Bezos and the Celtics, Crown Jewel Franchise Rankings, Best Airplane Shows, Olympics Takeaways, and NFL Stadium Futures With Chuck Klosterman
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Chuck Klosterman, BS Podcast Hall of Famer. He hasn't been on in a while. We do a big little summer rehash of all the stuff we've been fascinated by over the summer. That's next. First, our friends from ProJet. All right, we're taping this on late Sunday morning Pacific time. Chuck Klosterman is here. We've been doing podcasts together for a long time.

I don't know. Late 2000s? 07? When do you think our first podcast was? I would have been right in the beginning. So whenever he started, you know? Yeah. And you like to...

So you like to kind of thinly know where the topics are, but then let me kind of move them all over the place. I prefer you to be in control. I like to cede control to you. But it's almost like ad lib. You're like a jazz musician. You're like, I'll just go on stage. I'll play whatever. Very much. I'm very much. I am completely extemporaneous. No preplanned ideas. Olympics, which you've been kind of...

hit or miss on over the years since I've known you. This last Olympics was a big hit and I watched way more of it than I thought I would. And I was at the point in my life where I just thought I was going to care about the basketball and the hundred yard dash and two or three things. And I ended up watching a ton of it. I know it was in France, so the time zones lined up better with America, but I was still really into it. So where were you on it and what was different about 2024?

Well, you know, this is probably the most I have watched the Olympics since 1988. Wow. And I did not have any intention to do so. Now, part of it, like you say, is the way it lined up time-wise. It was kind of perfect. You really cared, like, about track or whatever. I could watch during the day when the event was on. Or if you kind of missed everything, you could watch at night. But, you know, there was something else about these Olympics. Because a lot of people seem to be into these Olympics.

more so than I remember in a while. And I have like a small theory about why that is. I'm always nervous to say this or reluctant because a lot of times it's like I'm saying it's a theory about society when it's actually just describing my response. But I thought it was kind of disarming, almost charming, surprising to see people so happy about finishing second or third.

I, I, I'm starting to wonder if this is like one thing, like in America now we are so American sports, particularly we're so geared toward only the end. Like, you know, don't play in a bowl game unless it's part of the playoffs, you know, load management in basketball, the idea that sort of, if you go to the super bowl three years in a row and you lose every time you got to fire the coach or whatever, like,

We're really sort of myopic about this, just the end. And you watch the Olympics and I'd be watching track and it'd be a real close finish. And my natural inclination would be to think, oh, that guy's going to be devastated. And then he would be ecstatic that he got the silver or the bronze. I think a lot of people maybe were like, oh, it's interesting. These people actually seem to just be happy.

about doing pretty well as opposed to the top. And maybe we've really become, like, it made me think maybe we've become more distanced from that idea than I realized. That we're so now interested in only the final winner that we've lost sort of the grasp that, you know, that's not really how it's supposed to be. And when you watch the Olympics, you see these people very happy to take third sometimes. I thought that was really nice.

So you're saying we went from trophy culture to first place culture. And now we're back to, you know, what's really fun is competing and potentially just winning one of the three. Cause we were having the same conversations in my house. We were arguing about, you know, if you win the silver or the bronze, it doesn't really matter at that point. You either win the gold or you meddled. Yes. But if like your buddy came home and he's like, I won the silver or I won the bronze.

You'd be like, wow, that's so cool. You got a medal. And I, I don't know. It's it just, you could feel, I always felt bad for the fourth place people, especially in those races where the guy would get past. It was like, oh, he didn't get anything. And those are the worst ones. There's a pretty big drop off between the gold and the silver, I guess, you know, it's like, there's a big difference in terms of how your life changes if you win the gold as opposed to getting silver. But

It was just sort of surprising to me to sort of realize, or like when I saw like,

The guys from Serbia, after they got the bronze and like Joker seemed happier getting the bronze than he did winning the NBA title. Now, there's going to be a lot of reasons for this. My growing theory is that he actually hates living in America. Like I think he just thinks America is crazy. I think he thinks the way we treat sports is crazy and he just kind of can't get over it, but he has to do it because it's the top league. But that was about as happy as I've ever seen him be, I thought, on that bus when he was like celebrating.

I'm so glad you brought that up. I've had multiple conversations about this with people and that seems to be the prevailing theory that he's basically on a work visa playing in the NBA. Doesn't really love the league that much, but loves playing basketball. But, but,

It's really like as soon as he can make enough money and get out of here, he's probably gone. I think that's a real fear with Denver is that he might just be out of the NBA at like age 34, like at some crazy age that we don't see anymore. I noticed the same thing, though. He was so ecstatic on the bus and they're partying for two straight days. I was there when he beat the Lakers to make the finals and he couldn't have gotten off the court fast enough. And same thing for the finals. It was like, okay, I'll take my finals MVP, thanks. There's something...

with the country piece of that, especially with Serbia, with all the stuff that country's gone through and all the wars. And it just felt like it was so meaningful for those guys to medal and how close they came to beating America. It was probably the most profound basketball experience of his life. I can't even blame him on it. Oh, there's nothing to blame. I think it's just a legitimate reaction. Oh, you know, it'd be interesting. Like, what if you had like the job you have now, you, what if for whatever reason you had to do that in Spain?

Like every year you had to go to Spain seven months, you know, like I wonder if you would eventually become someone who identifies as someone living there or if would always be, this is where I have to be to do this job. And as soon as I'm done with it for this period, I can go back to the U S I think I would probably be in the second category when I lived in Germany for like four months and it was, I guess a good experience, but every day I wanted to go home. Well, the closest I probably came to that was when I covered the Olympics in 2012 and

And everything about, you know, the writing process, you get used to your routines. And then everything about being in every single thing is different, even like the coffee. And it was like kind of cool. It was like, it was definitely energizing. But after two and a half weeks, you kind of want to go back to the routine. But even two and a half weeks is a short time compared to, you know. I couldn't imagine I've been doing like seven,

eight months, something like that. It did make me think though, and I really love Olympic basketball and I've probably been on the highest end of like being the most excited about it over the years. And I wrote a bunch of pieces about it way back when. And I really love the connections these guys build over the years.

And the fact that Jokic has been playing with Bogdanovich for I don't know how long. And I probably overrate the impact of that stuff, but I always wonder why these teams don't want to, the NBA teams, why they don't want to put these guys on the same team. Because it feels like a completely different connection. Anyone who's actually really played basketball seriously or played all the time, when you play with somebody over and over again, you develop this shorthand connection.

It's almost like doing like podcasts or like playing music with them or something like you, you really understand everything they're doing. And I always wondered why the NBA didn't take advantage of that and really try to put these dudes together.

Are you saying the NBA or specific teams trying to win? Because I thought it was very interesting. The thing Schroeder said, did you see this conference after Germany? I think, I don't know if they got beat or something or eliminated, um, said like, okay, I'm gonna be careful how I say this, but like Olympic basketball is real basketball. It's not entertainment. And that like what he basically, what he was saying sort of is that the basketball that's being played in this tournament, um, is, uh,

maybe more distant from NBA basketball than like we're willing to sort of admit. And I think if you're trying to put a team together, it would be very difficult for me to not almost exclusively draft foreign players now. I don't know why. It just seems to be like that if the idea is to build the best basketball team, unless it's such an obvious talent that you cannot get around it, I don't know why anybody would not sort of

you know, move forward European players because it's, it's just, it's, you, you, you watch these teams in some respects, didn't you feel like the outcome, even though the Americans won the goal, that this is sort of a foreboding sign for American basketball. Yeah. We, we went through this from Oh two to Oh six. That was the first real reckoning. Right. I, it's funny. I went back and I watched, um, I watched the Puerto Rico game when, when, um, when,

I forget what year that was, but they beat them, I think, in Puerto Rico beat us, Greece beat us. There was a Puerto Rico year with Carlos Arroyo. That was our first professional interaction was writing back and forth about those Olympics, I think. I don't think it was a podcast yet. But the Greece one is incredible because you go back

That 06 US team, Dwayne Wade coming off winning the NBA title when it felt like he kind of was the alpha dog of the league or was developing in that. You had LeBron who was second in MVP that year. Carmelo was on that team. It was a really good team of guys at decent points of their career and they got beat by Greece. And Greece had nobody. I mean, remember they had like that guy Baby Shaq

It's hard for me to remember. If you watch it, you would remember one guy on the team and I'm watching it and the way we were playing offense and you just see it right away. You're like, wow, I can't believe we thought this was going to work. It was basically like guys pounding the ball and then just kind of trying to attack. And the guy who actually was best suited was Kirk Heinrich for some reason on the US team. And he made, so I think by that loss, that was when they realized,

We got to start emulating some of this stuff. But then that stuff trickled in the NBA and the slashing kick is, I think, a decent part of the game now. But what's different about international versus NBA is, and you could see it with Embiid, with LeBron, some of the guys who are just used to kind of colliding into somebody and flailing and getting a call, you just don't get them. And I think that's what Schroeder meant. There's...

You kind of have to earn the fouls in this version of basketball. And there's no star system. And there's no like, I'm going to put my head down and go to the basket and I'll get a call. And it made me mad that the NBA does it that way. As I was watching, I was like, why do we do it this way? Nobody likes it. See, what I thought he was talking about more was that

Unlike American pro basketball, it was like every possession matters in these games. He kept mentioning that it was more of a, it was coaching. It was more coaching, which I don't know if that was, was that in some way an attempt to undermine Kerr? I don't know. I mean, Kerr's perception, you know, the reputation of Kerr in the Olympics I found kind of interesting. Like I don't,

It does seem like everyone sort of agrees he should probably be the coach. He's earned it. There should be a lot of criticism of him during the tournament. And then he said something very true at the end. It's like they're in a very strange position where it's like,

anything but winning the gold is a failure. And not only do they have to win the gold, they have to be undefeated. If they lose a game in pool play and then win the gold, it's kind of like, well, they came back to do it. I mean, there's nobody, there's no, I don't know if there's any other situation like that that happens every time the Olympics are on. That One Nation is, it's a high-profile sport that they're assumed to win. And anything but complete success is just, it's like, we've got to blow the whole thing up. And it happens.

That would be a hard job. I was wondering what's more pressure. And LeBron's been in every basketball scenario at this point. But right, the two worst forms of basketball pressure, and they can come in FIBA or they can come in the NBA playoffs, is I thought we were going to win this, and now things are kind of falling apart. Right? So they had that. The 2011 finals is a really good example of that, where they're about to take a 2-0 lead against Dallas.

And then Dirk stages the big comeback and all of a sudden Miami slowly unravels over the course of the next week and a half. And you can feel it. And you could feel it again in the 2013 finals against San Antonio right before the Ray Allen shot where it just was unraveling. You could feel it in 2016, the flip side with Golden State against Cleveland when they had the 3-1 lead. And then that game seven and you watch Golden State, they're just so bad. They're missing everything. So there's that pressure of like, oh shit, we might blow the title.

