The Bill Simmons Podcast - Tiger’s Accident, Watson Trades, COVID and Common Sense, and NYC’s Future With Kevin Clark and Derek Thompson

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Kevin Clark to discuss Tiger Woods following the news of the golf star's car accident (2:30), before they revisit the market for Deshaun Watson and make up some fake Orlando Magic trades (20:00). Then Bill is joined by Derek Thompson of The Atlantic to discuss what experts have learned about COVID-19 since the early months of the pandemic, the various vaccines, post-pandemic life, and more (53:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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out what was going on there. So you can hear that. I'm also on ringer dish tomorrow. Cause Dave Jacoby and I are breaking down episode 11 of the challenge, doubleents and the rewatchables we did this week. Neighbors, the Seth Rogen, Zach Efron one, not the John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd one, just for the record, but that's up as well. Coming up, going to talk to Kevin Clark about Tiger Woods and Deshaun Watson trades and what the Orlando Magic might do as the surprise trade partner of the trade deadline. And then from the Atlantic, Derek Thompson is going to make us smarter about COVID and a whole bunch of other things. That's all next. Pearl Jam. All right, the ringers, Kevin Clark is here.

We're taping this part of the podcast. It's 2.30 on Tuesday, Pacific time. A few hours ago, Newsbroke Tiger Woods was in a car accident. It was not what we expected to talk about today. Serious car accident. The facts are what we expected to talk about today. Serious car accident. The facts are still coming out. Definitely had leg injuries. Well, I guess we'll find out what else happened to him.

Seems like he survived. Kevin, what struck me as the whole thing was unfolding was how scary it is from an information standpoint when something like this happens, where any sort of kernel of a half-truth or whatever, like at one point, Tiger Woods was, you know, critical injuries. His life was in danger. And I was like, no, no, it's actually critical injuries to his legs. And why haven't we been able to fix this whole terrible way social media dissects these

news stories where we have no information yet? It's a big question because it's the nature of social media. And it was, you know, you saw this about an hour or two before the sheriff's department released a statement, you saw rumors flying. And, you know, I just think that it gets to be very uncomfortable spot where just people were saying, Oh, Hey, I, you know, I heard this rumor from this guy who's in, it was in this ambulance or whatever. And I just unfortunately think it is the downside of social media that rumors can fly early. Yeah, the one thing was the pictures of the car.

Yeah. And it was clear like something bad happened to that car where it seemed like it veered across a mini one-lane highway and ended up flipped upside down and that, that there was real damage, stuff like that. So you're looking at this, you're patching it together, all the information and you know, the, the big piece is like, is he going to make it? Then you realize, all right, it seems like he's going to make it.

And now I guess we find out what happened to him. But, um, yet another, uh, twist for a career that we just saw laid out and dissected in that two-part HBO documentary. And it's, you know, the 2017 car accident he had where it was like everybody wrote him off. And then he has this dramatic comeback with the Masters. And now he has another really, you know, best-case scenario. This is just a huge recovery. And he's going to have to go. Who knows if he's going to play golf again?

That obviously doesn't even really matter right now, but just incredible twists and turns in this guy's life. And he's borderline hero. Then he's a tragic figure and he's a comeback figure. And here we are again. What I would say, you hope, as you said, the golf part is separate and almost meaningless at this point, because I, you hope, as you said, the golf part is separate and almost meaningless at this point, because, you know, I remember something Scott Van Pelt said on Rosillo's podcast earlier this year that Tiger Woods is only primary concern right now with the universe is being with his kids. And when he won the Masters two years ago, it was just through the prism of, hey, my

kids can see me at my peak. They'd never seen this before. And once that happened, he was, you know, he felt good about his place in the universe. And so right now, when I saw this, when I saw the footage, obviously, like you have been watching just cable news all afternoon, it just came to, I just hope he can be healthy and spend time with his kids and live a happy and healthy life because he's gone through so much. He was a god to me growing up in Orlando. uh, you know, probably lived 20 minutes away from me. And, you know, I think that there's a wonder you get,

I'm sure you had that growing up in Boston, but when you see someone like Tiger woods and I only had two or three times where I was actually close to him a couple of times at a magic game. One time I saw him at a range, um, hitting golf balls and it gives you a, even though I was a child, it accentuates your childlike wonder of sports. When you see someone like Tiger Woods hitting a six iron at a golf range. Um, and it shaped my love of sports, quite frankly, to have somebody like that in, in the, in, in, in the world, uh, that was close to me. So, um, geographically, so it's, I'm just hoping he has a healthy, healthy and happy life and, um, gets back to Florida and gets back to Jupiter and gets spent

time with his family. Yeah. For your generation. because you're younger than me, he was basically the Jordan for your generation of kids growing up. Yeah. And I thought about that today because I think that I remember something Bob Costas said about DiMaggio because he missed the DiMaggio generation. Right. And he would say that all of his dad's friends and his dad would, whenever Mickey Mantle made a play or anybody, they'd say, you never saw the real thing, kid. You never saw DiMaggio.

And I kind of feel like with my kids or anybody who's, you know, being born now, I'm going to tell them like, you guys think you can see a six iron be hit by some of these new guys, but you have no idea. You might think that Jon Rahm winning the Masters is cool, you know think you can see a six iron be hit by some of these new guys, but you have no idea. You might think that Jon Rahm winning the Masters is cool 10 years from now, but it's not nearly as cool as what Tiger Woods did in the late 90s. It's not nearly as cool as what Tiger did at Pebble those handful of times. And so that's us. That's my generation.

I was born in the late 80s. And from the time I was 9, 10 years old, from the time I knew what golf was, golf was not. And I look now and I see, you know, the 93 masters or whatever, and everybody's wearing those terrible visors and the crappy shirts and all that stuff. Golf was never that to me because I knew tiger woods from the time that I started watching golf. So I had a completely different experience than, than everybody else. I mean, I, golf was probably different and differently consumed for everybody else.

There's almost something mystical about Tiger Woods. I remember Robert Redford saying this a couple years ago, or a long time ago, actually, where he said that you're not supposed to control golf. Golf is uncontrollable, and Tiger Woods is the only person who can control it. And that, to me, shaped the way I view golf. And everybody

else, as I said, is not the real thing after it. So, yes, he is our Michael Jordan. He's our Joe DiMaggio. He's whatever you want to throw out there. Yeah, for me, it's Ali. I caught the tail end of it. That was right when I was, you know, growing up, watching Wild World of Sports, seeing the fights,

and he was, like, the first guy who was, like, the super- was like the super duper hero and then bird of magic and then right to Jordan. And then basically as Jordan starting to wind down, tiger shows up and it seemed like he was just the next guy. And I do feel like he was the next guy for, he was, he exceeded expectations in my lifetime. In my lifetime, there are two people who had unbelievable hype and exceeded it. And it's LeBron James and it's Tiger Woods. And I don't think... That is so rare that we had to, in my lifetime, have two people like that. And for Tiger Woods to do what he did and be just...

I mean, there's almost something mystical about it. And so I loved his career. And again, I just hope that putting aside the golf thing, I just hope he gets to live a long and healthy life after this and happy life. And that this is just another thing that he's

going to be able to come back from because he has there's been some unbelievable bumps in the road. Yeah. I went on fairway rolling with House of Nathan last week, and we were talking about how incredible that Masters title was in 2019. And where you just feel like the guy's body is basically broken at that point. Where he's had multiple back surgeries.

He had all kinds of issues with his knee. And for that to do that, I think I made the point as the years pass, I think that's going to become more and more incredible that he won the masters. I think we're going to look at that and go, Holy shit, how did that happen? Um, if he can come back from this, there's the obvious, uh, Ben Hogan parallels and things like that. But, uh, at the age that he's at with the, you know, how, how bad the his back stuff has already been and things like, God,

God only knows what happened to him. So it's tough to talk about because we have no idea. And by the time you hear this podcast, we'll have seven, eight more tidbits that will come out. But I think he was a weirdly beloved guy that hit rock bottom in a lot of ways in 2009, 2010, 2011 for a lot of people. But people also really loved him and

you could feel it in that master's thing. And for his generation, he's the guy. Yeah. And I would say, I would say that 2019 masters to me, it was probably a top five amazing moment for me. Golf is a cruel sport because there's no retirement, right? Like it's not like Peyton Manning sitting up on a podium and saying, I'm done. Next surgery's got me. You can, you can play the same courses. He could play Augusta in theory until he's 90 years old. And so you never really know when it's over. And so it's unannounced.

It's just subtle when it's over. And so when I was watching Tiger Woods before that, and obviously he had some triumphs in the years prior. He won at Eastlake and he was in contention in Innisbrook at the Valspar. But I just didn't know that was possible. And one of the things I've always thought about, something AJ Liebling said about

Joe Lewis, is when you have a guy who's getting a little bit up there in age, you root for him because you're really just rooting for yourself to age well. You don't want your childhood to go away. And so I was thinking about that a lot that Tiger Woods year where it's just like, you know what? Oh, cool. I'm still young because Tiger Woods is keeping me young because the guy who's been there my entire life is still there. And I think there's always a little bit of selfishness and projection when they, when a guy like that comes back. And I just thought that that's what I'll remember about that moment. That's why I think again, it's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen from on a, on a sporting sporting event. Yeah. For me, I don't

know what my top 10 is, but I know that's in there and Nicholas and 86. Right. I have two golf things in the top 10 and I don't know what the rankings are, but both of those have to be in there, especially with the tiger thing where after 2017, we gave up. That was it. It was a sad ending that all of a sudden wasn't. And now it's sad again, and we'll see how it plays out. Let's switch topics we'll talk about um deshaun watson yeah which was the original reason i had you coming on um trade rumors all over the place yeah um first question do you think he will be traded wow uh i think he will be eventually traded yes so i think in 2021 he will be eventually traded. Yes. So I think in 2021, he will be traded. I think they're saying no to everything right now, but Deshaun Watson is also not returning their calls.

Everybody's ghosting everybody else. The teams are ghosting the teams that are calling about trades. Deshaun Watson is ghosting his own team. I think there's a real, and I know the fines would be hefty. I know we'd have to give $21 million back if he retired, but I think that, and I don't think he's going to retire. I think that Deshaun Watson would be happy to have a standoff that goes into August and September, and then the team eventually trades him. I also agree. I think he will be traded. At some point, when you've passed the point of no return and you have a gigantic asset, you've got to flip that. It's also a smart thing for a front office to do because you're getting all these future picks, all these future assets. Now you're not

going to get fired. It's like, wow, we're rebuilding. We had to trade Deshaun. And so Nick Casario is like, well, it's a three-year project. And that's sometimes the best place to be when you're in a front office. I'm just going to say this. I was looking. Fandle didn't have odds for this, but I did find odds online. And he's a two-to-one favorite to just come back to Houston. I don't think that's going to happen.

