Chuck Klosterman: The NFL Explains More About America Than You Think

0:00Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. One of the craziest experiences of my life happened in Phoenix. This would have been either 2019 or maybe February 2020. 20 i don't remember exactly but i got invited to do a talk at the nfl owners meeting so that's 32 billionaires 32 head coaches 32 gms and then all their families i did this 10 minute talk on stoic philosophy it was actually sponsored by ted like the nfl had ted put on miniature ted talks at the nfl owners meeting it was surreal and it was actually funny i was talking to roger goodell who is the commissioner of the NFL.

0:58And he was like, I'm a huge Marcus Aurelius fan, which was just a surreal little experience. And I was thinking about this because I'm heading out to Phoenix. At the end of this month, I'm going to be doing a talk that you can come to and grab those tickets at dailystoiclive.com. But no, I was thinking about this because my son is playing football now. He plays flag football down in Westlake. And we've been seeing like parents who are like hardcore football parents, like not hardcore, hardcore Texas football, but certainly like the most animated sports parents that I've seen. And football is just a crazy game.

1:38It is nuts. I mean, I love it. I love watching it. I've been to a number of NFL games. I love writing about it. I'm thinking about it. It's probably my favorite sport. Like football isn't just a sport in America. It's like part of the culture. The famous example is like of the 100 most watched television events in the last year, like 90 plus of them were football. I mean, the president is talking about who's performing at the Super Bowl halftime show. And in the last election cycle, it was a major death knell that the president didn't feel up to doing a Super Bowl interview. Right. I think that kind of tells you everything.

2:19you know. They were like, oh, if he can't do an interview at the Super Bowl, he can't be president. So that intersection between football and culture, life, myth, story, Chuck Clashman's like the best writer in the world at that. He's the author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, But What If We're Wrong, which is a book I love, The 90s, which is a book I love, and then his latest book, Football. He's written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and GQ, and Esquire, and ESPN. He's also founder of Grantland, one of the greatest journalism websites of all time. So when I found out one of my favorite writers was writing a book about one of my favorite sports, I was pumped and I was very excited to see if Chuck Klosterman wanted to come back on the podcast.

3:03I'm very excited to bring you this interview here during the Super Bowl week. In this episode, Chuck and I are talking about football, talking about AI, talking about shared cultural experiences, what the future generations will misunderstand about this moment in time right now. You can follow Chuck on Twitter at C. Klosterman and definitely check out his new book, Football. And if you want to listen to his other interview on the podcast, I'll link to that in today's show notes. And I hope to see you in Phoenix at the end of the month. If you're the owner of an NFL team, you probably don't need to come.

3:39But everyone else, very much welcome. I'll see you at DailyStokeLive.com to grab tickets.

3:47I think about this thing that you wrote all the time. I think we even talked about it last time, but it's one of my favorite insights of yours. It pertains to football, but it explains, I think, life generally. You were writing a piece about the Cleveland Browns. You were there in the offseason, and you're walking around the facility. And as it happens, I think you're profiling Michael Lombardi, who actually introduced all my books to professional football. Well, I mean, he was there. He was part of the organization at the time. At the time, I was there because they had sort of said, we will allow you to sort of watch the draft, our drafting experience, which did not happen.

4:23But that was what the promise was of me showing up. Yeah. Yeah. But what I took out of the piece, which was not the main subject of it, but it was just one of those little insights, which is what I think long form journalism is best at is these like little sort of asides. And anyways, you catch the whole Browns organization basically watching ESPN to see what is happening. Like you're like, these are the experts of what they do. And they're just watching football, television, journalism like the rest of us. And we like to think that there's something more going on behind the scenes, whether it's like in politics or sports or entertainment or whatever.

5:03And then you realize like they're kind of just like the rest of us. And I mean, obviously, today it would be them scrolling Twitter or their Instagram feed. But you're just like, you want to think the experts have some super exclusive intelligence that they're getting. And then they're they're kind of just doing the same as the rest of us. Well, I mean, you either sort of imagine that they have some sort of separate elite version of this kind of dialogue or discourse. But you certainly don't think that they are using what I think most people think of is like just kind of like the lowest form of discord like the most consumer oriented you know almost like the creation of narratives and all these things you know that that we sort of see like when i watch talking head stuff on espn guys talking in a round table around fox i know that they're talking about you know real things and they have insight and they're former players and experts but i see it more as an entertainment vehicle yes that this exists to basically get us from game to game, how to fill up this time.

6:08It was a little strange to see these guys to make a draft pick, and they're watching these things intently. Now, part of me wonders, are they watching it intently with some aesthetic distance? Like, are they actually watching it for the things about it that are untrue? But I gotta say, it didn't seem like it. Like, they would sort of nod their heads at the part you're supposed to nod the head at. It was like, it was, you know, it was a surprising thing to me, you know? Yeah, it's like you wouldn't want a hedge fund manager just watching CNBC all day because you would think that that's late already.

6:42Like you would expect the newsmaker to be getting their information from somewhere other than the news. Because typically in life, if the media is covering something you really understand, you know, a situation happening in your hometown or maybe a story about you or whatever, you know, it's almost always wrong to some extent. And that's not even a criticism. It's just kind of the imperfection of the thing that if somebody is trying to explain a technical matter to a real technician, it's going to always seem flawed. And that's what I thought would have been the case with like the GM of an NFL football team.

7:19that if they were watching the NFL network, you know, discuss some offensive lineman from Tennessee or whatever, they would not be going like, well, this is something I got to care about. This is, I would think they'd be like, couple of these guys just don't get it. Like that thing they're saying about leverage, that's fake. Like we know that that's just fake or whatever. Maybe not, you know, maybe not. Maybe there is, maybe there is less of a chasm between the bottom of society, top society, than we think, at least intellectually and ideologically. Maybe that is actually, you know, since we live in a totally mediated culture, maybe that is what sort of connects the top and the bottom.

7:57I don't know. There's a phrase for that. It's honestly something more people should understand. I think it's called the Gale amnesia effect. I think Michael Lewis coined it. But you have a decent definition of it in the book. You said, anytime I read an article about a subject I legitimately understand, the article has been at least partially wrong. a reaction that's become increasingly pervasive. Every national story about a localized conflict will seem erroneous to the local population it depicts. Any entry-level exposition about a technical problem will seem imprecise to genuine tacticians.

8:29And then the amnesia effect is the part where then when we read or watch something about something we don't understand, we defer to what we've just been told as if the area we have expertise is the exception and not the rule to the insufficient coverage or the tendency towards inaccuracy. Well, and I think everyone who thinks that they have something to offer, whatever that skill is, they kind of see it, that the value is the uniqueness of it, that it's coming from them, that it's specific to them. But as soon as then they're kind of confronted with this kind of consensus collective view, there's a little anxiety that maybe that in order to have my unique idea get across, I first got to show that I understand, you know, what the parameters of the discourse is.

9:16Like I have to show that, like, I understand what everybody else thinks in order to somehow enter my new thing, you know, and it's probably not a bad sort of impulse because, I mean, if you jump right in with the sort of the counterintuitive idea, I think it leaves some audience, you know, to think like, well, this person doesn't even understand what the playing field is. It's like they're making up a new game or whatever. I definitely see this with AI. Anytime I ask AI a question about something I do know quite a bit about, and I'm like asking it to find something that I just don't want to spend the time getting the specifics on or whatever.

9:53Anytime I kind of know the answer it's supposed to give me, I'm always very disappointed with the quality of the answer, I get bit by a jellyfish and I'm like, what should I do? I'm like, well, it says I should do this. So that's obviously what I'm going to do. You know, I'm incredibly deferential when it's well outside my area of expertise and I'm just desperate for any kind of confident answer. But if I were to ask it like what the best restaurant in Austin is, I'd be like, this thing doesn't know what the fuck it's talking about. What do you make of the sycophantic nature of AI that this sort of built in tendency it has to always begin with some kind of compliment to sort of insert this idea that your question is especially, you know, trenchant?

