The Bill Simmons Podcast - The Tom Brady Awards, Plus Chuck Klosterman on Instant Replay, Athlete Longevity, and the ’90s

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons gives out his Tom Brady Awards to honor Brady’s legendary career (2:36). Then Bill is joined by author Chuck Klosterman to discuss Brady’s retirement; the longevity of the modern athlete; instant replay; Chuck’s new book, ‘The Nineties: A Book’; when the decade officially started and when it really felt like “the ’90s”; the impact of the internet, pop-culture, and more (34:41). Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Chuck Klosterman Producer: Kyle Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Subscribe to youtube.com slash Bill Simmons. You get all the breakout videos that we do from this podcast, as well as the rewatchables, and you get six years of stuff that we already did. Some really good stuff too. Check it out. YouTube.com slash Bill Simmons. Subscribe. It's the Bill Simmons podcast presented by FanDuel. Football is in full action. FanDuel's highest rated sports book is the best place to bet it all. We've been doing pretty well on million dollar picks this year. I love the first month of the season because you have to go into the season thinking, I think Pittsburgh's going to be good. I think the Chargers are going to be good.

I think Seattle's going to be good. And then trying to back what you think in those first few weeks and then zag the other way if you were wrong. You could bet on new and fun markets on FanDuel, like to catch a pass, same game parlays, highest scoring game across the Sunday slate. Offensive TDs in the next drive. They have so much stuff, it's crazy. The app is safe and secure and easy to use. And when you win, you'll get paid instantly. Plus,

look out for FanDuel Squares this season. Here's what you have to do. Visit FanDuel.com slash BS to download America's number one sports book. The ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available and listen to the end of the episode for additional details. You must be 21 plus and present in select states. Gambling problem called Win 100 Gambler or visit rg-help.com. 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 gangs here, you're tailgating outside the stadium. It's a great time for beer. Or how about when you're standing at the grill and the smell of sizzling burgers is in the air? Moments like that. Or when you want a light beer that tastes like beer, that's delicious. You don't want to load up on those heavier beers and then you only have two of them. Then you feel tired. Your stomach feels full. Miller Lite, it's your friend. It just accompanies whatever else you're doing. You're super happy with it. Opening an ice cold Miller Lite can signal the beginning of Miller time. Miller Lite is the light beer with all the great beer tastes we like. 90 calories per 355 mil can. So why not grab some Miller Lites today? Your game time tastes

like Miller time. Must be legal drinking age. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network where we have new rewatchables that went out Monday night. We declared February would be fucked up family February

on the rewatchables. Oh yeah, it's a thing. We're doing five effed up family movies. The first one was Ordinary People. We have four more coming. It's one of my favorite gimmicks we've done in a while. It was really fun to talk about Ordinary People actually. There's a lot of stuff going on with that movie.

Oscar stuff, casting stuff, it was a good one. Check that out. Don't forget to check out Ringer NFL and Ringer Gambling Show as we head toward the Super Bowl. All of our great hosts on those. Prestige TV pod, Chuck Klosterman is coming up a little bit later. We're going to be doing Pam and Tommy on Friday.

So if you're going to watch Pam and Tommy on Hulu, you can hear Chuck and I breaking it down after his new book coming out about the 90s. And we're going to talk about that as well. Top of the pod, I'm going to do the first and only annual Tom Brady Awards for a guy who's been in my life since for basically the entire century. And Belichick's texts are in there. I'm going to wait until Thursday to talk about it. I want more information on all this stuff. Right now we're taping this. It's in the afternoon. It's going to go up tonight.

But that is a crazy story on Monterey. It really feels like it has a chance to be one of the most impactful lawsuits that's not only happened in football, but in the history of professional sports. Because, first of all, it's crazy that Flores doesn't have a coaching job. I can't believe he wasn't snapped up by one of these teams. I, you know, after going against the Dolphins the last couple of years with the Patriots, like I just assumed he'd be the first coach fired, hired, and he still has not been hired. So I want to monitor that, but we might talk about that on Thursday.

We'll do some basketball as well. Today is Brady and Klosterman. It's all coming up. First, our friends from Pearl Jam. So Tom Brady retired today. We've been expecting this for a couple weeks as a possibility. I was still kind of wondering, would he go to the Niners? Is that in play? But apparently not.

He's done. 22 years. Here's how I described the Brady era in January, 2017 in a column. It's like sitting at a red hot blackjack table and knowing there's an unfavorable dealer change. Only we've spent the last 15 years at this table. I'm on an ongoing email thread with a few Patriots fan buddies. And every once in a while, another team does something atrocious. And one of us will invariably make the, that's going to be us after Brady and Belichick leave joke. Because it's true. They're going to leave. The Patriots are almost definitely going to suck for God knows how long.

Well, I never could have guessed he'd keep going for five more years after I wrote that, including two in Tampa. But I will say Boston fans always appreciated what was happening in the moment. We knew from Bird, we knew from Moore, we knew from Pedro. There's always an actual finish line for greatness and you have to savor every single freaking moment. We love this guy. We appreciated him, revered him, we treasured him. Especially me. I loved the Patriots for my entire life. My first QB was Jim Plunkett, number one pick in the 1970 draft. Got the shit kicked out of him for half a decade, and then the Raiders

eventually saved him. They won a Super Bowl with him. So that hurt. We had Steve Grogan, who was like a Marcus Mariota type until his body got demolished. I remember at one point, he was wearing the neck donut. He was so banged up. For his career, he threw 182 touchdowns

and 218 interceptions. I swear to God, you can look that up. Then we had Tony Eason, talented kid, first round pick, froze in every single big moment. You could always count on him turtling in a big game from a sack. We came to despise him. And by the time I got to college in the late 80s,

we had a run of Doug Flutie, Tommy Hodson, Mark Wilson's corpse, Hugh Millen, Scott Zolak. Those were our QBs. That's when I started gambling. Not a coincidence. And then Drew Bledsoe showed up. We thought he was the savior. He never quite got there. That's 30 years of pretty forgettable QBs, which honestly didn't make us much different than nearly any other NFL franchise.

But Brady drops from the sky. Suddenly our team mattered. We won titles. People came to hate us. We became a weird cross of the Yankees and Duke and the 1980 USSR hockey team. We didn't care. We had the best QB.

We had the best coach. We hit the jackpot. And I'm telling you, we appreciated it the entire time. We appreciate it today. We had the best coach. We hit the jackpot. And I'm telling you, we appreciated it the entire time. We appreciate it today. So I couldn't resist handing out some Tom Brady awards now that he's actually leaving. Let's call this the one and only Tom Brady awards. Greatest moment. Here are the nominees. The final drive against St. Louis, Super Bowl 36, going 16-0 in a regular season. The Seattle comeback, Super Bowl XLIX, or the Falcons comeback from 25 down in Super Bowl XXXI.

The obvious answer is the Falcons game. Here's what I wrote afterwards. Super Bowl XXXI played out like an old-school, by-the-book, cliche-litten, stereotypical sports movie that Hollywood had churned out for 43 years and counting. You had the handsome superstar QB fighting an evil commissioner, fending off his handsome successor, battling advanced age, hiding his distress about his mother's

ongoing cancer battle. For the actor, think Kevin Costner, 1995, 96 range. You had super athletic rivals with more raw talent who should have prevailed, couldn't stay out of their own way. Think South Central in Hoosiers.

You had a cast of goofy sports movie characters, including 2017 Sound FX MVP, Julian Edelman, as tweeter for Varsity Blues. You had Rob Gronkowski as Rob Gronkowski. You had LeGarrette Blount and Dante Hightower

as the lovable charismatic teammates with a knack for putting our hero's greatness in perspective at the very end. And of course, you had the mercurial curmudgeon genius guru, Bill Belichick. I think Gene Hackman and the replacements crossed with a non-evil Bud Kilmer, if that's even possible.

You had the everything goes wrong first half debacle followed by the inspirational halftime speech, which you know happened, followed by the everything goes right second half comeback, in which the scoreboard seems like it's on drugs. The comeback team keeps the ball for 20 straight scenes because it's a movie. Who needs to see defense stops? Kind of like the longest yard. You had our underdog easily competing, usually difficult two-point conversions, pulling off miracle catches, relying on its opponent's ongoing stupidity, and then, best of all, you had the overtime

victory in the long-awaited Goodell-Brady post-game handshake, which was the real-life version of the longest yards ending, when Paul Crew rammed the football into the warden's stomach and said, stick this in your trophy case. That was the best Brady moment.

And also at that point from Deflategate, that was when he really became part of Boston. You know, there was like a little undercurrent. He left, there were shots of him in the Yankees cap, married the supermodel. He kind of became such a big celebrity. There were some murmurs. And then Deflategate happens and that was our guy.

They were coming after our guy and it tied into the us against them thing that makes New England what it is. New England is all about us against them. It's about, we drove the British out in the 1760s and 70s and everybody's still against us. And Deflategate was perfect. So there you go.

Luckiest moment is our next award. Here are the nominees. The tuck rule, obviously, even though the rule was interpreted correctly, just for the record. The J.R. Redman spot in Super Bowl XXXVI, underrated. He's going out of bounds. They say that he got out of bounds.

It really doesn't seem like he did, but they said he did. And that opened the door for a couple more plays and they ended up beating the Rams. The D Ford offsides in the Chiefs-Pats 2018 game, Miramove's Chiefs fans, which if he's not offsides, the game's over. So that's the Super Bowl. And then the Malcolm Butler play, which, you know, that's another one. I just listed four plays that probably led to three Super Bowls. But the Malcolm Butler play specifically,

one of the craziest plays in the history of the Super Bowl. The best defensive play ever made in the Super Bowl. The culmination of this awesome chess match where Belichick's letting the clock run down. Here's what I wrote afterwards. I did a retro running diary of that game on ESPN. The stakes if they don't win the Butler game, if Brady were to rally back from 10 down,

he would clinch goat status and foil Seattle's chance for back-to-back titles, which seemed impossible in the salary cap. Now that happened. If he were to fall short, it would mean three straight Super Bowl losses and a winter spring summer of maybe it's time to change the offense.

So we're not asking a 37-year-old quarterback to string together impeccable 13-play drives from four straight quarters on big stages because we can never run the ball when it matters. We haven't had a deep threat since Randy Moss. Those conversations would have started. So forget about the Anna Cincinnati joke. We would have been onto a new offense.

And that finishes that excerpt. But yeah, we would have been wondering, all right, is this team now cursed? What's going on here? We haven't won since February 05. The Tyree catch, Spygate, does this team now have bad juju? Instead, everything changes.

And ironically, right after the curse catch that made it seem like the curse was now in process, but it wasn't, we won. Next award, most stunning fact that illustrates how long Brady was good at football. Brady became the Pat starting QB two weeks after 9-11. That is fact number one. Fact number two, when Brady won his first Super Bowl, LeBron was a junior in high school. Fact number three, Peyton Manning was Brady's biggest rival. He retired seven years ago. Fact number four, since 2001, we've had nine Fast and Furious movies and 10 Brady Super Bowls. And fact number five, Brady's first celebrity girlfriend, Bridget Moynihan, was the girl who played Mr. Big's hot young wife in Sex and the City, a show that has now been rebooted with a bunch of women in their mid-50s. Five pretty stunning facts.

I am going with Brady winning his first Super Bowl when LeBron was a junior in high school because it feels like LeBron's been around just as long as Brady. And in a way, he has because we knew about LeBron. But anyway, that's our answer.

Biggest what if of the Brady era. Here are the nominees. The Tyree catch. What would happen if they go 19-0? Gronk spraining his ankle before the second giant Super Bowl. Edelman's torn ACL before the Eagles Super Bowl season. Brady tearing his ACL when they traded Deion Branch in 2006, which I still believe cost them the Super Bowl against the Bears.

They never got there because they were missing a receiver. The answer to this is Brady tearing his ACL because that leads to the most what ifs. Would that team have won the Super Bowl the next year? It ended up being that weird card stealer Super Bowl. Did the Pats have the best team? They went 11-5 anyway without Brady. Does, if they win the Super Bowl, does Brady have the same carrot dangling over him that I'm going to talk about later with Chuck Klosterman? Does that same carrot dangling or because they didn't win the Superbowl, any Torres ACL.

Now he dug in and really wanted to go to another level. Who knows? A lot of what ifs from that, but that was also the worst moment award that we're going to have. 18 and one losing the Giants as a nominee, the Eagles loss and getting strip sacked when it seemed like everything was set up for the sports movie comeback, blow in the 2006 AFC title game or Brady's 2008 season lasting eight minutes.