But this gold medal pressure the U.S. had was in a way more pressure because if you lose this, you're like, oh my God, we just put together. Like if they had lost the Serbia game with 12 of the best 13 players in the game, that's one of the worst basketball losses of all time. It's completely inexcusable. It would have been except that Serbia played great.

And it was like, yeah, I think someone, I think maybe it was Kirk, like compared it to like Georgetown Villanova or whatever. They were playing perfectly. Like, I think that there were probably a lot of people watching that who found themselves kind of rooting for Serbia in that situation. Because how could you, in a way it was very hard not to. I mean, it was just, it's like, it depends on like, you know, what do you care about more, America or basketball?

You know, and it's like the concept of America for a lot of people, I think, is a very sort of hard to deal with in a way. Like they're not sure how they're supposed to feel about it. They're often told you're supposed to feel bad about it. You know, whereas basketball is more of this kind of pure thing. So you're watching that game and you love basketball. It just it's it was, you know, it was fantastic.

I don't know. So, so let's say, cause if that guy hits that three, I think like it was a minute nine left guy from Serbia. There would have, they would have went up five if he makes that right. Okay. And then Serbia would have won. So let's say that happens, you know, like,

I don't think that the feeling would be so much LeBron has failed us, Curry has failed us. I think it would be more, well, this proves Joker's the best player in the world. There's no question about it. I feel like it wouldn't have been so much on America as it would have been sort of an adoration of Serbia.

And I think if Greece had won – no, Greece. If France had won in the title game, I think it would be – I think the emphasis would have been on Mbamadiana and the idea that this is like – that his presence has already changed this. This is going – the future is now or whatever. I don't think that like people hold Olympic failures against these basketball guys the same way that they hold NBA title failures against them.

I think they would have, I think people would have been really mad at how the team was set up and how it was built around three older players. That would have been the legacy if they had lost the survey again. It was like, well, this is, you decided to steer this team around Curry and Durant and LeBron.

And this is what happened. You decided to basically make this like an Olympic swan song for all these dudes. And we just lost the gold medal. Why do we do it that way? But if you don't put them on the team and they lose, then the most pro high profile guys, the guys people are most familiar with aren't there, aren't playing. And then people would question that. I mean, if the women's team would have lost in the title, there would be all this Caitlin Clark discussion. It would be, they almost did. They almost did, you know? And that was like, uh, I think that would have been, um,

a real troubling week of discourse if they would have lost, you know, it would have not troubling to me, but like troubling to Clark. Like it would have been like somehow she would have been somehow been pulled into again, the situation that she's not really saying anything about, but everybody else is talking about. And that's a strange deal. Yeah.

We seem to do this all the time where we do these teams and I think they know the right way to do it, but there's so many egos and relationships that they end up just putting the 12 best or 11 of the 12 best, however they do it. And what they really should do is just pick the nine best.

And then two people that are totally fine being able to play if somebody got hurt. And then you put like a 12 person who's basically the late in their dream team spot. It's like, you're just here. You're not playing. Or let's say, let's say at some point the U S is going to lose in basketball again. Every time, you know, we've sort of got this mentality that we cannot lose this. Right. So when, you know, they, they lost an 88, it's like, now we've got to go to the pros. And I think if they, you know, and when they lost the Latin in 2000 and like,

with four or six. I can't, I keep getting the year off. Well, 020406, they lost all three. Yeah. Oh, six. Yeah. Um, um, then it was sort of like, well, we got to get your chef skin and sort of kind of revamp the whole thing. I suppose if they lost again, there would be some talk of like, well, the Celtics won the title.

they should be the team that represents us in the Olympics. They can add like one or two guys. It kind of is like how Babe Ruth baseball works. Yeah. Like, you know, if a Babe Ruth baseball team advances, they can take the best guy that they beat in the playoffs and like that. Like that's maybe how it would be. Or if you're like the Nuggets and they do it and you're losing guys, well, you can just sub in dudes who you want. Basically have like,

an actual roster with that coach plus one or two extra guys, I think that could... I can see people wanting that if the U.S. would lose because like I say, there's just this idea that we cannot lose this. Well, that idea is about to go out the window because you look at the 28th situation. We're going to have a situation with the All-NBA teams at least in 2028. Half of the best guys in the world will be foreign at that point. And you're going to have this little bit of a transition. They're going to need...

somebody in that kind of Anthony Edwards age range to mature into somebody who could potentially be the alpha dog of the team. But, you know, by the time we get to 28, Wemby might be easily the best player in the league, in the, in the league and in the world. Right. Jokic will still be heard from. Giannis will still be around. There's probably more guys coming. Who knows what country Embiid will play for in four years, but there's, it's just, it's going to be way more problematic. The good news is it's in LA, but yeah,

I can't believe like when you think back, cause we're, why is that good news? What's the good news about it being in LA? Well, I think from a home court advantage, that'll, that's going to help us just like it helped France. Oh, I suppose. I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. There's going to be a lot of people, but it's funny to think cause we're around the same age.

how far ahead we were in 92, like how, how inconceivable it was that this moment would have ever happened. You know, it was just like, this is, here's a sport that we're going to own forever. Nobody's going to touch us on this. And now you go in 24 and they barely beat Serbia and they barely beat France with an all-star team. I'll tell you if the goal of that was to sort of globalize basketball, has any endeavor ever worked more successfully?

I mean, it's unbelievable how that 92 team, what that has led to in terms of how the world plays basketball and is interested in basketball.

I can't imagine anything that would... If the goal was just me to send guys to win the gold, I guess that's to see it. But if the goal was, this will be good for the sport kind of in a global perspective, it absolutely was in a way that I just... I don't even know what's close to it, what comes close to it. So do you think that's what's actually happened? Because I feel like that's one of those things that has...

The narrative of what happened has veered into a completely different narrative of what happened where they're like, David Stern,

He wanted to grow the game abroad and send his guys. Cause my memory of it was losing in 1988 was the most shocking, awful loss with that team that John Thompson put together. And at that point we were like, we're never losing this again. We're sending the pros next time. These guys, these other countries have 30 year olds and 35 year olds like, fuck this. We're sending our real guys next time. And I, I feel like all the other stuff that came out of it was like an unexpected bonus. Yeah.

You know, it was interesting, though. I was looking at the 1988 roster, you know, because at the time, I thought that he had done just this horrible thing.

a job. But, you know, now they did a pretty good job of the guys he picked. Like, I remember thinking it was like, oh, why they wouldn't take Rex Chapman, but they took Dan Marley. Well, Dan Marley was a better player. Like, just because I wasn't as familiar with him at the time. When I look at that team, it was, you know, and they had Robinson, so he should have been able to match the bonus in a way. And, you know, it was a... Somebody got hurt. I think one of the best guys got hurt. Maybe it was Danny Manning, but the big mistake he made was he

He had Bimbo Coles and Charles Smith as the point guards. And I think they let... Like, Steve Kerr wasn't on that team. I think he's still pissed about it. And Tim Hardaway was the big one. They just didn't have... They had below-average point guards when you watch international basketball now. It's like...

That's like the number one thing you need is somebody who can play slash and kick. It would have been fascinating if the Russians would have been at the 84 Olympics because that was an extremely good American team. But Sabonis would have really been at his absolute peak.

Right. You know, and that would have been very interesting because we kind of dominated everybody that year, but the teams that we really cared about weren't there. And, you know, I always wonder what would have happened that year because Jordan would have been involved. It's just hard to imagine Jordan losing in the Olympics. But that might just be mythology in my mind. Maybe anyone can lose to anyone. Yeah, it's so funny thinking because it's 40 years ago from that summer. And that was like the most patriotic summer we've all ever had.

You know, it was like the height of Reagan. Uh, I think, I don't remember if Rambo was that year or the year after, but that, that was like when the testosterone action heroes were coming, um, and was born in the USA with Bruce Springsteen and just,

From a culture standpoint, it felt like America was driving everything. And then we had this Olympics that the best country didn't show up in. And we just dominated everybody and crushed everybody. It was the birth of Jordan. It was all these things. And you think like, man, if Russia had been there,

That would have been unbelievable. It would. I think that was the year that Red Dawn came out, wasn't it? I'm not sure exactly. But you know, we skipped 80 and they were like, we're going to ruin your Olympics too. I mean, you know, it's like. That's a tough one. The skipping 80 is still, you know, that I hate skipping Olympics because you think like these guys, they have basically one chance, maybe two, right?

Ideally, you're peaking for two Olympics, but most people are probably peaking for one. And to just take that and remove it from somebody's life. When the first Olympics are- It's a purely symbolic act too. It's not like any country is gonna be like, oh, well, boy, we invaded Afghanistan. I guess we're gonna pull out now because they didn't come to the Olympics. It's like, that's not how, it's something that I feel like world leaders feel what they have to do to make a point, but it really is using athletes as ponds then because they're not, there's no Olympics

involvement is going to change. You know, it's not as though like Hitler stopped because Jesse Owens was so impressive. He wasn't like, oh, I guess I was totally wrong about who's inferior. You know, it doesn't happen. Yeah, that's exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's too bad. Cause I was telling somebody about one of my kids was asking me actually what my first Olympics that I remember. And I was saying how it was 76.

which was, you know, Sugar Ray Leonard and Bruce Jenner and all this, Natty Comaneci, all the, and it was just, it was in Montreal and just everything was on and it was amazing. And then I was so fired up for 80 and then we just kind of no-showed it. But the Winter Olympics were, I think like five, six months before and they were so awesome. Yeah. Kind of carried us through the summer. But I thought the biggest reason it came back this year other than the time zone, some of the, some of the actual events were incredible. Yeah.

Like there's just like the 1500, like some of them were just like really fun to watch. I thought the, uh, the high jump, um, the woman's basketball over and over again, it just seemed like there was really dramatic stuff happening, but it was, I mean, that's the two biggest things are like either it's a credit to NBC, how it was presented, even though it didn't seem to be presented any differently, maybe they did a better job. And then it's the performances themselves, but yeah. Um,

I mean, even saying this, it's not like I was glued to my screen. I just watched it more because I usually don't really care at all. I love the Peacock on demand part of it was the part I wasn't fully prepared for because the Olympics had hit this point maybe 12 years ago.

When it was that, do we tape delay this and pretend nobody knows the results? Do we show this live? And they were in no man's land. I forget that there was one Olympics, maybe 2000 was the first one where they were really holding stuff, but the internet had rounded into shape enough that you kind of knew who won before you watched it. And everybody was so mad about it. And now they were just like, fuck it. We're just showing everything live. See it when you can see it. And if you can't see it, go to Peacock, queue it up. It's right there.