Denver was three-to-one by these weird internet odds I found. Panthers were plus 350. Dolphins plus 350. Jets plus 450. For whatever reason, the Panthers were the team that jumped out to me for two reasons. Okay. They are owned by that guy, David Tepper,

who I think is a hedge fund asset, sees big picture. This thing seems expensive, but I'm not scared off by the price because I know blah, blah, blah. They're also more on the advanced metric side. And if there's a team that's going to overpay for him and then make the case, here's why we overpaid because we're smarter than you. It seems like the Carolina Panthers. They are a, we're smarter than you team. Oh,

you're making fun of us that we put four first rounders in here. Just wait. We're smarter than you. And plus he's from the Carolinas. That's another thing. And, and him in that division, that makes the most sense to me.

What do you think of that option? Yeah, I obviously played college in South Carolina. It's from the Atlanta area, so he knows the Southeast really well. I would say it's funny to me that you brought up the Panthers because the Panthers have an interesting role in all of this,

which is the Panthers were the team that got Nick Casario hired because Bob Lamont, who is the agent for both Jack Easterby and Nick Casario, called Cal McNair, the owner of the Texans and said, Hey, Nick Casario is going to go to Carolina and he's going to bring Jack

Easterby with him. And that was the entire thing that set this all in motion. It's also hilarious because it presupposes that David Tepper would take Jack Easterby and his organization. Like there's so many red flags. Could you imagine David Tepper being like, Oh yeah, the guy I really want is the character coach. Who's had a hostile takeover of the team in Houston and got everybody fired and decided to trade Deandre Hopkins, all this

stuff. Okay. David Tepper. Let me, let me make the comic there. Cal McNair is listening. Let me tell you something. They were not going to Carolina. David Tepper was not taking Jackie. Yeah. Okay. So it's a, it's an intriguing team. I would say the fact that the eighth pick is hurts them a little bit. If there was a pre-draft, right? I think the draft is a soft deadline because if they wanted to move on from Deshaun Watson,

they'd want the quarterback this year. Again, I think it's going to come down to whether or not Deshaun Watson wants to miss games. And that's why I think it goes into September, August, September. But I think that the teams that make the more sense

would be Miami and the Jets, who are at two and three, respectively. But he doesn't, he's been pretty clear he didn't want to go to the Jets. There's been rumors he didn't want to go to the Jets. Right. And he has a no trade clause, which means he controls the whole process.

Miami makes the most sense. I would say Miami is problematic for the Texans because the first round pick they would get back is the Texans first round pick, which was traded for Laramie Tunsil because they were trying to protect Deshaun Watson and failed. There's very little scenario here where the Texans don't

end up wearing a clown suit. Everything that they've done was so mistake riddled that they're going to have to sort of undo a mistake that they've already made. So they're going to have a Laramie Tunsil as one of the highest paid tackles in football, and he's not going to be protecting any quarterback worth protecting. Right.

And so that's a funny wrinkle to it. I think Miami makes the most sense from that regard. You know, I, David Tepper, the report is that he'll do anything. The quote was move mountains to get a franchise quarterback. And there are a bunch of those guys out there who

might be a little bit unhappy. Russell Wilson could be one of those guys. Aaron Rogers could be one of those guys. Deshaun Watson is one of those guys. And I think that Deshaun Watson is obviously the closest one towards moving, uh, this year, but I kind of feel like he's going to be aggressive. The, the, the trade rumors so far, you saw Peter King this week. A lot of the trades were two first round picks and then two second round picks. They were staggered and staggered years. So a 2021 first round pick, 2023 first round pick, whatever. Teams are going to get creative. I think one of the problems, Bill, it's almost like the James Harden trade. The price tag is so huge that it's almost a failure of creativity that they don't have more trade offers right like what is the price for deshaun watson if two first round

picks get you a pretty a really good defensive player in this league i think it starts at three first round picks plus players um john mclean who covers the team and i think this is kind of weird to be honest with you that they're all like deshaun watson's not getting traded but also here's what they'd want for Deshaun Watson. I am very specific. So John McClain had two first round picks, two second round picks, and I believe two defensive starters in this hypothetical,

by the way, in this hypothetical package, which doesn't exist because the Texans haven't even thought about trading him, but here's a very detailed list of what they'd want. Okay. And so I, I,

that, that would seem to, and McClain has said this point to the jets, but again, why would Deshaun Watson go to a franchise like the jets that he has to go someplace with the talent base because the picks aren't going to be there obviously. Um, and so I think when you look at Miami's young core, that makes the most sense to me, especially when you look at the return, if, if the deal was to happen in the next month, I think, I mean, if, if the Panthers draft Mac Jones,

are the Texans really going to want to take that? I don't know. I just think that the Panthers have the ambition to do it. I don't know if they have the assets to do it. I have a lot of follow-up thoughts on this, but we're going to take a break. This episode is brought to you by Movember. The mustache is back with a vengeance.

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All right, coming back. You mentioned something that I just really enjoy anytime a story like this happens, where the Texans, they maintain, look, we haven't thought about trading Deshaun Watson. It's the off season. You're a front office. It's not like you're playing games, you're training games. All you're doing is sitting around scouting players and playing in the future of your team. So let's say I'm Nick Casario and you're Chaplain Easterby. And we're hanging out all the time.

At no point for 20 minutes do we have the, hey, if we did trade Deshaun, what do you think the package would look like? We're just not talking, like you bring that up to him like, no, no, no, not talking about that. It's almost irresponsible for us not to talk about it. What else would we talk about? That'd be the number one thing I would talk to you about every day. Hey, Kevin, I just realized I probably need a third round pick too. I'm going

to, here's the trade. I redid it in my head. Here's what I would want. They, they're not talking about it at all. Get the fuck out of here. It's, it's ludicrous to think they don't have a plan in place or even a thought. I mean, if you had assets, what I just from a, from a trade standpoint and all that stuff, you'd always be thinking about the value of everything. Right. And so Deshaun Watson is an amazing player. He's an amazing person as, as many beat writers have said, pillar of the community, all that stuff. Um, there, but there's going to be a, at some point there's going to be, at some point, there's going to be a fair value. And it's Nick Casario's job to understand what that is.

Now, for me, the contract- Also, isn't it his job to assign two interns and be like, can you research every superstar traded in the history of the NFL? Yes, yes. And make a spreadsheet for me? I just want to study it

for the next two days in the bathtub. And Bill, this happened in European soccer with Neymar, where it didn't seem like there was a price tag for a player like that. And then Paris Saint-Germain basically said, okay, we're going to invent a price tag for it. And they ended up giving hundreds of millions of dollars to Barcelona. You invent the trade if there doesn't exist. And that's what needs to happen here. The contract with Watson is really interesting because the Texans paid out $27 million in signing bonus. So this year, a player is only

on the hook for $10.5 million. Excuse me. The team is only on the hook for $10.5 million. Next year, 35. Year after that, 37, then 32 in 2024 and 2025. That is ludicrous because the TV deals are going to kick in, Bill. Wait until see in 2025, what Trevor Lawrence gets, because it's not going to be $32 million when the NFL gets a hundred billion dollars in TV money and essentially goes up a hundred percent with all of their rights. I promise you, Trevor Lawrence is going to be making a lot more than $32 million in 2025. Um, and so, which is when he will, does that mean, does that mean you and Danny Kelly and all the ringer NFL people do, do we also have to factor that in? Just tell me now.

I got to work on our ringer salary cap. It depends on the value of the franchise tag here at the ringer. Okay. That's not that all. Yeah, it's a little bit different. But so, yeah, I just think that you're going to have to give up so much. But at some point it becomes worth it. PFF, Seth Galena, who I think is one of the best writers going right now.

He made the case a couple of weeks ago that if you look at the numbers and you look at the supporting cast and the play calling, Deshaun Watson maybe had the best season of the last 15 years of any quarterback because he's the only quarterback who graded out that well with almost no help. It's Manning on the Broncos with Wes Welker and those guys and Damaris Thomas. It's Brady and those guys with Belichick and Joshua Daniels and the supporting cast he's had in the past throwing to Randy Moss or whatever. And then it's Deshaun Watson with an interim coach who never runs play action, who's traded.

And after six months after they traded one of the best receivers in football for a running back, right? There was no, nothing was stacked for Deshaun Watson. There was no suggestion he should have success this year from a team building standpoint. And he did anyway. And so we keep talking about whether or not Watson would make the Broncos Superbowl contender or the Panthers Superbowl contender. And I don't know if they would win the Superbowl, but I definitely know that if you're trying even a little bit and you don't have Jack Easterby running things and you're not just going out of your way to make yourself a less talented team all the time, you're going to be relevant with Deshaun Watson. And I think that that's a,

I think that you can pay the price for that. If you're, if you're most franchises, I'm going to make a prediction, Kyle, alert the video team. Get the recording ready. I feel another ringer social breakout here. This Deshaun Watson trade is the NFL's Anthony Davis moment. When the Lakers were negotiated with New Orleans and it was like, oh, all this stuff could be in the trade.

And then when the actual trade happened, there was way more stuff in the trade. It's when the actual trade happened, there were way more, there was way more stuff in the trade. It's like, Oh, they got Ingram and Lonzo. Oh, they got all these picks and they got pick swaps.

Um, and it was just this cascade of assets for a team that really, we knew he was going to the Lakers. They really didn't have the ability to even bring in another team to negotiate. It was just this offer and they still got all that stuff. I honestly think he could go for four first rounders. I know that's heresy.

I know that's crazy, but I think we're going to have a moment with this trade where somebody is going to overpay for him because we have multiple suitors. Even if it's just Carolina versus Miami, Miami can do the two. They could do the three in the 17. They could do two future seconds and throw in a defensive starter. And then Carolina now has to top that. So maybe they trade Bridgewater and a second for a late first, and then they use three of their own first, whatever it's going to be. Yeah. I think the price is going to be four first and FYI, I think he's worth it. Especially like if you have him and you have a good team,

you have it there to have the coach. We, we both like the coach and they have a good team in place. And those are back of the first round picks anyway, but you end up with, I don't know, one of the five most important players in the league. What's the price for that?

There is no price. If you called up the 31 other two, 31 other teams and said, I will give you Deshaun Watson for your quarterback. The only team that hangs up is Kansas city, right? I think, I think the chargers hang up.

