Chuck Klosterman on Why Football Owns TV (and Why It Won’t Forever)

15:32Chuck Klosterman:Well, it has changed in a lot of ways. One, it has really amplified the strategic understanding of the game from a schematic level for people. Because the introduction of, you know, when John Madden got involved with that video game, his whole thing was versimilitude. They were like, well, we want you to endorse this game. It's going to be like this seven-on-seven. It's kind of like football. And he's like, no, it's got to be 11-on-11. I'm going to give you the Oakland Raiders playbook. I want you to build the plays off this. It's got to be real. And what has happened is that the language of football, when you watch a game now, a lot of times analysts will use language that would have seemed really surprising to hear, even in the 90s.

16:13Chuck Klosterman:But they can do that now. In terms of specificity of the calling of play, what's a real route? The lexicon of things like that. But yes, you know, it's like there's almost this assumption that you're like, you probably wouldn't be watching this game if you didn't understand this to some degree. Also, and I think this is less of a football point and more just sort of like interesting, is that because, you know, things like Madden and EA College Football, these games are, you know, simulations. They're like these active simulations where you are a participant in the simulation. You are doing all these things.

16:43Chuck Klosterman:Things happen in these games that can't happen in life. and bizarrely over time they do um i mentioned in this book that you know i was there's this one a friend of mine michael weinrich but he's the only guy i play ea college football with but we've played just you know hundreds i am guessing now thousands of games and early on he would often do things with his quarterback that to me would just drive me crazy because i was like that can't happen you can't have a guy run to his left and throw the ball across the field in the opposite way sidearm. Your body doesn't work like that. Yes. And now Patrick Mahomes does it often.

17:17Chuck Klosterman:Many guys do it often. Things that we now see as incredible plays in football were once impossible plays in football. A disallowed play, something a coach would bench you for. But it began in these simulations. These things that we see now happened once in this fake world.

17:34Peter Kafka:I think it's kind of interesting. I would just, because I grew up in the area where video games were still kind of niche and nerdy, and you would think there'd be some sort of disdain for football video games from real football. But whenever you see clips of players doing anything in a hotel room, they're playing Madden or a version of that, or they care about how their representation on Madden looks. It's fully part of the ecosystem.

17:59Chuck Klosterman:And that's not super surprising when you think of a player who's 22 or 23. It makes sense that he's really... But what is even more fascinating is that it has, to some degree, especially with younger football coaches, impacted things like time management. Like when you play a college football game or you play Madden or whatever, it very often comes down to figuring out like, well, okay, when do I call timeout? When do I spike the ball? All these things, you know, that these people have a sophisticated understanding of this at 13. You know, Andy Reid is one of the best coaches in NFL history. There was a long stretch of his career where he got hammered for terrible time management.

18:39Chuck Klosterman:You're going to see that complaint. Well, actually, you won't see the complaint less because it will happen less. The complaints will happen just as much because the audience now is hyper aware of it. You know, we'll be right back with Chuck Klosterman.

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22:37Peter Kafka:And we're back. Gambling, sports betting, which, again, growing up was on the margins of not just sports, but sort of society, right? Like you could only legally do it in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. and you might know people who did it, but it was really considered subterranean and the networks wanted nothing to do with it. And of course, all that has flipped around since 2018. And it's wild that it's still not in a handful of states like California and Texas, but it's omnipresent. You seem ambivalent to positive about it, which is not where I thought you'd end up.

23:09Chuck Klosterman:Well, I guess what I, my take on this is this, you know, I started playing fantasy football in 1990. That was the earliest kind of stage of it. It was, you know, rotisserie baseball had existed, but the idea of fantasy football was kind of this new thing. And that was at a time when the idea of gambling was seen as having no relationship to fantasy football. It was seen as like, that's what degenerates did. Like Pete Rose banned from baseball for the idea of just like, they didn't seem connected. Well, now either on purpose or accidentally, it's very clear that like fantasy football kind of primed the pump for this, this idea of like seeing, watching a football game and the actual outcome is not what you're interested in.

23:49Chuck Klosterman:You're interested in the spread or the individual performances. Now, do I think that gambling in this legalized way is bad for society? I would say probably. For the obvious reasons. For all of the predictable reasons, particularly the sense that, you know, it's on your phone and you've put your credit card number in so the money does not seem real. Like, even if it was just a situation where you had to feed dollar bills into it, everything would change.