I thought it worked. I thought it was great. And I think generationally, I think people, I think it bothers them less. Like I, it was, it's still very hard for me to, to record a sporting event and watch it knowing that it's over, knowing that I could just find out who won it. But I think that because it might be because like, I'm still in a world where I sort of think television is,

is sort of dictated by the television. Like things are on when the television says it's on. Whereas younger people now assume things are on whenever I want to see it. So therefore the idea that something happened, it's like they control it anyway. It's like, I still feel like I've controlled my television. My television decides when I watch this. I don't think younger people feel that way. Yeah, I was telling my kids about the mid nineties with the Thursday night NBC, how important that schedule was.

And how kind of people all watched it. They just stood and they were like, they don't even know what channel things are on anymore. They just go to like the apps and they couldn't even conceive of like, oh, it's eight o'clock. We have to now sit in front of our TV and watch this thing. And I was like, it's kind of like how sports work now. You know, that's what I said to my son. It's like when UFC, the main event of UFC is on and you're watching it live. That's what it was like just to watch like an episode of Friends. But he couldn't conceive of it.

Well, I suppose you, I mean, they might be able to conceive of it in a way, I guess if they just, they just think it's crazy. I mean, cause certainly if the way things are now would have been described to us, then we would have said, I want that. Like if somebody would have said like, you can watch whatever show you want, whatever you want, it's your choices. Nothing to do with that. Also, you can listen to any record you want anytime. You don't have to buy it. You don't have to look at just, there it is. All these things I would have been like, that's better. And yet in practice, it doesn't seem that way.

It actually seems like what has ended up happening is the value of these things, because there's, you know, scarcity is just gone. As you can just kind of have whatever you want, they feel less valuable. So it, like, it's, it's a strange thing. It's like, it, we got all the things that we wanted, you know, and it made things worse, you know, and how, and that's just like, it constantly happens. I was thinking about this, I was flying back.

from San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. When was the first time you rode an airplane? You took a flight. What year was it? Probably sometime in the mid seventies. I don't remember where we were. Okay. Cause the first time I took, I was on a flight was 1990. It's after my senior year in high school. Wow. And you know, I'm, I was thinking though about the experience of going to the airport and

Getting on your plane, doing all those things. We start these things before these, not way before the internet, it's before even the idea for you, before of like network computing, right? It's like everything was, you know, how different is the experience from then till now? Is it more similar than it should be?

It seems like it hasn't changed that much in a lot of ways, considering the insane technological advances we made. Like it doesn't seem to have made flying and going to the airport, doing this. In fact, in some ways it seems slightly harder now. And that's very strange when you think about it. Like every possible thing should have improved. Remember how easy it was to get on planes? Yes, absolutely. But, you know, but it shouldn't even like...

It's not just the 9-11 stuff. It seems like the whole thing, like we still go to the airport at roughly the same time we used to to get to a flight. You know, it's like the process of going through everything isn't that different. If things go wrong, they kind of go wrong in the same way they always did. Does this seem as though this technology should have improved flying more than it has? This is a great segue to our next segment, but we have to take a break.

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So you mentioned being upset that flying wasn't better after all these years. Not really upset, more or less just kind of surprised. But you think that it should be an easier process because every aspect of the technology has advanced, you know, by many, many times, you know, and we understand things better. Communication is improved. It doesn't seem that different, though. The experience for the actual consumer seems pretty much the same.

I had a segment called things I thought we'd be better at by 2024. Okay. I'm going to say the flying is better. And I have a very recent example of this. My son and I flew back from Boston last night and we timed the flight because we're on JetBlue and there's wifi. We timed the flight hoping to see the UFC 305, the latest pay-per-view, right? So we were on like a nine o'clock flight back and the thing came on at 10. We were able to get

the fight on wireless, but I also had direct TV on the, on the seat. And I was able to watch ESPN's boxing thing. And I was watching boxing on the, on

on the whatever seat. And then the UFC on my iPad, I was watching my son at the same time. And I was like, this is great. We've done guys like this is, I'd be doing this at home. But then on the other hand, you know, same thing where it's like delayed people brought too many bags and it was all the same stuff that would have happened in 1975. We had stopped because people had to check their bags. Um, so some of it's better. I think the app stuff is better with flying.

Um, but I think the wifi is the biggest thing. Like think how boring planes were. It felt like, Oh, I forgot a book. I'm just going to have to sit here and stare at the seat for six hours. I'm going to read this airplane magazine. Now we have phones and things to do. Right. But part of it has to do with expectation, right?

Because now I can kind of expect when I get onto a flight that I'm going to be able to watch live television or whatever. You walk onto a flight, you see the seats don't have the little TV screen. You're like, ah, you know, it's like my expectation now is that I should be able to watch television when I fly. I think when I flew in 1990, I had the expectation as well.

I need to find a, I need to bring a book to read and I'll, and I'll, no one will interrupt me or whatever. Although I guess when I wasn't at the time worried about that, that's something you worry about later in life that people are going to interrupt you. But I think the expectation was not based around how entertaining the flight would be.

And I'll go sort of by adding, by adding that aspect, I think it has only like, it is, you're totally right. There's nothing. It's great. If you're on a flight, oh, and it turns out like it's a four hour flight and it happens to exactly coincide with like a college football game or something. That's perfect. Right. It's like you're, you get to really, really watch it. The time almost seems to disappear. All that. That's true.

But it is odd to me that that's what now I think of like what a perfect flight is as opposed to efficiently getting somewhere else.

You know, I actually I almost look at flying on an airplane now as something that's supposed to be fun. I think that, you know, so I think that expectation is probably fed into why the process does not seem like it's for some reason. I just feel like it should be it should be more efficient to get from place to place than it was in 1998. Doesn't really seem like that is the case. That's the principal reason I'm on this plane.

Well, the airport traffic situation seems like it's gotten way worse, not better. You would think like there would be less cars, better infrastructure, easier way to get in and out. It's like never been worse in every single city. It's a disaster. Well, because I think what has happened is that there probably are things about air travel that have dramatically improved, but they've immediately compensated by adding more passengers. Yes.

It's like they've added more flights. It's like instead of having the efficiency sort of work to make the experience better, it's just been a way to like, how can we sort of pull every last dollar out of this? And as a consequence of flight, it seems worse now. And you see these situations where people are stuck in places for six and eight days, which I think used to happen in the past. Yeah, that's crazy. But for some reason, it seems like it shouldn't be happening now. What are some other things you think that we should have been better at that we are?

or not. I have one last fine thing and then I'll get to that. It struck me last night. I think Seinfeld is the greatest airplane show of all time. And Law and Order is probably second. And I think it's like a Jordan LeBron thing. Because Seinfeld, basically, even if it's commercials, it's like 28 minutes. So, you know, it's like, oh, I have 43 minutes left on my flight and you're flicking whatever. Or maybe they're on demand. It's like, oh, I can get a Seinfeld and then we'll land.

But I think Law & Order would be the other one because you just kind of go into this Law & Order world for 45 minutes. But like with Seinfeld, we've all seen all of them. They're kind of fun to rewatch, but you don't really have to pay attention and they just work. Law & Order, same thing. It's like, I don't remember if I've seen this one. I'll watch it anyway. It's like, you don't want to be challenged too much mentally.

but you need enough to kind of keep you a little focused. And I think those are the two goats. What do you have? Well, I like to watch Veep on the airplane. Veep's a good one. Yeah. Well, because I just, I, you know, I was, I, I ended up rewatching seasons five, six, and seven, the last three seasons. Yeah. And,

I guess I have sort of now come to the conclusion that purely for the writing, I think that's the best written show that there's ever been. Wow. Well, for the amount of really...

high quality jokes, like real high quality. Well, a thing that in a lot of shows would be the best joke in the entire program and happens so often and has miraculously not aged that much. The stuff that was in these last three seasons seem more pertinent to what's going on now than I would have ever possibly imagined. Every character is good. The acting is always good. Plus it was sort of the last period where people could talk like that on television. And it's so it's like,

It's kind of crazy to hear some of this stuff sometimes. But at the same time, because you have an understanding of where it's coming from, it never seems uncomfortable. It actually seems pretty insightful, really pressing. A lot of the stuff that they talk about seems very much

I almost wish I could get back to when I watched it originally and like, where did I think of that then? Because the way, you know, a lot of things I think about now. The Law and Order thing. Curb is up there too, I think, for that. That would be good. Curb, same thing. It's like 25, 27 minutes. You're in and out. Fun to watch. You might be able to watch eight. You could watch two, whatever. What were you going to say about Law and Order? I find its collective reputation mind-blowing, sort of. That show is so beloved.

And so often noted by people as like the most addictive, satisfying thing. I mean, I've watched it, I guess I understand why it's a procedural that really, really goes to the procedure. Like they're, they're really, but I'm surprised still how often people will mention it as like, oh, they were in some situation, they had mononucleosis or whatever. And it's like, oh, I watched Law and Order nonstop. It was perfect. I, I, it's like,

It's like the highest approval rating of something that's actual substance seems to be kind of workmanlike, you know? No, I'm with you. I was never a huge law and order guy, but yeah, you're right. But it's just serviceable to the most amount of people.

I'm not saying it's bad in any way. Like it's, I'm not saying it's a bad show. It's just, it's people use, it's almost as like, it's like the go-to example people use when they're trying to describe television that's like the experience of watching it is more satisfying and more comforting than anything else. I just, I find it very interesting that that has happened because I would, I, and, and, and every kind of stratus of,

of society. Like, it's not something that like, well, it's not like a working class show, but working class people like it. People who are snobs about everything will still like that show. It's very interesting. I've been, it's been funny watching my daughter hit the cycles of like just getting addicted to different shows that you and I have always known about. Like right now she's watching

This is us. And she's in like season five and she thinks it's incredible. She'd never watched it. She banged out sex in the city like five, six months ago. And it's just funny, like these shows that hit in whatever way, when they happen, which ones end up having a tail and which ones don't. And then which ones resonate with this younger generation and other ones don't like, I have no idea. Like, is my daughter going to watch the Sopranos? Probably not.

But like Sex and the City and This Is Us made total sense, you know? And I wonder as the years pass, like you mentioned Veep, Curb, like which kind of those Mad Men, those type of shows, which ones will have a tail and then which ones will disappear? Because you think about the shows when we were growing up or we were in college, there were shows that were massive shows that just kind of disappeared. Like

LA Law felt like it was the best drama for three years. And I haven't heard anybody mention like 20 years, but it felt like it was the most important show. We've talked about REM was like this too. I think REM felt like they might've been the biggest band in the world for like four years. And I don't know if they have the tail that some of the other bands that hit that level is now. And I don't really understand why. Well, yeah.