Oh, because of the, the price of Herbert and how young he is in that you get, as, as we've been detailing, I think this was one of your first ringer pieces was that rookie contract QB thing. Yeah. I've been on that corner for a while. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That it's the single biggest asset you can have. And it was funny. I was talking to

Chris Long about it last week. We were just catching up and he was saying how, you know, that went when they had Wentz on that awesome Eagles team, it was the perfect storm, right? They had a really good team and They had the guy on the rookie QB contract, whatever. I just feel like Herbert, I would rather have on that cheap contract as much as I love Watson. So if it's like, if

they call the Chargers and like straight up Deshaun for Herbert, I don't think the Chargers say yes. I really don't. That's a close one for me. But what I want to say broadly about this is that we're acting like the Texans are a rational franchise here. And we're making all of these guesses

based on this team existing in a world that's tethered in any way to reality. So if you haven't been paying attention, listener, Jack used to be taking over the organization. And we live in an age of hyperbole. So I don't want to overstate this. This is the weirdest thing I've ever seen in football. Like I've never seen there've been like Bruce Allen types, or Matt Millen, and they get really

close to the owner and they stay three years longer than they should, but at least they were football guys. This Easterby thing is so strange. He seems to have unchecked power. Mike Florio wrote the other day now that the Texans president essentially quit because Jack Easterby was running the organization and Florio wrote there would be a shock if it's a potential that Easterby could just become the team president or they would just hire a guy who Easterby

wants to be in there who can be kind of his puppet I don't understand any of this stuff I've watched Jack Easterby sermons now that's the, I've watched Jackie's to be sermons. Now that's the tape I've been watching. I want to be sensitive to everybody. Bill, they're not good sermons. They're not good sermons. He's not a good pastor, whatever we want to call it. Um, I don't know, maybe because I'm from Florida. I've just seen some really good sermons in my day. Jackie used to be, he's not giving one of those. Um, I don't understand any of because I'm from Florida, I've just seen some really good sermons in my day. Jack used to be, he's not giving one of those.

I don't understand any of this. And so what bothers me here is if the Texans were committed to winning, first of all, they wouldn't be in this situation. But there would be a much more coherent plan. You're saying, okay, where there's going to be four first round picks. Well, do we know that the Texans are actually going to have a true auction? Because one of the sort of Rosetta Stone's for this bill is that the Texans are actually going to have a true auction? Because one of the sort of Rosetta stones for this bill is that the, the Texans traded John Dre Hopkins last year, and it was clear that they didn't call 31 teams.

Okay. And when you see Stefan digs getting traded, you can see that more. Um, the, the Hopkins pick was, I think 18 picks behind the digs trade. Uh,

you think that, is that a problem when a receiver who's about the same level goes for a second round and David Johnson runner? Yeah. And then there was a quote, which I think didn't get enough attention during the year, which was the Cal McNair was like, well,

we wanted to trade Deandre Hopkins to a good place. And I know the Cardinals ownerships and they're, they're good guys. And it's like, wait a second. What, what is that? The guidepost? Yeah. You're good guys. And it's like, wait a second. What is that the guidepost for? Yeah, you're in a competitive league.

You're competing against other teams. You're not doing favors. Let's not trade. Let's not do what Kevin McHale did with the Celtics and Kevin Garnett. Let's just move on from that, Bill. But no, I just think that there's... I don't think that there's a real coherent plan. I don't think there's, I don't think that there's a real coherent plan.

I don't think there's going to be a true auction. I think that, you know, I wrote this in November and Texans fans kind of rolled their eyes at me. But I said, listen, the Bill O'Brien firing could result in a power vacuum that will have you wishing for Bill O'Brien. And that's exactly what happened. Like Bill O'Brien was awful. And he was, if he was acting in, you know, basically to sabotage the franchise, he wouldn't have done anything differently.

I don't think he was, but he, in a weird way was keeping them from a much worse fate, which was becoming the Houston Easter bees. And, and now we're here. And I think there's a reason to Sean Watson signed that contract, aside from the fact that it's four years,

160, uh, when O'Brien was there, signed that contract, aside from the fact that it's four years, 160, when O'Brien was there, which is that they had made the playoffs that year. They were up 24 to seven on the Kansas City Chiefs last January. I mean, it's unbelievable. And so I think that there's, I've never seen, I've been covering this league for seven years, eight years, something like that.

And I've never seen anything like this. Um, Deshaun Watson, his first season, he was donating game checks to the hurricane Harvey victims. I mean, he got the crap knocked out into the point. He couldn't fly with the team and had to take a bus because the

offensive line was so bad. I think that was his second year. I'm like, he's done a lot of good things and been a really good soldier for the Texans. And the fact that he wants out now is an indictment of every decision they've made in the last year. More realistic, Jack Easterby becoming the president of the Texans or nephew Kyle becoming the president of Spotify? If you had to pick.

Easterby. Kyle, you do a good job, just for the record. I think you're a listener. I think you'd be great. And you're a doer. I think you're a listener. I think you'd be great. And you're a doer. I think you'd be great. What would you do if tomorrow Jack Easterby was just working at Spotify?

You just walk in, you just go on an email. He's the chief content officer at Spotify. Jack Easterby at Spotify.com. You're just like, this can't be good. He was in a clubhouse room with Daniel Ack. And Daniel Ack's like, who is this guy? Let's put him in. Can I give you the

case for Miami overpaying for Deshaun Watson? I have a wrinkle in here that you're going to love. I think the Tua Herbert thing is a disaster for them. And it's not a disaster yet because they can do the whole thing like, oh, look, you know, we're being careful. You know, it's basically we kept them in the bubble wrap. We didn't want to like really let them live, but next year we're going to let them lose. They can sell it all they want. Just wait. It's a two-year entry. They'll have a lot of excuses, but taking him over Herbert is a disaster. This is a get out of jail free card for that disaster where you trade them. Now you're smart.

Now it's like we would trade two or three 17 future. We got to Sean. So it's like, hey, can't kill us for taking to it. We turned him into Sean. It's a great point. That's a great point.

Here's the opposite way that plays out. They go to war with two and next year and he he leaves us cold again. And Herbert throws for, what, 5,200 yards next year?

4,900 yards next year? And it's just, it becomes like the Luka Doncic-Marvin Bagley thing where the Kings fans are just like, ugh. Why? I think that's a real scenario. and I also say that the the Dolphins

the Dolphins have talent in a lot of places the skill guys are not the skill guys not amazing that needs to be upgraded as does the line but they have Xavier Howard

they have Byron Jones they might have Xavier Howard oh yeah that case was closed the case was closed yesterday oh good okay great yeah he's back he's back bullet scandal is out the window nothing to see here yeah he's back uh so i think that there's the building blocks are there if they get the quarterback um again i mean i'm not

saying when we're talking about the Panthers or the Broncos, like none of these skill guys blow me away. Jerry Judy, KJ Hamlin, obviously, Cortland Sutton on the Broncos. I don't know if Christian McCaffrey would be in a deal with the Panthers if they made that. Also, is that guy that excited, Christian McCaffrey? How many more elite years does he have

at a position where the guys peak for like four years? Yes. I just don't. I think you prioritize draft capital. You have to prioritize draft capital. And also, McCaffrey's not cheap by any means. So I would not see that as

an incredible haul for Deshaun Watson. If they're putting a first or a second-round grade on Christian McCaffrey, I wouldn't care about that. But again, this was a team that a year ago traded DeAndre Hopkins for a second-round pick in David Johnson. When everybody knew David Johnson... I mean, this is the problem, Bill.

This is the equivalent of everybody... There are so few times when everybody agrees on something and everybody could see the cliff the texans have been driving off of for a year and a half even when even when they were doing the laramie tonsil thing right before the 2019 season everybody was saying hey man look out for that cliff look out for that cliff look out for that cliff and then they just went over the cliff they didn't listen to anything and so for me to sit here and say, oh, they won't trade for Christian McCaffrey. They won't put a first round grade. Like it doesn't, they keep making these mistakes. This is one of the worst. I, this is one of the worst franchises I've seen. Who's their basketball equivalent. The Kings are, I was thinking about this. I think it was when the Magic named a minor league hockey GM,

their own GM, because they liked him. It's actually kind of similar. Remember that, John Weisbrot? Ownership. He only made one of the worst trades in history. Ownership liked the minor league hockey GM, and they were like, I like this guy. We're going to make him the GM of our...

Someday he's going to trade T-Mac for five cents on the dollar. It'll be great. Steve Francis and Coutinho Mobley. And it reminds me a little bit of that. There's not really, I mean, I think the most franchises in all of sports have moved away from the random guy who can just take over a franchise, right? Like there really isn't anybody like that in the NBA, right? The last one was Vlade Divac. I was going

to say Vlade. I was going to say Vlade. You mentioned a key guy that cozy up to the owner and then eventually, basically the Matt Millen. This guy's got the owner's ear. He was famous for just having long conversations with Mr. Ford about the Civil War. He knew how to play that.

I heard Chris Spielman I think has a little bit of that i don't think he's formally as powerful as matt millen is but i do think he's involved with the lions and it's a similar thing like he's friends with the owner isn't that true that's that's the way to get everything like there are very famous stories basically the advice you always get when you start at any sporting organization is be friends with the owner. Do whatever you can. Don't become friends with the coach.

In fact, try not to become friends with the coach because they get fired. Or the minority owners. That's another one. The minority owners are not going to help you. The majority owner is threatened by the minority owners. Don't be on their side. That's a dead end. The big thing in sporting, in any sports organization,

you always hear whether it's a, you know, like if you're a running backs coach, do whatever you can to become friends with the son of the owner or the cousin of the owner or just the owner himself, if the owner is that involved. Just figure it out. Figure out the pathway to friendship. That's my advice to any assistant coach in the NFL. All right. So we think Panthers or Dolphins. I'm going to throw this at you, though, before we move on to one last segment where you give us Orlando Magic fake trades, which I know America's

on pins and needles for. How many first-rounders would the Bears have to give up for Deshaun Watson before their fans go, Oh, God, that's too many. Five? I'm trying to think of the Bears fans in my life.