10:38Now, do you think that this is part of the, that the creators of AI were like, well, this is actually what people want. They want to feel as though they're being helped by someone who is subservient. That will give them less fear. That it's not like a hell situation where it's like, you know, that this is a situation where, oh, look at this. This AI system is behaving as though it's lucky to be talking to me. Or am I actually personifying it too much? Like, why do you think that is its normal nature? No, I do find that annoying and weird. And I think revealing about what your sort of average human wants.

11:15I also find it strange where when it's wrong and you're like, hey, that's obviously wrong. What about this or that? And then the quickness with which it goes, oh, you're absolutely right here. And so like there's something not just annoying about its overconfidence in giving you incorrect or insufficient or bullshit answers, but the obsequiousness and the immediacy and the spinelessness with which it will change its mind over and over and over again until you go, OK, that's good. That's what I wanted. There's something revealing about that, too, where it knows that what you want to do is feel right more than you want it to give you what is right.

11:59And the speed complicates it too, though, because like, let's say you had a personal assistant and you had them, you want, you need them to look up a bunch of information about state capitals or whatever. Yeah. And you're going through the information they gave you by hand and you notice that they got something wrong about, you know, they, Carson City, they didn't say was the capital of Nevada. And you told them this, uh, they would be like, Oh, you're absolutely right. I know this was my job to do this. And I made this mistake. It's almost like the AI is doing that instantaneously. Right. Like they're finding out that they're wrong, thinking about it, feeling, I don't know, a shame about it.

12:35It is bizarre. Although I wonder, like, are we the only generation of people who are going to have this dissonance? In the same way that, like, really people our age are the only people who are obsessed with the difference between the pre-internet world and the post-internet world. That we're constantly saying, like, oh, you just have to go to a travel agent or whatever if you want. You know, now you don't have to. Like people older than us don't really see that, you know, like elderly people, they maybe never really use the Internet in a in a in a practical, functional, everyday way. People younger than us is like, oh, we're the only age kind of like basically if you're 40 now up to maybe 60.

13:14Like that's the only window of time where you fully experience both paradigms. When I was watching the wildcard games this weekend, there's this Microsoft AI commercial where the guys like the running back or whatever runs by really fast. And then he goes, oh, and he starts like typing in queries to chat GPT or whatever to to narrow down, rank them by this and then do this and then do this. And like what strikes me about it is just no one would do that because no one would trust a thing that like imagine if Excel, Excel does all sorts of calculations for you. Right. And if Microsoft Excel was just wrong, like 10 to 15 percent of the time and you're like, wait, you just added all these cells up incorrectly and you were like, that's wrong.

14:01And then Excel was just like, oops, yeah, you're right. Let me do it correct this time. Right. Like the error rate that we're willing to accept with ChatGPT is like or any of the AIs is so enormous to me. It strikes me as as like this crazy thing that no one's talking about. Like we're like, hey, it's amazing. It can do this stuff. But also it's like preposterously laughably wrong. a significant percentage of the time, and you don't know what that time is. But by the way, you should lay off your staff and replace it with this thing. Well, but it is interesting. I do think about the early days of Wikipedia.

14:41Yeah. When I was in a newspaper, the idea in those days, if you would use Wikipedia at all as any kind of source, it would have been like, you're gonna get fired for that. Now, it actually seems probably more secure than most sources of information. But is that just because everything else has gotten worse? well that's part of it certainly but also i think over time sort of these things that are all kind of user generated or whatever they are going to improve i mean it's very interesting like okay so i'm sure you're familiar with this this look this anthropic lawsuit about books i was just filling out the the thing the other day because my agent was like no no i can't do it for you for you you have to do it and now i'm like i have to fill it out like 20 times yeah well i mean just uh well actually you don't okay and i'll say this is this is how i know okay so i hear about this secondhand i didn't know anything about this for people who don't have any idea what this is anthropic which i believe is the search engine i think that people call claude i don't use this one but so it turns out there's like this class action suit and and you can you can opt into it or you can opt out of it and what initially i thought was if you opted into it it meant you were giving them access to year books.

15:49As it turns out, they've taken them all already. That's all in the machine. So if you have any works that were used by Anthropic, if you fill out this form, I believe you get like, it's like$3 ,100 per work. And then you get half in your publisher gets half. Yes. So, you know, I like you, I had a lot of books on there. Right. So the actual amount of money was not insignificant. Okay. So I'm like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to opt into it. But it was very difficult to do with all these things until I asked ChatGPT how to do it. And it made it incredibly easy. It did a lot of the things for me.

16:29I mean, it was the first time that I ever used one of these things in a way that was actually practical. In every other situation I've ever been in professionally, to me, ChatGPT is good for like, you put a sentence in and go like, is it grammatically correct it's good for stuff like that you know but but this was the first time it actually gave me how to like take all of the works and make it into one file and present it all at once yeah and then it checked it all for me and instead it can look up to see if to make sure it was received it was like so this thing that i'm technically suing right i'm suing the idea of this system which has already taken all of my work the cow is out of the barn or whatever of if you want to see it, but it's out.

17:13So it's like, well, you get this little money now. In a way, I was almost like, well, what happens if I, I guess if you don't opt in, the only upside is you, there could be a lawsuit that you could opt into later. They say the settlement will never be this big. I don't know. It's a, it was, it's a strange deal. It really, like, it was a real collision that like, of modernity, like this thing that everybody sort of said was going to happen. All of a sudden it was like, it already happened. That already happened. You know, it's like, oh. As soon as I have to start filling out like complex forms, I start to immediately go, wait, now, how much am I getting paid for this?

17:48Because I might just not do it. Well, yeah, because then suddenly you're weighing it against time, right? Yes. Like, is the amount of time this is going to take worth what I'm going to get back? Like, you can notice what I get back, you know? Yes. And then what are the chances that I'll actually get it back at all? And then I start to start making excuses. And I was like, you know what, this seems like a task I should give to someone else. And so now that I know I can give it to ChatGPT, that's nice to know.

18:24Look, this is the time of year we try to get our health in order, try to get back on track, try to have better habits, put better things into our bodies. So maybe you're thinking about supplements. If you are, you know it's a confusing space. There's a lot of brands out there. It's a low trust category, not a lot of regulation, a lot of scammers, a lot of big unpronounceable ingredients. It's hard. And that's where Momentus comes in. And it's also what makes them stand out. They become a high trust brand in a low trust category. They weren't satisfied with the industry standard, so they built the Momentus standard, which is their commitment to doing things the right way, not the easy way.

19:04They use only the highest quality ingredients on the planet. Everything is based with clinically backed, highly bioavailable nutrients, no fillers, and no artificial sweeteners. Every product is independently certified by NSF for sport or informed sport, which means they test it for contaminants, heavy metals, banned substances, and verify for label accuracy. If you want to start this year with supplements, I can't recommend them enough. You can try their protein or creatine or omega-3. Those are all ones that I have tried. I've been taking the creatine lately. And right now, Momentus is offering our listeners up to 35 % off your first order with promo code daily stoic.

19:44Head over to livemomentus.com and use promo code daily stoic for up to 35 % off your first order. Livemomentus.com promo code daily stoic. Today's sponsor is Chime, the fee-free banking app changing the way that people bank. You know, Chime isn't just another banking app. They unlock smarter banking for everyday people with products like MyPay, which can give you access to up to$500 of your paycheck anytime. It can help get you paid up to two days earlier with direct deposit. No more overdraft fees, minimum balance fees, and monthly fees. Plus, Chime makes your everyday spending work harder by delivering real rewards and financial progress.