I think what it might be is this, okay? It's like, okay, like look back, think back to your friends you had at college, right? Like if a person's at college, like your daughter's at college now, right? So, you know, you have this huge kind of net of friends, you know? And when you're 20 or 21 or 22, you think to yourself, well, which of these friends am I going to know the rest of my life? Who's going to stay in my life? And what I have found is

in my life is that I am quite surprised by the ones who have remained in my life and the ones who have not. And that in some ways, what I recognize is a lot of people I was friends with because of what we were doing at the time. Like we were partying together at the time and that there were people who I had a different kind of relationship with that didn't seem as interesting at the time or as deep at the time. But it turns out that those things are things that kind of go on forever. It might be the same with these TV shows to a degree that like,

that some of these, especially at these prestige shows, like for instance, like, you know, Breaking Bad. I feel like Breaking Bad is going to kind of disappear from people's memory. Even though at the time that seemed like of the four kind of prestige show I even wrote about this, I kind of thought maybe it was the best of those four shows for all these different reasons, all these kind of moral reasons, all these things. But,

maybe what was happening is that show had to be happening then. But whatever was going on culturally and the kind of things we were thinking about, it was sort of tied to that program. And if you were around when that program was happening, it had a lot more meaning. And then some shows, maybe because they don't have any of that, they're not really tied to anything. They're not attempting to sort of comment on what's going on in the world right now. You can kind of cut and paste them anywhere.

there was a time when I was in high school and I was really into Barney Miller. I was watching, I used to love watching Barney Miller, which was a show that had kind of been from the past or whatever. And I wonder if part of the reason I liked about it was that it had a, there was a timeless nature to it. Like it didn't seem tied to anything going on in the world ever, you know? So these shows that you're like, you're talking about with your daughter, it might be the shows that in some ways are, we would classify as like a little less sophisticated, but they're,

They have a longer tail because you don't need to know what's going on in reality to understand what's happening in this fake world. Maybe. I don't know. Well, Grey's Anatomy is another show like that that I think has a long tail. I think it comes down to like...

One word things that always work, right? Family, like sad family or complicated family that always works. Hospitals always works. Police stations, procedurals. There's just certain things that work. Cheers is an interesting one to me because I do think that was the most important half hour show of the eighties. I don't even think it's debatable. And

I don't know what kind of legacy it has now because when you watch it, it feels like it came out a million years ago, right? You just, you look at the outfits, you're like, wow, that show seems super old, you know? So it like, so it has a shelf life almost from the look of the show to

But if you watch the first few seasons, that show is still, you know, it's way, way, way up there all the time. Well, I think watching Cheers now, it almost feels like I'm at a play. Like I'm watching a play. Right. Because the set is very static. They rarely leave that. They sometimes go in the back room. They sometimes go somewhere else, but not much.

The writing is really good. Like the characters, sometimes it's real joke based. It's not so much plot based as much as it is like joke based. So I actually think that that is pretty, like it's still easy to watch that show, but I just don't watch it the way, I don't think of it the way I think of other television shows. It was to a degree serialized, but it didn't feel that way at the time. Oh yeah. Not as much as we expected. Cliffhangers and all kinds of stuff. All right. I got off track.

Things I thought we'd be better at it by 2024. I texted you about this. This is my number one. Solving old murder cases. I just thought by 2024, we would have been able to figure every single thing out that ever happened. Like the Zodiac killer, just, it's a wrap. We know who did it. I was, I watched, my daughter had never seen Zodiac and we watched it a couple of weeks ago and it's an amazing movie and it's held up really nicely. And there's a lot of great actors in it and some good, that guys and,

And she didn't know the story. And then it ended. And she's like, wait, we're not going to find out who the murderer was. And I was like, yeah, that's why this movie is so fucking cool. And she's like, well, how haven't they solved it now? We have all this stuff. I'm like, I don't know. So I just thought we'd be better at that. That's what I'm going to lead with that.

Well, okay. First of all, I think we probably are a little better at that. That does happen now sometimes. I mean, I feel like it was Zodiac. They have a sense of who they believe that, you know, who did it or whatever. I hate saying this because it's so annoying when people say this, but some people would claim that our inability to do that is a manifestation of capitalism. They would say is that they would say that there is no financial motive.

to use this kind of technology to solve things from the past. And if there was some situation where it was like, you could become a billionaire by figuring out who the Zodiac killer is and by figuring out like all these things, then there were all of us, it would all of a sudden happen.

That one of the problems people would say with capitalism is that it completely amplifies the importance of things that have a financial reward. And if there's no reward, it just becomes something that's maddening. Like, why can't we do this? Because we should have the technology to almost recreate that world. But why create that world?

Like it's almost as though somebody like if someone wanted to really absolutely solve like an old serial killer case, it would almost have to be built in to a television series that's going to come out. That's going to show how this happens. Like nobody would just do it. I mean, like the only people who are still just doing it are the people who always did. The kind of person who's just like,

I'm very interested in this. I know they go on Reddit and they read about the thing. Maybe they do a little research themselves, but they don't have access to like, you know, the ability to take this DNA testing. You're like, they can't get fragments from the crime scene. It's like the Mary McNamara. Remember Mary McNamara solved that murder case and she just like, yes, beat through her whole life around it for years. And that, that's how it does.

I like your theory. I think you're right. But if there was some situation where, I don't know how this would happen, but someone would be like, we're going to give $10 million to anybody who solves these following crimes. That sounds like a Netflix idea. Netflix should do that. Well, they could. They're running out of documentaries. They might as well just be like, we now challenge somebody, 10 million bucks. All right, that's my first one. Boxing. So boxing has been just lawless,

and crazy and ridiculous the entire time we've been alive. There's like no oversight. It takes years to get people to fight. Promoters steal money from everybody. There's a million titles. Nobody can keep track. And it's kind of been at the point college football is at right now for like 50 years. And it's somehow still going. It's interesting. All this Saudi money that came in

has kind of fixed boxing a little bit and nobody wants to talk about it, but we have such, there's so much money at stake. And these guys are like, here's money. You two fight each other. And these two people that normally wouldn't fight are now like, all right, you're paying me how much. And now we have, we think the, the boxing matchups have just gotten way better over the last two, three years. And this is basically what's been happening with UFC for the past 20, where it's like, Hey,

You want to, you want to hold a belt. You want to get paid. You have to keep showing up. You have to fight people, blah, blah, blah. And it made me think like, it feels like we're getting closer to fixing boxing, but we're still really far away. And I don't, this goes back to how we need a sports hour and all this stuff, but I just wish we had a better, better feel for how to actually fix this. Cause now we're getting closer. Okay. This is kind of off topic, but it's interesting. You bring this up.

So what's something that we always hear about whenever we talk about the 1920s or the 1930s? What were the three biggest sports in America? Right. It was boxing, baseball and horse racing. Those are always the three we hear. Right. And, you know, I think certain things happened that that that changed these sports. And I think that there are cultural things. Right.

I think horse racing, I think the reason that disappeared is because we started moving into the 20th century and people no longer had any relationship to horses.

Which in the past they did. They may have already owned a car, but their father had a horse or their grandfather's horse. My dad was born in 1929. The greatest memories of his earliest life was this fucking horse. He shows pictures of his horse. Love this horse. Rode a horse into a bar once. These are stories that tell me about my dad. He's dead now.

But, you know, like horses were part of the world. They were like part of, you know, you talk to people who describe what it was like to live in Chicago during that period. They're like, it was the city of horses, horses everywhere. And then that disappeared. And I think as a consequence, the interest in horse racing changed. It only became something the gambler was interested in. The average person just liked Seabiscuit or whatever, just like horses, had no relationships.

boxing i think followed a somewhat similar trajectory in the sense that like okay remember in that you mentioned madman earlier there's an episode of madman where like they go to watch um uh like the like the like the listen ali fight in the theater like you know it was like you know that and like it's all these guys in suits business guys doing okay like people who um you know uh not uh

the upper echelon of society, all of these things, white collar guys were still interested in this. And I think that is because

That was still part of an era when it was not uncommon for men to have experienced fights, that they have gotten in fights in their life, that it wasn't a crazy thing to think that if you went out, you might have a fistfight or, you know, like most people now, particularly if they're in a if they're financially secure and go their whole life and have no relationship to fight it.

except seeing it you know other people doing it or whatever now there's things that are popular like you know mma and stuff like that but it doesn't have that that has taken on sort of a kind of a low brawl ball like a lowbrow appeal like you went in the in the 90s for example do you remember like hoist gracie and kent shamrock and those guys yeah when they were fighting the octagon hoist gracie was this brazilian street fighter and his whole family were these great street fighters and

You know, you'd watch those things. There would always be like, there's only four states we can do this in. They're always having to move the event or whatever. It was seen as sort of like a, it was almost like, it was like a pornographic nature to it or whatever. Now it's not that way anymore. It has become something that like you watch with your son or whatever, but it doesn't have, I feel like the,

The like the the like the the umbrella of society, the way boxing, whereas people just watch boxing on Friday nights for a long time and they could relate to it. Like, I mean, it's a weird thing to say they can relate to it. I'm talking about people born before me. What the fuck do I know I'm talking about? You know, I could be totally wrong on this, but I do think that maybe our lack of relationship to horses.

And our lack of relationship to fighting made both of those sports kind of become these fringe things that only really appealed to the degenerates kind of. And that's sort of what those sports kind of are now in a way. Not that everybody who likes them is a degenerate, but it sort of took on this idea that it's like, it's for people wagering money. It's for people, you know, these like, especially boxing, like boxing is a ripoff sometimes for the consumer. Like,

Like you pay all this money for like a bout. And like, like, I like, I remember when Tyson came back and like fought McNeely or something in a few seconds or whatever. And it costs all this money to get the paper. Like that would happen. Like you almost expected it. I don't know. And then baseball. So, so baseball was, was able to come out of that and exist. But now baseball has sort of had a different kind of experience where it has faded a bit, but that happened. I think because every little kid used to play little league baseball. And now it's kind of understood to be a bad sport for your kid to play.

You know, it's like he stands around a lot. If he strikes out, everyone's going to see. Oh my God. I was so happy when my son stopped playing baseball. It was great. It was like, wow. I've heard that from so many, I've heard that from so many people, you know? And like my kid doesn't play baseball. And in some ways it would be like, I would hate if today I had to go out and watch, you know, but in some ways I wish he would too. Like, it's like for just because it was like, I did,

I don't know. It seemed like that was just, that was the sport you start or whatever. Wait, hold on. So your theory is that society pushes the love of these sports one way or the other based on the actual behavior of the people watching. So now that more, like gambling is becoming more and more kind of common. Yes.

That's really good for UFC and boxing because those are probably the most fun sports to bet on other than basketball. I mean, I'm sorry, other than football. But like, it's not good for horse racing. It always, you can always bet on horses. Like that's not going to change that at all. But horse racing, I've never, as you know, I love gambling.