That is the answer. That was the worst moment of the Brady era. Here's what I wrote the next day. What a surreal feeling when your season gets assassinated before it really starts. It's only happened two other times with my teams. No Mars wrist injury for the 2001 season. Bird's heel surgery, six games into the 80-89 season. Each time, Boston had a shred of hope to recover in time for the stretch run. And of course, they never did. Getting final word on the Brady injury felt like being an actor on a cop show and identifying a murder victim at the morgue. Yep, that's it. That's the 2008 Pat season. You can pull the sheet back over it. Thank you. That's how it felt.

You knew it was done. I also wrote later in that piece, that's another milestone for that Brady injury. It's the all time, if this happened in Madden, I couldn't have pressed the reset button fast enough moment. In fact, I was pressing it subconsciously

even as Brady was limping off the field. Damn it. Yeah. And throwing in there too, that was also the number one fantasy football injury of all time. To have Brady, you lose him in eight minutes. Nuts.

I still can't believe that happened. Next word, craziest fan moment. The answer to this is an email from John B. in Valley Stream, New York for one of my mailbags. He says, Brady's injury gave me an idea. If you had the power, would you take so-and-so's injury yourself so that he could play? In this case, would you allow your knee to be blown out, have surgery, go through rehab if it meant Brady's knee never got injured and he played the whole

season? Here was my response. Excellent idea. I think it depends on your mindset as a sports fan in that specific time as well as your age. For instance, I wouldn't absorb Brady's injury because I wouldn't want to be on crutches for a few months when I have two young kids. And besides, we won three Super Bowls this decade. But let's say you're my friend Mike Tolan, a diehard Philly fan who's a little older than me and has older kids. If the Mets and Phillies were tied with a week to go and Ryan Howard's wrist was broken by a pitch, would Mike do the switcheroo and take the broken wrist? Well, I called him and here was his first response.

Quote, the left one or the right one? That was his actual response. We talked it out for a few minutes and Mike ultimately decided he would sacrifice the left wrist in any scenario, but he'd sacrifice the right wrist only if he was guaranteed a World Series trip because quote, that's my writing hand, my Blackberry hand, and my shaving hand,

and I wouldn't be able to play basketball for six weeks, although I guess I could run, dot, dot, dot, end quote. For all I know, he's still debating it. I'm going on a limb and saying Philly needs to win a title soon for everyone's sake. As it turns out, they won a title. Did I will the Eagles to win a title with that paragraph? We'll never know. Next award, single greatest pass I ever saw Tom Brady throw. This was the Hail Mary to Randy Moss in Super Bowl 36 against the Giants. On third down, I was at this game.

I watched this in real time, and it's still one of the three or four most incredible things I've ever seen in person. Here's what I wrote the next day. After an unforgivable sack on second down, we had less than 30 seconds to play in one timeout. We needed to play the let's throw a Hail Mary pass to the greatest deep threat ever and hope he does something superhuman card. Almost like a last resort in a Madden game. Well, everyone in the building knew it was coming, especially the Giants. When the ball was snapped, the cornerback facing Moss turned around and just started sprinting. So did the safety shaded over to his

side. Brady rolled out to his right, bought a couple seconds, waited as long as he could, then uncorked the pass from his own 12-yard line. The flight of the ball alone should have been mesmerizing, but there was Moss racing down the sidelines. We didn't have a chance. Suddenly, we had a chance. It was the distant cousin to the three-pointer that Larry Bird missed by a half inch in game four of the 1987 NBA finals, where we knew we needed a miracle. We knew we had the right horses in place to make that miracle happen. And then the play was happening. The ball was headed toward a good place. And we were standing there frozen in absolute disbelief.

Wait a second. Why does it seem like you might catch that? Wait a second. Wait a second. Brady ended up underthrowing him by about a half a yard. Although underthrowing is the wrong word because the ball traveled an astonishing 85 yards in the air. I still think it was his best throw ever. Coming within a hair of completing an Uber bomb to a double-team receiver in stride on the 19-0 season's last gasp was like Tiger needed a hole of seven iron to win the Masters, missing it, but hitting the pin. Moss had to ease up for a split

second of a split second, screwing up his timing because he was sprinting about 85 miles an hour at the time, allowing one of the Giants to make up two yards and tip the ball before it could land in the freak's hands. So long, miracle. And for whatever reason, you never hear this play discussed in reverential what-if tones like some other famous near misses, even though had the ball traveled a yard further, it could have spawned one of the single greatest moments in sports history and made that team immortal.

Bird Street was the greatest crowd moment I've ever seen in person because 15,000 Celtic fans were screaming at the same time. The sound for Moss' almost Hail Mary was a little different. So you had the, oh, that was all the past fans having their hopes dashed. But then you also had the Giants fans going, ah. They're petrified, they're crapping their pants. They're celebrating their escape. They know what I mean.

Every one of them is nodding right now. They remember, I promise you. But that catch was not meant to be. So I wrote that after Moss got traded. And I kept thinking about the Hail Mary and Moss and just how unbelievable he was for that year, and that catch, it's weird. The catch that he didn't make

is the catch I'm always going to remember. Next award, most impressive statistical achievement that isn't him breaking almost every QB record we have. First choice, 18-0. Second choice, seven Super Bowls. Third choice, 10 Super Bowls in 20 years as a starter. So he's basically batting 50% with Super Bowls. Fourth choice, last two buck seasons where in his early to mid 40s, not only is he winning a Super Bowl one of those years, in the other year, he's down 27-3 in a playoff game and we're

all sitting there waiting for them to bring him back. He's 44. And then the fifth choice, which is the answer, Brady's playoff record. So he's 35 and 12, but amazingly, he's also at 13 first round buys that he earned. So if you're saying the actual stat is playoff rounds that Brady advanced, he's actually 48 and 12. That's insane. Montana had 16 playoff wins total. Elway had 14, Bradshaw had 14. Manning was 14 and 13 with eight buys, which makes him 22 and 13 for rounds advanced. And Brady's just obliterating everybody. I still think I can't get over that. That, Bill Russell with being undefeated in game sevens and winning titles in 11 and 13. Not only are the two greatest

Boston sports accomplishments ever, but you could argue that those are the two greatest in team sports ever. So that's that. Next award is, it's a quickie. It's the funniest Brady subplot. You have the evolving hairdos over the year. I mean, one of the great things about this man

was he was able to regenerate his own hair. We still don't know how he did it. We have, when he snubbed Jimmy G in the post-Butler pick celebration, Jimmy G's hopping over to get in on the Brady jump and Brady just jumps away to Josh McDaniels. We knew Jimmy G was done then. It was a matter of time before he got whacked

like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. And then the other choice, which is the winner, is the fuck you handshake with Roger Goodell after the Super Bowl and the flake gate had been decided when there's this great photo of them shaking hands and Brady just kind of eyeballing him with that look that you have if you've dated somebody's girlfriend or boyfriend before they did, multiplied by a million. That was my favorite. Next award, the best Brady prediction that actually came true, October 2014. Here's what I wrote for Grantland.

One night earlier this year, I ran into friends in New York who happened to be with Julian Edelman. After a breakout season, Edelman had been debating whether to re-sign or leave for a bigger offer, which meant he'd be leaving Tom Brady. His friends were busting his balls about it.

Go ahead, leave Brady, see what happens. It was actually pretty funny. Edelman knew what I did for a living. He had a couple of drinks with him. He was feeling emotional about Brady. Again, it was unclear whether they were done as teammates. He launched into an endearingly genuine monologue about Brady's brilliance,

what an unbelievable teammate Brady was, unbelievable quarterback, worked harder day in, day out than any teammate Edelman ever had, owed everything to the guy. We joked that Edelman almost sounded like a religious fanatic discussing the cult of Brady or something, but that's how he felt. I asked him how long Brady could keep playing. Without hesitation, Edelman said, as long as he wants. Like 43, I asked? Edelman nodded. He described Brady as, quote, a football machine, adding, he's in bed by 830 every night, exclamation point. He'd never seen anything like Tom Brady. He couldn't imagine Brady not playing football. Six more years, at least. That's what he believed. And yes, Edelman re-signed with the Patriots just a few weeks later. Let's just say I wasn't surprised. So that's what I wrote in 2014. Edelman was actually, he was wrong.

It was more than six years, but that became a story in the news because I wrote about that and it was like Tom Brady goes to bed at 8.30 every night and then it became a story. And I think Edelman might've even denied it, which it happened. But now we know from all the documentaries. Brady goes to bed probably maybe even earlier than the 830.

Next award, most underrated achievement by Tom Brady. Giving the Patriots a great video game, QB? Brady's Madden rating in 2002 was 54. We never had a good video, QB. It was always Randall Cunningham, Joe Montana, Steve Young, Brett Favre. All these guys were amazing. And ours, our guys always sucked or were mediocre.

Brady, after winning the Super Bowl, goes to 84. Then to 94 a year later. By 2008, he was a 99. We had a 99 as a batting QB. To me, that was more unbelievable than winning a Super Bowl. Next to word, best movie parallel for Brady. Nominees are For Love of the Game. Clearly, the 27-3 game felt a little For Love of the Game-ish,

although unlike Billy Chappell, he didn't get the perfect game. But I think he knew he was done at that point, pretty confident. And that was the one last comeback, and then he actually did it. So it's like the perfect game where the game is now tied going into the 10th inning, and you have to pitch the 10th, and you lose. Next one would be Rollerball as a movie parallel. I don't know if you've seen that movie, 1974, James Caan classic. It's about this sport called rollerball that is being taken over by an evil commissioner and corporate overlords. And they decide that they don't want stars to emerge from this game and they make the game more and more and more and more violent so that eventually the game will be the only thing that survives. But they weren't counting

on James Caan as Jonathan O. Spoiler alert, James Caan survives. He's the last one standing. They can't get rid of him. A little like Goodell with Tom Brady. If you watch Rollerball next time, if you're flipping through cable channels, you'll see the similarities. But the winner of this answer is the Fast and Furious franchise. So here's an email that was sent to me by Alex Costa in Indiana once upon a time. I was trying to make sense of how

every Patriots Super Bowl is insanely dramatic. Isn't the Patriots dynasty like the Fast and Furious franchise? First three Super Bowls, exciting games, had nothing to do, had nothing that made you wake up the next morning wondering yourself, how in the world did that happen? Same with the first three Fast and Furious franchise. First three Super Bowls, exciting games, had nothing to do, had nothing that made you wake up the next morning wondering yourself, how in the world did that happen? Same with the first three Fast and Furious movies. But then the fourth Pat's Super Bowl movie took a turn from ridiculously believable to just plain ridiculous. Fifth and sixth ones even became more

ridiculous. Then Super Bowl 51 Fast Seven took it to another stratosphere, where there was the 25 point comeback Edelman's Catcher, the Fast 7 crew parachuting out of planes, landing their cars in a mountain, the eighth Fast and Furious movie trailer even premiered during Super Bowl 51. Does that mean we should expect an eighth Brady Belichick Super Bowl? I can't imagine anything topping 51,

but I would have said the same thing for 49. That's what Alex Costa wrote. Well, we know what happened. Fast 8 came out. The Eagles Patriots Super Bowl happened. A little dissatisfying. Then we had a ninth Super Bowl with no fast movie to match it, although Fast 9 eventually did come out, and then a 10th. So when we have 10, we can really line them up. But here's what I wrote as a response to Alex.

Amazing. You even left out this tidbit. The Fast and Furious was released on June 22, 2001. Tom Brady became New England's starting QB three months later. Does that mean Brady and Belichick are like Dom and Brian? And what about how their supporting characters kept changing with the Super Bowl movies? Or Gronk slash The Rock showing up for the fifth Super Bowl movie, helping to carry the sixth one and battling injuries in the seventh one? Or Brady and Dom never really aging? Or the bad guys changing in every Super Bowl movie.

You did it, Alex. You came up with the single most preposterous Patriots pop culture parallel that actually makes sense. Congratulations. I still stand by that. Next award, best Brady-related villain. Some great ones here. We have Bernard Carmel Pollard, the guy who knocked Brady out in eight minutes in 2008. And then three years later, three and a half years later, he knocks out Gronk in the AFC title game before the second Giants Super Bowl. Gronk has to play with a high ankle sprain and we barely lose the game.

So yeah, Pollard got to the point where you saw him on the field during a Patriots game. He just got frightened. He was like Jason Voorhees. That's one answer. Eli Manning took two Super Bowls from us and pulled the Tyreek catch out of his butt. But the winner is obviously Roger Goodell,

aka The Warden. And for whatever reason, all the dumb shit that happens in football, he decides to do a witch hunt on the one star in his league who all he did was just play football and try to be a good guy. So I will never forgive you, Roger Goodell.