20:27And Chime has just launched the Chime card. It's a cash back card that helps you build credit with your own money. Two things that don't usually go together with banking until now. It's got no annual fees, no interest, and no strings attached. And when you get qualifying direct deposits, you can get 1.5 % cash back on eligible Chime card purchases. Chime is not just smarter banking, it's the most rewarding way to bank. And you can join the millions who are already banking fee-free today. It just takes a few minutes to sign up and you're going to head over to Chime.com slash stoic. Chime.com slash stoic.

21:01Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services, a secured Chime Visa credit card, and MyPay line of credit provided by the Bancor Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A. MyPay eligibility requirements apply, and credit limit ranges$20 to$500. Optional services and products may have fees or charges. See Chime.com slash fees info. Advertised annual percentage yield with Chime Plus status only. Otherwise, 1.00 % APY applies. No min balance required. Chime card on-time payment history may have a positive impact on your credit score. Results may vary. See Chime.com for details and applicable terms.

21:24you know it's funny obviously you talk about this at the beginning of the book like uh you know the thing that people want to compare football to is you know the roman coliseum gladiator uh games but but i remember i was in uh istanbul maybe seven or eight years ago and the hippodrome there the there's a racetrack in the middle of of istanbul which was at one point known as Constantinople. And I'm reading this sort of exhibit about it. And I didn't know how big chariot racing was in the ancient world. That like chariot racing was like, after the sort of rise and fall of the gladiatorial games, chariot racing becomes sort of the main sport of the Roman Empire.

22:07And I'm reading about this event. This is like in 500 AD or something. There's a chariot racing. And basically the chariot racers get, it's like red and green and blue. And the different colors are basically associated with different political factions. And apparently there's a there's like a chariot race during the reign of Justinian that goes sideways. And maybe there's allegations of cheating. I forget what it is exactly. But like this riot breaks out and like 30 or 40 ,000 people are killed in a riot during a chariot race in the center of what was then the Roman Empire. And I remember just thinking like, OK, yeah, this would be like if if the different divisions in the NFL became associated with Republican or Democrat or libertarian or whatever.

22:55And then during the Super Bowl, a riot breaks out. And the end of the story is the emperor is almost forced to abdicate because like his his chariot faction loses and then he tries to intervene. And so there is something about like whatever the dominant sport is in a period of time that that just becomes absorbed into culture and into the entire sort of political and social system of a country. And it is weird that football has become that you sort of marvel at that at the book that like you wouldn't think it would be football and somehow it is football. Well, I mean, football has done this in a way that's also so clear.

23:39I mean, it is it's not really a debatable thing. There's no argument in the United States over what sport is most reflective of society or most popular of all these things. Like we understand it. Football is an interesting thing because, you know, it starts in the 19th century and sort of evolves on its own for about 70 or 80 years and then intersects with sort of the rise of television. And that is really what makes this happen. And in terms of the sort of the metaphorical and symbolic significance it takes on, the things about society it absorbs, the things about society it reflects, you know.

24:17And that, you know, is chance, right? You obviously can't start a sport before the invention of a medium and think like one day it might work for it. I don't think the inventors of television saw this is a perfect vessel for football. I think they thought that about boxing and horse racing and things like that, baseball. But to me now, and the big reason I wanted to do this book is I think if you're thinking about the United States from the last half of the 20th century, and you're trying to understand it through another thing, through an outside idea, like football is probably the best source for that.

24:52I don't know if that will be true going into the 21st century. But I think that for the last half of the 20th century, like football was and is this like, sort of like kind of reflective, profound thing. A profound in kind of an underrated way. Like it is just a sport. It is a form of entertainment. It is kind of just a distraction. And yet there is, I think, a deepness to why it became so central to not just like, you know, American popularity, but like American identity, specifically certain regions of the country where football is, I mean, almost inarguably the most important extension of culture in those places.

25:34Yeah, it's like the only monoculture left. You make a point in there that I didn't think about, which is like, it makes sense that soccer is the most popular sport in the world because anyone can play soccer anywhere. And you can play it in in a bunch of different conditions that are all close to, you know, what you would see or experience like watching it professionally or watching it on television or whatever. And then you're like the very small number of people that play football, American football, versus how popular it is. That feels like it says something like it is weird that the supposedly democratic country has as its game and its sort of iconic sport, a fundamentally elitist game in the sense that not that many people play it.

26:28I mean, maybe not elitist, but exclusionary for sure. Yes. Yes. And I mean, there are many things about this that seem to contradict what we what you would expect if, say, you were some alien, you know, thinking about what America wants to think about itself. OK, the fact that no team sport is so dictated and is so controlled by things outside of the field itself. You know, the play coming from the press box down to the sideline, sent in by a messenger. Look at the Byzantine code on your wristband. You know, it's like it's the most controlled thing. One of the, you know, the popular ideas I mentioned this often.

27:08I mentioned the book like this, this essay that our critic David Hickey once wrote about basketball was that the larger idea was that any rules or sort of bylaws of a sport should try to liberate the players. Well, that's what we care about. Right. We care about the people on the field. So we want to give them the maximum amount of freedom and kind of creative expression. Football does the opposite. Football is not made for the individual. It is made for the collective. It is made in this hierarchical, you know, stratified thing where what you're seeing is never accidental. It is the most corporate sport, not just in terms of the extension of how it works in actual business.

27:49the construction of the game has many sort of similarities to any kind of highly controlled system is built. And I think that it kind of shows that this is what people want. Like we want freedom for ourselves. We want control for the rest of the world. Like we want to feel like we have agency, but we're more comfortable, I think, seeing others act without it. Yeah. Yeah. No. And your point about like, what are what are we going to think about what football says about us 50 years from now, 100 years from now? Just like what do we think about what the various sort of cultural obsessions about the Romans and the Greeks says about them?

28:33Like I think I was in Greece this summer. And one of the things that I, I find so interesting is like the Greeks had a bunch of different running sports, but all of their running events, none of them involved them going around in a circle. Like they had straight sprints and then their distance ones involved like running to a line and then running back. It was this like sort of, you would do these multiple stadium length wind sprints basically. And I don't know what it says, but it says something interesting that they weren't just like the track is circular because they would do chariot events, but people wouldn't run in a circle.

29:10What does that say? It's just weird. You know, there's just endlessly fascinating, revealing little quirks that you learn about a society when you study what it watches. But here's the deal. When we talk about something like that as a retrospective thing, like we're looking back, we do exactly what you just did. It's like, what does it mean? It must mean something. And the only meaning that we can apply are typically meanings that would exist in the present tense. Like it had just never occurred to them that they had a very linear way of thinking, that somehow they believe the curves of the track created some kind of mystical advantage.

29:51We always have to think, what was the reason for this? And the fact of the matter is, there probably was a reason for it. There probably may be even a real kind of practical explanation. But that's not how we want to think about it because we think of it as history and history want to have meaning. That's a big part of like sort of, I guess, kind of the conceit of this book, which is that I know that there is going to be a time in the future when football is not the last remnant of the monoculture. It's not the center of like how American entertainment and recreation operates. It's going to be something that is either I don't think it'll probably be I don't think it'll be gone in totality, but it will be this niche thing, this minor thing.

30:30And then people are going to try to explain why. And I'm not sure exactly what that description will be, but I think it will be wrong. And I suspect it will be pejorative because that's usually how we work. We look at something in the past that failed and we're like, well, it failed because it had a problem. And that problem was endemic to the world it comes from. So I wanted to do a book that was like, OK, so you read, you know, obviously it's kind of a kind of a gimmick because I'm trying to sell this book to people who are alive. I'm doing this podcast, right? I'm not doing this podcast for people who have not yet been born.

31:05I do not expect people to listen to this podcast in 100 years and then find this book. But I do like to think about time in this way where like, how can I reflect what the present actually is like for people who will have no way to access it? Like whatever we think about Roman gladiators, you know, it's a ton of knowledge about the mechanics of how it worked and all that. But I don't think it's possible for people in this day and age to truly understand what it really felt like or what the motive was or what people wanted or how it was viewed. Like, we assume it was viewed in some way like the way we view football.