I've never bet on horses. It just, to me, it just seems like a giant crapshoot. And the people who actually understand how to bet on it are people that are like, they're studying all the horses and they go to the track. And I was just like, I'm out. But you feel like you're doing that for football. Yeah, but it's actually fun in football. Like the horses. If you like, but see, if you like, I guarantee you, if your dad, if your dad had grown up with horses,

You fucking love horses. You would talk about horses all the time on your podcast. Yeah, I'm trying to think what scenario that would be. So we'd probably live in like upstate New York.

Like near Saratoga? - Lexington, Kentucky. - Yeah, Kentucky. - Yes, yeah. - I'm just really into the Kentucky Derby. I'm like the world's-- - No, you're really into your backyard, which was up against a fence and you watched the thoroughbreds galloping about every morning and every dusk. And they would come over and you would touch them on the nose. - I've done a six hour secretariat documentary. - Yeah, yes.

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Can I ask you, I kind of somewhat, I feel like this could be a controversial thing, but I want to ask you this because, okay. Okay. So I watched that Pete Rose documentary, the one that was on HBO. Okay. Charlie Hustle, it's called, you know? Yeah. So, okay. I was thinking, okay, so Pete Rose is,

He was like, you know, he's just super competitive, right? Super competitive guy. Will do what it takes to succeed. And also kind of interested in statistics, his own statistics in a way.

way, you know, beloved by Cincinnati, by his hometown in a way that to this day, apparently, according to this documentary, you still see people wearing Pete Rose jerseys all over the place, you know, had this super intense relationship with his father and sort of saw his life

in a way like, you know, I'm doing this in a way to fulfill sort of the thing that my dad gave me, this potential he gave me. Love to gamble. Can't stop gambling. In any way, do you relate to Pete? I feel like he has a lot of qualities that are similar. I feel like all these things, like not all things, but a lot of ways, there's a lot of qualities that I would think you would say, like, I can understand that.

All those things I just said are all could also be said about you. Every one of them. Now, his gambling was like deranged though. Like he was managing the reds and betting on the game. Okay. Well, I've never known what your real gambling is. No one does. No one knows how much money you actually gamble. No one knows when you talk about this constant gambling, if you're gambling 50 bucks on these games or if you're losing thousands or winning thousands of dollars a week, no one knows.

How much do you gamble? Well, definitely not nearly as much as Pete Rose. No, I just bet on football and basketball and some Olympics, but that's what Michael Jordan said when he got in trouble. But Michael Jordan is a good example though. He's playing these $200,000 skins games against shady dudes in the early nineties. Like he loved gambling, loved it. Like to the point that he was willing to risk his whole career to continue to gamble on golf.

What is the most money you've ever won on one event? See, I'm a bad person for this because I don't have fun. If there's a lot of, I'm like this, like even playing blackjack at casinos. I don't, when the stakes get high, I get, I just get nervous. I don't enjoy it. So you've never won a thousand dollars in an event?

Oh, I've definitely won a thousand dollars in an event, but I've never won like that. The biggest bet I ever, the biggest bet I ever won was Sal and I bet on the Warriors to win the 2015 title. And they were 30 to one odds. And we did really well on that, but it wasn't, it wasn't like a hundred thousand dollars. Yeah. What did you put in?

I don't remember, but I remember like that was like the biggest call. These are personal questions. I realized even by asking them, you're not supposed to, these are things you have to ask people. But I, I was just, I, you don't really, I, I just, when I was watching this Pete Rose thing, you know, because I, you know, in some ways, no, but there's a, there's a whole other level though. But cause like the real ones, like if you listen to South pod, like some of his friends, they're betting on like,

Asian tennis tournaments and you know, they're betting on hot. I don't bet on any sport that I don't really follow. I just bet on basketball and football stuff. I think that actually probably is a key difference, you know, because if you're betting every week and you don't know, yeah, you don't know what, whatever it is. It's like, oh, it's, it's the freaking FedEx, whatever tournament in, in Tennessee. I'm betting on that. Like that's a whole other level. Yeah. You'd mentioned rewatching Seinfeld. There's that episode of Seinfeld where like,

He's betting with a guy from Texas on flights coming in at the airport. They're looking at the board of flights. I have a friend and I know if I was with her at an airport.

And I was like, Hey, so do you think that I know she'd be like, let's do it. Like, like, like she likes to gamble on literally anything. Like, you know, uh, I could just, if I was flipping a coin, I'd be like, you want to be, you want to do it. So I think that there's a huge difference. So you only gamble if you're already in, you know, so you don't gamble on college football at all. No, I like gambling on stuff where I feel like I have an educated opinion and that's it. Like either I really have a strong feeling or it's something that,

You know, like yesterday in UFC, I think I did one parlay cause I was in Boston and you could bet there. Um, but it was like, I bet on the, a knockout for the first one. And then ironically, I bet on Izzy to win in the main event and he got, he got choked out, but it wasn't like, I bet like a lot of money and I was just like, ah, it'll be fun to put a parlay in on this. There's a whole, there's like three other levels that you can go when, if you're betting on anything, if you're betting on stuff,

you know, like weird golf tournaments. You're betting like to me, the people that bet on baseball, I think that's like, you really have to follow that pretty hard to bet on baseball with the, the way the shifts and the pitching and,

I don't know. The odds aren't great. I don't get the betting on soccer. I don't even really understand how to bet on soccer because it has to end at 90 minutes. I'm like, I don't do that at all. Every match comes down to one goal or two goals. So it's like, it's always, um, like I'll do some series bets. Like I had the Panthers in a parlay with the Celtics to win the, uh, Stanley cup. That was fun. But I, I don't think I would have bet game to game on it.

So yeah, I'm pretty low. Like Pete Rose was like, Pete Rose was like a degenerate. Like Pete Rose would go when he had dead times, he would go to like the horse track and his friends were all degenerate gamblers and he was at a whole other level. Oh yeah. There's a, there's like a Rick Riley. I started interviewing one time about going into see like interview Pete Rose for something. So he walks in the Pete Rose,

his house and he has like three TVs up and like Pete Rose is just sitting there before this interview going like, Oh, the fucking Canucks. Oh geez. Now Dallas is like, you know, just like all he's doing. Although in your pool house, you have like the same kind of TV setup. So I have like Pete Rose. Yeah, but that's really, that, that helps me for the football and the basketball. That helps me for my job, you know, especially like the ability to be able to like watch,

One of the big things when we moved, we had the bigger TV and then the two TVs next to it. So I could put basketball on those other TVs. So I know what's going on, but we can also watch, you know, a movie or TV show or whatever. And I kind of have a general sense of what's happening, but it's more to keep up with the league. Cause I feel like it's just, there's so much sports on at all times. It's tough to keep track and keep up with everything. Okay. Which of these statements would you say you agree with more that a,

You understand Pete Rose's gambling addiction or B, Pete Rose's gambling addiction confusing to me. Don't get it. Like to gamble, but don't understand why you'd be that way. Yeah, I'm in the confusing camp with it. Interesting. Especially, but on the other hand, I do think there's a certain profile of these dudes that are like these ultra competitive dudes that they just can't shut it off. And I think Jordan fit that too.

To a degree. I think he wanted to compete at everything at all times. He couldn't shut the faucet off. I follow this gambling stuff pretty closely, but I don't gamble because it's like, I've done a lot of things in my life that are addictive and didn't seem to be fine. I was able to handle it. No problem. But gambling, I always wondered because especially now that it's all on phones,

Like if the imaginary nature of money would sort of lead me down to a path of destruction. Cause like you're in Las Vegas and you're actually betting, you're going up and you're giving them money. And that's one thing. It's like, it's a difference between like credit cards and cash. When you're dealing in cash, somehow I understand it. But I, I, I feel like I would be nervous that I would, that, that I, it seems like there could be something that I could get into too much thoughtlessly and then be in too deep.

But I love looking at the lines. That's why, like, if you were like a college football guy, like, to me, there's nothing more interesting than trying to figure out if, like, is Ohio State going to beat Marshall by more than 39 and a half points? It's like, it's so crazy. It's like, how do you even? And there's, Vegas is so amazing at this. Like, if I could, I've told you this many times, if there's one story I could really do or one documentary or some question I could answer, it would be how do they manage to do this so well? How do they manage to do this so well?

How do they manage to get the lines correct on things that there's absolutely no context for it? Two teams that are completely different. One is an elite. One is nobody. They're playing for the first time. They say it's going to be 39 and a half. Inevitably, the game ends up either 41 or 47 point difference. It's just amazing. Yeah. And one of the things that's amazing off of what you just said is how they can completely miss it sometimes.

Like there was a whole, like when the first COVID season with the NFL, when there was no home field advantage because there were no crowds and the game started going over and they didn't, it took them like four weeks to adjust. And there were some smart people that just killed the books on that, right? There's some people like Raheem who hosts the Ringer Gambling Show for us. He thinks there's potentially going to be an inefficiency with the new kickoff returns that points might be up.

And he's been talking about that on the podcast that because the field position, there might like, there might be a touchdown or there might be somebody starting at 50. Whereas in the old days, which were last year, all the kickoffs are basically just kneel down. We start the ball at the 25. Now there's going to be more variance with it, which might be better for. How do you feel about the new kickoff rules aesthetically? So I've watched some preseason videos.

It's just weird. It's what it just doesn't seem right. So I don't know how many weeks it's going to take to get used to it, but it feels like there's going to be at least two months. Right. What'd you think? Well, my natural inclination is to always be against anything like this. Right. I'm just, I'm extremely conservative when it comes to any kind of changes in sports. Yeah. This one, I thought, well, I don't know. I'm going to try to stay open-minded about it.

It does seem actually like it's going to make the play a little more watchable. I really dislike the fact, though, that you cannot onside kick in a surprising way. I think that's really a bummer, sort of. Because it's just like, you know, not that it happened that often, but it's weird to sort of remove that completely.

And I don't know. We're going to have to see because I watched, I think it is the USFL now, right? The USFL again. It's changed identities. Yes. I can't remember if it was the XFL. But I think it was during the pandemic. I watched the championship game. It was a really good game. And it came down to a situation where a team had to go. Their onside kick was the 4-15 situation. Yeah. And that is...

I will say it does, to me, it feels easier than onside kicking by quite a bit. Fourth and 15 isn't far enough. To me, that has to be like fourth and 20 at least. Fourth and 15 is conceivable. You can get that. Fourth and 20 now becomes hard. The problem is the frequency in which they call pass interference.