24:17Peter Kafka:You're taking an addictive, something that's addictive for some people, gambling, marrying it to your phone, which is addictive for some people, seems like an obvious way to get in trouble.

24:25Chuck Klosterman:But for football, it is good because it adds a different context for conversation about it. When I have a conversation with other dads, when we were hanging out in some scenario, You know, I have kids now, so I'm off in like a dog park or something. We'll talk about sports a lot. And then there'll be this other conversation about gambling. And we're still technically talking about football, but this is a whole different thing. It has a different context, a different meaning. It says more about the person all of a sudden. Like some could argue that's a weird argument for gambling being good, like it's fun to talk about.

24:59Chuck Klosterman:But if we look at football as a form of entertainment, a distraction, something to consume to sort of occupy ourself in a way that isn't just fictional, still part of the real world, I think gambling does make it more interesting.

25:16Peter Kafka:Now, I— This is by the whole pitch. This is the pro-gambling pitch from the gambling companies from the sports leagues who, again, stayed away from sports betting legally as much as long as they could. No, no, it improves the game. It adds stakes. It takes a game you weren't interested in and makes it more interesting. This is their argument, and you seem to go for it.

25:35Chuck Klosterman:Or you think it's a valid argument. I don't know if that, to me, their argument is essentially, it's like, people should have the freedom to do what they want with their life. They have agency. If they want to take this risk, it is their option.

25:50Peter Kafka:No, they say it's better. They say it improves the experience of watching sports to be betting on it.

25:56Chuck Klosterman:I mean, certainly there are people who feel that way. I mean, you run into somebody and he'll say like, oh, yeah, you know, it was like I was watching the Mac game on Tuesday night. And then it was kind of dull, but I put some money into it because I want to feel something. You know, I want the juice or whatever. So for that person, it does. I think a lot of people I know who do a lot of gambling, they even have like they have sort of a mixed feeling about. I think it does bother them that suddenly the game seems meaningless if they're not gambling on it, you know. But for me, as somebody who doesn't really put money into it, I don't have skin in the game or whatever, I find it a fascinating thing.

26:34Chuck Klosterman:I find that the idea, like last night, Indiana was an eight and a half point favorite. They did not cover. But the meaning of eight and a half points in a spread suggests that the gambling markets believe it will be a blowout. And that's different than saying, well, I think Indiana is going to win easily. It's like it's a it is a I find it to be much more intriguing than I would have thought. I was definitely against the idea of this. You know, I just thought kind of kind of an ideologically. I kind of thought this is bad. And like I say, socially, it probably is. But for each individual sport, I think that there's one thing that is weird about it is the idea of prop bets, because prop bets really shift the meaning of what you're saying.

27:19Chuck Klosterman:Just explain what a prop bet is. Well, a prop bet is like you're betting on whether or not a specific receiver will have more or less than three and a half receptions.

27:27Peter Kafka:Will this player do this specific thing? It's not that they have to be sports related. Will they get kicked out of the game or whatever? And these are the things that the gambling sites push the hardest because they're the worst odds.

27:37Chuck Klosterman:Well, and also they are the most ripe for corruption because you only have to get one guy. And especially, you know, if like, you know, you say three and a half receptions, you pick the under, you know, It's like he just has to.

27:51Peter Kafka:And the scandals we've seen so far in sports in the last few years are about prop bets. A player taking themselves out of a game so their stats go down.

27:58Chuck Klosterman:And in some ways, this is like the real relationship to fantasy football because that's what fantasy football was. This idea that instead of watching the game, you were watching the parts. You were watching the components. And that is a big shift. And it's a big mental shift. And I think fantasy football prepared people for that. Like I said, I don't think this was necessarily conscious on the parts of the casinos. The betting sites didn't exist. It's not like they were like, we're going to push fantasy football because 30 years from now, this will exist. But that's what worked out. That's what happened.