31:43I guess I can understand that relationship, but I bet it wasn't that way. You know, I was kind of almost concerned, I don't know, concerned is the wrong word. I guess obsessed with this idea of like, I want things to be remembered the way they actually were, not the way we can project the present onto them. It is interesting though, like we, we assume when there is a monoculture that it is in fact an actual monoculture and that there wasn't a divergence of opinions at the time, right? Like, so, so we go, okay, the Romans really liked gladiatorial games. They obviously thought it was okay to, you know, send criminals and whomever in there to fight and die and how grotesque and violent this is.

32:28And then I think it's really interesting, you know, there's this essay that Seneca writes where he's not talking about this at all. And then suddenly he kind of goes into this tangent and he's like, why are we doing this? It's so violent and horrible. Like, who likes this? You know? And you go like, oh yeah, some people thought it was dumb then too, right? And so we always assume that everyone was on the same page and certainly that they weren't. Oh, absolutely. Certainly. Yes. And, you know, but what I'm saying is the people who are critics of football now in a future world, those people, I think, are going to be seen as the guideposts because the thing failed.

33:04Right. Right. And it will seem like, oh, well, you know, they're saying it's barbaric and it was just it was like a blood sport or whatever. That must have been what it was. But you just bring up Just kind of casually Like lots of interesting things Like we mentioned The monoculture, right? Yeah Okay, so what's something That's a thing A lot of people who Study or follow TV know They know that the last Episode of MASH Was the most watched show In history And that will never happen again That it is now Absolutely impossible That a show could have That many people Watching one episode All at the same time And yet What were people saying At the time?

33:38They were saying The monoculture was over Because cable television had come into play. And suddenly it was possible to get, you know, the New York Times in Seattle. The world was becoming this sort of already these things before the Internet exists. We're kind of using these terms. You see, you'll go back and find things where like people use terms like memes and like and like, you know, the global village and all that stuff. So this thing that we now understand to be the apex of the monoculture, 53 million people or whatever it was watching this episode of uh you know a korean war sitcom or whatever at the time they already believed the thing that we say about it now was over that the monoculture to them had been you know the 50s that was a monoculture you know right the 20s yeah it's it's so weird realizing that there was a present moment at every moment in in history.

34:35Like I just went down this, this weird rabbit hole. Like, did you know there was another Winston Churchill? Like in the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was an American writer, a novelist named Winston Churchill, who was so famous, like in 1901, he had like the bestselling book in America. He was so famous that Winston Churchill went by Winston Spencer Churchill for most, like people don't even know Winston Churchill, the statesman supported himself as a writer. And there's all these like, there's this great book called No More Champagne, where it's like basically a biography of Churchill as a writer and as a guy who spent more money than he had.

35:14And there's all these like things about him complaining about his agent and his publisher. And it's fascinating. But but like Churchill went by Winston Spencer Churchill. So people wouldn't confuse him with Winston Churchill, the author who is selling millions and millions of books. and not all and he's just totally forgotten like just nobody knows that he exists even though he sold millions and millions of books and if you had asked people in 1906 you know are people going to remember who winston churchill was they'd be like yeah he's a great novelist the idea that we would remember him as the guy that saved the world of western civilization as a statesman from a different country would have been like utterly incomprehensible.

36:01Are you a big Churchill guy? Do you know a lot about him? Yeah. Because there's one thing I've always wondered about him. I'll tell this anecdote. Maybe maybe you're familiar with it. I had heard that. So, you know, in those in his era, we're talking with political era, you know, everybody smoked, right? Everyone was smoking. So he would remove all the ashtrays from the room and he had figured out a way to sort of not need to ash his cigarette as much. And eventually someone else would ask him for an ashtray. And he felt this gave him a tactical advantage. What was the advantage? Like, what would that advantage be?

36:35Like they would have to ask him for an ashtray? Yes. And he saw this as sort of like, that it was almost like who blinked first or something. But I've always wondered, I've heard that story more than once, but I've never had an explanation as to what the advantage would be. But I don't really doubt it, right? Obviously, he knew what he was doing. You know? I mean, this is a guy who is drunk all the time and yet saved the world. or whatever, you know, it's like he's an amazing person. It's weird. I've read a lot about Churchill and I've never heard that story. Or if I have, I skipped over it, not thinking much about it.

37:07You know, the other weird one you hear all the time is like, they go like, do you know how much shit there was on the streets of New York City and like the horse era? You know, like I heard that one again the other day. Chicago, especially. They call Chicago the city of horses. Yeah, there's just like manure everywhere because there's so many horses and then one day it's just gone. But that's one that happened in my lifetime, obviously not as much, but just like the idea there was smoke and ashes everywhere all the time. And then just like that, it disappears. And then every once in a while, you're in a casino where they let you smoke and you just go, I can't imagine what the world was like when it was like this all the time.

37:49I remember we went on a trip as a kid. We were in Arkansas and we stopped at like a sizzler or something. And it was still, there was a smoking section and a non-smoking section. And that's the last one that I remember being like, oh, this is horrible. It is amazing how something can change. And it's almost like that period just disappeared. Like there were ashtrays in hospital waiting rooms. Yes. Like you could smoke in the hospital. You could smoke in the hospital. do you know who sam gwynn sc gwynn he wrote empire of the summer moon he wrote that book the perfect pass about the invention of the forward pass in football okay um he's an amazing writer he wrote this book called empire of the air about like the hindenburg it's about like uh blimps you know but they're not called blimps i'm forgetting what uh how to pronounce the actual word but anyways he's talking about this one famous one that that goes down like the hindenburg And there's this whole section in the book about there were smoking rooms on those blimps, those blimps filled with highly flammable gas.

38:52There was a sealed smoking room on those blimps. And it's not just like, oh, this used to be a thing and we forgot about it. But it's like, no, no, there used to be like legalized insanity. Just like everyone was collectively insane about something. And then we've just pretended that it didn't didn't happen. Well, although like this has come up in a few other podcasts, have you heard this story about, you know, the San Francisco 49ers have seemingly many more injuries than every other team over the last five years? And now people are wondering, is it because of their practice site is located next to this like electromagnetic site or whatever it's like it's right next you look it up there's man is it possible in some future world or like do you realize that like people didn't even realize that having like an electrical plant near people was it but yeah at the same time here in the present like it would be weird you'd really be a marginalized person if you were like i refuse to come within one mile of a, you know, of a power plant or a transformer or something.

40:00But if it suddenly became obvious that that was like the main factor for a whole laundry list of problems, then we'd be like, people were so crazy. It's like smoking a cigarette on a Zeppelin or whatever, you know, but it's not. It's not because we don't have that understanding now. We're always trying to do this. We're always trying to put the understanding of the world we have now onto the past. I mean, I'm not blaming people for doing it. I do it all the time. It's just it's but it's crazy. It's a you know. Well, they bring the smoking thing back to sports. It is crazy when you watch those you look at those videos or you see photos of like athletes smoking during halftime, smoking in the locker room because that one isn't it's not like, oh, you shouldn't smoke because, you know, you might get cancer many years from now.

40:47Like they were coughing like like smoking is something where like the smoker tangibly daily feels the consequences to doing the thing. No one would feel that more directly than an athlete doing a sport with lots of cardio in it. And yet there they are. Things get sort of built into your brain and they don't really change. Like I'm looking at you, you're wearing this New Orleans Saints jacket, you know? So when I think of the New Orleans Saints. Part of me still reverts back to my first exposure to them, which was the year I really got into football cards and the Saints went one in 15. So my natural impulse, my natural inclination, when I think of the Saints, is to think of, like, part of me says, like, well, that's like the worst, that's like the worst franchise.