That's the thing is that it seems possible to, to under throw guys on purpose in that situation. And then just see if you get the call. Maybe in that situation, a referee will be less willing to call pass interference. Also the goal for getting rid of the onsite kicks is allegedly safety. But if it's like a fourth and 20 play,

One of the plays is you're going to send the receiver over the middle and just get nailed by two safeties at the same time. Well, yeah, I, that guy's probably getting hurt. So I don't, I don't know how much you've solved the safety piece of it. Well, that has become this thing now where anytime you make any change for anything, as long as you say it's for safety,

you can do it. Like no one can, no one can push back. If you're doing it for like, you know, for caution or for safety, it's like, well, is it really safer? And it was like, we're doing it for safety. And it was like, okay, okay. We're not going to, you just can't, you can no longer be in a position where it seems like you're advocating for anything that, that would make anyone a fraction less safe than they were before. You're seeing it with soccer now. Cause they're, they're basically changing the, uh, the headers.

There's a lot of different states, I think, where you can't head the ball until I don't know what age, but like if you're 10, you're not doing headers and games. And so what happens when those kids become adults and they've never like done headers, you know? Wait, I have a couple more things that I thought would be better at by 2024. Just quickly, I thought we'd be better at recycling by now. It feels like we're getting worse. You read these stories about how like all these, it's like 2020,

I don't even know what the numbers are, but it just felt like

We had a really good plan for recycling and now it feels like there's more plastic bottles than ever. And I don't know what we're doing with that. Flying cars. Wasn't there this American life episode about how it turns out all the separation of recycling and garbage. It's terrible. Yeah. It's a disaster. They're just all throwing it again. We're all trying to like recycle aluminum cans, you know, aluminum, we gotta get these cans, you know, I mean, I might be wrong about this, but isn't like aluminum one of the most present,

on earth, like it's 6% of the earth's crust or something. It's like aluminum. I realize we don't want to have this garbage piling up or whatever, but I don't put a lot of thought into recycling. I'm not a big, I'm not a recycling buff. I mean, I do it. You got to do it, especially in Portland. Who knows what will happen if I don't, but it's like, I'm annoyed by it every time. And people hate when you say that. They're like, you should, that's terrible. But it's like, you know, it's not like littering. Recycling is something different. I thought we'd be better at it.

I talked about this with Derek a few weeks ago, but I thought we'd have some flying cars by now. And I'm disappointed by that. 2024, I thought we'd have it. Here's the big thing. I really want your take on this. I don't feel like we're good at football stadiums still in 2024.

We built all these new ones. I was on a text thread with people the other day, a couple of friends trying to figure out who's like the goat football stadium right now for pros. Cause there's college ones. There's great. Like there's iconic ones that you can't change, but we would also never build football stadiums like some of the iconic college ones. But for the pro ones, we were like, is Dallas the best football stadium? Is it so far the one in LA? Um,

And I think part of the reason we do football stadiums wrong is because we keep making the same mistakes with them, which is why I'm so interested by what they're doing in Tennessee. I don't know. Have you read about the new football stadium they're building? I have not. So the one they have now, I think is 70,000 seats. Maybe it's 69,000. The one they're building has 60. And the theory was...

all right, yeah, we could have built an 80,000 seat stadium, but that's 7,000 more cars. That's 20,000 more people coming in and out.

And a lot of times those are the worst seats in there. So you can create more demand, have a smaller stadium, 60,000 easier to get in and out and just better. But nobody, I don't know anybody who's like my, it's so much fun to go to my football stadium. Really? The only one I've been to where it kind of made sense was Indianapolis. Cause it was downtown.

But in general, like we, we had that era that we had in the, you know, the seventies and eighties, those big concrete stadiums they would make for baseball and football. Right. And then in the late nineties, they were like, we're going to do this better.

We've got better ideas for football stadiums. And that's where you have like the Pats Gillette Stadium and some of the ones they built in the early 2000s, culminating in the Giant Stadium one, which is I think like 2010 range, which is an incredible pain in the ass to get to, is way too big. You go there, if you're in the top floor, it takes you 20 minutes to get up there. And this is like a recent thing that they put real thought into. The San Francisco one, which I've been to, it's in the middle of...

kind of, it's an hour outside of San Francisco. It's in like where like all the tech companies are and it's like really hard to get to. It's hard to get out. It's a huge monolith and we're just not doing this well yet. And I can't believe in 2024 we haven't figured it out because it seems like Balmer figured out the basketball thing. I don't know if he figured out the traffic, but I actually think he figured out a new way to do a basketball stadium. That's going to be a thing. So the first one,

where somebody figured it out in some way, some sort of new motto is Jerry Jones in Dallas, right? But that was late 2000s. That was, you know, 16, 17 years ago. And I wonder, what is the ultimate football stadium look like for the future? I have kind of a semi-long answer to this. So I'm going to be as fast as I can. Okay. And I'm not sure how much I'm going to say about this because, so I'm writing a book right now. And this is what you're talking about is a part of it because, you know,

What I'm writing about is how the rise of football and its sort of incredible dominance in American society is due to many things. But the principal reason is its relationship to television. That the experience of watching football on television accidentally is the best television experience there is in terms of how the game is paced. You know, the stopping, these plays that stop, you know, people write these stories like, you know, football game, there's actually only 11 minutes of actual action. That's actually good.

It's like we get desensitized to nonstop movement. There's a way football works on television that has made it completely different than every other experience. And this is what this is like a big part of it. And now here's the other thing. So I think football is so interlocked with the television experience that we are always watching the game on television, even if we are there. And this is what I mean by this.

I mean, let's say you're sitting in the corner of the end zone for USC, UCLA. You're watching this game. You're in the corner of the end zone. Occasionally, there's going to be a play. Someone runs a fade to the back flag where you have the optimal seat, right? That's right in front of you. You're seeing something that no one else is seeing. But in every other situation, I believe...

unconsciously we are seeing what we were seeing from the seat where we are at and transposing it in our mind to the shot we see on television the shot from the press box at the 50 looking down not the most optimal shot the most optimal shot is the sky zone behind the quarterback but we don't think of football in that way we think of it as the way that we always see it so when you're in a football state you know hockey is a better sport live everyone understands that basketball

Depends on where you sit. You got to be close. Otherwise, it could be worse than TV. Baseball can be good just because of the weather and all these things. But there is no one in the world who says, I really want to see this football game. I better go do it.

Everyone knows if you actually want to see a football game, you watch it on television. There is no place you can sit in a football stadium that lets you see the game and comprehend the game the way the television experience does. So when you talk about making better football stadiums, here's the only purpose football stadiums provide, crowd noise ambience for television. It doesn't matter what the game looks like. The people are there to really see the game. They are an extension of the game. They are there particularly in college football.

to make it feel as though there's a degree of intensity and that there's this sort of, you're seeing this thing that like, like it's almost like a Roman Coliseum or whatever. But in terms of actually experiencing the game, it is completely meaningless because there are, there is no good seat at a football stadium. I mean, it's amazing to me, the head coach can't see what the fuck is going on. You need the offensive coordinator to be upstairs watching the game from above and looking at a monitor.

Like the guy who's running things, even like the quarterback, the guy on the field, he's in the game, does not see the game as clearly as I do on television.

That's an extremely unique situation. And it's the reason football is so successful. So when you're to answer your question, you're like, we haven't figured out a way to make a good football stadium. It can't be done. But you can't make a football stadium that's actually designed well for watching football. That's not the purpose of stadiums for that sport. Okay. Here's my zag on that. This is the only sport we have where colleges figured out a better version than the pros.

Because everyone would agree college stadiums are much better and much cooler than NFL stadiums in every aspect, where they're located, what it's like to go to them. Not the seating. The seating is often more comfortable in Brooklyn. But nobody cares about that in college because they're just going to be part of this big, loud throng and the whole day is an event. So you're not talking about the stadium. Now you're talking about the people there.

That's different, right? No, but some of it is about like 102,000 seat stadium only makes sense in college football. You wouldn't want to have that if you were like the Chiefs. Like, why would you want 102,000 people at a Chiefs game? But you would want it if you're, you know, Auburn.

Yeah, because I mean, but because, you know, you go to an Auburn game or whatever, like you might be sitting in the student section watching the game. You might need to watch it on your phone. Like you might not be able to really see what's going on. It's like you're going there for an experience that there's this event happening in the middle of the stadium. There's this essentially collective party happening all around it.

on these stands and you want to go to that party as well. But if you really want to see that game, if it's the iron goal and it's, it's so important to you to see Auburn beat Alabama or whatever, you would be better served to watch it on television. And, and it's, you know, it's, it makes you seem like, I think some people feel like, well, I'm a fan of this team. It's my obligation to go. And like, that's a, that's a different thing. That's like, that's like, you're, it's like going to like a political rally to hold a sign and jump up and down for four hours.

It doesn't really make you more engaged with politics. It's just that you want to be there. So I mean, this idea of, I don't think that football as a live experience can be done in a way that serves the principal purpose of watching the game. I just don't think it works. I don't think it's possible. Yeah, because I was trying to think if the crafts decided we want to actually build a football soccer stadium in Boston, downtown Boston, we make it smaller.

And I was trying to think like, could they build something that would be beloved to go to the same way like Fenway Park is? And I think it would have to be, you'd almost have to do like a 50,000 seat stadium. That would have to be a dome that would have to be souped out. And the football version of what bomber did. Cause the bomber thing, I can't wait, you know, the first games and I think two months,

Everything they're saying in principle makes total sense to me. Right. That's like, we have, they're going to have this whole wall behind, uh, behind the, the, the, one of the baskets. So in the, the, the theories in the second half, the words are shooting against this basket.

And instead of like the way arenas normally are, it's just this whole wall of fans who are just going to be trying to fuck with them and make noise. It's like, all right, that's pretty interesting. The way that they, the accessibility getting in and out of there and the way you can be able to buy food. Everything is like, you just walk into a thing, grab it and leave. And everything is designed to like, they want people to spend money and stay in their seat as much as possible. It's like, all right, that's really cool. None of it's going to matter if the team sucks.

Right. If Kawhi Leonard is on one leg and James Harden is 20 pounds overweight and they're the third worst team in the West, I'm not going to care how cool the stadium is. But in college football, it's like, oh, what are you doing Saturday? Oh man, I'm going to Auburn. I'm going to see an Auburn game. Like, whoa, you're going to Auburn. That's going to be amazing.

And I just don't know if there's a way to replicate that with pro sports. We've only really seen it with baseball. Like baseball parks are the only ones. And Lambeau. Weirdly, Lambeau is the other one. Yes. Yes. I mean, when you talk about like, you know, beloved stadiums or whatever, could they build a, you know, could the Craftsville, the football stadium is the loved to spend away park. I mean, possibly if it stood there for a hundred years. I mean, these things got to be old. Yeah.

Things become, you can't build something and have it be beloved. It will not, there's the word beloved and the word new do not really go together. You know, it's always like, well, what you love about this is sort of like,

You know, the stadium itself and then also like the memories you had there that you then injected in the stadium and get back out. This idea that somehow it's it's like part of, you know, your community in this way that defines your community. I mean, this actually kind of leads into the other thing you want to talk about to me, which is, I think, a very interesting question. Let's take a break.