Next award, best rival, Peyton Manning. The upper hand between these two guys shifted 10 times. 99-02, Manning. 03-05, Brady. He has the upper hand. We got some Russell Chamberlain stuff starting to build. Nope, going back. 06, Manning.

07, Brady. Breaks all the records. Almost goes undefeated. 08, 09, Manning takes it back. 2010, 11, Brady again. 2012, 13, Manning goes to Denver, grabs it back, beats Brady in a playoff game even. 2014, Brady grabs it back, wins the Super Bowl. 2015, Manning, who's noodle arm Manning at this point Somehow beats Brady One last time In a playoff game I'll always think Brady got concussed

During that game And then The defense wins The Super Bowl for him And then in 2016 From that point on Brady takes it back again It changes 10 times

Pretty amazing rivalry Next award Most perfect teammate Troy Brown Gronk Welker Edelman Or Moss

All due respect to Moss, who I still think is the highest upside teammate possible for Brady. It was just watching those two guys together was unbelievable. But Gronk, greatest tight end ever. Perfect sidekick. Unintentional comedy, real comedy. He brought everything to the table. Even followed Brady to Tampa.

Best teammate I ever had. Next award. Number of times Brady was involved in the 12 greatest sports moments of my life. Well, here are the 12 moments due from number one to number 12. Game seven, 2004 ALCS, we beat the Yankees. I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime. I never thought I'd see number two either. Super Bowl 36, we beat the Rams, the Patriots, the black sheep of the Boston sports scene wins the Super Bowl. Number three, game five, 1986, American League Championship Series against the Angels. Hindu hits a home run. Top of the night, two outs. Saves our season. It's

the only time I've ever blacked out during a sporting event. I actually ran outside my aunt Jen's house and don't remember doing it and ended up outside the house and didn't know I got there. Number four, Super Bowl 51. That would be the comeback, 28-3. Got to watch that with my son and nephew, Kyle. Number five, Game 5, 1987, NBA Eastern Finals against the Pistons. That's Bird, Steele, Zabal. I was there. Number six, Super Bowl 49, Malcolm Butler. Number seven, Game 5, 2004 LCS. I was at Game 4 and Game 5, so you lump those together. This is when the rivalry really starts to shift and David Ortiz turns into a superhero. Still the greatest two-day experience

I've seen in person in my life. Number eight, Game 7, 1984, NBA Finals. Number nine, Game 7, 1981, NBA Eastern Finals. I was at both of those games, beat the Lakers, beat the Sixers. Number 10 is the snow game in 2002. I was not at that game. I had a ticket, decided not to go because of the blizzard.

And it's my biggest ticker regret of my life. And then if we're rounding out top 12 game for 2004 World Series, Red Sox win. Game five, 1976 NBA finals, Triple OT, Phoenix game, first great game I ever went to. So Brady was involved in four of the 12 greatest sports moments of my life for rooting vicariously for a team, including for the top 10. Super Bowl 36 was number two. This is what I wrote for ESPN the next day. The only column I've ever handed in,

I don't want to say I was drunk, but I was over-served. And we went to Pat O'Brien's after the game and we just kept yelling, we're the fucking champs at each other. And then this is a piece of what I wrote from that. And that went on for three straight hours. You think I'm kidding? I'm not kidding. Three hours. No lie. We were the champs, the champs, the champs, the champs. Have I mentioned that we were the champs? We couldn't stop talking about it. Sports Illustrated is coming out with their annual Super Bowl video. The Patriots will be the main attraction.

There's a Super Bowl party happening. It's happening in Boston. Matt in 2003 probably needed an intro and a team for the cover of the game. It's going to be the Pats. Letterman needs a Super Bowl-related guest for his show this week. Brady or Vinatieri? We're having a victory party on Tuesday, a day-long Mardi Gras,

and it's taking place in Boston. Good God. Does it get any better than this? True story. At around 3.30 a.m. CT, we were huddled in the back of Pat O'Brien's, the infamous bar right off Bourbon Street, when the theme song from The Greatest American Hero started blaring from the

speakers. And we started singing along, all of us. Believe it or not, I'm walking on air. We sang the whole song. Sounds corny? It wasn't. You had to be there. I'm telling you. The Pats had just won the Super Bowl. We were celebrating New Orleans. We were belting out the lyrics to the greatest American hero. Some moments you just don't forget. Not ashamed to admit that this was one of the five or six happiest days of my life. Seriously. I don't know if it's in the top five or six anymore for me, but it's definitely still in the top 12. Anyway, next award, most endearing home playoff win. We had the snow game, which it can't be understated. That was the last game in the history of the shithole. That was Foxborough Stadium,

Sullivan Stadium, whatever you want to call it. Just 30 years, 40 years. I don't even remember how 30 years. I think it started in the early 70s, but aluminum seats, it just sucked. It had no life. Nothing good ever happened. It was all bad memories. And then the last game ever played in that stadium becomes one of the great home wins in the history of the Patriots. And the people call it the tuck world game. We call it the snow game, the birth of the Brady legend. We come back, we beat the Raiders, the team that was one of our arch nemesis that took the Superbow for most of the mid-70s. And I love that one.

I love the cut that meat game in January 2005. That's another candidate. That was the second time they beat the Colts when the crowd's, Peyton Manning had done the cut that meat commercial and the crowd's just chanting cut that meat at him as he's getting his ass kicked. Love that.

But my most endearing home playoff win, January 2015, Pats 35, Ravens 31, about a week before the deflacate thing blew up. Here's what I wrote afterwards. A pull it out of their butts comeback highlighted by a signature touchdown thrown by Julian Edelman. You know, the wide receiver pass that Belichick had been setting up for 12 solid years, that one. Brady finished with 306, seven yards, three passing TDs and a touchdown scamper in freezing weather against a feisty Ravens defense. Bonus points because we've never had a better or more timely rendition of the outfields, your love, which Patriots fans ripped off not once, but twice before Baltimore's

crucial fourth and three. That's one of my favorite YouTube clips, by the way. The next one, moment he became the GOAT patriot. That's the next word. I have for an answer here, right after Spygate, when the Pats became the FU Pats and started killing everybody. I wrote this in mid-October. Barring injuries, it's going to be an enormous, enormous deal if somebody beats New England this season.

That's the sign of a truly great team, regardless of the sport. During my sophomore year of college, I remember watching the 89 Niners and thinking, there's no way in hell they can be beaten. You need like 35 things to happen. As it turned out, they outscored their opponents by a 442 to 253 margin in the regular season, lost two games by a total of five points and rolled through their three playoff opponents by the unfathomable score of 126 to 26. The 89 Niners, different level. We haven't seen anything like it since.

And now we're seeing it again. Those were the stakes for that Patriots team, by the way. I'm done with that excerpt. It wasn't just that they're trying to go undefeated. They were doing stuff that we hadn't seen in football since the Montana era. There was a domination happening that felt different, and it became pretty clear it was going to be a huge deal

if somebody beat them, which sadly became true. The moment he became the GOAT QB is our next award. That's 28-3. I wrote after that it was the greatest accomplishment ever by an older athlete. Here's what I wrote. If you're combining age, miles, degree of difficulty, quality of opponent, punishment during the game,

level of quality, and the stage itself, it's pretty undeniable. Nicholas won the 86 Masters by shooting a 65 in the final round. Brady basically shot a 62 on Sunday and went 10 under on the back nine with like 110 million people watching. That's a little more impactful than, say,

Foreman knocking out Michael Moore. Brady's taken such phenomenal care of his body that you can tell him apart in different seasons only by his haircuts. He's also turning 40 in August. He's the same age as retiring Cubs catcher David Ross or Kareem during the 87 finals or even Tiger Woods two years ago. And he's getting absolutely pounded in these playoff games. At 59-year-old, Tom Watson pulled out the British Open title in 2009. There's a different answer for this question, but I think it's Brady.

So there you go. That's yet another thing Brady pulled off. Our next and final award is best quote. So anytime somebody would ask Brady what his favorite Super Bowl was, he'd always say, the next one. I wrote this about Brady in January 2011. Within a few days of last January's Baltimore thrashing, normally a time when star players are licking their wounds in a tropical beach, Brady was working out so maniacally that a friend looked at him in disbelief, genuinely concerned, and said, buddy, you got to slow

down. Brady wasn't working that hard to catch Peyton Manning. He was doing it to remain Tom Brady. Big difference. Every day when something isn't happening is a lost day. Every day serves a smaller purpose for a larger goal, a goal that can never officially be enjoyed because instantly it becomes about the ensuing goal. For Brady and Manning, it never ends. That's what makes them great. So I wrote that January 2011.

Then you see Brady's Instagram thing. And this is why I always thought he was going to retire. I never thought it was about, can I still play football? It was about that 365 days thing. This is what he says in the Instagram post. I've always believed the sport of football is an all-in proposition. If a 100% competitive commitment isn't there, you won't succeed. And success is what I love so much about our game.

There's a physical, mental, and emotional challenge every single day that has allowed me to maximize my highest potential. So if you watch Man in the Arena, or even if you watch Time vs. Time, he's obsessed with this. He really feels like he took whatever his potential was, whatever his ceiling was as an athlete and as a teammate, and he maximized it. And I think around, I'm going to say after he tore his ACL, but somewhere around 2010 range, that's when he became obsessed with that. How do I keep getting better? And he said, the one time I talked to him for an interview

for a piece in that January 2011 range, he was saying, I feel like I'm getting better. I feel like I can keep going. I still feel like I'm getting better as a quarterback, which made no sense, because at that time he said he's mid-30s. But that's how he felt. He felt, for him,

it was putting together the day in, day out, day in, day out. His commitment to that was the last piece that that was his edge over everybody else. And he was right, because nobody else was able to do anything close to what he just did. So it was amazing to watch. It was amazing to watch him transform. And he's been around so long that I was living in Boston, in Charlestown in in 2001 when Brady versus Bledsoe became a thing. And you can go back and you can read my pieces from back then. I was team Brady.

Just felt like he had something. Didn't expect this, but you could see something different about him from the first couple games. And now he's the greatest quarterback of all time. It was a pleasure to watch him. It was a pleasure to follow him. I wish him the best at his next stop. All right, we're going to take a break and we're

going to talk about him with Chuck Klosterman in one second. 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 Super Bowl, but your fundraising will support mental health, suicide prevention, and prostate and testicular cancer research. And if you don't want to grow a mustache, you could still walk or run 60 kilometers, host an event, or set your own goal and mow your own way. Do great things this November.

Sign up now. Just search Movember. All right, Chuck Klosterman is here. He has a new book coming out called The 90s. When is it? What's the official date? It should be, well, if today is the first, it should be one week from today, February 8th.

How many books is this? Nine, eight, 10? 12. 12. You're eight away from Tom Brady seasons. Give us your Brady take, big picture, because he was there for basically one fifth of the NFL league

that changed a lot during that time. And the central question with the Patriots is always Brady or Belichick, who's more responsible, which I always thought that drove me crazy because I always felt like they're both responsible. Like there's no way to pull one away from the other. But it does seem like the league's drifting in the direction of players are more responsible.

You can see it in even some of the hirings of these coaches. Well, they'll just hire some random 32-year-old guy and we'll be like, we'll teach him how the organization thinks about coaching. But the players, to have a Joe Burrow is always going to be more important. So what's your take on all this? Well, I mean, is this sort of related to the idea

that there's all these, today at least, the questions I keep hearing when I was driving around this morning is why Brady did not thank the people of Boston or the people of New England or the Patriot organization. And I guess part of me does wonder if this is in some kind of, I don't know, abstract way, kind of connected to the player empowerment movement in the sense that there seems to be this growing feeling that particularly kind of coming from elite pro athletes that

like, maybe we shouldn't be crediting coaches and franchises and organizations at all. That, that, that's, that is sort of a vestige of the way we used to think about things. That really is the players, the players who matter. Like you say, like you felt like Belichick and Brady were both equal. Would you say they were? Would you really say they were equal?

Like they were both obviously central, but did one matter more than the other to you? I know that's like a question people kind of talk around. But if you really had to answer that question, who was the more essential component? I would say Brady, just because, you know, he's the player, but, you know, I can't unwind the two. Like, for instance, I'm probably the only person who watched all of Man in the Arena already,

who is in the media for a living. I'm sure a lot of Pats fans have watched it. But it was really interesting to me, the first couple episodes, how important Belichick was to Brady with stuff I didn't totally realize or I had read or I had forgotten, where they would meet every Tuesday

and go over who they were playing for that week and go over the tape and go over all these different things. And he was basically admitting on Man in the Arena, I learned so much every Tuesday from Belichick. Like this is like probably one of the best three or four football resources anyone's going to have. He's a young quarterback.