41:40They've won Super Bowl since then. Everything has changed. there are if someone were to say if i were asked to be to rank that you know all every franchise in the nfl historically the greatest the worst they would not be at the bottom for sure but there's a part of my brain that sees that like i guess where they always say like the lizard part or whatever and i'm like oh yeah they had archie manning and nothing else they had chuck muncie but he wasn't good yet because he didn't go to the chargers i still think of the first understanding I had of the Saints, you know? Well, my first one is, I remember I got a book out of my school library and there was a picture on the front of that kicker whose name I'm forgetting, who didn't have the front of his foot.

42:25Yeah. Tom Dempsey. Yes. He broke the NFL record with half a foot. Yes. Yeah. And I just was like, what is this? This is insanity. Like, how do I not know about this? And that's what took me down the rabbit hole. Yeah. It's strange. In a way, he had half a foot, but it was a huge advantage. I know. Because they allowed him to wear a shoe that had a steel plate where the toes would be. So he was actually like hammering the ball with almost a literal hammer with his foot. You know, so it's always a weird thing. For many years, I believe it was a 63-yard field goal. That is no longer the record, but it was for a long time.

43:05It was certainly into the 90s. I think maybe a guy from Denver tied it at that point. But there was always that, you know, it was always sort of like a profile in courage. You're like, you know, like this guy with half a foot is the kick the longest field goal. That's like, well, yes. Also, he did have the advantage of kicking the steal. But, you know, it's a. Well, I almost told that story in my book, The Obstacle is the Way. And it's not like the record now is like 10 yards further. It's not that much further. Yeah, I think. Yeah, it's I think it's a it's not that much. I mean, there is probably a limit to what a kick can be, you know?

43:39Yes. And regardless, it still is an obstacle. I mean, yes, he had this advantage of this shoe that was specially designed for a guy with half a foot. But that also meant at some point in his life, he had half a foot and he was like, I'm going to pursue field goal kicking. Yeah. And that is an amazing thing, right? I recall the last time we talked, we talked a lot about Iron Maiden. Yeah, of course. Yes. So do you like Black Sabbath as well? Yeah, sure. I love Black Sabbath. And the classic story about Black Sabbath, or one of the many ones, is that on the last day of working in the factory, before he became a full-time member of a band, Tony Iommi's working in the factory, and the tips of his fingers are all cut off.

44:23You know? And he plays left-handed, so it's his right hand that has no fingertips, you know? And he can't have—it would seem to be the end of this, right? Sure. Like his mother made him go to work, even though he was quitting. She was like, you got to finish your last day. And he's like, I'm going to be a musician. And she's like, go your last day. Thing comes down, you know, cuts off his fingertips. He's kind of, you know, obviously depressed and believes it's over. And someone brings him a record and plays the record for him. And I won't remember the name of the artist. Somebody else listening to this will know.

44:53The guy plays the record. And Tony Iommi's like, oh, okay. This is a guy's a pretty good guitar player. Thanks. You know, it's like not the greatest time for me to hear this. And the guy goes, okay, the guy on this record has one arm. He only has one arm. And then Tony Army was like, if this guy can play this with one arm, like I can figure out a way to, you know, he starts burning wax to cover his fingertips so he can press down on the strings and eventually he just builds up the calluses. And the reason Black Sabbath sounds different than every other band who's tried to copy them is probably this.

45:30The fact that the guy playing the guitar does not have fingertips. But there's another part of this, which is like, there's a guy who pursued playing guitar and became a virtuoso with one arm. What motivates the person to do that? It's like you would think that if you like if I lost my arm, I wouldn't give up. Right. I wouldn't give up my life. Like, I wouldn't be like, I want to do something, but I don't think I would pick a job or a vocation that seems so specifically geared toward the two-armed guy. I mean, Norm MacDonald always had a joke about that, about this, about the Petraeus, the printer from Australia who had those, like, ski things, you know?

46:09And Norm MacDonald was against this guy. And people were like, why? Because you believe he murdered his wife, which was always in the news? And he was like, no, no. It's that he shouldn't be a sprinter if he doesn't have. I mean, you know, it should be like you should have to be a biped or whatever to be a sprinter. You know, I know he's jokey, of course, but there is something funny about that. The idea that, like, I'm going to try to do something that seems so geared against the natural proclivities of my body, you know. Well, it's also weird that, like, we as a society, like your point about like, OK, he has a steel plate in his shoe and that might give him this small, you know, statistical advantage in one sense.

46:49And then our sense of fairness is so binary. And obviously you could connect this to a bunch of other debates that we have as a society. But we get obsessed over whether there is objectively one bit of advantage here and totally tune out or refuse to consider all the other disadvantages that person had. And then we're like, see, it's not fair. They should be excluded. Right. Like we're like profoundly obsessed with, you know, whether Pistorius's legs give him this slight advantage and not considering like, OK, but but ninety nine percent of the population when they were born without legs or whether they lost their legs or whatever would have just not pursued this sport at all.

47:34This guy's obviously coming from an enormous disadvantage in the fact that he's even being considered as an enormous triumph. Certainly the game is not rigged in this guy's favor, even if these blades are giving him a slight advantage on the field. Do you remember Jim Abbott, the pitcher? Yeah. So this is a guy who only had one arm. You know, so he he would tuck his glove underneath his kind of his stump or whatever pitch with one hand, then jam his hand into the glove. And then he would field with it. If the ball came to him, you would then kind of pop the ball up and throw to first base. Yeah.

48:11Now, so he was an amazing story. When I was a kid, that would be like a like you get a weekly reader or whatever. And it's like, look at this guy. He's a one arm pitcher. You know, you know, he had a few seasons at the end of his career that were really a biz. In all likelihood, if he had been a normal pitcher, maybe he would have been relegated to triple A or double A or something. And he wasn't. But it's odd because, you know, I say that. And yet those were still some of the most amazing stories and successes anyone could have. Like he's pitching with one arm. It would be like somebody asked me who my favorite drummers are.

48:49And I would be like, oh, you know, John Bonham. And, you know, it's like, but like I should probably say the guy from Def Leppard. he has one arm right like he literally can't do drum fills it can't it's impossible but yeah you know so but I don't think I don't think of him in that way I don't think of him as an elite drummer even though the thing he's done is the most amazing thing a drummer probably has ever done to be a one arm drummer in a band of that magnitude a hard rock band where drumming is really important granted there was all this technology to help him in all this but still

49:23We've got an employee here at Daily Stoke. I won't say who because it's kind of private, but they've been using Monarch, today's sponsor, to track their progress as they try to pay off their student loan debt. I'm a college dropout, so I don't have any debt, thankfully, but I can only imagine how overwhelming it would be to have this thing hanging over you. And she's been using the app to budget and save, and it's bringing her a little bit closer every day to being debt-free, which I can only imagine would be a huge relief. Monarch shows you exactly where your money is going. It helps you redirect it towards what matters.

49:57With automated tracking and clear projections, you can actually see yourself getting closer to being debt-free or hitting your savings milestone instead of just hoping it happens. Unlike most other personal finance apps, Monarch is built to help make you proactive and not just reactive. And Monarch helps users save over$200 per month on average after joining. You can set yourself up for financial success in 2026 with Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. You can use code STOIC at Monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50 % off your first year at monarch.com code stoic.

50:38So the performance superhighway of your body are your blood vessels. You have 60 ,000 miles of blood vessels in your body that deliver oxygen and nutrients to every cell. That's your cardiovascular system. You've got 60 ,000 miles of blood vessels that deliver oxygen, nutrients to every cell in your body. And this is why elite athletes and longevity experts invest directly in their cardiovascular systems, because supporting healthy blood flow is critical for energy recovery, mental clarity and performance. And that's where today's sponsor, Human, comes in. Human with two N's. They actually started out of research done here in Texas, actually at the University of Texas, and they have 15 years of experience making award winning supplements.