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And I happen to have a bunch of information on this because this is a huge, huge topic right now in the circles of people that would want to buy a team. And there's a bunch of stuff going on. I don't care about being aggregated on this because I'm right. The league wants $6 billion for the team, for the Celtics. $6 billion. They don't own their arena. It's a crazy price, but they're probably going to get it. So there's that. They want the $6 billion because...

They want expansion teams in Seattle and Vegas. And then Mexico City is kind of looming as a third team, but they want to get $6 billion apiece for the two franchises for expansion, which would mean a check of $400 million to every NBA owner, all 30. So they're trying to establish a price with the Celtics team and the Celtics themselves, the Grosbeck family, because...

The dad of the majority owner, Wick, is driving the sale. And he's, there's no favorites. He's like 90, right? He's 90. He's a legend. He's going to 25 times what he paid for the team. And he just wants the highest price. He's not like, oh, these local guys, let's cut him. He doesn't care. He wants the biggest price he could possibly get. And in the last few days, there's been some, I think, legitimate buzz about Jeff Bezos buying the Celtics. And I think it's real. I think he's going to be one of the suitors.

Which got me thinking, why would Jeff Bezos, when he's looking at the Celtics, what is he seeing? What does he want? And I think the only way it makes sense, I mean, granted, he has a kajillion dollars, but it's one of the crown jewel franchises, right? That's why you get it. Like to him, it would be no different than if he bought this famous, gigantic $300 million yacht. But I think it's real that he's potentially in the mix for this. So my question to you is,

is how many crown jewel franchises are there? And then what are the rankings? Well, you know, cause when you texted me that you were like, is the number like less than 15? So I was thinking about it, you know? And my feeling on this is that the number is either very small or almost too big. That it's, it, that the number has to be very small because if you start moving beyond,

like, you know, the kind of these true sort of elite franchises, you then start being like, well, what about this? If you're going to include that team, you also got to include that team. And all of a sudden it balloons up. So I think there are four. Okay. I think there, I think it's, I think. So I had, I had five in my first tier. So I'll be interested to see which one you left out. Okay. So I think that the, the, the principal one is the Dallas Cowboys. I had the number one as well. Yeah. I think number two is the Yankees.

I had them number two. And I think that the two that I would say are sort of connected and ancillary to that are the Lakers and the Celtics. And they're sort of dependent on the existence of each. But the way I was thinking about this is a little different, I think, than you might be. I was wondering if maybe you would really skew toward the actual value, like the cash value in a way, like the worth of it. To me, these are things...

No, because you can't. The Broncos went for like $7 billion. Sure. And I wouldn't call them one of the all-time crown jewels. To me, that's more like situation, market. It's a team that's available. It's a famous name. But I wouldn't say they were like a top 10 crown jewel franchise. So who was your fifth one? So I had the same list you had. Cowboys, Yankees, Lakers, Celtics, like 3A, 3B. But then I had the Dodgers.

In there as well, because they would be close. Yeah. Okay. So for a few reasons, one is I think it's the second most famous baseball franchise. They still have some New York fans from when they're in Brooklyn, but then also the LAPs.

But really, I think the reason they moved in there was because of this Otani signing and having him and having the connection they have now in the Far East with how much money they make. That they're like really the, there's only two global baseball teams. So I think they kind of have to be in there. And then I think after that, I looked at it as like, yeah, you're right. You could have 25 teams in this list. But I was working backwards. I was like, who has to be on the list? And I started there.

if you put the Dodgers in, then suddenly it's like, well, what about the Knicks? I mean, New York is essentially a, you know, a real basketball town. They play in the most famous arena. You know, it's obviously is kind of like a, like a media drip mark, but this is kind of a media driven question, you know, in the sense that like, no, but so, but think about it this way. I think,

the city really matters if it's one of the biggest markets in America. I think the history of the franchise and how long they've been and how many generations of fans they have matters. I think you have to think about if somebody hears the name, whether they're here or whether they're in like Germany or New Zealand, feel like the Knicks, like, oh, I know the Knicks. Then you have to think like if they won the title, how like big and impactful and important would that be? So I had like for my next four games,

I had the 49ers, the New York football giants, the Golden State Warriors, and the Knicks as the next four for different reasons. Because I think the 49ers and the Giants are the next two big football teams and they have the history. They've won titles. They have generations of fans. They're in big cities. You don't put the Packers in that group or the Steelers? I had the Packers and Steelers right after.

This is what's complicated, though, when you start kind of opening the window just a little bit, then all of a sudden it seems like, well, how can you have them but not those? See, my thinking was this. The reason I picked those four franchises was this idea that if one of these teams collapsed and went bankrupt, it would suggest to me the league is collapsing and going bankrupt. Wow. That's a good way to think about it. That if that, you know, like, you know, I think

The Cowboys are a particularly interesting example to me. I mean, they're like, they're the top of this, you know, because, okay, so like the idea of America's team, that is something that everyone seems to disagree with and everyone accepts.

That anytime you discuss this, people give you reasons why Dallas is not America's team. And yet the conversation never disappears. And that's when you know something is really important. When the fact that people consistently try to explain to you why it isn't and it goes on for years. That decades pass and there are people still trying to say Dallas really isn't America's team. But of course, if that was really the case, you wouldn't constantly bring it up.

I think he bought the Cowboys, Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys for like $140 million. Now they're $9.2 billion. Football has become more popular since 1989, but not to the extent that that has appreciated value. It hasn't changed that much, which is troubling. It's troubling in a way. I do think that the ascending value of these franchises and the ascending value of salaries is incredible.

going to cause a real problem in about 20 to 30 years in a way that I think that the American sports landscape is going to completely be reinvented, maybe almost gone. But the reason I picked those four franchises, well, I do. I think it's a problem. I think it's going to be, because what's going to happen is I, at some point,

there is going to be an understanding or a collective realization by companies and corporations that advertising is not worth what we're putting into it. That the value we're getting from it is not worth this cost. And all of these leagues are dependent on the fact that they're the live events that people watch because that's the only place that people can see these commercials. They know that people will watch them because they can't fast forward if they're watching live.

I noticed this with Super Bowl ads. If you notice with the Super Bowl ads, it's like they're not as innovative. There was that period in the 80s and 90s where it was the big deal. It's like, oh, we have the 1984-based commercial and all these things. Now it's more like just actually having the slots.

just getting the slot. Use a commercial. It doesn't even seem that different from other commercials. Just put it into the timeframe because it's not worth putting all this money in. All we're trying to do is get people to notice it. And I do think over time, there's going to be a realization that that is not actually what sells things. Certainly not the cost advertising is going to have to go in order to pay for all these things. And I think there's going to be major work stoppages because I think what will happen is that the league will suddenly not have the money

to pay athletes what the salaries have escalated to. And it's not like the athletes are going to go like, I understand. I understand. They're going to be like, no way, pay me. And there's going to be these big stoppages and people are not going to mind the work stoppages as much as they have in the past. The idea of baseball disappearing for a summer or basketball disappearing for a winter is not going to impact people the way they did in the past. And that could be the end. But that's a way to stop the pandemic.

I mean, that baseball lockout in 81, that felt just like an absolute catastrophe. It did. We didn't have that much to do. It's like they removed one of the basics. I worry about what you just said the most with the NBA because they just have the least number of people per team

And the amount of money that's being poured into it and guys making 80, 85 million a year, plus whatever they make off the court. I just don't, it's this factor that I just don't know how it plays out. Well, I mean, it's totally fine. It might be fine. Revenue keeps coming in, but at some point I think it's going to stop. I don't, I, I, I, I suspect that the, there's going to be a complete sort of reevaluation of the value of advertising with

within the next 20 to 40 years. But getting back to what we were saying before, so the Cowboys, you know, it just, to me, it seems like if the Cowboys franchise was in trouble, this franchise who, you know, if the Cowboys go, if they start the year two and six, it's one of the main things people are talking about.

Like it's like they are part of the discussion regardless of how they're playing. They can play good, bad. If it's good, of course, people are talking about it. If they're playing bad, people are saying what's wrong. If they're average, people are like, do they need to blow it up? It's like, they're the only team that seems to be viewed as, as like everything is news. Literally everything that happens is news. Yeah. What you're describing. So basically, I mean, there's a bunch of different barriers we can do for this, but really the Cowboys and the Lakers are,

are the two most omnipresent franchises we have. And that you can tell by the ESPN and anyone, and I went through it too when I did TV for them. Anyone who does TV for ESPN knows, like, it doesn't matter if the Cowboys and Lakers are good or not, what season. It's like, we're still, it's here we go. Welcome to NBA today. The Lakers are 18 and 19.

Zach Lowe, what's going on with them? Can they still make the playoffs? That is a more important topic than what's going on with the Grizzlies. It just is. It is probably, except that if LeBron were not on the franchise and LeBron were to leave, I don't know if it keeps going. Where with Dallas, it doesn't seem to make a difference.

It's like Quincy Carter can be the quarterback and people are like, what's going on? Yeah. It's like, it's like the Lakers, the Lakers need LeBron to be there. And they had Colby before that. So, you know, and before that, they, it's like, they, they, they, they have been exceptionally good at always having, but they're always going to have somebody because they're the Lakers. People always are going to want to play with them. We'll see. I had my last, my last six teams. Cause I had 15 total Packers, Steelers, Cubs, Red Sox,

Chicago Bears, New York Rangers. I only had one hockey team. The baseball, it's weird to put the baseball in context because even you were, we were talking about the Pete Rose documentary and just Pete Rose in general and how important he was. And I texted you a couple weeks ago about how 1978, the World Series, which was the Dodgers and the Yankees, was 44.2 million viewers for that World Series. Last year was 9.8.

Now, that was the peak World Series ever. It was when people cared about baseball probably the most than the modern television. Well, not just that. The population of America, I think, what, was 190 million? And now it's 335 million. It's like it's, you know. So you look at that there were 195 million people and 48 million of them, you said, that's what was watching that game? 44.2. And now...

Um, last year it was 9.8 and you'd be like, well, there's more to do. Well, the Superbowl in 1978 was 79 million and now it's 125 million. So football has unquestionably gotten bigger and baseball is just at a completely different place. And the Pete Rose piece of it is interesting to me because when I was growing up, he felt like one of the biggest

stars in like sports, movies, TV. Like it felt like Pete Rose was one of like the 10 biggest stars in the world, you know? And I don't know if, I just don't know if a baseball player that would ever happen again. It would, it would basically have to be, I don't know a scenario. Cause right now Otani has a chance to have 50 homers and 50 steals, any pitches, which if I had said to you 20 years ago, there's this guy, it's going to come in. He's basically going to be Babe Ruth in 1918. Yeah.