He's on his way up and he has this guy who knows everything and is able to just basically unpack defenses and take them apart and point out things. And he's like, there's no way I'd be the player I was if I didn't have that. So that's why it's really hard for me to separate them. Because I think if he's just on, if his coaches are like Doug Marone and Marty Schottenheimer and Ray Rhodes, and he just has this random slew of coaches, kind of like what Rodgers had, I don't think he has the same career. Now, would it have been three Super Bowls instead of seven? I don't know the exact number, but

I don't think it would have been the same career. And I don't think Belichick would have the same career either. Well, they certainly wouldn't have had the same career. So I guess the question is this. If someone drafts Brady in the fifth round, some other team drafts him in the fifth round before the Patriots do. Do we assume that just because of what he has sort of kind of proved and validated over time, does that suggest he would have had a very successful career regardless? Had he played for, you know, the, the, the Seahawks or the Rams or whoever? I feel, I feel like he would have. Well, I just don't, it wouldn't have been the career he had. I do sometimes wonder though, if, if when you, if a guy drops to the sixth round,

the perception of him generally is this is probably a backup quarterback. We're drafting. We're not seeing him as someone we're going to slot in sort of run the franchise. So if he goes elsewhere, um, does not only does he have a different career But does he possibly

Accept a different career Like Would he sort of be like I'm going to be like a Chase Daniel type person I'm going to dedicate my life to being sort of like A guy who can contribute to this team Because he cares about winning and all these things Or is the idea that he would have just

Powered through and no matter what Franchise he would have went to he would have become The starting quarterback and he would have just powered through. And no matter what franchise he would have went to, he would have become the starting quarterback and they would have had massive success because I think the general sense is that, well, if Belichick had just coached a different team over this period, he still would have had quite a bit of success. Now, would he have been able to have a career that long in one spot without that

kind of success? I mean, that's a long time for an NFL coach to be with the same team. But I think what I'm, what I was just kind of getting at is I wonder like when I, like if in Brady's mind, he still feels like they still see me as part of this thing. When actually I led this thing, like he goes to a different team. He wins a super bowl. But then this year when actually I led this thing. Like he goes to a different team,

he wins a Super Bowl, but then this year when the Patriots, especially in the middle of the year, and it kind of looked like maybe they were going to challenge, you know, for the conference title, then it was sort of like, aha, see, we were right before. It was this guy. Or like when Castle was their quarterback that one season,

when they go 11- five or 12 and four, you know, 11 and five. So there, there wasn't like a sense, I think that, I mean, there is to me somehow it's, it still seems like that,

that the, the coach is really the most important person. And that could be a misguided thought. And I wonder if someone like Tom Brady looks at this and it's like something he now realizes that is always going to exist. That conversation is always going to exist despite the fact that he did exactly

what he must've assumed he would've needed to do to end this discussion. Like he goes to a different team, they immediately win the championship. Seems that should have been the end of the discussion, but that's not how it worked. We're taping this. It's one o'clock Pacific time.

So maybe we'll find out why he didn't mention the Pats. I think there's three reasons for it. One is he felt like he already did it two years ago when he said goodbye to the Patriots and he already checked those boxes and did all that stuff. Two is, you know, he thanked a lot of people on that and the Patriots, the Crafts, Belichick, it seemed pretty obvious they weren't

there. Maybe there was some weird reason for that that will come out later. Three, this is nephew Kyle's dream that he's going to come back to the Patriots and sign a one-day contract and retire. So it's one of those three. but you're talking about what his career looks like on another team. And it's an interesting, what if I feel this way about great athletes? Um, most of the time, I think there's some of them need carrots and some of them need luck and some of them need nudges. And if you kind of pull one of those things away, I'm not sure you can say the career is the same. Like for Brady, they win those Super Bowls early, right? He's a starter.

They win three and four. And then they stop winning. And Manning, he's got this Manny Brady thing, but then Manning kind of takes the mantle and he starts the records and all that stuff. And then something around 08, 09, 2010 changes with Brady where he's like, I'm actually getting better. I can feel it. And I want to get back there. And my wherewithal that you're constantly measuring yourself with, right? And so like, think about LeBron. LeBron has can't win a title in Cleveland, goes to Miami, and now he has to get over this hump. He gets over

the hump. And for some people that might've been enough, but now it's like, now I got to figure out this Cleveland thing. But then he still has the ghost of Jordan too, that he's chasing. And it's, it's all these things together that just make him want to really give a shit day after day, even though he's been in the NBA, you know, 19 years now, I do think the carrots are important. And Brady had a lot of carrots, I guess is my point. One thing that's a kind of frustrating about this to me in a sense is that, okay, so let's say Brady thanks no one. Let's say he just retires. That's how the world works though. Then that's fine, right? But it's because he thanked some people, but not everybody. It's a problem. I mean, it really is like an example of like, he's trying to do something nice. And the only thing that is received as is the people he wasn't

nice to also, I mean, it's kind of like why it's, it's why you should never be the kind of person who just like gives everyone a compliment. Cause if you're the kind of person who compliments everybody all the time, all that happens is people notice when you don't like you, it's a, it's a, it's a strange thing. I mean, he probably thought like, well, okay, I had a great time in Tampa Bay here. I'm going to put this out. Another part of me, of course,

thinks that like, well, DeBrady's not like that. He doesn't do things extemporaneously in that way, where it's like, I'm going to do this. And, you know, it never occurred to me that people in Boston, he's very, he's puts a lot of thought into this shit. Well,

you know what else changed? I was thinking about like back to your Brady Belichick question. The league has changed so much over the last 20 years. It didn't really in the last 10, 11 years where, you know, like Warren sharp, who does the gambling show for us,

he doesn't even really care about games that happened before 2010 when he looks at models because his theory is like, you know, once they started cracking down on concussions and the hits over the middle and just everything, and they really started protecting quarterbacks, it morphed into a different sport. And you can't compare that sport post-2010 to pre-2010,

which I think is relatively true. So in the old days, the quarterbacks really mattered, but you could also win the Super Bowl with Trent Dilfer every once in a while, right? You could get to the Super Bowl with Neil O'Donnell. Like there were these things that would happen where the infrastructure of the team and the defense and coaching and, you know, or you could spend way more on the salary cap than the other. But now we're in this moment where quarterbacks have become so important that you basically can't sniff the Super Bowl without a really good quarterback.

And you think like, I'm in the AFC, I have Burrow and Herbert and Mahomes and Josh Allen, and we have Mac Jones, who's not as good as those guys. And you start to think like, all right, what are the scenarios that we can even make a Superbowl? You know? And then that's when you go to like, all right, well, Stafford, I guess would be the best case scenario with the Rams. You know, they spent a lot of money. They have a good coach. They have some big hitters on defense, but Stafford still has pedigree. He was the number one pick in the draft. And I just think quarterbacks have become more important. So the Belichick Brady thing, I think if you're looking at it now, it's like you would clearly want the Brady over the Belichick if you're building for 20 years. Yeah, well, I mean, what you're talking about is interesting, though, because does it not seem in a way that pro football and really pro sports in general are starting to become misshapen.

Yeah. Because what seems to be happening is all of the things that were once understood to be important have been amplified in importance. I mean, the quarterback position is the clearest example where it is, you know, where, where, uh, you know, if it's 1975 or whatever, um, your running back might be the most important person on your team, but you still need like a viable quarterback to win. And then by 1985, uh, it, there were still a lot of important

running backs, but you would want a quarterback instead by 1995. There's already this understanding that running backs are kind of interchangeable. You can be the Denver Broncos and just switch guys in, get a guy from the Army or whatever. He'll rush for 1,400 yards. But it keeps going. It doesn't seem to hit these ceilings where it's like, okay, well,

the importance of the quarterback is established. It can't be any more important than this. So now we have to sort of increase the value of all these other positions. It just keeps going. Like, I certainly think that there's going to be someone who's going to throw for 6,000 yards in the next five to 10 years. Is that, I mean, or is that... Especially with 17 games. Yeah, that's going to happen.

It seems real possible. It seems like it could happen real quickly. You know, um, uh, it doesn't seem impossible that we are going to see, um, a college game,

certainly a high school football game where maybe a team doesn't run the ball for the entire game. Maybe that's already happened on the high school level. I don't know. I don't think it's happened. It hasn't happened in college yet, but it will. Where somebody will, a game will end and we'll see somebody went, you know,

54 of 97 passing and they ran 97 plays in scrimmage. Well, think about with Josh Allen, just even in the last two years, how whatever he's doing feels like the evolution of something where you have this guy who's basically can run like a running back, but throw like any of the best quarterbacks. And if you put them in shotgun, you watch it and you go,

how do you stop this? I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. I love Josh Allen. I mean that chiefs bills game I felt felt was the best pro football game I'd seen since 1982. The chargers dolphins game had been what I always thought was the best game. But, you know, I was nine at the time or whatever.

So my perception of that game kind of gets calcified and doesn't seem like it can change in a way. There could be games in between that period who were more important because it was the Super Bowl. Yeah, the stakes. But in terms of the game itself, like, I mean, there was no part of that game that wasn't exhilarating. Like, even that Chargers-Dolphins game,

it was like the first quarter wasn't close. You know, and then the Dolphins came all the way back. But this game was always close. Well, you know, the thing with Josh Allen, though, is, you know, and, you know, he is great to watch. He's just really exhilarating. There was a degree of this with Cam Newton, certainly with Lamar Jackson, although in a little different way.

It is a real rules problem, though. Like, if you're a strong safety and you're 14 yards upfield, then Josh Allen's running at you. And he has the ability to kind of truck over you or fake you out or slide. I'm not really sure what a person is supposed to do in that position. I feel like this is going to become a kind of a problem as these quarterbacks run more, but are still protected differently. Well, and some of them are learning how to use it against the defenders too. Mahomes does that. He'll fake like he's going to run out of bounds that he doesn't.

The quarterback, the college quarterback from Pittsburgh this year did that in a game. And I think they're changing the rule because of it. Like he just he faked he was going to slide and something like once a quarterback is more than five yards upfield, his protection changes, you know, unless he like slides immediately. Yeah. But no, but even if he's like, he gives himself something it's,

it's just, it's too impossible. I don't think, how do you, how can you possibly tackle Josh Allen? If there is a chance that doing so will give him an additional 15 yards? It's just impossible. So he is great.

Those guys are bringing something that is totally new and it's great to watch. But it is becoming too much of an advantage. I mean, the way that they have sort of changed the downfield passing rules in general have sort of made this a lopsided thing. The Debo play last Sunday when Garoppolo led him into an absolute disaster and Debo got crunched. Right. And they threw a flag because they're so used. They're reflexively now just throwing flags on those hits. And then the refs gather together and they're like, wait, that was a clean hit.

And then we see the replay. Clean hit. Just hit him right. Shoulder pads. Exactly how you're taught. And they the refs gather together and they're like, wait, that was a clean hit. And then we see the replay, clean hit, just hit them right shoulder pads, exactly how you're taught. And they picked up the flag, but it was so rare to see a receiver just get destroyed. You think like that's been another huge advantage for the QBs. What is your take, I guess is the word we use now. What is your take on instant replay in general? I am still pro, but I think it should go much faster. I think it should be some version between how long it takes in basketball and how short it takes in tennis. There's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle of that.

I think it should be like 90 seconds. And I think you should have to look at it right away and decide and go. And then we keep moving. Well, I mean, I kind of think it's a detriment to the sport now in almost every way. I think that it seems crazy that a guy can go to prison for less evidence than the evidence we need

to overturn possession in a football game. That seems crazy. But here's my idea. What if this became the way we did instant replay just as it is now but you have to watch it and in real time you can't stop it you can't slow it down it has to be clear enough that when the replay official watches the videotape he's seeing it in real time because the thing is the worst thing. Absolutely. The worst situation is what happens in basketball games. Now, when a guy slaps the ball on someone's hands and technically there is a millisecond where it passes.

You know, it's like if you hold the basketball in front of you like this and I think someone punches it. The last thing that's going to touch is the bottom of your fingers. But that in every other situation in the history of basketball, that is out of bounds on the guy who made contact with the ball aggressively, except at the end of games when they slow it down and it's reversed. Well, especially you're, you're slowing it down where it's like, what is it? 120th is fast or one 10th. I don't even know, but yeah, they're stopping it. They're moving it frame where it's like, what is it? 120th is fast or 110th?