If they gave up four first rounders for Deshaun Watson, there would be a drunken celebration. They had the 20th pick this year. That hurts them. I think five seems right. I think if you give up six, that's too many. So you think six, the Bears give up six, that's too many. So you think six, the Bears fans are like,

that's crazy. I think that half of them say that's crazy at six. And the other half talk themselves into it after a deep dish pizza and three beers. It's just they,

they wear the scars of it. You know, I mean, like the biggest, I went on a show a couple of years ago and I said that Trubisky was football Sam Bowie, right? And if you think about the embarrassed fans right before the double doink game,

just tried to old takes expose me on that one. Didn't work out for them. But if you gave, and I'm not saying Watson's Michael Jordan, although Deb was 20, his college coach has said that I would say that obviously Patrick Mahomes a little bit more like that. I would say that in this scenario,

a lot, he's more a large one. And obviously Bowie was after the large one, but let's, let's leave that aside for a second. If you were to ask the, uh, the Blazers,

how much they would pay to get out of the Sam Bowie mistake four years in, I don't think there's a price high enough. I don't. And, and that I... It's like seven first runners. Yeah. And I think that that's how the Bears and any team should think about this. Because when I think about teams that don't have franchise quarterbacks, everybody's on the verge of getting fired all the time. They're trying to find it. Scouts are stressed out. The GM is depressed. The coach

hates his quarterback. It is palpable when you don't have a franchise quarterback. When the shortcut is standing in front of you and the shortcut costs three or four first-round picks... And by the way, a team like the Rams, they haven't had a first-round pick in seven years and they're fine. That's taking some creativity, but whatever. I just think that you take those swings. This is a home run league. And if you solve the problem that everyone is trying to solve, you're 80% of the way there.

Who finished first in the Dak Coach H's QB rankings? Or I heard Coach Blank hates QB rankings, or I heard coach blankets, QB blank. Was it McVay and Goff? I would say they're retiring the number for Peterson and Wentz. There we go. I would say, yeah,

I would say they're the gold medalists. Yeah, they're definitely the gold medalists. I would say McVay, McVay and Goff are, are definitely in the mix there. Um, and then Nagy and Nagy and Trubisky winning the bronze.

Yeah, but I also kind of feel from what I understand, Nagy is just overly stressed. And I just kind of feel like he, I don't know. The book I've always heard on Nagy is that he sweats a little stuff and he's really concerned.

Obviously, we saw the symptom of that was when he tried out 500 kickers after they missed the double doink and he just spent six months just trying to figure out the kicking game and it's like dude you're gonna be fine um and so i kind of think that there's there's just a real anxiety in chicago and and the fact that there's that they never know if they're coming back until december of every year and they have to you know it's almost like a college remembers reminds me of the university of virginia a years ago when they had Al Groh, and Al Groh would just save his job every November.

He'd have Grovember, and he would just win. He would just beat Georgia Tech. He would just beat Georgia Tech, and they'd be like, Al Groh, he's back, baby. And that's the dangerous trap that the Bears are falling into, which is that they might start 4-4 every year, and then Pace and Nagi need to pull out two wins over the Vikings or whatever. So it's just not a good place to have a franchise.

Bears fans, send your thoughts to Kevin's Twitter because he checks his Twitter replies. I do not. But I would say five is the number. How do you know I check my Twitter replies? I've been phasing that out. It's your generation. Before we go, the Orlando Magic,

13 and 18. They're just a half game out of being third worst in the East. They're also two games away from being an eight seed. That's correct. They've had the year from hell. They've had some hilarious starting lineups. And unfortunately for them, or fortunately, probably my favorite trade machine team this year.

A lot of trade machine possibilities. Evan Fournier as an expiring contract. Aaron Gordon as a change of scenery guy. And then the big prize, Nikola Vucevic, who I feel like I represent all Celtics fans here. The Celtics made a pretty big play for Vucevic using their trade exception, only giving Orlando back a couple short contracts, saving them a bunch of money and some future firsts,

maybe a pick swap. That could be a deal that works for everybody. Here's the problem. Could you argue Vucevic is a keeper? Is it Vucevic or Vucevic? Am I screwing that up? Vucevic. Vucevic. You can go Vuce. You can go Vuce if you'd like. I'll call him Vuce. That's what all of Orlando. Yeah.

He's 30 years old. He's averaging a 24-12 this year. And if the Celtics can get Kemba Walker going again, which I'm not too optimistic on, but you have a spread-the-flo floor offense on the Celts with, you know, Vooch, who also has the ability to post up

and they'd be really good. Can Orlando, A, can they trade him? And B, if they did trade him, what would you want back? So everybody's on a pretty manageable contract in Orlando. Obviously, Fultz and Isaac are out for the year, so let's table that. They're also part of the future.

I would say Okiki is also... I love him along with Cole Anthony. Those are my... That's my core going forward. Two of those guys are toward ACOs, but that's your core. I've developed a respect for Vuj this year that I didn't

always have. I think my frustration was he played a style that was very specific. You have to play through him. He doesn't work with every lineup and all that stuff. This year, I've seen, obviously, the scoring touch and I've seen the toughness he's always had, but I've come to

appreciate it because of how bare-bones the rest of the roster has been. My joke about Vuce, and it's not really a joke, is I view him like the band Mumford & Sons, which is, if you said to me, do I like Mumford & Sons, I'd be like, no. I don't. But then whenever Mumford & Sons comes on, I just, I listen to

every song. And then when the top 100 on Spotify comes, it's like five Mumford & Sons songs. And at the end of the year, I say, damn, I kind of like Mumford & Sons. And with Vooch, I'm just like, man, I'm really glad he had 19 points and 11 rebounds tonight because otherwise he would have scored 40 points. Like there's just something there where I don't realize it until I see the big picture, how much I enjoy him being around

and how much he has been the only source of offense in a lot of these teams. And, you know, we got him in the Dwight Howard trade. And I don't, I think that he's, he's, he's represented some lean years there. And, you know, he's played with Alfred Payton a bunch. He just, nothing ever made sense in that team. And he never had shooters around him ever. Never had shooters around him ever. And his ability. So the answer is I would try to keep him.

Honestly, I would trade for an EA. Probably trade Aaron Gordon. Probably trade. I don't really want to go down this road. I'd probably try to get whatever I could for Mo Bamba. I love Mo Bamba. I thought you finally gave up to him. You said no further comments at this time.

I've given up on Mo Bamba. Yeah. Yeah. I think I've given up on Mo Bamba. Yeah. Yeah. I think I've given up on Mo Bamba and I had a discussion with our friend Kevin O'Connor in which I conveyed this to him and he said that, well, he said

Bamba needs to, when are we going to see Bamba on a team that truly accentuates his strength, which is just a bunch of guys who spread the floor and shoot, right? And my argument to that, and again, I think Bamba can be a very good NBA player down the road, just not with the magic and now right now. My argument is if you need the perfect team to look competent on NBA floor, I don't think

you're very good at basketball. Right? I'm sorry. If you said to me, this quarterback looks bad. If you told me that... I'm not making the comparison, but if you told me like, hey, oh yeah, Jared Sinem or Nathan Peterman,

one of these guys who's a bottom rung NFL starter, if you said to me, well, if he was running these three offenses, he'd look, he looked decent. You wouldn't notice that he was bad. Well, that's not really how the world works. And so I'd like a guy who can at least look competent in other offenses. Okay. If he was running the 1999 Rams, you'd think he was good. Great. If, if we need to, if we need to build the entire plane, so to speak, out of Mo Bamba's offensive game and just try to figure out everything, I just don't think that any franchise is A, going to do that,

and B, I just don't think that reflects well on your ability to play competent basketball. So you keep Fooch. You're shopping Gordon. Gordon, how many hairdos are we up to with him now? I think he's pretty good. How many looks? Four looks for him?

A lot of looks. I mean, he's in Orlando. What else is, you know, what else are you going to do? We're in a bubble. We're in a pandemic. There's just not a lot to do. You can change your hair. I'm going to change my hair a little bit.

So I'm going to call you and I'm going to offer you Time Lord Robert Williams. I'm going to offer you Aaron Neesmith, our 13th pick. Just don't watch any of his game tapes this year. They don't reflect how good he is. Is this like a two-way situation?

Romeo Langford, who's hurt. Dumping him? Dumping him before I can notice he's bad? Romeo Langford is hurt, but was the number two prospect in high school two years ago. I'm going to give you

two first-round picks, including this year, which should be a good pick. I'm going to give you two first round picks, including this year, which should be a good pick since I'm not a top three. It might be, you know, in the 13 to 17 range. I'll give you another first two years from now, and I'll give you a pick swap in like 2024.

You're hanging up on me. I'm just giving you a boatload of young talent and some picks. Are you, are you talking about for Vooch? Yeah. Three first round picks? I'll give you one first round pick and two swaps. But I'm going to give you this year's first round pick.

And you get Time Lord and you get Aaron Neesmith and Romeo Langford. I'd have to think about this a little more. I'd probably, I'd probably say yes to that. Oh, and you're going to save $17 million because you're running the magic.

That's the bottom line. It's great. I'd probably say yes to that only because I'm, I've seen this core and I know what it looks like and I just need to shake it up. I want to roll with the guys that I talked about it looks like and I just need to shake it up.

I want to roll with the guys that I talked about earlier, those four guys and build for the future. And I think that getting a nice package like that for a guy like Booch, I think is a good starting point. So yes, I think that the Isaac, the Isaac and Fultz injuries just screw the timeline up so much that I'm okay.

Keeping two eyes in the future instead of one. I was excited that you were playing a guy this year named Jordan bone, which was the best poor name. I think of the 2020, 2021 season, Jordan bone. He's just open an only fancy cat. Uh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, it was weird. I liked the back to back where we didn't have any point guards. I thought that was good. That was, what was the game when you had to play Terrence Ross as your point guard for the last three quarters of the game? That was amazing.

That was, uh, that was golden state. I really enjoyed that. That was fun. It went, we, uh,

we put, it was a tough hit for the point guard position because he actually looked fairly competent. It's like, he looked, are we overrating point guards? I thought about that because I was looking at them. Like looked totally fine. Are we overrating point guards? I thought about that, because I was looking at them,

and I'm like, I'm not really noticing a difference. Maybe it's because I've watched so much bad point guard play before Cole Anthony got here. But I was like, this looks fine. I remember Hito Turkoglu handled the ball for us a bunch on the 0-9 team and before that. So I'm kind of used to weird, innovative play. So yeah, maybe bringing the ball up to court is, is kind of an easy job. Mediocre point guards are like mediocre studio hosts of sports shows. Like you're almost better off not having a host unless it's

going to be a good host or a good point guard. All right, Kevin Clark. Um, we didn't get to MMA or boxing maybe next time, but it was good to see you. And I'm sure you'll be back before the draft. I love it. Ring Around NFL Show with Sheil Kapadia is up today. I do want to give a quick shout out. There's a Therese Paylor scholarship fund. I tweeted it out earlier today. It's a joint venture with Yahoo and the Wall Street Journal.