51:23Human Cardiovascular Health Daily is plant-based and made from clinically studied ingredients like grapeseed and sea kelp extract. It supports nitric oxide production for healthy blood flow and energy, while also supporting blood pressure and helping support the delicate inner lining of your blood vessels. You take two capsules every morning to power energy and recovery. It also helps you play the long game of your long-term cardiovascular health. Human has an exclusive offer for our listeners. You just go to human.com slash stoic. That's human with two N's dot com slash stoic for 15 % off your first purchase.

51:58All you got to do is enter code stoic at checkout. Human with two N's dot com slash stoic for an extra 15 % off with code stoic at checkout.

52:11So you mentioned baseball and it made me think of something when I was reading the intro of the book, because you're talking about like sort of who the book was for and you're sort of setting it up that that maybe you weren't doing yourself any favors by writing it for this group versus that group. I wonder if there's something revealing about football in that there's a lot of great baseball books. There aren't that many football books. Is there something about football that like it's such a televised sport that we don't we don't read about it? But what or maybe that's just baseball's sort of was the dominant game in the era when books were more popular.

52:48But but I guess there's the blind side. I mean, there's a cliche about this. There's a cliche about sports books, which is that the best books are like a disproportionate to the size of the ball. So it's like, like golf. Yeah. A lot of, a lot of writing about golf. Okay. Baseball, a lot of writing about baseball. Tennis is now, you know, football less. Actually now basketball has sort of changed this, that there's that, that the sort of the, the, the meaning of basketball in part, Because it has like such an ability to discuss things like, you know, race and these things. Basketball has become almost like easy symbolism or easy allegory.

53:31But I'll say like my publisher did not want me to do a football book. Like he straight up said like football books don't sell. I think the thinking being that, you know, people who love football don't necessarily want to read about it. and people who sort of have like a, I don't know, ideological or intellectual issue with football aren't interested in the sport itself. So it's like hard to find this middle ground, you know? But this is the book I wanted to do. So it's like, I'm always surprised when I talk to other writers and they tell me, and this happens a lot, I bet you've had this experience with people, that they tell you that their agent or their publishing house kind of convinced them not to do a book they wanted to do.

54:13that they'd say like, well, it's not commercial or it's like, it's been tried before and it's failed. And it's like, you cannot think that way. I mean, it's like, because you have to work, for a book, you work on it for a year and then it takes another year before it comes out. So in a way you're like kind of living with this thing for two years. Like it has to be something you want to do even if nobody else wants it. I mean, that is the most important thing. It's gotta be something you want to do, you know? Yeah, no, no, no. No, I mean, I think there's two separate issues there. I just think it's like there's something about how television-centric football is that it's not lost on me that it's not a literary sport either.

54:54But baseball, which is kind of boring to watch on TV and great to watch in person, is somehow the more literary of the sports. But so is boxing. That's true. Yes. So it's like the thing about football, the thing you're mentioning is something I hadn't really thought about. I mean, I've thought a lot about, obviously, this book about football's relationship to television. I didn't think about this, though, the idea that by being so married to television and that, you know, one of the things like the aphorisms I guess use in this book is that like, you know, football is a completely mediated event, even when there's no media involved.

55:34that now the experience of watching a football game live with no cameras is still understood by the consumer as it would be seen on television. It is possible that because, you know, this this kind of interlocking idea of this entertainment medium and this game just sort of became the same thing and so dominant that, you know, the hundred most popular broadcasts in the year 2023, like 93 were NFL games. and then three or four more were college football games. I mean, that's just a crazy statistic. It makes no sense in any other society. There's just nothing like this, right? Maybe that does overwrite the possibility to write about it.

56:18Like in a sense, it's like, in the same way, it's like if you're doing film criticism, you're usually talking about the ideas and you're sort of also talking about the plot of the film. But you don't want to talk about the plot of the film too much for two reasons. One, you don't want to give it away, but also it doesn't really work. A description of a story will either of a film particularly, because it's only like two hours, is either going to seem like weirdly rudimentary or too complicated to really get like the visual part of film is a hard thing to write about. Only the best film writers are really good at it.

56:54Football, I guess, in the same way, because of the visual experience of television is so pervasive and dominant in the mind of every consumer, it is difficult to describe. Like describing a football play, and I do it a few times in this book, always seems awkward. Well, there's too many characters. There's too, like boxing, baseball obviously has a decent amount of guys on the field, but the action is so distributed in football, it's very hard to describe. And it almost goes against our natural instincts. Like I thought it was revealing, there was an interview, it might've been on their podcast, where Taylor Swift was talking about how she thought that the Kelsey brothers had faced off against each other.

57:37Like she didn't, it didn't occur to her that they weren't, would have never been on the field at the same time. And you're like, oh yeah, because that's not how you would design it if you were thinking about designing it for being like, like the idea that the best players are not like that the two leaders of the teams are not on the field at the same time is not how you would guess the biggest game in America is is designed there are so many things about football that if you describe to someone who had no idea about it it would seem not just confusing but like almost straight up bad like if you like this thing that you said like you could say like okay so the best player in the league might not touch the ball the entire season it would be very easy for that to happen okay yeah the fact and i just talked about in the book but you know it's like so like the wall street journal in 2011 did this kind of study where they found that in a three-hour broadcast of an nfl game there are 11 minutes of action and this is often described as like it's used by people who are trying to convince you that football is not interesting or whatever yeah and as it turns out i think 11 minutes within a three-hour window is actually perfect but in a pitch meeting it would make no sense yes like if i was saying like hey i came up with this new board game takes about three hours to play however you only make 11 moves during the game most of the time you know like nobody would be like it'd be like you know like like risk without moves or whatever you know yeah and they actually do some riffing on it on that on that Nate Bergazzi SNL skit, the George Washington one, where it's like, okay, it's, it's football, but you don't use your feet.

59:24So, oh, so there's no kicking. Well, there's some kicking. And then it's like, and it's kind of worth this many points. And then sometimes it's worth this many. The only thing more confusing than American football is Australian football. And I had the experience. I went to one of their games and they were explaining it to me. And I was like, what are you talking about? This is like, you took the most complicated and nonsensical game and you made it much more complicated and nonsensical is kind of perfect. But it was weird to be like a foreigner watching a football game and going, oh, this is this is what people who are not Americans think when you talk to them about the Dallas Cowboys or whatever.

1:00:06Yeah, I think another spoiler is cricket. Yes. Like when the first time, like someone tells you like, well, a cricket game, it might take two days. It might take two days. It's like, why would it take two days? Like what's going, what's happening? And it's like, well, it's not much is actually happening, but it's, you know, it seems very confusing. But in some ways that is the charm of these things. I mean, what I think that like, sometimes, you know, it's like in the book, bright lights, big city, you know, which is nobody thinks about anymore. I think about it all the time because there's almost no other good novels in the second person.

1:00:39Okay. In that sense, Jay McInerney kind of ruined it for us, right? No one can do a second-person novel now. Even all these years later, if I wrote a novel in the second person, Jay McInerney would be mentioned every single— So he was like—that alone is the brilliance of that move. He's like, I'm doing this. but there's a scene in the book where the guy walks into a bar and like he asks you there's a sports i can't remember what the sport is even but it might be like hockey because he says like what quarter is it and the guy's like it's the second period and this because this character knows nothing about sports and he says like my whole life i've been cut out of the world's largest fraternity and i do sometimes think about but i mean this is kind of a gendered thing like of guys who don't follow sports at all, I can't imagine what it must be like to go to a lot of the functions like I go to as a father.

1:01:30Like if we go to some event, some school event, and the kids are doing whatever they're doing, the wives are usually talking and the guys are talking. And the likelihood that we are talking about our kids or sports is about 98%. Yes. Like I think there was a time when people would have talked about politics, but that's very touchy now. People are very nervous about that now. I live in the Pacific Northwest, which is one of the weird things about this is people don't like to talk about their jobs. Like when I was in New York, if someone started talking to you, like you met them, first thing they'd ask is what do you do?