I don't even know. But yeah. Well, they're stopping it. They're moving it frame by frame. I mean, it's like it can't be any closer. Touch this fingernail. So if they had to watch these things at game speed, you'd still be able to deduce an end, I guess. Like the big error that a guy was clearly stepped out of bounds before

he caught the ball or he stepped on the sideline. Well, you know, I think for, you know, like, like, I know you really thought like the guy for the like there was a trap in the Titans Bengals game when that guy. Yeah, it felt like it touched the grass simultaneously. It didn't feel that way when it happened live. No, it did not. So I was glad that it didn't get overturned. But you're old enough to remember the game that started all this.

It was the Oilers-Steelers game. Mike Renfro. Yeah. Which was like, it actually felt like the Oilers were robbed. And from that moment on, the instant replay train started and we eventually got there. I have one Brady-related thing to something that you mentioned, but we gotta take a break.

So earlier when you were talking about Brady, I thought you were going to the longevity piece because when you were talking about how things are now distorting your overall sense of sports and year by year and how the seasons fit. I feel the same way about longevity. And it's, even though it's completely different, there was that moment with baseball in the early two thousands, after like five, six years of the PD stuff, when we realized like, uh, the, the stats are now screwed up. There's no going back.

We can't, we can't put the genie back in the bottle on this one. This is a wrap. Does the home run records on baseball, all this stuff is just now getting mutilated and it's going to be hard to find a way out. The longevity thing's different because it's authentic. These guys are doing it. We think authentically, but I look at say, and it's not just Le guys are doing it, we think, authentically. But I look at, and it's not just LeBron. It's like Chris Paul too. Chris Paul's as good this year as he's been in any year of his career. He's actually starting to get some MVP buzz because the Suns are so good. Brady's down 27 to three at age 44. And we're all watching going, it's conceivable that this guy comes back. Nadal just won the Australian Open.

We're hitting this point where, and it feels like this is going to keep happening with athletes, right? There's going to be a next wave after these guys where like, I don't know how to put primes into perspective anymore. I was watching something about the 89 Niners about how Steve Young was breathing down Montana's back. And it's like, is the old man done?

Montana had been in the league like nine years and it was already like, uh-oh, the old man, look out. And now it's like, is the old man done? My dad had been in the league like nine years and it was already like, uh-oh, the old man, look out. And now it's like, Brady's the old man and he's actually an old man. He's a middle-aged man. And I just wonder with the records, like I'm thinking crazy stuff.

Like should the NBA have 40 teams now? So if these guys are going to play 22 years instead of 12, we have too many stars. maybe we should just have more teams maybe we should have 32 35 i don't know but i don't know clearly i'm more talent for for the vast majority of people who even view themselves as nba fans they are often watching nba games seeing players they don't recognize because they had no relationship with those guys in college. That doesn't really exist anymore.

Yeah. And you see, you know, so, I mean, if we're going to there are certainly more elite players. I mean, my view is always I think if you had four less teams, you would write the number of really great basketball games would be, you couldn't get away from one. So I'm always against increasing the number of teams. The longevity thing, you know, that is a bunch of stuff. I mean, it's like nutrition and the way these guys treat their bodies. Yeah, we've talked about all the reasons. Yes. And like, there's so much for them to gain by playing at the end,

particularly when the money is so big. I mean, the record ramifications are like, is LeBron going to get to like 75,000 minutes? Is he going to shatter the points record? Is it even conceived? Like some of the stuff Brady's done, is it even conceivable? Somebody will play in 10 Super Bowls again and all these things. I can't tell if it's the start of

just the way sports is going to be, where it's going to be completely reasonable that people are going to have 30-year careers in 10 years. I mean, it will be hard for someone to play in 10 Super Bowls as a quarterback, even if they have a 35 year career. I mean, there was, it really is. It's just, I'm sure there's like some kind of connection here, but like the fact that

Brady's had such a long career, mostly on a team that was always in contention, like a lot of things had to happen for that. I mean, George Blanda played a very long time, but he wasn't consistently in a position to win a championship you know so that was like a you know i mean records in general i guess are going to become uh like uh less discussed because they'll be broken all the time i mean you know you uh uh i think uh, uh, uh, like Derek Thompson, the guy who has a pod on your thing now, didn't he do a piece on this on like what records won't be broken? Yeah. You can look at like Chamberlain's records, but that's, and they won't be broken probably.

Uh, because like, you know, even if you watch like the Kobe Bryant 81 point game, it seems like he's scoring every possession. The idea of him scoring 19 more points, it doesn't seem like you could even sandwich it in there. But all the cumulative records are all going to disappear. I mean, and it's also going to really skew our understanding of like, there are guys now that we think are amazing because of the statistics they're putting up.

And then those statistics will become common. And I don't know if we'll think of them in the same way. Like there seems to be all of these amazing quarterbacks right now, young, amazing quarterbacks putting up these gargantuan numbers. But I think there was a sense of that, like in the 1980s, it was like, look how many yards Steve Bartkowski's throwing for, or like Vince Ferragamo threw 33 touchdowns this year. It's like all these things happened that now we've completely forgotten.

Like they're not even a Hall of Fame. Like they're not, we don't even talk about them in these Hall of Fame conversations. Where it seems like, a guy texted me recently and he was like, I'm looking at Kurt Cousins statistics. Is Kurt Cousins going to make the Hall of Fame? And I'm like, well, no, everybody knows he's not. Like everyone knows he's not. But it is weird because

if you only saw like if you look at if you just call up like jared goff statistics if you're my age you look at these numbers and you're like he's this is the start of a hall of fame career but he's not going to make the hall of fame you know it's like it's he's not he's never going to be one of the 10 best quarterbacks in the league. So we're just going to look at those things differently. That was the thing that it did hurt. I get like, well, I can kind of push my book in this 90s book. I talk about this with baseball. The thing with steroids and baseball, the problem to me wasn't that these guys were

using these drugs or they were somehow, you know, they had this unfair advantage. I mean, that's I can understand all those arguments. The thing that it did to baseball was that that was the only sport where you could talk about a guy in 1992 and actually compare him to a guy from 1941 in a realistic way and be like, well, okay, you look at this, you know, um, and then that got destroyed. Like, you know, like Brady Anderson hits 50 home runs or 55 or whatever it was. And it's like, this is, you know, now all these things are meaningless. And that was one of, I think, the things that really changed the way baseball was perceived in this country. Because it took away the thing that separated it from every other sport, which is that it existed outside of time. It's going to make it really hard to compare the greats from different eras. Because even like, there's going to be a point 30 years from now when Jordan will just get annihilated in any greatest argument. Because they'll be like, well, they only played, you know, 15 years.

Guys now are playing 40 years. We got LeBron James Jr.'s 62. He's still playing. Like, there would just be no way to even compare anything. What the thing is, is that what people need to do, though, is that there's this tendency to take a guy now and move him back through time. You know, like take LeBron now and put him back to 1966 and be like, there's no way anybody could stop him. Yeah, you can't do it. But you can't do it. But you can't do it. You have to take him back to 1966 and then have him be born in the early 40s. And you have to have him go through the experiences

he would have had in the 40s. The fact that he would have not played, he would have wore canvas shoes and that people would have been like, maybe you should smoke cigarettes to stay thin. And the fact that like, you know, it's like all of these things that maybe you wouldn't have played on a hoop

with a rim or with a net with a rim, we hope without a net until high school, like all of these things that, you know, the way travel used to be. I, I think I've told you this before. There's,

I read this book. It's like about the, like the relationship between Bob Cousy and Bill Russell. Yeah. And one of the things it discusses is written by this historian. It's on my bookshelf over here. It's like Gary Pomerantz.

And like, okay, so Bob Cousy is the first leader of the NBA Players Union. Yeah. And it lists what their demands were. And it's things like, you can't be made to ride a train for more than 36 consecutive hours. And it's like, it's like you have to have $9 for food if you're on the road for a week.

I mean, I'm kind of just paraphrasing this. No, but wasn't it? One of it was like, yeah, you can't play 13 preseason games in the span of 16 days. Yeah. Like the thing, the request that they have, it almost seems like that would be like, it's like what you like, what any kind of coach would be fired for making people do in practice with their day to day life, you know?

So that really, I mean, that, that really shortened careers. I mean, you know, it's like the people always want to say things that they take a guy like, oh, they look back on, on, you know, like Pete Maravich or whatever. And they'd be like, well, can we put them in the day's modern game? You know, you can shoot threes now it's more wide open. You know, I think that's like, that's true. That that's an advantage he would have, but it's not nearly as much as the disadvantage a modern player would have going back in time. Right. So I just I just I always think the way to do this comparing guys and areas is you have to compare the distance between them and their peers at the time.

That is the key. It is not how you how their size or physicality or any of these things that changes. It's how much better they were than everyone else who was playing in the given moment that they were at their best. It would be interesting if sports became like music, where it was absolutely conceivable for somebody like 28 years in their career to still have some sort of valuable contribution as a player. And in music, it doesn't even happen that often, right? But if you went and saw Pearl Jam play right now and they've been together 30 plus years,

it would still be really good. You would have a good time at the show. If you saw some athlete playing their sport 30 years into that sport, you wouldn't have as good of a time. That's why we have the retired games and stuff like that. But there are some outliers with music, but for the most part, it's usually like a decade. It's like five to 10 years where they peak. It's very rare you see the person who 20 plus years in and still cranking out stuff that's like super duper interesting well it's true I guess that they're not I don't know how comparable it is though because in the other thing where we're literally

talking about physiology though so it would be if somebody was at their best 28 years later I mean I guess if they were playing billiards or something maybe that would be what I guess acting acting you could be maybe acting directing um or something maybe that would... I guess acting. Acting you could be, maybe. Acting, directing.

Now, golf would be tough. It's hard to imagine someone's like, like a, you know, 28 years into an acting career. I mean, I guess that you could have a long acting career before you get famous, but success in acting seems more to do sort of with

the role you're in, circumstance. You were always good, but now like, you know, it's like Samuel L. Jackson had a very long kind of insignificant career before then suddenly becoming this major performer. I mean, it's like that.

It wasn't as though he suddenly figured out how to act in the early 90s. It was just the opportunities changed where sports aren't really like this much. You know, there's something figured out how to act in the early 90s. It was just the opportunities changed. Where sports aren't really like that as much. You know, there's something I wanted to ask you about that I heard on one of your podcasts. It's not controversial at all, but I found it to be one of the most interesting things

you ever said, unless I misheard this. If I misheard this, so you play fantasy football. Did you carry four defenses this year? Did I understand that? That you had four defenses on your fantasy? Is that true? I had in the last couple of weeks of the season, because I was so set at running back, receiver, quarterback, and I didn't really need to have a bench. I picked up other defenses to try to mix and match depending on the week to see if I could gain an advantage.

By the way, it didn't work. Yeah, I just, I never, I mean, everyone cares two. That makes sense. Three seemed to be crazy. So it was just at the end of the year. You didn't see didn't In the year Carrying four defenses I've had years

Where I did the Four quarterbacks To me that was the most Controversial thing You've ever said in my life I don't Yeah That would make

That doesn't make a lot of sense But it makes some Virtually any position Outside of kicker Makes sense To have four You know it's like Like a

Well it would still be crazy But like you know The defenses are so close like in the amount of points that they score in any given week. The thing is though, there's always like three or four bad offenses, especially as the season goes. So you think if you can hit with like

so-and-so against you know, the Texans, and I think they could actually get a defensive touchdown so maybe I get 17 points out of that defense instead of eight. That was the thinking. Can we talk about your book? Sure.

So first of all, you wrote a book about the 90s. It's a lot of shorter essays, longer essays, all kinds of different takes on what happened. The first thing, and I texted you and you didn't text me back. When did the 90s officially start? Because you talk about this in the book. thing and I texted you and you didn't text me back. When did the 90s officially start? Because you talk about this in the book about when does a decade become a decade? Does it start on January 1st, 1990 or does the concept of the 90s, sometimes it could even maybe start 89. I thought to me in

my head, because I was lucky enough to be there, Douglas knocking out Tyson, to me, is when the 90s start. And I don't know why, but that's like the first 90s moment. And then like 90210 shows up right after and just some 90s things like the UNLV team. And now I just start to feel like I'm in the 90s starting with that Douglas Tyson thing. Well, okay.

