that now I feel like we've, we've come entirely to the opposite end of the problem where now I think what's the easiest way to possibly make ER two for the 21st century. You probably just pop all of the episode descriptions of ER one into a chat GPT and say, give me a hundred ideas for episodes. You could do the same thing with, you know, Grey's anatomy, which I suppose is still running. But this, I think, touches what has to be a very deep and difficult creative problem, which is how do you come up with ideas that are surprising enough to make people feel like they haven't seen them before, but familiar enough to make people feel like when they watch them, they're going home. And this is that ineffable secret sauce of making the most popular content in the world. Presumed Innocent nailed it.

Early Law & Order seasons absolutely nailed it. I wonder if maybe it's just easy to describe and incredibly difficult to do. Yeah, people, they got pretty caught up with these shows where somebody's, that kind of big little lies formula became a formula. Oh, here's all these people. Everything's going great, but there's this dark secret. And then they kind of big little lies formula became a formula. Oh, here's all these people. Everything's going great, but there's this dark secret. And then they kind of butchered those.

It's like, you know, it's, you know, it works. This guy had a mistress and, and she's dead and he's trying to pretend he wasn't involved, but he actually was. And now we got to figure out if he actually killed her or not. All right, let's do sports really quick. What do you got for sports? All right. So there's a concept that I recently learned about. And I'm sorry to begin this in academic world, but it'll hit sports very soon. There's a concept in sociology I recently learned about called sport space. I think you might like this. It's the idea that culture only has room for three to four sports at scale at any one time. And this term comes from a book called Offsides, which is an effort to explain why soccer is the world's favorite pastime,

but a distant also ran in the US behind football, baseball, basketball, maybe hockey. And the thesis from this book, Offside, was in the space between 1870 and 1920, America's sport space was filled. Baseball, football, basketball is invented, takes over. And America at the time was very interested in honing an identity that was distinct from Europe and certainly distinct from England. And so we resisted soccer. And for the first 100 years, football and basketball and baseball crowded out the game of soccer, essentially. And boxing. And boxing. Yeah, absolutely right. Especially in the early 1900s, mid-1900s too. But so this

idea of a fixed sports space would explain why it's really hard for sports to break into mass, mass culture, right? We don't really have a lot of earthquakes. We have some long tectonic shifts, but not a lot of earthquakes. And this is my long windup to say that as big a deal as the Caitlin Clark phenomenon is, I wonder if 15 years from now, it'll be clear that we're actually systematically underrating what a big deal Caitlin Clark's entry in the WNBA is. We're treating the story as if the WNBA is having a boomlet, as if this is the top, but what if it's the beginning? I was doing some research on the differences between the WNBA and NBA rights deal that was just signed. In the new WNBA deal,

the Women's League gets about $20 million a year. Tell me if any of this is wrong. I'm not an expert on this. I just did the research. WNBA gets about $20 million a year. NBA deal is worth closer to $7 billion a year. That means the NBA is getting 35 times more money per year from the television networks than the WNBA. 35 times more. Is the NBA really, statistically, mathematically, 35 times more popular than the WNBA is right now? The NCAA women's tournament beat the NCAA men's tournament, although it got like 99% less money.

The typical NBA game on ESPN ABC gets 1.6 million viewers. In June, ESPN reported that WNBA games are averaging 1.3 million viewers, not 35 times less, like 25% less. Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese games are averaging 2.3 million viewers, more than the typical NBA game. What if this is one of those once in a century earthquake moments in the sports space? What if the WNBA has crashed the gates? And rather than thinking, oh, this is a nice story, this is a neat story. No, actually, maybe this is such a big story that the current deals just signed will be seen as laughably incoherent in five years. What if in a few years the WNBA is right at par, if not getting more viewers per game than the NBA?

That's not so crazy considering it's only 25% less now. And again, the gap is 30, is a factor of 35. So in terms of what they're making. So I am really interested in the possibility that as much attention as obviously is being brought to the WNBA, it's actually not nearly enough. We're in a once in a century moment in American sports. Yeah, you could feel with Caitlin because there were similarities to Tiger Woods and some other like phenomenons that just felt like this is something. This isn't a fad. This isn't like a short term thing. This is something that feels different. It's tilted, whatever the landscape was. So I asked people, I didn't understand why they didn't split the WNBA out of their deal. Right. And I think the reason, and I'm not reporting this and I'm not positive, but I think the reason is because