1:02:05Here they might be like, what kind of mountain bike do you own or some fucking bizarre thing? Because there's a chance you might not have a job, right? Yeah. Well, yes. Well, also this, I'll hear there's this, I say this is crazy. Now, this is something that before I moved here, I wouldn't have said that sounds positive. but now it seems crazy this real emphasis on do not let your job define you in any way never give the sense that what you do is something you know it's like well actually what i do is my identity but regardless what i'm saying is for these dads right we're sitting around talking about sports and now gambling that also always comes up and there's always some people just hanging out there and and in my mind i think oh they're kind of quiet maybe they're shy but then And another part of me is like, they just don't care about Auburn and Alabama.

1:02:56Like they must think we're insane sitting here talking about whether or not the line on an Alabama Auburn game is too high. It's like, oh, it's eight and a half. You've got to take them. You know, it's a bizarre thing, you know, and I don't even gamble. I don't gamble, but I'm constantly talking to guys about betting lines in football because it is just part of being a middle-aged dude now. That's what you discuss, you know. And luckily, my entire life prepared me to do that because I've been thinking about football constantly for 40 or 45 years. It's so funny. I've been trying to get my kids to like football since basically they were born and it's not work.

1:03:31I have two boys and they just came home from school one day this year and they like football because some kid at school likes the Eagles and now they like football. And it was before bed, you know, a couple of weeks ago. And my son was like, can I watch my iPad before bed? And we're like, no, you know, you don't do that. It's time to go to bed. He's like, can I watch something on your phone? No. And he's like, hey, wait, isn't it Monday? Can I watch the Monday night football? And I go, yeah. And so I go and I get the laptop and watching it a little bit. And then it goes, I just figured it out.

1:04:02And I go, what? And he's like, football is an excuse to watch TV. And I'm like, you got it, dude. You figured it out. You cracked the code. Like, that's what it is. It's just a thing to watch on TV. I mean, saying this makes me sound like I'm 90. But this thing you described, I think, was also a key to kind of the all-encompassing nature of football during the last half of the 20th century, which was that, you know, when I grew up and a lot of people like me, most people like me, there was one television in the house. It was in the living room. And, you know, it was usually, it was controlled by your parents, often your dad.

1:04:42And if there was ever a football game on, that's what we were watching. Like it didn't matter. And they knew what the teams or the investment, there was nothing that we were going to watch instead of football if it was on. So like I'm the seventh kid in my family, even my sisters who don't care about football really at all. They understand the culture and the kind of mechanics of football much better than like most people I meet now, just because it was this shared sort of experience. If your son had, if you'd been raising your son in the eighties, those first three steps of can I watch the iPad or can I look at that wouldn't have been there it'd be like can I stay up yeah well okay Howard Cosell is on you know so any would you just sit there and watch it you know I do think that part of you know you always hear these stories now that are just completely and they're probably exaggerated but they're mystifying to me in some ways where people are like I can't go home at Thanksgiving I politically disagree with my parents and my uncles or whatever like i can't do that like i'm cutting my family off or whatever and or people who would be like i feel very isolated it's like i don't really have a social you see these statistics where it's like men averaging less than one friend per per you know it's like all these academic of male loneliness i too wonder how much of that is a manifestation of the end of the completely shared monoculture of the living room where there used to be stuff that we all watch the same shows.

1:06:13It's just that if you're watching anything, this is what you're watching. And now that would never be the case. There are many situations where me, my wife, and our two kids are all watching separate things simultaneously. You know, saying it's hard to get your kids to watch football. You know, I think every guy kind of, every person maybe who likes football kind of wishes that their kid did too. It's a very difficult sport to get your kid into because it doesn't have a natural kind of engagement. There's so many rules. You know, sometimes I'm watching the red zone and my son comes down and it's like, I don't know if he understands it's like it's going from game to game because he's never thought of these things.

1:06:48And I'm totally comfortable with my kid not caring about football, not playing football. I in no way would ever want to enforce the things that I like onto my kids. I just think that's the worst thing you do. Um, but I, I always think to myself, you know, there was a period in my life in my twenties I mean, I didn't really have anything to talk to my dad about, you know, but we did still talk about like, who was Notre Dame recruiting? You know, did the North Dakota State Bison win the previous weekend? It really did allow us to sort of have this surrogate relationship until I got old enough to recognize it's like, oh man, my dad's going to die.

1:07:25And this is, these are important. You know, it's like things changed. I hate the idea that like that there could be a period where that's harder to find with my kids. Like maybe it'll be film or maybe it'll be music. It'll be something else. I'm not going to let this happen. And football is not the only way. But man, that was an easy way to have it happen. You know, I had an expert level knowledge of football when I was like nine or ten because I would read and memorize every statistic in the sporting news. I would watch the NFL today. I'd watch any time. Everything in Sports Illustrated, if it was about a sport I liked, I read.

1:08:01I consumed every aspect of this. So even as a nine-year-old kid, I remember, you know, like older people at our house, relatives or whatever. And I could talk to them about these games in a way that, you know, that I think they thought was cute. But it was also completely normal. It was like two adults talking. It was the only adult conversation I was having in a way. and that's just it's it's hard to do that like magic to gather it you know it's like it's hard to do that you know yeah yeah you and you'll talk to a kid about football in a way that you wouldn't talk to them about politics or something there's an equal equality under the game kind of thing like you'll allow you're allowed to have opinions about it as a nine-year-old in the way that you're not about other monoculture things and it's like i mean it really is like a simulation or a simulacrum.

1:08:46It's like the stakes are lower. And yet in the same way you're talking about the same things you would be talking about. Like if you're talking about oh, you know, should Mike Tomlin be forced out or whatever? Or like, you know, is there some kind of stylistic problem with Lamar Jackson or whatever? These are in many ways, like kind of complex, nuanced things. But in sports, you don't, the nuance can sort of be not ignored. but it can be the underlying part of it. The top part is just the conversation, you know. In politics, that is harder to do. I mean, it happens in politics. If you're talking about what's going on politically, in some ways you're talking about these fundamental ideas like about, you know, what is democracy really?

1:09:33Does, you know, what is fascism really? We're all these, you know, but it's, you're right. It's harder, you know, and it's less interesting to them. Yeah. No, no, it was mad. I mean, I'm so glad it happened. And now it's like now we have something to watch and sort of that's not, you know, brain rot on YouTube. So I'll take it. Yeah. Now it's weird because some people heard that and they think that they just that you meant, oh, YouTube rots your brain. There actually is this thing called Italian brain rot. Maybe every parent knows that. But like, you know, it's like anybody who doesn't, they hear that term and they're like, oh, it's just like that must be the term they use now to describe like kind of useless, frivolous information.

1:10:12No, it's actually these creatures with Italian names that do nothing. I mean, that and, you know, the whole I just find this stuff really interesting. Like the whole six, seven and all these things. They all so much of like kid culture now is based in a kind of absurdism. Yeah, that I do think is reflective of something more than just kids are weird, you know, because there's always been aspects of that. Kids have always been into kind of absurd things. I mean, people will be like, oh, yeah, they used to have pet rocks or whatever. But this is different where it seems as though the absurdism is the complete meaning of it.

1:10:50Don't you think that's because the kids are contributing to the culture for the first time? Like in the sense, like if I feel like what kids used to be into even relatively recently, you know, it's like, hey, kids like Paw Patrol because presented between these choices of shows, they seem to like Paw Patrol more than these other shows. Now they're like the kids are actually talking to each other or have much more control over the the remote. And the kids are it's not just a one way relationship. Like the kids are driving the means in a way that they weren't before. Oh, well, I think you're right about that for sure.