So when did the 90s officially start? Well, I suppose officially, they do start on January 1st of 1990, but no decade or time period operates that way. Nobody thinks that when the calendar changes, like life has shifted with this move. There is sort of a conventional take or has developed to be the conventional take on this is that you start the 90s with the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989, and then it ends with 9-11 moving into the 21st century. And the way my book is framed, it does, that is the end point, that 9-11 is the end point of it. But I don't feel like the 90s begin with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Because when I look at 1990, it still seems a lot like

the 1980s on autopilot, that a lot of the things that happened throughout the 80s had really sort of come together and kind of calcified. And the year 1990, especially when you look at it culturally and politically, it's still very much the way the 80s were. I do think that the idea of the 90s sort of having a texture, a feel, a way of perceiving the world differently in a collective way does begin with the release of Nevermind by Nirvana. Not because that album was so much greater than any other record that had come out in the previous years

or is the greatest record of the 90s. I don't believe those two things. But I think that once Nevermind, and particularly like both the visual component and the sonic component of Smells Like Teen Spirit became sort of universally understood as the biggest song and the biggest record in the world. There was this idea that now all ideas

had to be pushed through this filter of this singular individual. The way Kurt Cobain looked, the way he acted, his view on what was important, all things had to be understood through that. And when we talk about the 90s, what we're really talking about are these ideas that sort of emerged from that inception point. Now, plus, there's kind of two 90s. There's like the first half and the second half. Pre-internet and internet.

Yeah, I would actually say it has to do with sort of like the the uh i mean if you look at 1995 as this critical turning point for the internet you know where you know amazon starts as a kind of a bookseller and craigslist comes into play all these things like there's even a book that I use as source materials, like 1995, the year the future began. But for most people, the internet was still something that they were hearing about that was coming. In two years, it would be here and everything would change. Oh, how's it going to change things?

Oh, it's going to change everything. You know, it was still like an insular world. When I think of the 290s, I sort of think of how the first part of the decade, there was this, you know, like the independent film movement exploded and crunch became sort of this dominant music, which was, you know, the idea of the what had once been seen as the counterculture was now the dominant culture. Um, we had a change election in 1992, uh, where sort of the idea of, well, we're, even though George Bush had been exceedingly popular for the first, you know, two and a half years of his presidency, um, there was this idea that we needed the world to be different. And he became an exceedingly unpopular president during the one window of time when it really mattered.

And we get out of that, you know, Cobain kills himself, Tupac Shakur is killed. A lot of these things that sort of seemed like central ideas about 90s culture were like abruptly stopped. And we moved into this more caricature period where like a lot of the ideals uh that were expressed with some degree of sincerity uh in the early part of the decade were now sort of like uh it's funny like it like the term you know calling things gen x or slacker and all these words, even the word irony kind of became like a funny sort of simulation of what people were actually experienced.

So the way this book is framed, I basically begin with Nirvana and go through September 11th. Yeah, I don't, to me, everything starts in 91, even though there's breadcrumbs in 90, but you mentioned like some of the stuff, like the music and it wasn't, you know, you had the grunge alternative, but you also had hip hop and rap really starting to go more and more mainstream, especially as we got into 92 and 93, but then you also had the movies too. You had like New Jack City and Boys in the Hood. And, um And you had on TV where there were no black shows, all of a sudden we were starting to get some again and in living color and things like that.

And the culture was just starting to feel a little different. Michael Jordan is becoming the most famous person in the world. The magic and bird era, we're kind of shoving them to the side. And magic's HIV announcement, I think that's another one where you could say that's one of the seminal start of the 90s moments where that was

that generation's version of, I remember where I was when I heard that. I think anyone who's in college or younger or older, they remember where they heard when they heard that news. Same thing for the Gulf War when CNN Gulf War was the same thing. It's weird the things you remember.

Of course, we were all watching the Magic Johnson announcement on television when it happened. And I was speaking, I was asking you about your fantasy football team. I was running a fantasy basketball league in college. And I remember I'm watching this and my phone rings. And I think it's going to be a friend of mine or somebody's shocked by this. And they were like, I want to pick Sadal threat off of waivers. Like I really remember that. Like somebody said, Oh my God. Well, it's really smart. I guess. Yeah. But here's something though.

I do want like, okay, so you're talking about these, these seminal moments. So these things that really make you remember these things and there's's that, that's in this book to a degree. Yeah. This book is not nostalgic. Right. And it is, it's frustrating because you write a book about the nineties and people are like, Oh, you know, like he's trafficking in nostalgia, but it just kind of illustrates that people do not understand the definition of the word nostalgia. Nostalgia is consciously misremembering the past through an emotive lens to make it be different than it actually was to look back at something that may have been bad and saying, oh, it was actually great or special or all these things. My book is not like that. I do not look at the nineties through an emotional lens.

It's like, and in fact, I, maybe I shouldn't say this, but I assume that there's probably some people listening to this podcast and they're like, Oh, this is going to be a book where like, I talked about my life in the nineties or like, I'm not in this fucking book. Like, I mean, it's like, that's not how it is. Um, so these things you're talking about that are like a like like memorable things that you really remember them. They aren't necessarily reflective of where the culture was moving as a whole. In fact, sometimes you remember them because they seem to almost contradict what was happening. I mean, like, OK, like the OJ Simpson Bronco chase. I think that is real reflective of sort of the way people felt about the world at the time, because we have this guy who's a celebrity who murdered people. Like he could commit suicide on live television.

Everyone's watching this event. And yet the stakes still felt kind of low. You were still watching this as entertainment. It did not seem like a tragic event. And yet the stakes still felt kind of low. You were still watching this as entertainment. It did not seem like a tragic event. If it was disturbing, it was disturbing because so many people seemed excited about it. I mean, things like that, I do think have a real connection to the way certainly a lot of young adults were kind of living their life through the 90s because you were able to sort of think about yourself as separate from society, which is not how it is now. Like now it's it's it's really kind of perceived as incredibly problematic to be someone who's like, well, you know, I can't think about what's going on out there. Like I'm thinking about what's going on in here. Like my life is small. Like

you're supposed to believe that your life is big because you're part of a movement or whatever. And the 90s were different in that way and that it was very acceptable to be a separate individual, to be a separate person and to be a separate person, and to sort of live a small life that was really interior. So when I talk about and write about things from the 90s, it often kind of comes back to that. The idea that you could live a life that was not necessarily intertwined with the culture, but more kind of just sort of bouncing off it. I think we're saying mostly the same thing. Because to me,

the seminal moments that I remember about the 90s, part of the reason they mattered was because we didn't have any connective tissue to the outside world for the most part. Like I've talked about this before, but my friends and I used to love Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. Like we, and we thought we were the only ones.

We had no idea anyone else thought he was hilariously funny. And we did jokes like that about him for years and years. And then when the internet came out, then it's like, oh wait, other people thought this is funny. We thought it was just us. So when you had these weird moments, like the Gulf War was one of the few times where you kind of knew everyone around was experiencing the same thing. Same

thing for the magic HIV and these other things. But sometimes there was stuff you had no idea. And it goes to the point you were making about you were in your own little world with whoever was in it, with the writers that you read, with the movies you watched, with the TV shows you watched, with whatever other cultures you experienced from a culture standpoint. But that was it. And you didn't really know, you couldn't experience anything, not even in real time or right after with like the rest of the world, like the same way like you and I could watch the Bill's Chiefs game now. And if I wanted to go on Twitter, I have all these friends I'm watching the Bill's Chiefs game. The 90s were really lonely. And I think you hit that point really well in the book. Before we had the connective tissue of even emails and message

boards in 96, 97, there's five years there where it's just kind of like, I have my friends and that's it. I watched this TV show. If I call Jacko to talk about this real world, that was the only person I knew who watched it. There was a loneliness that I haven't seen a lot of movies from that era capture. I think that's why we like Kicking and Screaming because that's one of the few movies that hits how lonely it was back then for whatever reason. This is very interesting, Bill.

Parts of me agree with you and parts of me disagree. In some senses, I feel that the illusion of connection that the internet creates is in some ways more alienating. I agree with you. And that people can now feel lonely despite their recognition that they're having this shared experience. Another part of me is like, well, I do recall,

but here again, this is like a personal thing. Say it was 1995 or whatever. I'm living by myself in fargo um i might just go out and walk to the barnes and noble and hang out in that barnes and noble for two hours right like looking at books sitting on couches i guess maybe in my mind sort of imagining some scenario where like i meet someone and we're like we're both looking at a book about thoroughbred racing or something. It's like, oh, wow. It's like, there's all these books about racing. And then we, a relationship comes from that. It never, ever happened. But I think that was, I was like, it was almost like you were going to a bookstore with the idea somehow that all the other people there who were lonely were somehow going to create a, like a community of people who had

similar interests in these books. Coffee shops are like that too. I'm going to go get coffee and I'll just sit there at a table and maybe I'll talk to somebody. I guess in a way though, it's like, and maybe this is exactly what I'm talking about. Maybe so this maybe proves my own sort of argument wrong, but that period of loneliness to me, what you're describing as loneliness seems desirable now. Now that could be an example of looking back at the past and something bad and saying, well, I'm looking at it emotionally now. So I'm deciding that that was good. You know, uh, maybe I was very unhappy during that period. Uh it just felt though, was like so many,

like, like community was more optional. Like it was, I know sometimes feel like I am being pulled into society and pulled into the discourse against my will and that you can't exist without it. Like I have to be on Twitter because it's pretty much impossible to be someone who sells books, uh, to have like, like I, I would just have to rely on, I would just have to hope that like, that, that people are interested enough. You know, it's like, there's almost an obligation to do that.

I'm interested in the news. You can't really follow the news unless you're on social media. It's it's, it wouldn't work otherwise. So there's all these things that are happening against my will. It's sort of like I'm living in this kind of virtual world, not because I'm choosing to, but because it's like, that's kind of the only way to live and be a certain kind of mediated person. I don't know. So you felt, when you say, what do you mean when you say lonely, I guess? Do you literally mean alone or that you were with people and felt alone? Because both can happen. I'm going to answer that question right after this break.

All right, we're talking about loneliness. So I think here's the difference between, say, 1992, 1993, and now. There's a lot of differences, obviously. There's a million differences. I think in 1992, 1993, if you were alone, you're actually really alone. It's like, oh, I have two hours. What am I going to do?

My friends aren't around. I'm not with my family. My roommate's gone, whatever. Now it's just you. And it's like, what am I going to do? And for people like us, we're like, I'm going to write something. I'm going to read a book or I'm going to watch this game or do whatever. Um, now if it's like, if you feel any sense of loneliness, you can go online and in some way have some sort of interaction or read other people or just kind of be around people even though you're not. You talk about the alienation thing. the nineties, sometimes I think about just like, you know, being in college, just wanting to get off campus and driving in my car for like three hours, listening to music. Like I would never do that now. My wife, like, where are you going? I'm just going to get in my car and drive for three hours. Like that was the thing I actually did in 1992. So it was different. I'm not sure if it was better. I also think pop culture was so much more important in the early 90s and shaped so many different things in such a weird way. And your book hits a lot of it in ways like it informed the way we talk, the way we shoehorn jokes into casual conversations in ways that I think would seem kind of weird or forced now. Back then it didn't. And pop culture was just everywhere.

Sports, all that stuff. It was a lot of our communal experience back then. Yeah. I don't know if I would say the amount of pop culture has decreased. That actually seems like that has increased. It feels like we have more now, yeah. I think that part of what I find interesting, maybe you want to write a book about this period, is that the 90s are the last decade of the 20th century. time through this idea that there are these values and ideas and, uh, like, you know, kind of concepts that are central to the experience, even to people who disagree with

them. For example, it's like the, the, the qualities that we ascribe to, uh, to generation X, for example, that was really only a sliver of the populace. Like I will admit I was very much like a, like a, almost a cliche of all those things, but most people were not. And even, even a lot of the people who were, were very consciously, um, you know, uh, against those sort of ideas, but we all understood that this is sort of what people are saying about the world now. And we share these ideas and we either have to be against them or be part of them. It's like, uh, it, it was, it was something that, uh, um, uh, it was, it was harder to live

as a, a kind of a niche idealist. Um, also one thing that like I mentioned about this is, you know, there was a course of a fascination with the seventies in the nineties. Cause they're always, it's like, you know, in the seventies, there was interest in the fifties. Okay. With the idea that like, Oh, we watch happy days. We watched Laverne and Shirley. We watched Greece. It was a more wholesome time. Then in the eighties, there was an obsession with the sixties, you know, like family ties, uh, you know, 30 something, the big chill, the ultimate example of this. Um,

and, and, and when people in the eighties were something, the big chill, the ultimate example of this. And when people in the 80s were thinking about the 60s, it was sort of like, well, what does it mean that we thought we had this kind of radical revolution of thought and then it all kind of fell apart? It was all fake, you know? So then in the 90s, of course, there was interest in the 70s in a predictable way, except for the way it manifested itself. It had to do just like the stuff from the 70s. Because when you look at a show like that 70s show, which came out in the 90s, what are the kids doing in that 70s show? They're sitting in a basement and they're driving around in their parents' car

and they're smoking weed, which was the same experience high school kids were doing in the 80s and in the 70s and the 60s. It wasn't some alien portal, but this could only have happened in the 70s. What those kids are doing in the 70s and that 70s show is not unlike what kids in the 90s were still doing. And now those things, those relationships don't work. Like we've now kind of moved into this perpetual sense of now that the difference between time periods in terms of like how we see the culture seems static and yet what people are actually doing within those spaces is new because it's probably just coincidental, but there does seem to be some kind of significant break with the 21st century in terms of how we expect people or assume people are living their day-to-day life.