28:29Peter Kafka:The other big change in the last decade besides sports betting is, you mentioned earlier, NIL. It's for college sports, names, image, likeness. Shortest version is it allows college athletes to get paid, which, again, was verboten and is now considered standard. I got head fake at the beginning because of the name, name, image, likeness. And some of the initial coverage said, oh, this is going to go to attractive athletes like female gymnasts or something. And they're going to make money selling. And that sometimes did happen. Which was true. And I missed the major point, which is it allows, because you can now pay players, any college program can go ahead and sort of assemble the best possible team with very little financial restraint.

29:10Chuck Klosterman:Well, no financial restraint. I mean, people say like, oh, it's the Wild West is like the Wild West had more rules. You might get shot. And this is and this is sort of about Indiana.

29:18Peter Kafka:Indiana didn't. Well, every team is buying their way into it. But Indiana bought a bunch of good players.

29:24Chuck Klosterman:Well, for them, it was more the use of the portal, the idea that you could just move players around. He the coach was at James Madison and he built a good program there. And then he went to Indiana and brought the best guys. It's just like a. I kind of lost my train of thought.

29:41Peter Kafka:I would think that this would be something you, Chuck Klosterman, would be very uncomfortable. The idea that you can assemble teams this way. The flip side would be it's the only morally correct way to have college sports, which is to pay these people who are risking their health, generating a ton of money for other institutions and not getting any money themselves.

30:03Chuck Klosterman:Yes, I guess, you know, in these broad strokes. I mean, initially with like the NIL stuff, the way it was sort of sold was that, you know, guys like Tim Tebow, guys like Johnny Manziel, these superstars, you know, they're selling thousands of jerseys in their, you know, like the school bookstore or whatever. And like they are famous and these universities are having this benefit and like those guys should benefit. But that lasted for about eight seconds. And then it became like, oh, well, if you can pay guys for their legitimate worth, you can just say, we think you're worth this. So we're just going to give you this.

30:38Chuck Klosterman:You know, like I believe it was Arkansas at one point just like put a letter out to their boosters and said, like, we need linebackers. Right.

30:44Peter Kafka:Again, all this stuff that we scandal that would get a team banned from sports in the 70s and 80s, having the boosters pay the players is now condoned and encouraged.

30:54Chuck Klosterman:The complex part about this is like, especially when you say like it's the only this is the only moral thing. Right. Right. Because in the present tense to the college kid, you can't say like, well, you shouldn't make money if you can. If someone sees you as having value, you know, you should be able to receive that value. And people are making money from your labor. But what I think is sometimes, again, you can't expect kids to think this, but these sports operate really as wider institutions. and as this happens like right now initially there's almost a spike in interest in college football because it's very interesting it's like who would have guessed Indiana could ever be in here or whatever you know the casual fan likes to see that but this is going to drastically change the meaning of college sports and there could be over time like it's going to I think be catastrophic for it now here again like you can't tell a kid you can't tell a kid don't make money because in 40 years or whatever, things are going to be different.

31:54Chuck Klosterman:You think it would be catastrophic for college sports because... Well, it would be catastrophic for college sports because we're professionalizing it. And what was great or is great about college athletics were all these qualities that could never be applied to a pro situation. There was a huge regional quality. History mattered more. In a sense, when you say we're watching Wisconsin play Ohio State, you were in a way rooting for the kind of person you sort of suspect goes to those institutions. You know, it was Catholics versus convicts, Miami, Notre Dame. Although that was more like the actual players.

32:31Chuck Klosterman:But it was still heavily cultured. Just the idea sort of that like that college sport, you know, I mean, I've said this many times, but it's like it just it is disturbing to me that the idea of getting a free education at, say, the University of Texas is now not only seen as, like, not enough, but, like, you got jammed. You got ripped off. Like, everyone has to do what's best for them. But football is fundamentally a collective idea. It shuns individuality. And that is one of its strengths in terms of the role it plays in culture as kind of a value or whatever. And they are now making it into a situation where it is sort of every player for themselves.

33:17Chuck Klosterman:I thought, because I've thought this for a long time about that college sports

33:20Peter Kafka:was just not correct, that I thought it was abusive. And I thought what we should move to is, all right, University of Wisconsin has a football team or a basketball team, and all those kids who participate get the ability to attend the University of Wisconsin or some other college, because in a lot of cases, they probably couldn't swing University of Wisconsin on their own and definitely couldn't do it if they're doing 60 hours a week playing football. But that's separate. We're not going to pretend they're going to school here. They represent the school. Maybe they'll come to campus, but they're not.