And it goes to Howard University. So click on it. Donate. We love you, Therese. And it goes to Howard University. So click on it, donate. We love you, Teres. Awesome. Thanks, Kevin Clark. All right. Been meaning to have this guy on for a while.

He's one of my favorite writers. He writes for The Atlantic. His name is Derek Thompson. He's been doing a lot of smart stuff recently that I care about and that you out there should probably care about. Let's start here. You've been zagging against, Rousseau calls it the zag. You've been zagging against some of the conventional COVID wisdom for a while, and you've been covering it and writing about it in the moment. It's really interesting to go back and read your archives. A lot of it

has been borne out. The last piece you wrote was about why are COVID cases dropping and that it's not just as simple as the vaccines. So you laid out four reasons. Let's talk about that. Do you feel like this is a sustained drop and why? Yeah, I think it's definitely sustained drop. I was really pessimistic about a lot of aspects of the pandemic in 2020. And I've really never felt more optimistic about the near future of the pandemic than I do right now. And it's because of the numbers that we're seeing. We're looking at cases plummet. We're looking at hospitalizations plummeting. Daily deaths, which took a while to really come down, have now come down 30% in the last week alone. I mean, it's not going to be at that rate forever. At that rate, we would have zero COVID

deaths in four weeks. That's not going to happen. But the trajectories are just incredible. And the mystery, the weird thing is that it's not just happening in New York or Oregon and Texas. It's happening in the UK. It's happening in Canada. It's happening in Spain, in Germany. It's happening all over the world at the same time. And so this piece was really about trying to dig out, okay, what explains this mystery? I mean, all the smart, brilliant forecasters, when they were coming out with their models in January, were saying, this thing is going to peak maybe in March, and then things are going to come down slowly. They were all wrong. All the genius quants were wrong. And the end of this COVID spike came way before they predicted. And that is a really fascinating and just important point to just

put your finger on. This is happening and it's fantastic news. So you have the vaccines, the shots work. Yeah. We'll start there. The vaccine is really good. I know there's some anti-vaccine people out there, but all the data on it is the shot really works. It actually works, I would say,

on the highest end of how these vaccine shots are supposed to work, right? I think we're probably downplaying just how great these vaccines are. The numbers that are most reported in the media, the numbers that are most reported in headlines are the efficacy numbers for symptomatic infection. So when you see Pfizer, 94%, Moderna, 95%, Johnson & Johnson, 66%, that's efficacy against symptomatic infection. But disease isn't just infection. It's about whether you get the disease, whether you can transmit the disease, and whether it can kill you, right? I mean,

people get common colds all the time. No one cares about that infection. And what makes these vaccines so special in a way that I think is really downplayed in the press too often, is that they are 100% successful in the trials at blocking hospitalizations and deaths. Not 66, not 95, 100%. Out of 75,000 people that went through these trials for Pfizer and Moderna and AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, no one, zero out of 75,000 were hospitalized after four weeks and none of them died in that arm of the trial. I mean, these shots are miracles. And so when we're deciding between shots, I, in a way, don't want people looking at these headline figures, 95 versus 66, look at the number 100. That's how effective these are at blocking hospitalization and death. Do you think, I mean, you've theorized

this, but it's pretty obvious to me, they've done a terrible job at publicizing this. And I think part of it has to do with the general public suspicion of all information now, right? They don't know what's true, not true. They don't know how to disseminate truths, half-truths, whatever. But it almost seems to me like they should be running ads that just lay out the numbers and like, look, these numbers are unassailable. These vaccines work. Here's why almost like PSA ads. Like if you go back, um, in the eighties, right. When they were really trying to do the war on drugs and they were running all those PSAs, especially in the 84, 85, 86 range on cocaine is bad.

They would have these minute long ads during like the Cosby show about, here's why cocaine is bad. Here's why you have to stop. Here are all the numbers. And sometimes you'll see it if you watch old clips of NBA games, Cosby show, whatever from the mid 80s, you'll just see these long PSAs.

Should they be running PSAs to try to educate people on this stuff? I think that national messaging, both federal government messaging and media messaging on the vaccines is so bad right now that just about anything you did would be an improvement. I am for advertisements. I'm for posters. I'm for PSA campaigns. Do it all. But I think there's a really fundamental philosophical mistake that people are making. Throughout 2020, for really good reason, we were emphasizing risk constantly. We were telling people, put on a mask or you could get someone sick or get sick yourself. It's an airborne virus. We were saying, don't spend time

in crowds inside, again, for good reason. Don't do this and don't do that. And this was during a time when we didn't have a handle on the virus and we didn't have a vaccine that was authorized. But now we're in the presence of a bunch of miracle drugs. And the goal is to get shots into arms as fast as possible. And it's not appropriate to hold on to that mode of risk emphasis in the face of a get the shots into arms as fast as possible campaign. What you want to do. 0% hospitalization, 0% death. These are extraordinary drugs. And if you take them, you can get back to living your normal life as fast as possible. This part of, frankly, the messaging aspect has really driven me crazy. You're seeing not only news outlets like NBC emphasizing some 82-year-old woman who got a shot and three days later died of a heart problem that was unrelated to the vaccine.

You're seeing those sort of annoying independent cases being reported as if they're representative. But you're also, I think, seeing people like even Dr. Fauci emphasize that we might be wearing masks into 2022 and beyond. I think we need to tell people in really clear, crystal clear language, if you get vaccinated and your friends get vaccinated, you can do it all together. You can hug and you can kiss and you can go to a bar and go to a restaurant if that thing is open, you can get back to the normal life that you love, that this pandemic ruined with those vaccinated friends. And instead, we are emphasizing all of the ticky tacky risks in a way that is, I think, hurting the cost benefit analysis of the many Americans that are on the sidelines. Because it's not 100% of

Americans that want to take this drug. 30% of Americans are saying, 40% in some groups, like Republicans, Black Americans, non-college educated, are saying, I don't want to take this drug. Or I'm going to wait and see because I don't want to put some newfangled chemical in my body. Or I distrust the way among Black and Hispanic communities, I distrust the way that the medical community has and continues to use us as guinea pigs. We need to find an optimistic way to get people to see the benefits of these drugs. And I don't think we're doing a good enough job of it. So you listed that as the main reason COVID cases are dropping, but there's three other reasons you had. You had behavior. People are just getting better at the masks and the social

distancing. We were all practicing this for about a year. Look, I don't know what it's like all over the country. I just know what it's like in California. It does seem like it's gotten better over the last year. You mentioned the seasonality, which people think once it starts to get warmer, it's going to get better for this, which who knows if that's how true that is, but it definitely seems like it's at least a little true. But then the other one you said, which I thought was really interesting, was about partial immunity and how the virus needs bodies. It's almost like a science fiction horror movie where it needs these proxies to keep going. And the more people that get the vaccines and practice behavior, and there's just less bodies,

that's bad for the virus. So can you explain that piece of it? Like how when it runs out of receivers, it actually can die off? Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, this virus does not live in or replicate in the air or on Amazon packages or in couches. It needs our bodies to grow. And it might be running out of bodies. And there's two reasons for that. One reason is partial immunity, not herd immunity, but partial immunity.

About 15% to 30% of Americans, it seems, have probably contracted SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. And that 15% to 30% isn't spread evenly across the country. It's probably really concentrated in groups that were more likely to get sick in the first place, whether it's frontline workers, people who live in multi-generational houses, or just like teenagers who wanted to go party in Florida last July and were like, I don't really care about this disease, it's not going to hurt me. But for a variety of reasons in those really high-risk groups, you have a lot of immunity built up. And there's a lot of evidence that people who get this disease do in fact develop pretty long-lasting immunity to it. So you have that body, that base of partial immunity in the country.

And now we're adding the vaccines on top of it. Millions of vaccines a week. We vaccinated or at least put one shot into about 11, 12, 13% of the population. So it's possible that between partial immunity, right? People who've got sick and still have immunological memory, and the vaccines, we're looking at a country where like 40, 45% of Americans have something in their body that's ready to fight this thing. And that, I think, really goes quite far into explaining why the cases didn't just start

to plummet in mid-January, but just kept coming down. It's because the virus and even maybe the variants too are just running out of bodies. Their pathway forward is being narrowed. So I was talking to a friend of mine who was in Miami last week, who is known to go out and have some fun. And he was like, because we were joking about how this summer, if everything kind of becomes more normal, this could be like this crazy summer where everybody will just be this pent up frustration of not being able to be a normal person.

Everybody will be going out. And he was like, dude, that's already happening in Miami. Like Miami is now insane. Miami is like it was 10 years ago and people are just out doing their thing. And it made me think like in Florida, because they, you know, they thumb their nose at, at, um, this virus really from the get-go with some, with some kind of temporary exceptions. So how do you explain that? How do you explain a state that hasn't really listened to a lot of the stuff that doesn't wear a mask that much and is basically to a lot of the stuff, that doesn't wear masks

that much, and is basically living the kind of life, at least in bigger cities, that we dream of having again, and they're not having rampant outbreaks? This is such a good question. It's something that I've noodled over, and I honestly don't know that I have a perfect answer, but let me tell you how I'm thinking about it. So number one is that we know that coronaviruses are seasonal and that for reasons that we don't entirely understand, they tend to decline over the summer, go crazy during the winter, kind of like influenza, just like the flu. And then starting around January, February, March, they come down again. So what is seasonality though? Some people say, all right, it has to do with temperature. So we think maybe this disease doesn't thrive as well in humid

environments, in sunny environments, in outdoor environments. It has to do with that. So it's possible if that seasonality describes the course of this virus, that places like Florida just might be naturally worse for the virus to replicate in because it's more humid, because it's more sunny, because it's warmer. So Arizona would be like that too then. Right. Arizona would be like that too. Here's the problem though, because you can roll that seasonality thesis out a bit and it sounds like, all right, well, you've really got something here. But then you say, well, why did Arizona and New Mexico have their spikes? Why is Brazil having such a hard time with this virus? What about South Africa? It's gorgeous down there. People are outside all the time on Table Mountain and at the beaches, maybe just like Florida, Miami in terms of its weather. And that's where the big question mark is. We've been studying this virus now for over a year. We understand a lot about it. We understand that it spreads through the air and not as well on surfaces. We understand that it doesn't do well when it's hot and humid, and it does better in indoor environments, especially ones that are dry and cool.

But that equation hasn't been filled out yet. We haven't reached 100% understanding here. So my Miami hypothesis, I think, gets me to like 55, 65% of the way there for why is Miami having such an easier time with this than, say, New York City, but I'm not at a hundred. I look, I have no evidence for what I'm about to say, but I almost wonder like being exposed to it in little short burst moments, the more you're exposed to it. If it doesn't catch on, but your body's kind of, you don't even know your body's fighting it, but it's just kind of fighting it off, but you're doing to have enough exposure to actually get it. Just kind of being around it, maybe that's the only thing I could think of. You're kind of near it, but it's not like in you, but you're around it and maybe your body naturally starts kind of fighting it.