the NBA basically funded the WNBA forever, right? They always shoehorned it into their deals. The league was not popular. The league was not doing well. And they were basically like force feeding the networks to carry it at it like it was worth more than it probably was until you get through the mid-2010s. The league hit this point where Taurasi was the best player in the league

and didn't even play one season because she could make more money elsewhere. So the first 20 years, they really put the time in and kept it alive and funded it and spent money on it. And to me, the move should have been because they could see what was happening to pull the WNBA rights out and try to sell it for as much as they could. keeping this league alive and funding it since 1996, whenever it was, that we're going to shoehorn it into this deal because we want the benefits of it. And then 10, 11 years from now, if the WNBA keeps going the way we're going, then we'll shoehorn it out. So it's almost like this was kind of their tip

on the restaurant bill for everything they did. And I don't think they should have done it that way. I think they should have done it that way. I think they should have spun it out. And everybody wants rights. Everybody wants, I think they could have gotten way more than whatever the number was assigned for. And it just felt greedy to me. I didn't get it.

When it's, the question is greedy on behalf of whom? It's greedy on behalf of the NBA whose proceeds are going to the owners and the players. But it's not going to make any sense if five to 10 years from now, the WNBA has essentially the same ratings as the NBA. It's going to lead to a labor strike is what's going to happen. That's exactly where I was going. That's where we're heading in the next two years. No question.

If there's a world where Kaelin Clark and Angel Reese and Jay Wilson are all making 35 times less. I mean, right now they're making 600 times less than NBA players. If they're still making 30 times less than NBA players and they're getting the same TV ratings, of course they're going to strike. What if there's an alternate league? I mean, this is how the ABA started, right? The NBA players underpaid, didn't make enough money, didn't really have some basic labor stuff in their favor until they unionized in 64. But then the ABA came in 67 and guess what? All of a sudden, all this shit changed and salaries went up by four times. And then in the seventies, all of a sudden NBA players were worth three times what they used to be worth.

I think the thing that I think is going to happen is I think somebody is going to try to form an alternate league because it's not like all of these WNBA players are tied to their teams forever, right? So you could start a league and be like, you know what? We have more money over here. That would seem to be the move. And I personally don't understand why the women's soccer franchises are worth... They just paid $250 million for the LA one. And the expansion ones for the WNBA

were at $110 million. I don't understand why soccer is worth more than WNBA because the TV ratings say the opposite. The interest on social media and the interest even in the sports world just says the opposite. So yeah, I'm with you. So we both feel like something funky is going to happen over the next couple of years because of this deal. It doesn't make any sense. If I'm part of a company and I know that I am just as successful and just as lucrative as an employee at some other company

who's making 35 times more than me, why in the world would I stick with that company? It doesn't make any sense. Of course, something is going to happen that has the potential to blow up the WNBA as the rights deal exists. And in that respect, I think, you know, to take your tip analogy, this is just incredibly short-sighted. If you think you're essentially just saying, I'm taking the tip on all the benefits that I gave you for the last 20 years, this is your way of saying thank you. Okay. Well, you know, Caitlin Clark, was she alive when the WNBA started? Well, they also put it in where it's like, it's a four year, four of the 11 years, and then we'll revisit the WNBA side

as an out cause. Should have done something like that. All right, we're aligned. I have a, I'll make this quick because we got to go. I, my,

my future of everything. I think we're in peak athlete hagiography era. This is it. We have player pods where people just get to say whatever they want. Nobody challenges them. Nobody asks questions. They just get to be like, yeah, we would have won the title that year. There's no facts brought in. We have these infomercial documentaries and

the all access shows that usually somebody involved as an executive producer, their production company is. We have these biopics about celebrities that I'm sure are coming for athletes too. And then we have these social media clips from the pods

where these things are spat out in 90-second clips where it's like, you know, Joel Embiid saying stuff like, yeah, if Jason Tatum has a super team, if I went five for 20, we'd lose every

game and nobody sitting with them could be like, but Joel, you've only played 433 games in 10 years and Jason Tatum's beaten you three times in the playoffs. How can you say that? Nobody challenges everything. And we're just in hagiography mode now. And everybody's going to have their own long documentary series that spins whatever their career is. Even the people that weren't that successful now have these pods where they talk about themselves. They were like these major amazing things. Just the inability for anyone to challenge some of this stuff feels

like we're just creating this alternate version of sports history that's just kind of happening over here. And I hope people see it. Why do you think this trend is going to end? It's not. It's going to get worse. I thought you said it was peak hagiography. Yeah, I think we are. This is it.