33:50Peter Kafka:We're going to stop pretending they're students and we'll still give them an education one way or another, however they want to achieve it. But we're just going to formally disconnect the idea. They now just represent the school in some way and stop pretending you're going to see this guy in your psych class.

34:03Chuck Klosterman:I mean, the quarterback for Miami basically said a couple weeks ago, it's like, I've taken no credits. Like I'm not in college right now. Right.

34:10Peter Kafka:Yeah. I was. I really had not followed. And I saw that it was a six-year senior. Yes. And I was Googling, how is that possible? And the answer was he went to school somewhere else for four years and came here.

34:20Chuck Klosterman:And, you know, it's like I understand that argument. It's always been easy to understand that it seems weird that somebody who earns money for someone else gets nothing in return. But, you know, what might be morally good or morally positive in a specific case is going to end up destroying the thing that made it exist in the first place. I mean, would it be better off to equitably reward these players if in 25 years college sports don't really exist? I mean, would that, like, it's, or they're going to exist in a way that have absolutely no relationship to what made them popular? I mean, like, it's, I sometimes think that, like, you know, when you look at sports leagues, it's very tempting to, say, look at any situation that involves labor in the same way that we look at, say, the NFL Players Union the same way we look at, like, the Auto Workers Union or whatever.

35:21Chuck Klosterman:And it's a different deal. Things have different qualities. And a lot of things that are seen as draconian because they don't seem to be on the side of the labor force are different in sports.

35:36Peter Kafka:Partly, right, because they're entertainers to us. We also say they believe and know they're playing a game even though it's incredibly difficult and very high stakes. But they're playing a game. And I think it makes it hard for people to understand the idea that they should be worth a lot of money.

35:49Chuck Klosterman:Well, they're playing a game and we have to care. The consumer has to care. It is not as though that there is some sort of unalienable right that if you're very good at a sport, you're supposed to be able to make money from it. Like sometimes you'll notice this with like, you know, a player will complain about having to deal with the media or whatever. They're like, I don't see why or a coach will say like, why should I have to do, you know, a sideline report with a reporter or whatever? There's nothing to do with my job. But like your job exists because of this, right? It's all part of it. I think that a lot of the things, a lot of the changes that have happened to college sports have been something that is kind of a strange thing to say.

36:35Chuck Klosterman:It's like it thinks too much about the individual and not about the collective. The fact that these things are not about people, they're about a group.

36:44Peter Kafka:The other big change, I think, in the last 10-ish years is 10 years ago, if you were talking about football in a room like this, it would be very reasonable to say football is going to go away in the near future because of brain injuries. And that it's just morally and also legally, this is just not sustainable. And other sports are going to eclipse it because people will have their kids play because they won't have the chance of brain injury. That discussion has almost entirely gone away. And occasionally, you know, you'll see someone with a funny looking helmet and say, why is that the case?

37:19Peter Kafka:And, oh, it's to protect their head. But if you look at this, if you look at it for a second and do any reading, you realize that there's been no meaningful changes in the way head injuries are treated, right? People are just as likely to get injuries playing football now as they were. So the sport didn't get safer in a meaningful way. We just stopped pretending that we cared about it or stopped caring about it.

37:37Chuck Klosterman:The kind of like strange thing or the almost diabolical thing is what appeared to happen for a while is every time there was sort of a scientist who had bring information about that, the NFL immediately hired him.

37:48Peter Kafka:You know, so like a lot of these, which is a brilliant. And they did a settlement with the players. The players signed away basically all their rights to complain about this for like a billion dollars, which seems like a lot of money. But then you divide it up by the number of players, number of years, and it's not.

38:00Chuck Klosterman:What is surprising to me is that when this was happening, they were like, we got to teach kids to tackle differently. we've got to teach defensive backs to hit differently and I thought this is impossible but it did work there is less like you uh there was also I think you know it's weird how how like sometimes it does seem like the discourse is able to imbue actuality in a way that shouldn't work it seemed like during the period when this conversation was constantly being you know discussed there was a ton of guys who would get hit kind of follow the ground and not move and they would be like, I want, you know, and in the past that never happened, right?