Yeah. I think it's a really interesting theory. I've talked to epidemiologists about that theory. I haven't quite gotten a green light on it, but let me tell you why it might not be so crazy. So the first vaccine in human history was the smallpox vaccine. And that was a vaccine that was created from cowpox. Vaca, cow, gave us the word vaccine. And before they had a cowpox vaccine, the way that they treated smallpox in Europe, in the Middle East, really around the world, was through something called variolation, which is actually kind of gross in practice. People would get smallpox, they develop those pox, those marks on their skin. And then if you sort of scraped a little bit of that pox and injected somebody else with it, gave them that tiny little bit of that deadly smallpox virus, it would inoculate them against smallpox for most of their life. Now, sometimes things got out of hand and they got really sick

and started epidemics. But for the most part, or at least in large degree, variolation worked in many populations. And there is a kind of outside-the-box theory, definitely not fully accepted by epidemiologists, but certainly possible, that various Americans, maybe by wearing masks and getting only that little whiff of the virus, or through other means, might be achieving the same results with COVID-19 that people in the 15th century in the Middle East and England were experiencing with variolation, that just getting that tiny taste of the virus taught the body how to defeat the whole thing. I don't want to represent this as like, that is what's happening. That's the theory. But I do think it has a bedrock of plausibility underneath it.

Well, that's why this is the most fascinating time for science. I don't know, at least in the last 15, 20 years, like probably since they were trying to figure out, maybe more than, probably since they were trying to figure out maybe more than probably since they were trying to figure out HIV and, and basically how to stop that, what, how to stop it from spreading all that stuff. Um, you had a couple, you've been on a couple corners earlier, uh, on this COVID stuff than anybody else. One of them was you were just zagging against the, uh,

the hygiene stuff where for months and months and months, there was actually no evidence like, oh, that my Amazon package might have COVID. I put my hand on a counter that somebody had COVID and now it's transmitted to me. And I do feel like people were in real fear with that stuff. I'll never forget, probably like everybody else listening, the first couple weeks when everything shut down, like getting gas and being so scared to touch the nozzle. And I would have like latex gloves on and my mask on. And then I remember one time somebody parked in the island next to me and they were five feet away. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm

going to get COVID. And you just think back now and it seems kind of silly. Why the hygiene thing? Why are we still pretending you can get COVID this way? Well, first, let me confess, Bill, I was the exact same way in March and April. When my wife and I shopped at Trader Joe's, we would unpack the Trader Joe's packages, the meats and the fruits and the vegetables, and we would spend the next hour taking the Clorox and wiping down everything. My wife too. Same thing. Every little square inch. Yeah. And that just seemed like the right thing to do. All my friends were doing it. I thought that's how germs work is they spread from surfaces. But then the more we

were learning about this disease and the more we were seeing really interesting studies of how this disease was spreading, the more it became really, really clear that people weren't getting this disease from surfaces. They weren't getting it from Amazon packages. They weren't getting it from gasoline nozzles. They were getting it very simply from being in closed, indoor, unventilated spaces where they were sharing each other's air. It was about shared air, not shared surfaces. So almost like tiny spit particles is the best way to put it, right? The air that has little tiny spit particles from somebody says something and comes flying out, somebody sneezes, and then it's just kind of floating around like a UFO. That's right. Yeah. Like little tiny UFOs. Yeah.

Aerosolized virus. It's the little spittle that we produce when we talk, when we breathe really heavily, like at the gym, certainly when we sing or when we yell, those are little aerosolized particles. And when we're infected with the virus, we are, you know, volcanoing a bunch of little spittle into the air where it can waft around and then get into someone else's mouth, lungs, nose. That's how the virus spreads. But for so long, we were doing these ridiculous things like spending millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases, wiping down transit and buses and subway cars

in New York and Boston and DC. We were taking these subway cars offline, denying service to millions of people so that we could blast antimicrobial spray everywhere. This was doing nothing. And it was actually doing worse than nothing. It was giving people a false sense of security because they were thinking, maybe entering a restaurant. Well, the restaurant is safe because I saw them wiping down the table. Well, no, the virus doesn't live on the table. It lives in the air. So wiping down the table doesn't do anything. By the way, they're still doing that. If you get takeout in some places,

they're wiping down the pens. They have the pens that people have used bucket versus the pens that people haven't. It's like, all right, I'm not getting COVID from a pen. I'm sorry. Right. It is extremely, extremely unlikely that anyone is getting COVID from pens. So I wrote this piece called Hygiene Theater that was about how our obsession with this disease being a kind of ground war disease where we had to fight it by scrubbing every square inch of surface that we could find was totally off base. It's not a groundwar, it's an aerial war. We have to focus on ventilation, on shared breathing spaces. And when you think about the virus from that perspective, I think it really changes a lot of different sort of public regulations. So for example, think about movie theaters. On the one

hand, movie theater is one of the first things to shut down, right? Because you were like, I'm not going into a movie theater with a crowd of people when I know that this virus is just being shed by people as they sit around each other. Or the guy sitting behind you who's coughing halfway through the movie and each time he coughs, you're just jerking because you think the spit's going on the back of your head. Yeah, exactly. But it's interestingly, when you look at the way this disease is actually transmitted, it's possible that movie theaters are much safer than restaurants because what do you do in the movie theater? You don't talk typically. I suppose in some movie theaters, they're talking quite a bit, but maybe you have a little library rule sign at the door. You don't have to talk in a movie theater. It's not a mandatory part of the experience. You don't need to talk. chew while you talk to people and you got a bunch of spittle coming out of your mouth in time. So the fact that we've prioritized restaurant

openings over movie theater openings strikes me as a really interesting way of how we're misunderstanding the way this disease spreads. And we're losing coherence in our public regulation, our public messaging, because we aren't starting with the basics, which is, this is basically a talking disease, number one, and this is a thing that spreads through the air, number two. Yeah. And you think like some of the horror stories about this virus the first year, it was always like, oh, they were having dinner in the presidential suite of a hotel and 15 of the 16 people got it. They were at a convention in some shitty hotel with, uh, you know, in the convention room where obviously they haven't changed the air

conditioning for a hundred years and it's getting just spreading around. It's like a big COVID tsunami basically. Um, that that's why, you know, when I, and I, I've talked about this on the pod, I felt pretty passionate about this the last five, six months. In general, I think youth sports and high school sports and college sports, the outdoor sports should have come back. I really feel strongly about it. People who listen to this know my daughter plays soccer.

It was so frustrating that we had to drive to Arizona to play soccer. I'm watching these games going, nobody's getting COVID from this game. We're outdoors. Even if there's a little spittle, it's just going to go up, you know, and you need to be really exposed for a prolonged period of time to get COVID. It needs to be like, you know, whether it's five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever you need to be like face to face back and forth. And the virus almost needs to latch onto you. And it's five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever, you need to be like face-to-face, back and forth.

And the virus almost needs to latch onto you. And it's not happening in these sports. And I don't understand why it's taken so long for some of the outdoor stuff to come back. Now it finally seems like it's about to happen. What took so long? Why was there such a fear of the obvious? You know, there've been a lot of really, really incoherent moments of state policy, but I think the height of incoherence was that week or two when California,

and you might know this better than I because you live there, California had kept malls open, but they banned outdoor exercise in groups and discouraged people from walking together outside or even going to the beach together. They said, just don't do anything outside in groups. This was maybe in December when things were really, really spiraling. They made the beach seem like it was like, oh, the spit, it can travel 10 times further and stuff like that. Yeah. And it was just ridiculous. It was just, it was the sort of document, it was the sort of rule that just, I can't imagine any scientist having spent a year looking at this virus would sign off on. It was completely backward. We have very, very little evidence that this disease travels efficiently outside, especially

among people that are outside and moving. Because there's cross currents and they're moving around everywhere. And so the disease doesn't have time to, as you said, stay near them and settle in their nose or mouth. Meanwhile, we were opening up all these indoor places at the same time that the outdoor areas were shut down. A totally backward strategy. And I don't entirely understand where the philosophy comes from. Maybe the horse of

economics was just dragging the cart of public policy. We just knew we don't make a lot of money on parks. Yeah. They're worried about liability and that's what's driving it, but it's also idiotic. Right. It's also completely ascientific. And one would hope that if you're in the middle of a pandemic and you're making public health proclamations, that there's at least a dollop of science in those rules. Yeah. And look, I'm as cautious as anybody else, but I think there becomes a real cost to some of this stuff, especially when you're talking about kids and you're talking about people who want to play soccer, lacrosse, name an outdoor sport, and they're just losing a year of their career, basically.

And in some cases, it's people that have a chance to get a scholarship or they're in this really crucial formative year for their sport and people are saying you can't play it. I get like basketball. That makes more sense to me. There's, it's a lot of contact. It's indoors. Um, I can see it. You're around each other constantly. Um, even that I'm not really sure, but you could also play with a mask on. We we've seen my daughter played soccer last weekend. Some of the kids had masks on. Some of them had them around their neck. And if there was like a corner kick and people are huddled together, they would just put it up there. There's ways around this, I guess, is my point where we can kind of have all the stuff we need to be normal while also

being logical about it. And that that's the thing that's really struck me in the last six months is logic has gone out the window. And I, you know this. A lot of it has to do with just the state of the world and the disinformation and how afraid people were of just knowing what was true and not true. But in this case, it just was logic. Yeah. I want to sign off on a lot of what you said. And I want to take it maybe one step further that the goal here needed to be, we have to get through this pandemic. We have to win this war. And the way to build, I think, public trust and patience with all these crazy rules is to tell people the few ways that they can continue to have fun and live their lives normally and healthily? And the answer is go outside. This disease, this virus hates the outdoors. It doesn't spread nearly as efficiently outside as it does

inside. So everyone, if you can, go outside, continue to live as happy and normal a life as you can outside. And instead, in many cases, we did the total opposite. We fearmongered the outdoors. We said, don't go for walks on the beach. How dare you try to exercise in groups? God forbid you play soccer. How about tennis? It's like, don't be careful. You get COVID on the balls. You're not getting COVID on the balls. Also, you're playing somebody who's 50 yards away from you. Right. Exactly. I totally agree. I totally agree. All right. We're going to take a quick break. Wanted to talk about a couple other things.