And that is the internet. Because the internet starts in the 90s, but it doesn't really exist the way we understand it until the 21st century. Yeah, I think as the 90s went along, you covered some of this too. There's so much, there's way more hope and optimism in the first part of the 90s. And then by the late part of the 90s, there's way more disillusionment, disappointment, how certain things turned out. And as you said, it becomes like a little bit of karaoke of the early 90s in a lot of ways. But the grunge stuff and people like Cobain

and Tupac and Biggie, and we lose all these different people. The OJ, everything that happens with the trial really rips off this giant wound that America has that we're pretending we don't have, but we do. And then the Clinton presidency, where there's so much hope, at least in some circles with him, it's like, oh, it's like possible JFK. And it just didn't turn out that way. And then by the second term, he's involved in the Lewinsky situation and a few other things. And by the time

we get to 99, there's real disappointment with how that turned out. And we have Y2K coming up. We have no idea what's happening with that. And it just, everything seems so much more chaotic by 99 and all these weird, subtle ways that I don't even really think I felt like was weird at the time. But now I look back and I'm like, oh yeah, things got a little weird there. Well, I mean, the 92 election is interesting because for a lot of people, it was the first time they could imagine a president who seemed more like their father as opposed to a grandfather. He seemed exceptionally young. Clinton seemed exceptionally young. And you know, Clinton was a president who was interested in popular culture on its own terms. Like Tabitha Soren wants to interview me. I will talk to Tabitha Soren. Sure.

Arsenio Hall wants me to play saxophone on his show. I will do that. Oh, what's my favorite song? Oh, it's Gold Dust Woman by Fleetwood Mac. It was like, what? Like, like, I, you want to ask me about what kind of underwear I wear? I will tell you what kind of underwear I wear because you're like, like Clinton sort of had this idea. It's like, well, culture is just there. Culture is what it is. I'm not going to fight it. You know, George Bush fought it. Uh, pro fought it. He was, he was into it. So it did sort of give the sense that like, Oh, you know, maybe, um, uh,, maybe things are going to be different now in an almost in like a natural way, like almost beyond what political policies he might adopt or have or express. Just the fact that he's a younger person who seems like he is interested in where the world is going as opposed to where the world was did give, I think, people a sense of optimism. But, you know, he was a pragmatist. He was a good president for the 90s because, I mean,

the 90s were an easy time to be president. We were not involved in any hot or cold wars. The economy was good. Like, you know, it was like we were the only superpower left. China really had not emerged yet. Russia had fallen. So for those times, he was a very good president. And then now, of course, the view of Clinton is extraordinarily negative. I mean, you know, so often a president leaves office and immediately he's appreciated more, you know, because anybody, when you're the president, you've got to be polarizing. Yeah. Half the country is going to be polarizing. Yeah.

Half the country is going to be against you at all times. And then, you know, a guy leaves office, like you've seen with George W. Bush, almost immediately the perception of them softens and it improves. Clinton is different in the sense that like people who sort of blame neoliberalism on everything point to him. I mean, people look at the Lewinsky situation and they cannot believe that like his presidential approval rating went up after this. But that's like younger people, I think particularly younger women, a lot of times will look at Clinton and they will be like, how was this? This was the president like, you know, but that is this is a like a temptation. I really fought hard against when writing this book, which is not to look at the past the way we think of things now. Yeah, I really wanted to write this book, how it actually was at the time, how it felt at the time. And that's why I didn't do like, I could have interviewed a lot of people about their memories

of the nineties, but I know if I did that, their memories would shift to wherever their position is now. Cause everyone does this. Like I even feel as maybe as you and I are talking about the 90s, we are unconsciously talking about the past through the idea that the person we are now was the person we were then. And that wasn't the case. OK, so I really tried to write about Clinton the way it seemed at the time, which was certainly not wholly positive, but not the way it is now as this sort of a, like a, like this, this tragic misstep for the country that, you know, it's like that,

because I think that would be inaccurate. I mean, I, I, I mean, we'll see what happens. We'll, I mean, I, I, I realize when you write a book like this, you know, you can't control how it is consumed or how people want to perceive it, how people want to sometimes consciously misread it. But my goal was to sort of be correct in a weird way. Like I was there are things that I'm writing about in this book that have no personal relationship to me that I base like like I did not like the movie Titanic when it came out. But I write about Titanic. I didn't either. That was a real critical moment in film culture because the 90s had sort of suggested at one point that independent film was going to become the way a serious person thought about film.

And the idea of spending $200 million on this epic movie, you know, up until the day it was released, everyone thought Titanic was a terrible idea. Every story about Titanic before its release is how this is going to be a disaster. It's going to be like heaven's gate or whatever, you know? But that completely altered then the way film moved forward. And now when you look at how film culture is now, only movies using a Titanic-like model seem to succeed. Anything else is a surprise or sort of shifted into this different kind of compartment

of where film can be. Now, like I said, I saw Titanic. I didn't like it. I gave it a negative review when it came out. But I now understand, and maybe even I understood then, why this film, in particular, the way Leonardo DiCaprio was covered and the kind of character he became um was like a a pretty important thing i mean he is the only actor and will be the only actor in history who is both a star under the old system where they were like kind of separated in like an ivory tower and they were just this unknowable

figure and a star in the post-modern way where the audience does all the work. And his fan base works for him. It's not just enough to have a picture of him from Tiger Beat on your wall. You needed to get out on the internet and support the idea of Leonardo DiCaprio being important. So things like that, I think, are worth sort of reinvestigating, even if they don't have much meaning to me. You know what's fun about the 90s for me is that it's such a self-contained decade that actually has a beginning and end that mirrors what the actual years in the decade were.

You know, you think like, I don't know, the 60s. The 60s are really different from the start to the end, right? It almost like the early 60s could almost, that's like the Mad Men, Don Draper 60s. And it's almost like its own decade. And then we go to like the 66 and on, and then that becomes like a different decade. And you could argue like 67 to 76 make more sense as an actual 10 year span than 60, 69 to. I look at the 90s to the bitter end, like 99, Blair Witch. That's something that really had to have happened in the 90s, you know, where it's like, we could keep the secret of a movie and you could release the movie and I could go to a theater and not know if it was true or not and not have enough people in my life to tell me

one way or the other, was that actually found footage or not? Left the theater. I was like, was that real? I left with my future wife and we're like, I think that was a movie, but wait, so what do you think happened? And then two years later, that's gone. Like I think 9-11, everything, that era, everything shifts. And, but not, that just feels distinctly 90s to me, but it's 1999. So I don't know if I've made sense of that. Well, no, I mean, the period you're talking about is, I kind of see as this window of like, well, let's just see what happens. I mean, this was one of the consequences of like the, like, like, like almost like, this is a weird word to use, but the, like, like the earnest alternative culture of the early 90s.

I mean, like the grunge bands were real serious and, you know, and the film the kind of the cultural landscape where all of these things that had once believed that could never be mass popular now work. I mean, like, you know, like a band, like, oh, like, like Dinosaur Junior or the Breeders or something. In the 1980s, there would have never been an assumption that these bands can be big, that they can be on the cover of a magazine or whatever. Then the 90s happened and those things change. So we keep moving through this period of the 90s where then it becomes like, well, who knows

what might work? Let's just see. Let's just see if this happens. You see a lot of pop songs from this period, which are very strange. Like, oh, the Butthole Surfer song, Pepper, or whatever. Here's this band, this grug-addled art rock Texas band who plays dissident music. Let's see if they can come up with a song that sounds a little bit like a normal tune, a little compromised or whatever.

And then that will be a big hit or the Blair Witch Project. Like this movie looks like it wasn't made on purpose. What a great idea for a movie. Let's try that. The whole idea of alternative comedy, which is very often comedians making jokes about the structure of comedy, like telling jokes that did not have punchlines. That was the funny part. That became a central part of everything. So, you know, I talk about how there was like I think it was the 99 or 2000 um there's a quote um by it's usually

created to charles barkley although some people say it was actually kiss chris rock where where like he says like you know the world's like fucked up when the best golfer is black and the best rapper is white okay and that was sort of you know in some ways that was like wow what a crazy thing these these these two idioms of the world that we associate as having very clear values have flopped. But in a sense, it was like, well, you see, that will happen now. So that's why I think at the end of the 90s, there was still this idea that there were some ideas you could be pretty excited about because a lot of the things that we had once said might happen were actually happening.

The best golfer was a guy who was black, biracial, multiracial, but is like scanned as black to the consumer. You know, Eminem was the biggest artist, both in hip hop and basically in pop music, you know, that had seemed like something that in the eighties, when we had like the, like the Beastie Boys or Vanilla Ice in 1990, it was always like kind of funny that they're white. And he was like, I am white. That's part of who I am. Uh, that's part of, of, of my identity. And yet I doing this art form, which I love. And, you know, um, uh, so I, it's hard, you know, it's the hardest thing about writing about history in general, specifically like, you know, close history.

The nineties aren't that distant. Okay. There's always this desire to look back and say this thing that we all thought, that's not how it was. It was the opposite. Like, you know, it's like, like, like Helmer Stan wrote that book on the fifties and like the book opens. And like, we think of the fifties as the kind of like, you know, it's like, like, like Helmer Stan wrote that book on the fifties and like the book opens. Um, and like, we think of the fifties as the kind of like, you know, language and all these, that's not how it was, you know, it's always the opposite.

And yet with the nineties, it would be incorrect to claim our perception of that time now is always wrong. Like as people will say, like, I saw someone say like, my book was like, it's not revisionist enough. And it's like, well, I don't want to be revisionist if that's not necessary or if it's not true. Um, well, I do. But don't you also think there was a big self-awareness in the nineties that we had that maybe the other decades lacked? Cause I do feel like we were discussing a lot of this stuff in real time and that's it. That's part of it. I don't know if you and I had been on that. We've talked about this before. If you and I had been on the same floor in high school, would we have hated each other?

Or would we have been friends? Or would we have had a love-hate relationship? Because I do feel like your friends would have been different than my friends. But I would have veered into your friend group to argue about pop culture and sports stuff. And I think we eventually would have become friends. Well, that's a real hard question because are we high school? We're in the same high school class, you say? I'm saying we're in college. We're in a dorm. Okay. I'm a sophomore and you're a freshman and you come in.

I don't know. I don't know because once again, we're kind of thinking of ourselves as younger versions of the way we are now. And I don't think I was this way when I was a freshman in college. I don't think I was like the way I am now. Well, how long have we known each other? Like 20 years? About 20 years now. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're always up for a good argument. I think, I felt like we would have been arguing about stuff even back then. We cared about most of the same things. But when I was a freshman in college, I was really argumentative. I was really... Yeah, see, I would have liked you.

I would have been like that fucking guy. I know. We got a huge argument about bleach, neurotic bleach. And I'm not talking about it anymore. I was, you know, I had a pretty small worldview. You know, it's, I was extremely competitive.

Yeah. That's the thing. That's one thing that I feel like has changed about me is I was just an extremely competitive person. Now, granted, if we were on, if we lived in the same dorm, this is actually kind of a fun idea to go through. Let's do it. Let's go back. Yes. I assume that you would have probably, I would have assumed you were one of the only people in the building who knew as much about sports as I did. Now, there may have been 20 other guys who did, but I would have assumed you would have been the only one. So we would have had that in common.

I think we would have had the newspaper together and we would have had a rivalry because you would have had like a general calm. I would have had a sports calm. Possibly. That could have happened, I guess. Yes, I guess I could have seen that. I think we have one huge argument about something really ridiculous.

But that was a normal thing to do in college. Yeah, and you didn't hold it against the person after. My closest friends, we argued all the time. And oftentimes in really personal ways that seems kind of like it would, it could never exist. Now you could never do that. Not just because the time has changed that all of that be part of it, but also it's like, as an adult, uh, arguing is different. Like, like you, you, you, you can't say there's an idea that everyone is kind of editing their behavior or whatever.