38:40Chuck Klosterman:You got up and tried to walk off the field or walk back in the huddle and all of a sudden they stopped doing that. Now, it can't be that those guys are not having those kind of collisions now. It's just that somehow because it's no longer the thing we constantly talk about, it affected their behavior. We had those blue tents on the sidelines. Guys will fight to stay out of that tent. Like they don't want to go in there because they know if they do, there's a chance that someone's going to look at their eyes with a little pen light and people are going to be moving it away and say, you're done.

39:09Chuck Klosterman:So it is—

39:10Peter Kafka:And they de-emphasize it because they used to celebrate. Oh, it was a big hit, took the guy's head right off, and then cut back on all of that. Video games used to highlight that. They moved away from all of that. They still have vicious hits. But the other thing that's happening is that, again, I'm no expert here, but my understanding is a lot of this damage just happens from normal hits that players go through on every game that are not spectacular, that if you're a defensive lineman, offensive line, You're getting slapped in the head. Well, no, you're talking about micro concussions. Yeah. And micro concussions.

39:38Peter Kafka:And you add those up. Yes. You get real brain injuries from that, but there's no way to prevent that and still have football. Exactly.

39:44Chuck Klosterman:It can't be the sport if you remove that aspect of it. And because you can't see a micro concussion, everyone gets to play on. What's also very complicated is the only way to test for CTE is for the guy to be dead, then to slice his brain up and look at the proteins. The only people that they do this on are people that they suspect might have CTE. So, of course, they almost all do. It is it is hard. It's a hard thing. I was did a podcast today and we were kind of talking about like, you know, it's interesting. Troy Aikman of the Dallas Cowboys retired because of his concussions. You know, now he's a broadcaster.

40:17Chuck Klosterman:And I think there was a time when it was like, well, what if we start seeing Troy Aikman's speech patterns change? You know, what will that how will that impact things? You know, but that hasn't happened. I mean, it is hard to understand how some guys are affected by this in a way that prompts them to commit suicide by shooting themselves in the chest. And they leave a note saying, I did this so you could look at my brain. There's something wrong with it. And then there are other people who have seemingly had experienced more contact and have no signs of it. Now that you can say, like, well, that's just how medicine works.

40:51Chuck Klosterman:She knows not everybody works the same. But then that starts bringing interesting questions about agency. Like, you know, if there's a hundred percent chance that if you play football, this is going to happen, then it's very easy or at least plausible to say, like, you can't do this. We can't do this. But if it seems capricious, well, then you start asking all these other questions. I mean, the whole thing about violence in football, I do like that's part of this book, because it's like, you know, people don't watch football as a blood sport. Very rarely. I mean, there are some, I'm sure there's exceptions to this, but for the most part, when people are watching a football game, it's not like they're looking for a wreck.

41:29Chuck Klosterman:They don't want to see someone die on the field, certainly. And yet, what makes the game meaningful is the possibility of that, the shared understanding that this could happen, that this is a violent thing where you could, it raises the stakes of every individual thing. So people like football for the strategy and sort of for the history and for all of these things. But it needs to have that aspect in order to still be football. And that is where sort of the complexity comes in. We'll be right back with Chuck Klosterman. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough.

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44:01And we're back.

44:02Peter Kafka:You played football growing up. You've got kids. One of them is a boy. If that kid wants to play football, would you encourage it, discourage it?

44:10Chuck Klosterman:Well, he's not going to. He has no interest in it. Would I encourage it? I don't think I would encourage it. Would I discourage it? I don't think I would do that either. I will just totally be honest with you. You know, in a marriage, there are compromises. My wife would never allow it. So it would almost be off the table. Because, you know, there are some things that you – a couple debates that's like we meet in the middle, but there's some things you don't really meet in the middle on. So there would be – no. But, you know, let's say I was a single parent or whatever. you know, and he loved football.

44:40Chuck Klosterman:Well, if your kid loves something, you know, you want to support that, of course you'd be like, well, I wish it was something else. I wish it was track or something, you know, I don't like the fact that you're putting, you know, your great brain at risk. But at the same time, what if he loves skateboarding? There are 400 ,000 concussions a year from skateboards, and those are just the reported ones. I would guess the real number might be three times that. But what's different about football is that there is this huge audience. So it kind of makes us socially complicit. Like the audience for rodeo is much smaller.