We're talking about zags and things that don't make sense. You mentioned, you wrote, you were talking about COVID solutions in a recent piece. And there was two things that struck me where I'm just like, well, why does it work this way?

One of them was the, I think it's called the AstraZeneca vaccine, which they tested and seemed to have mixed results with older people. But younger people worked and yet we're not using it. And yet we're not using vaccines on anyone 25 and under basically when it seems like this vaccine could work. In weeks are passing, we're vaccinating basically from old people. Now it's hitting 65 and over, it seems like, or if you have some sort of medical issue, frontline workers, stuff like that. And yet 25 and under, they're kind of last because people know like, oh, they're probably the least dangerous group we have. So we'll wait. Why not use that vaccine? What's the downside?

I think we should authorize it immediately. This is the way that I think about it. In the biggest picture, everything is getting better. Hospitalizations are coming down, cases are coming down, deaths are coming down. The rate looks fantastic. But the level of deaths is still unacceptable. 1,000 to 2,000 people are dying every single day. Last week, 15,000 people died of this disease. If 15,000 people died of anything else outside this pandemic last week, it would be just an unbelievable national crisis, a national horror. But we have kind of gotten used to it. And in that context, any progress that we make on expediting the supply of vaccines, increasing the number of total vaccines that we can put into people's arms, that's going to save potentially hundreds, if not thousands of lives. Well, especially when you said the partial

immunity thing you brought up earlier. The more people we have, the higher the partial immunity is. Right. And so you look at AstraZeneca. There were a bunch of problems with the AstraZeneca trials that we don't even have to get into. The EU has approved the drug. The UK has approved the drug. We have not. And there's a bunch of complicated reasons about why we haven't. But the bottom line, according to the epidemiologists and public health scientists that I talked to, is this. And it's really exactly what you said. This drug doesn't seem to work predictably very well for people over the age of 65. But for people under the age of 45, it seems to work pretty damn

well. It seems to be pretty good at eliminating hospitalizations and eliminating deaths, at turning what is now a pandemic into what could essentially be a common cold. And we know, just look at Florida, that people in their 20s and teenagers and 30-somethings are really likely to transmit this disease, right? They're very likely to go out and party and maybe bring it back to their grandmother or their parents and get that person sick and get that older person into the hospital. So if we can get shots into arms of the teenagers, the 20-somethings, the 30-somethings, that could have a huge impact on reducing overall transmission so that, you know, by giving the shots to young people,

you are helping their parents and their aunts and their grandparents. I just think... Well, even if we're at 95% with it, it's still worth it. It's absolutely worth it. And I also think that there is just a huge benefit to going from, say, 1 million, 1.5 million shots per day, that's where we are right now, that 1.5 million shots per day, to 3 million shots per day. There's at least two levels of reasons why it's so important to expedite this. First of all, it's just obviously better, right? You want to get to 75%, 80% vaccinations as fast as possible. But also, what you're seeing right now is this mad scramble to get shots.

You have people just doing whatever they can to get shots because the demand is so much higher than the supply. And a way to fix that, a way to get people to maybe chill out a little bit and recognize your shots are coming is by approving drugs like AstraZeneca right now and communicating to everyone, we are massively increasing the supply. Supply is going to meet demand and you're going to get your shot. I think people might be even more willing to do just a few more weeks of the double masking and the staying inside if they know that those shots are coming right down the pike. So I just think all the information militates toward our expanding the supply of vaccines.

And a huge part of that is authorizing AstraZeneca. And you're also dubious of the two-shot strategy. It's not that I'm dubious of two shots. I think that we should follow the science and give people two shots eventually. But I also think that there are reasons to pursue a strategy that is sometimes called first shots first. And that essentially says you take the batch of vaccine shots you have right now, and you try to maximize the number of first shots rather than try to double up and give 75 of those shots as first shots and then 30% as second shots.

These vaccines are really good, and they are surprisingly good. We're learning more every single week, even in just their first shot. So if we can sort of maximize protection in the short term, we can trust that the supply chain will replenish the number of vaccines, whether from Moderna or AstraZeneca or Pfizer in a few weeks, in a few months, and then we can deliver those second round of shots. But right now, I think there are a lot of really good reasons to just maximize the first shots. Got it. And the fear with that would be you get the first shot, so much time passes before you get the second shot that now people would think, well, then I'm not as immune

as maybe I would have been if we just did it the way we had said initially. But nobody also really knows that because we haven't had enough evidence one way or the other, right? That might not be the case. Yeah, it might not be the case. I think the best way that this was explained to me is that the trials had a really short interval of time between the first and second shot for the really obvious reason that is the ideal interval for every country in every circumstance. And so you can be a little bit flexible and update that strategy in the face of all these deaths that we've had and continue to have and say, look, what is the best thing that we can do? What's the biggest bang for the buck that we can get with the supply of vaccine shots that we have right now? And I think it's a very

defensible case that the best thing to do is to give as many first shots as possible, build up that protection in the population. And then four weeks, five weeks from now, they all get their second shot of that vaccine. One of the other things you zagged against was the fear of bringing your kid back to school, especially little kids, and what the evidence was with that. Now, there's a whole secondary piece of this, which is teachers and whether they feel safe in that situation, which we don't have to litigate there. I'm certainly not going to tell some sixth grade teacher who doesn't feel comfortable teaching in a classroom, no, no, you have to go. Um, but I do feel like with the,

with the little kids stuff, um, now we know because there's, we have a pretty big sample size, but that sample size was there for a while. I have a couple of friends who's, who's kids got it and COVID granted super small sample size, but it's like, Oh my God. Oh, and guess what? It's fine. Kids have like the most unbelievable bodies and ability to recover from things. Why are we so fearful of going back to normal with schools other than the teacher piece? Yeah, well, the reasons we're fearful

are reasons that you and I and everyone listening clearly know. We're really sensitive about kids. We're really sensitive about kids. We're really sensitive about education. We are rightfully concerned for teachers being forced to go back into a work environment that they don't want to be in. I have teachers in my family. My closest friends are teachers. I'm really sensitive to these fears. But I think the problem, the problem that has actually led to a kind of hyperbolic level of fear is that we haven't communicated the simple truth about kids and COVID. So I'm

looking right now at the CDC's data for how likely it is that certain ages are to be hospitalized or die if they get this disease compared to children between the age of five and 17. And that's what we're talking about right now. We're talking about kids in elementary school. People who are 65 to 74 are 35 times more likely to be hospitalized and 1,100 times more likely to die of this disease. Once you get to 85 and up, they are 7,900 times more likely to die of this disease than a five to 17-year-old. That is a number so large, I can't even begin to contemplate what it means for something to be 8,000 times bigger than something else. It's just gargantuan. So that's where I think we should start, is that this disease gets way more dangerous

by age as you go up and up and up. And that one aspect of that truth is that it's just not nearly as deadly for children as it is for the general population. So that I think is the first really big point. The second big point is, we wanted to know for the last year, are kids more likely to get infected with this disease? Are they more likely to get infected with this disease? Are they more likely to transmit this disease than adults? And it turns out the answer is just no. We now have about a year of evidence suggesting that children, especially children, say under 13, are way less susceptible to infection, way less likely to experience severe symptoms,

and less likely to transmit the disease. And we know this not just from one study in Ireland and one study in Norway and one study in North Carolina and one study in the Northeast. We know it from all these studies all over the world that seem to say the same thing. Young children under 13 don't get as sick and aren't as likely to transmit this disease. And I think that when you start from that science, you have to think that the level of in-school education in this country should, by all reason, increase. We need to start sending kids, more kids, back to school. And it's not just about the deficits of in-school learning and how awkward remote learning has been for people. It's also about free school lunches for low-income

kids that they're being deprived of. It's about other immunization efforts that are often tied to in-person schooling. There's so many reasons to get kids back in schools. And if you start from this basic scientific fact, less susceptible, less likely to get sick, and less likely to transmit to adults, I just think you're in a place where we really need to start having this serious conversation of how do we get everyone on board with the facts and then move forward with sending more kids back to school. Do you think teachers should have been treated like frontline workers? I mean, obviously not frontline workers are more important, but could you have made a case that maybe teachers got to jump the line so we could try to get things normal again with people

under 15? From a science standpoint, maybe not because frontline workers, healthcare workers are working with people that have COVID, and elementary school teachers are working with children who are less susceptible to that disease. But I have, over the last few weeks, thought that maybe from a political standpoint, it might have been the necessary move to say, there are a handful of let's call it, you know, protected roles in society and healthcare workers, number one, and educators are one B and we need to get kids back in school. ASAP. We know it's going to be a political dog fight.

If we tell a 33 year old teacher that she's going to be in the same, you know, tier one AB batch as me, like an online writer who works exclusively for my kitchen and doesn't confront anyone except my wife and dog, it's a slap in the face to be considered the same level of risk. So I do think, yeah, from a political standpoint, we probably should have prioritized teachers early on.

And look, there's still time. It can always be day one in the fight against the pandemic. And we can change rules as we go. Agree. I hope stuff comes back. It feels like at least out here in California, they're starting to push the envelope a little, especially with the sports stuff and classes and trying to get more normal. And there's definitely more optimism normal. Before we go, I wanted to talk quickly about, you wrote about major cities being in trouble, which I think is such a fascinating topic and ties in everything we're talking about right now, this last year has taught a lot of people that some of the ways we did stuff

didn't necessarily make sense. And I even think about how we were doing the ringer the last five years in 2017 and 18, especially where I would fly back to New York every couple of months. Cause we got to meet with potential sponsors and whoever, and just like get FaceTime with people and have meetings. And now it seems so stupid where it was just like, I, I could have saved myself a six hour flight each way, which is basically a whole travel day each way. And I could have just done these things on zoom with the exact same result. And I think people are all seeing it the same way. For the record, I feel like I was on this early because just the lifestyle I led, I was always working from home. Right. And even like when I remember doing Grantland

and I would come in the office at specific times because I always felt like I'm just more productive at home. If I don't have to go into the office till 11 or 12, I'll get more shit done here. Same thing for the ringer. Anytime I went to the office, um, I would get less done than if I'm just home trying to do 90 things. It seems like a lot of people are realizing that now, which leads me to question number one. What does this mean for New York City? If people don't have to be in New York City, what happens to New York City? Look, I love New York City. I lived there for seven years. I think that New York City is going to face a future that's a little bit akin to a forest fire.