I think that's fair. I also think friendships are different because like, I just think about like after college, you know, my closest friends from college, I would call them and we would talk for like an hour.

And now like my closest friends from college, I text with constantly, but we rarely hop on the an hour. And now like my closest friends from college, I text with constantly, but we rarely hop on the phone. And it's like, I feel like they're in my life, but they're probably not in my life the same way it would have been if I called them once a month for an hour. You know what I mean?

It's like they're in my life in like a not as good way. Yeah, I mean, we have that relationship. We text, but it's not like I call you and be like, hey, what's going on? No, I mean, uh, and if I did call you, you'd think something was wrong. I, I, in fact, though, I think that I probably would. Well, actually I would first think you were asking me to be on a podcast, I guess. Then I would think something was wrong. I wanted something. It is. And it's strange how things work. I mean, you know,

I would guess if we somehow had an odometer that could measure the amount of time you and I have spoke in our lives. And one was for times we have spoken with each other in public. And one was about the times we have spoken with each other, you know, without doing a podcast, you know. They wouldn't be dramatically different. I've talked to you more in life because of Grantland. But prior to Grantland, I felt like the vast majority of our interactions had been like in a public setting like this. Right.

Yeah, you're right. Well, people get older too. They have kids. They stop like, you know, there's less options to go out. But that's one thing about the nineties. Like, I do feel like people hung out in a slightly different way. Like, uh, mainly because what else were we going to do? You know, like it was like, if, if one of my friends was coming for the weekend, that was going to be the most exciting thing of my week. I get to hang out with one of

my friends, but now, you know, if I was like 22 and I had the internet, would it be as exciting that one of my friends was coming? I don't know. I don't, I honestly don't know the answer because I would feel like that friend was in my life all the time and it wouldn't have the same impact. Like, oh my God, my friend's here. Yeah. I, I, I don't know. I don't know either. I'm bad. I don't, I don't, well, it's just, it's things have changed in a way. Like I, I don't have. I don't know either. I'm bad. Well, it's just things have changed in a way. Like I don't have a great deal of friends where our relationship began in a virtual realm,

which I think is a much more common thing to happen now. Yeah, you're right. So that's part of it. Now we're moving to the metaverse. That's part of the problem. Pretty soon, nobody's going to hang out. We're just going to be in some virtual simulation, arguing

with each other. I guess that, I mean, strange. I guess part of me thinks that's not going to happen. I'm a little bullish on the metaverse. Let me ask you what, what do you think was the highlight of the nineties? When was it? What was apex mountain for the nineties? What was the peak?

When was the nineties? The most nineties? When was the nineties? Okay. That's what was the nineties. What the 90s-est moment that we had? And it could be a sad moment. Like you could say it's the OJ car chase. Because I would actually say that would probably be my answer, even though that was kind of a grim day. I mean, no, that would be right up there. I mean, in terms of like a lot of things from that period and a lot of the things that would be right up there. I mean, like that in terms of like a lot of things from that period and a lot of the

things that would come later kind of coalesced around this one event that like had was like, like, like, like head was tragic and comedic at the same time. And, um, you know,

uh, uh, things like, I don't know. In many ways, I, I, I feel like know, in many ways, I feel like Zima is such a representation of the 90s

in the sense that it was like, like, like a, the idea of a, of something that, that seemed futuristic that was just Coors beer put through a coal filter.

So it had no color, which is something of course no one had ever asked for. There was no demand. There was more demand for like clear beer that tasted like champagne Sprite or whatever, but someone brought, you know, but,

but it was created. And then there was this idea that it's like, is it healthier because it's clear? Is it for women? Is this directed toward, what demographic are they going after with this? Can you drink it and not get a DUI? Is it for young people? No one really knew. But the idea was like, well, this is so stupid. Maybe it's brilliant. And I felt like this is the 90s. You know, I feel like the whole idea and all of the battles over the concept of selling out, in some ways were this thing like, this idiotic idea is the most important thing about you as an artist. Like we all understand that it makes no sense

to create obstructions for yourself, to limit your audience and to consciously cut off your possibility for real success. However, you need to do those things to be considered relevant and important. And if you don't do those things- You need the street cred of it. Well, it was more than street cred. It it, like the idea of selling out was built around this ideology that, that, that if you need to be loved by people you have no relationship with and who aren't like you and who aren't your sort of peers, um, you're cheapening and commercializing the thing you're making. Your art is less valuable because you have made it valuable to people who in some sort of abstract reality aren't supposed to be consumed by it, aren't supposed to be interested in it. Your motive for doing this is false.

Your motive for doing this should be that you want to do it for yourself and people exactly like you. And it should be an insular culture. You should be insular on purpose. That was manifested most famously in Reality Bites, which is a ridiculous movie that we both enjoy. But was this... Yeah, well, no, I mean, that's...

That was where they hit this in the most basic, hardest way of like, here are these two paths for you as an artist. You either stay true to this weird documentary you made, or you could sell out and it could become this terrible MTV show. And she doesn't sell out. And like the script was rewritten like 80 times. There's all this product placement. It's got major stars in it. It's kind of a flat version it really is is it's like a it's like the sellout

attempt at illustrating the problem of selling out yeah which is why it handles it so perfectly i mean ethan hawke's character in that movie is the best encapsulation of the imagined Gen X person, maybe a person who never actually existed anywhere. But this was the assumption. This was- I knew a lot of, I knew a few choice. Yeah, well, you knew anybody close to that got compared to that. But I mean, for him, it is the complete essence of his,

like every fiber of him is that. Like everything that we think and pretend about Generation X we put into this. You know, it's, I mean, I think that's a pretty valuable movie in terms of understanding the past. It's not really an illustration of what the past was like, but it's a way to understand what people were trying to sort of world build. Like, like the, like, we want to believe that this is how it is. So let's package this into a movie and then sort of pretend like it's been ripped out of society. I just, um, I mean, and the other variations of that were, we've put all of these people together and they're different, but collectively this is

going to end up being something. And it was like, the real world was like that. Melrose Place was like that. Singles, the Cameron Crowe movie, that was like that, where it's like, we've taken these types of people and they're now together and you're going to identify with one of these people. And then it became friends became the one that unlocked it the most. Where it's like, we have this, these six people, they're all friends.

They're not alike. And they have this coffee place to go to. Well, I mean, these are all things that are like, yes. Like, okay.

So friends, uh, I have a quote from one of the creators from friends in this book about how, like, she's talking to like the orange county register and she makes a point of saying i was like our people on friends they don't look like you know the people in reality bites because like ethan hawk was dirty all the time you know yeah like friends was this super successful okay debuts on thursday night opposite my so-called life. Okay. So now we now use my so-called life as the shorthand for like, this was like the alternative

culture in the real world. Like Angela Chase was the way a lot of young women were at that time. And Jared Leto and all these things, the, the, the, you know, uh, all the, everything about you, Buffalo Tom is an episode. All these early nineties ideas are in this one season of my So-Called Life, but it only lasts one season. And then it's just gone. But Friends on NBC, because My So-Called Life was on ABC, goes on for 10 years. And a big part of that is because here's a show about the 90s with people in their 20 twenties going through the problems of young adulthood.

Seems like it should be like a Gen X show, but it's not. These characters exist outside of time. You watch an episode of friends. It is very difficult to figure out what year is this happening? Like there's the episode where they talk about who to get in the blowfish. There's an episode where they talk about like how Stella gets her groove back. But those are rare. That's a it's a very rare thing. For the most part, the reason Friends is still popular now is because that show could have happened at any period. You look at the coffee shop they go to. There's no coffee shop like that then and no coffee shop like that now.

It's not like a Starbucks. It's not a corporate place. It's also not cool. It's sort of like all things that a coffee shop could possess in this one setting. So the idea that like like the 90s were actually consumed and defined by the things we remember is pretty much wrong. I mean, it's like, you know, like Shania Twain was 14 times more popular than Courtney Love. A lot of these things that we remember are kind of false memories. Well, it's also the people talking about it after the fact helps the memory, which is something you've written about a bunch. The book comes out February 8th. Can I give you my Super Bowl half prediction, though?

You can. I have something to say about the Super Bowl. All right, let's do it. Then we got to go. Okay. So I was thinking about the last time that the Bengals were in the Super Bowl. Do you remember that Niners-Bengals Super Bowl? I sure do.

Yeah, okay. What do you remember about it? I remember Rice. That's the standout. Yes. And it seems like every time the Niners need a first down, every time they need the ball, every time it's critical, they go to Rice. Until the very last possession when they drive the field and John Taylor scores the game-winning touchdown. And I remember watching it in real time. Everyone just kind of assumed that Rice had got the ball.

And they were like, oh, no, that's Taylor. So then I was thinking about some of the history of the Super Bowl since then. I thought about the year the Cardinals got beat by the Steelers and they really, really relied on Larry Fitzgerald. But then at the end, you know, and then there was, you know,

when the Pats beat the Falcons, the Falcons really relied on Julio Jones. And then it seems as though if you really totally and exclusively rely on one wide receiver, he can be impossible to cover for the whole game.

But if you throw the kitchen sink at him at the end, you can take him away. Well, both the Rams and the Bengals really rely on one guy. Like the Rams go to cup every time they need anything.

And, you know, and the Bengals go to chase. So I think the key to this game will be is if Odell Beckham plays very well for the Rams. Because I feel like there's going to be a period where they're going to have to go. I think the game will be close. I'm assuming, I haven't listened to all the chatter around it.

I'm assuming the conventional wisdom is like the Bengals can't protect the quarterback and the Rams have this dominant defensive line. Maybe that'll happen. Maybe, maybe they just will not be able to block the Rams and that'll be it. But I, uh, I think this game is going to be close and I think the Rams are going to need a key drive late in this game to win. And they will not be able to go to cup at the very end. They will have to go to Adele. And I think if he plays well or makes a play, the Rams win.

And if he does not, the Bengals will win. So you would have made the same case about T Higgins with the Bengals. I think that's possible, but I don't think they would. I don't, I think if you're the Bengals, um,

you probably won't go away from your guy. He's too much. He like, like, like Chase is too much better than the, too much better. He's just, he's significantly better than. He's their impact guy. Yes. Whereas I fear the Rams kind of do have a couple options. And the thing is they're going to like,

like it's amazing to me how Cup can manage to get open no matter what the conditions are or what the situation is. But there might be a time late in this last game of the year when the Bengals believe or know that the Rams are going to Cup. And they just throw everybody at them. And then it becomes difficult. He's going to have to go away from it. And if he can do that, the Rams will win. If he goes away from him and he can't succeed, the Rams will lose.

I'm taking my son and he can't believe Kendrick, Jay-Z. It's funny to actually know somebody that's excited about the halftime show. I don't know if that's happened for me before. My son's fired up for the game too, but he can't believe all of these artists are going to be singing together at halftime.

What are your seats like? I don't know. Oh, you don't know yet? No, I don't know yet. I'll find out at some point. I'll be there though. I'm sure it'll take nine hours to get in and eight to get out. Alright, Chuck, your book comes out next week. Can you come back mid-March and I

want to talk about the reactions to the book, like most surprising things that surprised you the most about what people said because I'm interested to see what the perception of the book is because I knew what you were trying to do for it, but you had also told me before I read it. Yes. So I'll be interested

to know when people read it, what they thought they were going to read versus what they read and then what they violently disagreed or agreed with. Sure. I can do that. All right. So we'll come back. And then are you doing any tour stuff or no? Well, you know, I had the idea with this book initially is the reason it's coming out in February, as opposed to last fall is we kind of thought all this would be over and I was going to tour for three weeks. I was going to tour the East coast and I was going to tour the West coast. And then I was going to do like Minneapolis, Chicago, Austin, Denver, the middle of the country in the third week. But it all got killed.

All the events are virtual now. Actually, that's not true. I'm doing a real event in Seattle on the 21st. I love Seattle. All the other ones are now virtual. Like the day the book comes out, there's like a virtual event with the bookstore here, Powell's in Portland. Then there's a New York one. So there is no tour. I mean, it's hard. It's tough to find. Granted, there's differing views on what COVID is like now, but to get all the pieces together for the stores, for me, for the populace, it was just impossible.

So no, there really is no tour. All right. Well, buy the book. Good luck with it. Thank you. Good to see you. That's it for the podcast. Don't forget, Rewatchables.

F'd Up Family, February is happening. Ordinary People was the first one. Check it out. I'm going to be on the Prestige TV pod as well on Friday. I'll be on this feed one more time on Thursday. Don't forget about our same game parlays that we do every Wednesday for FanDuel. I'll have that up there tomorrow and

I will see you here on Thursday. I don't have.