45:12Chuck Klosterman:Guys are riding bulls. It is more dangerous to ride a bull than it is to play wide receiver, at least for eight seconds, you know. But it's a small niche thing where it's only a certain kind of person and it's part of a different culture and you can go a whole year and not even know a rodeo happened. But football is not like that. Football is something where, you know, when the Super Bowl is on, there are people who don't give a shit about it who are going to sit in front of the television and watch this. And that is, you know, it's like, it's almost like the sports risk is penalized. It's penalized for being popular.

45:52Chuck Klosterman:It's a weird way to look at it, but it's kind of true.

45:54Peter Kafka:I met Ahmad Rashad, a great Vikings receiver, six years ago, and I had to make small talk for a couple minutes. Are your kids going to play? Are your kids playing? And he looked at me like I had horns. And I interpreted that to be, of course my kids are not playing. I'm rich and successful. There's no upside in my kids playing football other than, I guess, of pleasure. But he looked at me like that was an insane question to ask.

46:16Chuck Klosterman:I mean, it is strange because that would have suggested that if the young Ahmad Rashad had come from a really affluent family, he would have been like, oh, I'm going to pursue, I'm going to get on the chess team. Well, that's one of the things you were hearing a decade ago. Oh, for sure.

46:30Peter Kafka:Was that football was going to be played essentially by the underclass.

46:34Chuck Klosterman:That's, there is real truth in that. I mean that, especially in places like the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest, there is this increasing sense that certainly, like you say, like, would you encourage it or discourage it? The idea of someone encouraging their kid to play football, particularly.

46:50Peter Kafka:These same places where the soccer leagues no longer allow kids to do heading. Exactly. Because they're concerned about that.

46:55Chuck Klosterman:Now, there are different, you know, there are places in Texas, there are places in Georgia, there are places in Alabama. I'm like, this will never probably happen. Or it'll be, you know, like they'll always, in fact, as that kind of sentiment grows, it will be inversely proportional there. Like the fact that kids are not playing football in the Northeast anywhere except Jersey or whatever. Makes it more important to the SEC in Texas. It will take on kind of this kind of political meaning, which it already has, but like that will be expanded. And it's a it's any of the in there and like there's going to be this future time where there's going to be people who watch football and people who play football and they're going to have absolutely no relationship.

47:35Chuck Klosterman:And it's already that way. Like it's football is already becoming a game where a lot of people who watch it, not only that they didn't play, none of their friends played. Their dad didn't play. Their grandpa didn't play. It's like it's this thing that's only a form of entertainment. It's not that different than a video game or whatever. And when that happens, that's when the sport does become extremely fragile.

47:55Peter Kafka:So that's where I wanted to go. So you start the book, and we just started the interview saying this is obviously the dominant thing in America. It will not be that way. At some point in the future, at the end of the book, you have to spell out your scenarios for how football goes away, essentially, as the dominant mainstream sport. Give us the synopsis of that argument.

48:17Chuck Klosterman:I mean, football is not just like the most popular thing or like too big to fail. It is too big to stop expanding. It has to constantly get bigger. The financial demands of it, the amount of revenue it has to make could only go up. The NFL only operates from this position is like, how can we stretch out further? Can we even swallow up all the other sports? Can we expand into Europe and all of these things? And right now, that's a successful thing because football is.

48:45Peter Kafka:The more they make, the more people consume, the more people spend on it, including most importantly, the TV networks and streamers who need it.

48:52Chuck Klosterman:And like the depth of caring is so deep that like if, you know, there were labor strikes in the 80s, if one, you know, and that was a big deal then, but football was not as popular then as it is now. If there was like if football went away this fall for whatever reason, people would be like, what am I going to bet on? What is my life going to be like? Who am I? What's my identity if I'm not, you know, a fan of this team or whatever? You know, I always bring this up. Like you really saw this during COVID. That was one of the moments of COVID. It was like, we're still playing college football. No one's in their class, but we got to play.