So with a forest fire, you have absolute destruction. And then afterwards, sometimes the thing that grows back is more biodiverse and more interesting and just a better forest. And it's possible we could see the same thing with New York. I'm not an optimist about New York, maybe for the next 12 months. I think its taxes are down. I think a lot of people have left. They've moved upstate, moved to Connecticut, they moved to Florida, to Arizona, to Texas, certainly. And the city's really going to struggle. I mean, just one really quick example. Think about transit. If they don't have enough money to run the subway as often as they were running it before the pandemic, then they're going to cut back service. But if they

cut back service, then the service is worse and fewer people are going to take transit, which means the ticket revenue is declined and then the transit is going to get worse. You have a bit of a vicious cycle. But in the long run, what's going to happen, I think, is prices are going to fall. New York got way, way too expensive. So rents will decline and the people who move into New York will be a different kind of middle-class American and immigrant. They might have more interesting ideas for restaurants. They might have more interesting ideas

for bakeries and retail places. They might just be a more interesting generation of people who come into New York. And that in the long run, New York will benefit from this sort of price reset where it experiences the fire and then grows back with more riotous diversity than it had before the pandemic struck.

So I guess I'm a short-term pessimist, long-term optimist when it comes to a city like New York. I see a future where the five-day week in the office thing will just become rare and rare. And you'll see somebody like, I'm coming in the office Tuesday and Thursday this week. I'll stack all my meetings for those two days. And then everything else I can do from home on Zoom. So you look at a place like New York,

you look at LA, Chicago, all the big cities we have basically basically, there's a world where you could live an hour and a half from the city. Like out here in California, a lot of people are drifting toward like St. Ann's is like a really hot place to live right now, or Santa Barbara, places like that. People know they can just set roots there. And then when they have to come back to LA twice a week, they'll just come back. I don't know what this means for kind of how we grew up with what America was with the big cities, small cities, you get the South, all this stuff.

You're seeing people drift toward Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota. Is it possible? This is almost like the NFL where they have revenue sharing and all 32 teams kind of play by the same rules. Could that be where America's going, where we're kind of spreading out revenue sharing style and just every state's going to have stuff? Yeah. So I love writing about the future of work and the state of work. And the most

interesting thing that anyone told me about remote work in the last year was this economist, David Autor, who said, the most important lesson from the pandemic isn't that it taught you how to Zoom. It's that it taught everyone else how to Zoom. So whenever you, Bill, or me, or anyone else thinks to themselves, I don't really want to go into the office for this meeting. I don't really want to fly to New York or Nashville or Miami for this conference. I'd rather just check in online, fire up a Zoom. Now we have the confidence that everyone around us knows how to do that. And that, I think, is giving people the ability to move out of the metro where they are living. I shouldn't say everybody, a certain kind of white collar worker, but they can move out of their metro. And so I think what you're

going to see is the rise of super commuters. That's sort of the phenomenon that you're talking about is these people who, when they do commute to work, it's not a 15 minute drive. It's not a 25 minute drive. It might be an hour and a half drive. And so you're not going to do that every single day. And you're listening to my podcast on the drive. It'll be great. Exactly. It's a 90 minute drive. And so you make it maybe once a week, twice a week, and that allows you to move out towards Central California or into Wyoming or somewhere else. I do think that an interesting implication is for politics. So right now, you have a sunbelt, sort of southern, southeast to the south and to sort of the northwest, that has been red for the last few cycles. But if you look at the states that are adding the most movers, what they call inbound

migrants, it's cities like Charlotte and Austin and Phoenix and San Antonio and Nashville and Miami. What do all those cities have in common? They're all in states that voted for Donald Trump in 2016. And the people who are moving often tend to be people in their 20s or 30s, that's the group of Americans most likely to move, who tend to be a part of this more liberal millennial generation. And so what you might be seeing, I think, is the bluing of the sunbelt.

That one of the huge sort of long-term implications of this sort of pulse of migration that we're seeing right now is that the future of the Democratic Party isn't necessarily located just on the coast in California in the Northeast. It's the Southeast, it's Georgia, and the Southwest in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado. In fact, just in 2020, all eight senators from those four corners of Southwest states are Democrats for the first time in like 80 years. So you're already seeing this trend happen, that the migration trends we're talking about here that are going

to be accentuated by the remote work revolution could totally change the geographical distribution of the Democratic Party. Well, so the upside would be less traffic, falling rent prices in the bigger cities, stuff like that. The ability for companies, maybe they're paying less for employees in certain cases because they're not paying for the cost of living in certain places, stuff like that. The downside to me is, I think it's going to make people weirder. Why weirder?

I think human interaction is important and being in groups. And I think humans are meant to be together. And we've seen that with the pandemic this past year. One of the reasons it's been so disarming and alarming is human beings like to be together. They like to go to sporting events. They like to be in bars. They like to go to concerts. They like to have work meetings

where there's eight people at a table. And if you're removing that element, making everything remote, I think it's going to have some issues. It's weird because I think people are getting better at Zoom. I've certainly noticed that even with podcast guests, March, April, May, right after the pandemic started versus now where everybody's really comfortable. But I still feel like there's real value in people being in a room. I know I miss it for the ringer, especially the five people that we're basically running with it

and the four people I started with, like, we're used to being in a room and spitballing and coming up with ideas. And it's just harder to do that on zoom. I don't like it. So I, I think there is going to be some negative effects, but I don't think they outweigh all the positive stuff. And I also like when we just look at stuff and go, wait a second, why were we doing it this way? You know, cause usually it happens in sports all the time, right? Where people, they take a step back and go, wait a second. Why, why when there's an offensive rebound in the NBA, we, the shot clock goes back to 24 seconds. What if it just went to 14? And it's like,

oh, this is cool. The pace of, right. Why did we do it the other way? That was so stupid. I do feel like a lot of that is going to happen with this remote work stuff where we're just going to go, oh, this is easier. My fear is that it's too easy. Yeah. Oh, man. Let me make two separate points. First of all, I totally agree that there's all sorts of revolutions that are obvious in retrospect after they happen. Like three points are more than two points. So why as a basketball team, wouldn't you just take a lot of threes? And it took how long? Basketball was invented in what, like 1890? It took 33 years. It took 33 years after the three-point line for them to figure it out. Yeah. Right. So 33 years after the invention of the three-point line, that is inexcusable for people to fail

the basic arithmetic test of three is greater than two. But then once it happened, everyone glommed on to the same idea at the same time. And I'm sure that 20 years from now, there's some strategic tweak that you and I might not be able to imagine right now, but will be completely obvious in 30 years. Remote work has very clearly done that. It's made it so much easier to talk with people, to catch up with people by just clicking on a link rather than getting on your step together and schlepping to the office. There's no question. I also think, though, that in the bigger sort of existential picture, sometimes we sort of pluck the low-hanging fruit

of convenience and we get kind of sick eating it. Like we eat too much of it. And you think about all the things that we can do now to entertain ourselves without seeing another person in the flesh. Not just Zooms, not just phone calls and texts. Video games, streaming. I could spend 100 hours watching every single week watching Netflix, and I have no chance of catching up on all the content they come out with, much less HBO Max, Paramount+, all of this. And it's just so easy to recoil into the conveniences that are available to us by sheer dint of an internet connection. And it's not entirely clear that that stuff is good for us.

I mean, what makes people happy is other people and being around them and making friends and falling in love and all of these touchy know, touchy-feely things that actually require touching and feeling in order to experience. And I do think that you're right, that there is a, we've been blessed with the ability in this pandemic when we shouldn't have gone outside with this absolute cornucopia of media and entertainment options that could keep us diverted inside. But at the same time, after it's over, I do worry that we'll keep plucking that low-hanging fruit to a certain extent and that we might look back in a decade and see that something

is lost, that we got a little too comfortable not seeing people. Well, social media plays into that too, though, because you have an entire generation who's grown up with social media. And in my opinion is addicted to it. And what does that mean? I use the word addiction. Usually that's bad, but I do feel like there's an addictive element to it that, um,

we don't really know what the ramifications are yet, but the, the constant endorphin rush of, I'm bored, I'm going to look at my phone. I do think there's real effects with that stuff. And I don't think it's a great way to spend 18 hours a day, personally. Right. And look, you see this in surveys.

You ask people, are you happy with the amount of time that you spend on social media? And the vast majority of people say, no, I think I spend too much time on it. And then what do they do the day after they take the survey? They're back into the dopamine hit world of being bored, feeling that moment's boredom and anxiety, checking their phone and looking at the Twitter mentions or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. Yeah, it's so toxic. And then they're back the next day. And they're back the next day. Yeah. I think solving this problem is really, really hard. I think it's really hard. And there really are two very different kinds of happiness. There's the happiness that you feel in the moment, the things you do

in that second to relieve anxiety and just get a little bit happier. But there's also that deeper sense of happiness that comes in reflection, contemplation. Like, I love my family. I love my work. I love my friends. That is a deeper, I think, happiness.

And it's interesting that social media takes those two forms of happiness and pits them against each other, that it provides this perfectly engineered sugar rush for the moment's anxiety that often makes us feel a little bit sick to our stomachs later. And I don't know that there's a technological solution to that. I feel like at some point, we just got to figure it out ourselves. I'm not saying I have. I'm going to get off this call

and immediately check my Twitter mentions. But I want to get better. And this is something that I'm thinking about, about how do we get better balancing those two kinds of happiness. I've been off Twitter for eight months and it's been great. I just go and I post my links.

But yeah, guess what? I don't miss it. If stuff happens, I'll find out. I'm also older. I think there's a certain generation where they... And then my daughter's generation. Holy mackerel. TikTok.

All that stuff. And it's just... It's how they communicate. And it's not even... You can't even talk about it as an addiction thing. It's just... It's how they socialize. So I don't know how you fix it. I'm sure there's going to be

some fascinating studies coming out. I'm sure it's something you'll be writing about for The Atlantic. I'm glad we did this. This was really fun. I hope you had a good time. This was fun. Yeah, fun too.

All right. Good to see you. What's your next piece? Next piece is coming out later this week. It's about vaccine hesitancy So right now, you know 30 of americans say they don't want to take the vaccine or they're in a wait-and-see mode um And that could be a problem. You know right now we've got a supply problem way more demand and supply

But in a few months, we're going to have the exact opposite problem We're going to need to keep vaccinating people and I I think we're going to hit a wall of resistance. So the question is, how do we break it down? How do we get people to say yes to the shot? All right. Derek Thompson, thank you. Thank you. All right.

That's it for the podcast. Back on Thursday with one more with a very special guest. You're talking hoops. Also, don't forget Ringer Dish. You can hear me on jam session today. And then, uh, uh,

the challenge double agents with Dave Jacoby, our episode 11 recap. See you on Thursday. On the wayside, let her run. Say, I don't have feelings within. On the wayside, let her run. Say, I don't have feelings within.