We've moved into another- The way I feel about hagiography is how I feel about conspiracy theories. It's just going to keep happening because all of the incentives push for it. I was watching Love Island USA with my wife and there were some accusations

that flew around on this show, like on every reality show, dating show, that some people are just in it to become influencers. But if you think about it, athletes are in a perfect situation to become influencers.

They've already won the lottery of fame. People talk about them on ESPN. a perfect situation to become influencers. They've already won the lottery of fame. People talk about them on ESPN. People talk about them on podcasts. They're already famous. And so if everyone sees fame as a road to becoming an influencer, then every NBA star in Gen Z and Gen Alpha, whatever's coming next, are also going to see that their NBA fame buys them a ticket that they can enter into the lottery of potentially becoming a cultural influencer that you can get a bunch of extra money from. So as I see it, there's a way in which if you were a manager or an agent for some young, smart, funny, articulate athlete, 22, 23, who cares if they're famous? Tell them to start

a podcast. The worst that happens is that you stop recording. The best that happens is that you become famous. So I think everything is pushing towards this. I think that you're going to see more. It's funny to think that in the 1980s, I think closer than you have probably had this conversation many times, but in the 1970s, 1980s, selling out was considered a bad thing. Today, it's entirely flipped. Selling out is a good thing. Merchandising yourself, making a brand of yourself is just what everybody does. So this world of, if you're a sports star, you can also be an influencer, this is just the start. Well, we had in the 40s and 50s, they would have autobiographies.

And then in the 50s and 60s and 70s, like Sports Illustrated, Sport Magazine, some of these places, they would write these first-person essays, right? And they were always, Will Chamberlain had some great ones. I remember when I was researching my book, Will Chamberlain,

he basically created what the player podcasts are now, where he's like, I should have eight titles. And my teammates let me down. He would just say crazy shit. And it was like nobody checking him because it was his first person essay. But in probably mid-70s on through the 90s, there was a balance to all this stuff. And that balance is now gone. And the reason I mentioned this is like, think about how crazy it is to produce documentaries about yourself. Right? Like we don't, we wouldn't blink if it's an autobiography. It's like, I wrote this autobiography, you're reading and you're like, all right, I'm going to take this with a grain of salt. It's an autobiography. But now people are producing documentaries about themselves and there's no grain of salt. And you really saw this with the Patriots one. It's like, here's the history of the Patriots. It's our story. And it's like,

no, this is Bob Kraft's version of the story. This isn't a documentary that's balanced and does all these different things. Can you imagine if you're like, hey, I have an announcement to make. I'm doing a four-part documentary about myself. It's produced by my new company, Derek Thompson Productions. And it's a four-part documentary about the impact that I've had on journalism. People would be like, what the fuck is going on?

You're producing it yourself? That's insane. But that's where we've landed with sports and culture. That's where we've landed with these biopics about Bob Marley, Elton John. It's like, what are we doing?

None of this stuff has any sort of real merit. I don't know. I just, I hate all of it. I'm not sure I like it either. I do think it's interesting to think about self-produced documentaries as really just being the 21st century version of autobiographies. I'd never quite thought about that. But we don't really have a moral issue

with people writing autobiographies. And yet we do. I think you're right. There is, it does feel something icky about a self-produced documentary about yourself. But maybe there isn't anything icky. Well, you're seeing it with all these all access shows that are going to happen.

Like there's 17 camera crews following all the Olympic teams. It's like, are we really going to get the authentic? Like what happens if Joel Embiid gets benched in the last two games of the Olympics? Are we going to be covering that in our all access on the USA Olympic team? No. So I just hope people understand the difference between content where somebody can at least, you know, there, there might be a tiny bit of journalism there

or stuff that's just all access infomercial stuff, which is where we're heading with basically everything. Yeah, it's marketing, right. Might be time for me to go. It's just in general. This new era might be out. All right, Derek, you got some Atlantic stuff coming, plain English.

This is going to be one of the most interesting times we've had in America, probably since I've been alive these next four or five months. So I know you'll be chronicling all of it and just try to get some sleep. Hope you have some good coffee in North Carolina. We got great coffee. Yeah. No, trade coffee and counterculture. I'm doing great.

The future of everything. We did it. Summer edition. I will see you in the winter for the next edition. Bye, Bill. Thank you. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Derek Thompson.

Thanks to Joe House. Thanks to Kyle Creighton. And don't forget, new Rewatchables coming on Sunday night. I will not have a podcast on Sunday. You probably won't see me on this feed until a week from Sunday unless something crazy happens. So stay cool, everybody. I'll see you in a few years with him

on the wayside I'm a person I never was I don't have a few years