49:26Chuck Klosterman:We got to play these games. We can't not play them. So they're in. It's really brittle. It's a system that has to keep going. But I think at some point there is going to be a change probably in advertising that it's not that advertising is going to disappear. It's just that what it costs to buy an ad to show during a football game is going to just become, it's not going to be worth the tradeoff. Like, it's going to be perceived as something that's like, it's just, you know, it's.

49:55Peter Kafka:Advertising won't go away, but the idea of spending however many millions of dollars for a Super Bowl, maybe that'll still happen. However much money it costs to have an ad on television will seem ridiculous compared to the bang for your buck you could get by spending that on chat GPT ads or whatever.

50:10Chuck Klosterman:Or maybe not even ridiculous, but just like not the best buy. I mean, like you might remember there was like a Super Bowl commercial way back that was like in 1984. It was a representation of the book 1984. Yes. The most famous ad of all time, yeah. Yeah. That kind of ad, you won't even see them in the Super Bowl now as much. Like there are still big, high profile ads in the Super Bowl. But for the most part, when you watch the Super Bowl now, most of the ads are kind of regular, right? Because the cost of producing that commercial and all the things that go with it, it's just like it's kind of really perilous.

50:39Chuck Klosterman:So let's say there gets to be a point when the Fox or Prime or who's ever carrying these games gets to a point where it's like, OK, time to renegotiate our contract. And for the first time, the number doesn't go up. Maybe even the number goes down. Like it doesn't disappear. But they're like, we can't keep this ballooning cost. We can't keep doing it. Well, the NFL is in this weird position. They got to take their best offer. The players are like, no way. There's no way we're going to take less money. There's no way we're going to start playing 22 games just because you're not making enough money from CBS or whatever.

51:12Chuck Klosterman:We're going to strike. Or the owners will be like, we're going to lock them out because that kind of happened to baseball one time. And if that happened now, it would be this sort of like this American calamity where people would freak out. But as people have less and less of a personal relationship to the game, when this happens in the future, they'll be like, well, that's an entertaining distraction. I can replace it with something else. and it's just not because something has to be part of your life for it to be so important that like I will I'll do whatever I can to keep it going like you know I the comparison I use is like horse racing right so horse racing in the 1920s along with boxing and baseball where it was the biggest sport and what happened with boxing and what happened with baseball is kind of complex and you can kind of talk about with horse racing to me it's very straightforward in the 1920s the average person still had a real relationship to the culture of horses.

52:06Chuck Klosterman:Like they had a blue-collar job and horses were still doing some of the labor, or their dad had a horse farm, or like they definitely sell horses all the time. The horse was part of the world in which they lived. That is no longer the case. Now horse racing is just for people who own horses and people who gamble on it. That's really all it is. People who watch the Kentucky Derby once a year. Well, but even that, it's like they're not really even watching the race. They're going to the party and wearing hats. And it's like if they had their little Kentucky Derby party and then when it happened, it was actually dogs.

52:40Chuck Klosterman:They wouldn't be any different. They might like it more. They might be, oh, it's cute or whatever. I suspect my fear. I mean, fear might be an overrated word because I will be dead and all this stuff. And I know this is, you know, we're not talking literal life or death. But like, I think that football is going to put itself in a position where it's too big. It's tentacles are too far. It's so wide. And people will be like, well, OK, I guess we'll shoot something else. And when it collapses, something that size collapses hard. It kind of implodes on itself. Now, I know people hear that and they're like, well, that makes no sense at all.

53:18Chuck Klosterman:It seems more likely that football will swallow up every other sport in America and will only have football. But I would go the other way.

53:25Peter Kafka:I would think, and this is where I've been wrong. I, you know, write about what's happening with TV and versus the internet forever. And the main thing that's been happening with TV is the audience shrinks and shrinks and shrinks for everything for super obvious reasons. Because everyone can do things on the internet. And that's something that distracts them more than TV or it competes with TV. And football is the one thing that is resistant. There was a couple years in the Trump era where football started to shrink. And I was like, well, obviously this is the same thing that's happening. And there were defenders saying, no, no, it has something to do with the Trump, the first Trump administration and how people were watching debates instead of.