1:11:30They're also like these ideas are allowed to sort of flourish in these silos of youth where, you know, if say in the past or whatever, It's like if I'm watching Facts of Life or whatever. And for some reason, Tootie and Natalie are always going 6 '7", 6 '7". Like, I could see, like, someone older in the house being like, this is stupid. Like, we're going to change to Magnum or whatever. Like, you know, we're not going to watch this. Whereas now they're able to, like, the whole thing with the Minecraft movie is a great example of this, where it's like people were seemingly surprised that these kids were going to this Minecraft movie And like there were all these innocuous things that made them just go ballistic.

1:12:10But it's like they were able to build that world in private. And then suddenly it spills into the world at large. And it's just confusing. And, you know, young people have always been confusing to old people. But what also is interesting is that we're also now expected to understand this more than our parents or our grandparents were. Yes. Like, you know, the very first book I wrote, Fartor Oxidia, I talk about this sort of how like one time how is like my dad was at the kitchen table, my whole family, and he was talking about our neighbor's cattle. OK, our neighbor had many different breeds of cattle.

1:12:47He had some Herefords. He had some dairy cattle. He had like weird. He had like no one did this. Right. And my dad was was talking about seeing this this small herd of like disparate cattle. And he was like, what a motley crew that is or whatever. and everybody in my, at the table starts chuckling, laughing, like, ha ha ha. And they're all looking at me at my dad's like, you know, what, what, you know, now some people would hear that story, I think, and be like, Oh, see, that's sad. It was like this thing that I loved as a sixth grader or whatever, you know, my dad had like, I didn't feel that way.

1:13:21I was like, this proves my dad has never been in my bedroom because I had, I had a Motley Crue bumper sticker over my bed. I had a Motley Crue post. I had, it's like he obviously had never snooped in my room. He never looked around. Like I felt really, it was almost a secure thing to me. It was like, it showed that he had absolutely no, now granted, I'm the seventh kid. So my dad was a lot older than the typical father. Now it's almost impossible to imagine that happening. Like I mentioned Magic the Gathering. Like I never played that game in my life until my kid got into it. Now I play it most days.

1:13:55So now I have this, and I have this understanding of the game and all these things. like what's good about it, the problems with it. It's just real interesting because, you know, they always say as a parent, you can't be a friend. You need to be a parent. But the way modern parenting works, it's very difficult not to be friends with them because you're sharing all these things. My kids like to listen to the top 40 station. So I know all those songs like that wasn't how it was for me or anyone I knew growing up. I didn't know one person who was like oh yeah um i'm gonna go see dakken with my mom like that would never happen that would have never happened you know yeah yeah it it's weird it's also weird like i wouldn't like when i was a kid pokemon was not cool right and it's weird that it's not just it wasn't cool it was for losers and now it's for everyone it's weird like it's it's weird that it's still around let alone it doesn't have any uncool or cool it's just a thing like you're not a loser for liking pokemon lots of people like pokemon but it's weird for me when my kids are taught i have to i have to remember like oh i don't need to remember what i used to think about pokemon we can just talk about pokemon i mean dungeons and dragons is a great example of this the fact that like so when my kid got into dungeons and dragons i was like well this is kind of interesting he must be sort of in that part of the part of the social group.

1:15:25That's not what it is. It's like it doesn't seem to have even a relationship to gender anymore or the idea that if you play sports, you wouldn't play Dungeons and Dragons. That is gone. In a weird, small, like this happens in a big way in like the world we live in, but also in a small world, I guess, with children, which is that inevitably the counterculture always becomes the culture. In a weird way for you growing up, Pokemon was your kid version of the counterculture. It was for people who did not like the other things kids liked, who felt alienated by the normal things, right? So they got into that.

1:16:02That happens in music. This happens in film. This happens in literature. It's always this way that the thing that is marginalized, if it touches people in a deep way, those are the people seemingly who enforce the ideas about culture later. because it means something different to them. They're getting involved in something. Like, this is why, like, the vast majority in the 90s and early 2000s of music critics and rock critics had all come from a punk background. I was completely out, like, seen as very odd that I did not, that all the people I worked with at Spin and knew at the other magazines at the Village Voice, they were all fundamentally people who had been into punk rock.

1:16:43And then they, so they were the underground culture and now they dominate sort of the over culture. That's just how it seems to work. And it does in some ways sort of detract from the meaning of anything that's commercially successful. Because in all likelihood, like the idea of like what Taylor Swift right now sort of creates musically, it is so popular. Nothing has really been that popular since Michael Jackson. It may not though have sort of the influence that logic would dictate. Like logically, that should be by far the most influential music of the future. And it probably will not be in the same way that Michael Jackson's thriller, while having influence, is not as influential as some of the things around it that seemed significantly less significant at the time.

1:17:30I actually thought of you the other day. Have you seen this documentary? It's on YouTube. It's like a 20 minute thing. It's by that comedian, Rob Shear. I think that's who did it. I'm embarrassed if I'm saying his name wrong. Anyways, it's called Taylor Swift Dads. And he just interviews different dads that are waiting in the parking lot at SoFi Stadium while their daughters are inside watching Taylor Swift. And it's a very lovely, sweet little 20-minute YouTube video. And it talks about a lot of the things that we're talking about. Some of the dads are like, I have no idea what's happening. I don't even know why I'm here.

1:18:03And then other ones, they know all of it. And they're really supportive. And then there's some dads, it's like they couldn't afford tickets. So they're just sitting outside listening with their daughters in the parking lot. What mostly struck me about it, having watched a bunch of sort of documentaries about music from, you know, the 60s and 70s and 80s is like there used to be a lot of that. There were lots of bands doing stadium tours. There were lots of bands. Obviously, Taylor Swift is singular, but there would have been lots of things that people used to line up for when they would come out at the record store at midnight or whatever.

1:18:40And that's gone. But here's what this might not be totally true. And I know I know it feels that way for sure. But I am consistently surprised to find to hear about some artist. And I'm like, they played two nights at Madison Square Garden. They played the Hollywood Bowl. It's like, you know, but the thing is, because we have stripped away that record store part, there's no longer MTV and radio doesn't exist in the same way. and everything is, you don't see sort of the outsized part of it that leads you to believe, well, of course, when they tour, it's going to be a big deal. What has happened now in music is that the only way to make money is touring.

1:19:19So like, you know, a band like, you know, Geese or something. I remember a couple of months ago, I can't remember what the name of the band is now, but they had sold out of like four nights at the Bowery Ballroom in New York and they have no record. Yeah. Like there's already this following of it that's sort of, I think, built online or whatever. And so it is, it feel, it definitely feels like we have lost that. The idea of like, oh, you know, Blue Oyser Cult is playing, you know, in Anaheim or whatever. And it's a sold, you know, their tour is sold out. And even though Blue Oyser Cult at the time is maybe the 14th most popular hard rock band or whatever, they're still that big.

1:19:55That, it doesn't feel like that happens now. Now everything is like a mystery to anybody who's outside of the world. yeah like you know the thing you say about taylor swift is it is what i have found with my kids is that they love it if i have knowledge about what they're into but they dislike it if i have opinions like they like that i know like who chapel ron is and i know her backstory and i know her songs but if i was like in a way you know if i anytime i start actually giving an opinion about what I think about this. It's like that's when they start using it. The cringe now is the word they use.

1:20:33It's like they appreciate my ability to keep up and be informed about this. They do not appreciate any actual idea I have about it. Well, I think that's because knowledge signifies interest in something that they're interested in. Yes. And opinions implies judgment. And so they want the first part and not the last part. Even if the opinion is positive, they're like no no no no i i just want i just want you to recognize this is important to me i don't actually care what it means to you yes yeah totally no this is uh this has been awesome well i thought the book was fascinating and uh i always love reading everything you do so i'm i'm glad we got to chat again well i appreciate you having me on thanks so much for listening if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on itunes that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show.

1:21:28We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.