54:03Peter Kafka:Oh, and also Tom Brady was out for a seat. I'm like, these are all just coping exercises. It's clearly it's going to shrink like everything else, like the Grammys, like the Oscars. It has gone back up. There's a little bit of a Nielsen explanation about why the numbers are up. But at minimum, it's still it has not decreased. It is as powerful as ever. Do you think that's just literally what we're talking about at the beginning, that this is just somehow accidentally built perfectly as a TV consumption device?

54:31Chuck Klosterman:That's part of it. Also, this is another thing that seems paradoxical, but like in every other sport, for example, if you're, you know, the NBA, Major League Baseball, you know, it's like you're always trying to say, how can we better feature the celebrity aspect of this? How can we make LeBron feel like there's someone in their life, like the social media presence of these things? And football is the exception to this. Football, you're watching this game, you're really just watching a collision of colors. You can't even see those guys' faces. Outside of the quarterbacks, the 20 most popular guys in the NBA are much more famous than the 20 most famous non-quarterbacks in the NFL.

55:10Chuck Klosterman:But that is also its power. What people like about football is the game, is the thing. It is not all these ancillary things that we use or organizations use or institutions or leagues, however you look at it, in order to say, like, well, how can we sort of capture this casual person? How can we sort of get the interest of the person who's not really invested? What people still love about football is the actual thing, and that is its uniqueness. And I think that that, you know, if the best argument someone could make kind of against my like doomsday scenario is that the thing itself is what matters.

55:46Chuck Klosterman:And if it's the thing, the trappings around it will just be shifted to fix it. Like we'll just somehow fix it. But I mean, you know, I'm not one of these big like, oh, capitalism, we're in late capitalism. I do think some of the problems of capitalism are easy to be are easiest seen through sports leagues, who are these like smaller simulations of society. And like what's happening with the way money operates in pro and college football is like it's it seems precarious to me because it's it seems to be changing in this kind of the financial side is changing in an exponential way. And I can't see how like like when society shifts, it's the big things that can't.

56:26Chuck Klosterman:They're not nimble. The small things can.

56:28Peter Kafka:Last question for you. If I take away football from it, you can't watch it on TV, you can't bet on it, you can't consume it in any way. You, Chuck Klosterman, no longer have football in your life. What do you do with that void?

56:39Chuck Klosterman:Well, you know, this is going to be kind of a sad thing. But, you know, sometimes there will be a period of the summer when there's no football and the NBA season is over. And I only follow baseball super casually. And in a way, I do feel like a little free. It's like, because here's the deal. I know it is insane to put football over things that really matter. My son, he loves playing Magic the Gathering. And I'll take him to this store in Portland and he can play against other people. And that happens on Sundays, you know. And I'm never going to be like, you can't do it. I want to watch this football game or whatever.

57:21Chuck Klosterman:I would never do that. It's so, it's wrong for every reason. And yet my mind is consumed by all the football games I cannot see. I'm here in New York, right? I'm promoting this book. I flew out here on Sunday. What is the irony of that? I spent the entire flight wondering what's happening in these football games. Like, I am enslaved by it. I've enslaved myself. There's no one oppressing me. I did it to myself. but I am psychologically enslaved by my compulsion to follow things that also just disappear instantly. Last night in the football game, I'm watching the game and I'm also, it was late, and I'm texting with a couple other guys who were all watching the game at the same time.

58:06Chuck Klosterman:And the quarterback for Indiana scores a touchdown. He runs a quarterback draw and it's a great run, you know. And my friend texts me like, well, there's another epic play I won't remember in three months. And I was like, it's true. It's true. It's like these, I care so much about the game that's coming up that I haven't seen. And then as soon as it happens, it just disappears. It goes in the ether. But maybe that is also part of it. The fact that it just kind of keeps coming at you. It just keeps coming. It's like these things seem important and they happen. And maybe they weren't that important.

58:36Chuck Klosterman:But this next one is important. Oh, that one came and went too. I guess it wasn't that big deal. I can't even remember it. But what's coming this fall? It's like it just, it keeps reestablishing itself as this future thing. I have to know about.

58:49Peter Kafka:Almost like something you were compelled to write a book about. Absolutely. It's called Football. It's by Chuck. It's out now. You should go buy it. Thanks, Chuck. Thanks a lot. Thanks again to Chuck Klosterman. Thanks again to Charlotte Silver who produces this show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring this show to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. See you soon.

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