You'd be like, well, that guy's going to be the biggest star in the world. And it's like, he's just not. Now you can say there's a bunch of other reasons for that, including the fact that people don't care about regular season baseball in the same way. But in 1978, that guy would have been a bigger deal. Oh, sure. But like you say, like you told me this 20 years ago, you know, actually, Bill, I think if we went back to our podcast 20 years ago, I feel we were talking about this.

Which piece? That baseball has sort of kind of faded. I mean, I feel like we've been talking about this for a long enough time now that we can almost sort of concede, well, it's happened, so we don't really need to... Because it seems like we keep sort of thinking about this idea. It's like, you know, baseball... It has been a long time. Yeah, like it's in the past almost. Well, you know, because 20 years ago, that's like when the Yankees and the Red Sox had all that... You know, it was exciting and stuff. People were watching those games. It felt like a big deal. We'd go to the bar and...

beyond stuff like that. But there was already a sense that somehow this had, it didn't seem as, it seemed as though people were still already then very clearly more interested in what was happening in football in October than what was happening in baseball in October, which I didn't think. Well, cause for this crown jewel conversation, I think if we did it 20 years ago, I think the Red Sox would have been in like the top five or six.

And now it's like, they barely made the cut. So yeah, I think it's somewhere between 15 and 20, but really it's four or five that are the big ones. I do think of like the 49ers went for sale. That would be a massive deal. The New York football giants, any of those are like, they get giant prices. What about the St. Louis Cardinals? I feel like that has a lot, like St. Louis is one of the few towns in America, I would say is absolutely a baseball town among major cities.

Um, it seems as though the identity that the whole kind of like, like St. Louis needs the Cardinals in a way that other places don't need their team with that. Does that factor into your consideration at all? I don't, I don't think it totally does because I just don't think the price would be nearly the same. Like if the Celtics go for 6 billion, that's territory that is really only NFL teams and that's it.

Yeah. I think the Warriors would go for more than that. The Lakers would obviously go for way more. The Knicks would go for more, but if you buy the Celtics, you're buying this famous franchise that has all this history and, you know, resonates in a certain way with the, with the city. And you could, you know, let's say you're Bezos. Cause I'm really trying to figure out like, if, if this is like really for real, he's going to be the owner of the Celtics. Like, what is that going to look like?

But how will it look differently? Explain to me how it will look differently. What will happen? I'm just speaking for him. Okay. What's the win for him to own? Because he kicked the tires with the Washington football team too, which is not, I don't think, as high in the crown jewel rankings. If you own the Celtics, you know, Boston's a pretty rabid sports city. You're going to have to spend money to take it seriously. So why would you do it? And then I was thinking...

Well, their arena, their lease is like eight, nine more years. Is the play for him some sort of Amazon stadium? Like we're already kind of seeing this with Balmer and some of these other, like these touchless stadiums where you just go in and grab things and walk out. Is the ultimate play for this to build some sort of state-of-the-art stadium that's never been done before for concerts and for basketball? And it's like the Amazon dome. Yeah.

And you put it like in downtown Boston and then that just becomes another thing he did. I mean, it's an interesting question. I mean, like I know you love the Rolling Stones, right? We talk about the Rolling Stones sometimes. Yeah. And a lot of times when the Rolling Stones come up in conversation, there is a fairly obvious question asked. It's like, why are they still doing this?

Like, what is the purpose of them to still tour? Why are their tickets still that expensive? Why are they trying, you know, and the idea initially, a lot of times people asking that question, they're just, they see it totally as a question of greed. Like, why is Mickey, why are Mickey so greedy? But they're still trying to like make all this money at the end of their life. I mean, Mick Jagger said he doesn't want to give his money to his kids. You know, so what's he doing? Well, I suppose it might have something to do with almost like a video game mentality.

Like it's just the number itself. It won't, there's nothing Mick Jagger can't buy now. There's nothing that's outside of his, you know, even, I would think even if he wanted, if he wanted to have political power or whatever, he would have achieved enough to do that. So with Bezos buying the Celtics, it's like, he's like, what, I mean, it's like, what else is he supposed to do with his money? I mean, once you have,

$70 billion or your value to $75 billion. And you're not even really spending that money. People are giving you that money to pay for something that you're not, you know, it's like, they're just using your wealth as sort of collateral. It's a completely fictional world. Well, I don't know if we can like, like you, you're kind of, I guess, expressing that you think that there'd be, he has like a motive for doing this. Like, no, I don't, I don't, I don't really know that. I have a thought on Jagger and then, then I can answer the Bezos thing.

I don't think it's about money for the Rolling Stones anymore. I think... Definitely not. It would make no sense at all. No, I think for... I think people like him and Springsteen, they kind of feel like this is what keeps them alive. And the moment they stop doing this, they're just going to drop dead. So they keep doing it because the energy they get from the concerts...

is what keeps them going. I don't, I don't, I don't think it's a financial thing at all. It feels like you give a speech in front of 150 people and you do a great job and they really laugh. It feels great. I can't imagine what that must feel like for them. There must also be though, sort of a weird kind of cognitive dissidence with him recognizing that what people are cheering and clapping for in a way has nothing to do with what he's doing that night. It sort of has to do with like,

his career, his life, what they think, what it means to be a Rolling Stone fan, what they think it means to be a fan in a public event. Although that in some ways that could be just as satisfying. Like maybe he feels- Well, think about like, let's say John Lennon never gets shot. Would the Beatles have had reunion concerts?

I think that there is a sense that they would have reunited at Live Aid. I think that there's a lot of people who believe that because of the cause of Live Aid, there would have been a real push from George to want to do it. And a lot of times when George wanted to do something like go to India, they did it, even though he was not, he was like the third most important guy. And yet they seem to kind of agree with a lot of his ideas sometimes on things we should do.

So I think that they probably would have reunited at Live Aid. And then... It's a fun thought process. Fun thought experiment. And the bands who did reunite at Live Aid, like Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and stuff, that did eventually lead them to reuniting. So if he had lived...

You know, that it probably does happen. I think, I think that there probably would have been a Beatles reunion because you know, it's like, you know, Paul sort of disappeared in the eighties, like, you know, wings ended and he wasn't really touring a lot. Some Michael Jackson stuff. Yeah. It was, yes. Yeah. I know. He wasn't lost. I'll talk to Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson buys all the songs, probably real frustrating. But so there was this period where I think that the Beatles would have been like, well, what, who are we now?

Are we just guys who used to be in the Beatles? And I think that it probably could have, like, I definitely don't think, because they didn't, the amount of animosity among the Beatles kind of peaked in 1970 and decreased from that point. I mean, it's like, you know, Lennon wrote, like, How Can You Sleep and all those songs. Like, they were kind of criticizing each other back and forth, but then it would be like,

George and Ringo would play on those songs and it seemed like they kind of, like it was, it's hard to tell how much those guys actually had animosity toward each other that wasn't just like,

I'm kind of sick of being with these people and being associated with them and everything. It's all a business problem. So I think they probably would have reunited if I had to guess. Well, they definitely still hung out a little bit because there's that famous SNL story about Lennon and McCartney just watching an SNL episode and almost just doing a cold walk-in. On your Bezos question, I think I have the answer. I mean, there's two possibilities, right? One is like,

This could be the forefront of some new business venture he's been thinking about with like the next version of the all-time state-of-the-art stadium. Maybe that's a piece of it anyway. If you're Jeff Bezos, nobody's rooting for you at this point. There's no like Bezos fans, right? There's nobody who's like,

Fucking love Jeff Bezos. So you're at dinner and somebody's like, you know, I fucking love, I've been reading everything about it. I just think he's a genius kid. I would love to meet him and hang out with him. Jeff Bezos, you know, he's like those super billionaires have just moved into this different realm. You buy the Celtics. What happens when you buy a famous sports team? You become a celebrity in that town.

if the team does well, you're beloved. Like you can even see what happened with Wick, the Celtics owner. Like he became the face of the Celtics. He vowed that they were going to win another title. They won it. You know, he was like, it is absolutely humanized Mark Cuban. Joe Lacob. Who knew who Joe Lacob was? The Warriors owner. Like you're going down the line and then conversely, if somebody is a terrible owner or a vile donor, it actually makes things way worse for them. Like somebody like Daniel Snyder. So with Bezos, like,

you know, it's a, it's a little bit of a heat check where it's like, if I own the Celtics and I spend money and, and we do a great job and we pop in and all of a sudden there's some sort of subtle shift, you become more human. Yeah. And maybe that's the other piece. And it's just this, you know, you spend a huge chunk of your life acquiring this wealth. And I would guess you'd be like, well, I want to do something that,

is interesting to somebody who doesn't write for fortune magazine or whatever, like, you know, like, I would, I certainly, I think if I was as wealthy as him, I probably would attempt to buy a sports franchise. I just simply because I don't know what else I would do. Right. Like, I'm not sure what else I would spend this money on. You can, you know,

I mean, part of what makes a rich guy a rich guy is that their main enjoyment is not spending money, but watching it accrue. And maybe I would be that way. I would just want to see it accrue. I think like when I talk about the stones, I think that's part of it. I think that they're not interested in spending their money, but sort of like amazed. It was like, look at this money. Yeah. Right.

made from playing you know we played these simple songs that are great people loved them so much and we didn't stop and now we have like isn't it look at that number you know um but uh i i had i had this thing about basis i had not heard that at all like this is news to me that you know but it doesn't shock me like you know yeah well that i mean i i guess i'm kind of that you like sports

Do we know anything about that? I don't know. I don't, I don't know that much. I'm actually going to probably read some Bezos stuff. Cause it does seem like it's a possibility. It's interesting. Cause I thought the minority owner was going to get it. Steve Pagluca. He put this group together. He already owns a big chunk of the team, but if somebody comes in and makes some crazy offer, like who the hell knows. And that's, that's what happens over and over again with these sports franchises. What happened with the Clippers? Everyone thought Russ Caruso was going to get, or Rick Caruso was going to get it. The guy, uh,

could build all the malls around here, the outdoor malls. And then Bombers is like, oh, I want it. And all of a sudden he's paying $2 billion for it. So, but it's all connected with what they want from the expansion teams and all of these, this $6 billion price, they want to get to that price and above. That's what Irv Grossbach, the guy, the 90 year old guy who owns the biggest stake of the Celtics who started this process, he wants the biggest price.

So we'll see what a big crown jewel the Celtics are. We're about to find out. Yeah. When you were 21, what did you classify as extreme wealth? How much money would you have had to have? Oh my God. We probably thought the same way. I was... So extreme wealth, like billionaire wealth? I guess that's kind of a hard way. Maybe we... But it was just strange. I do like... I remember...

at one point when I was like 21, insisting that the most money anyone needed was $205,000 a year. Because my thinking at the time was $100,000 is the right amount. So you double that now. You have twice as much money as you need. And

And then you have like $5,000 to waste on like a double neck guitar every year. Like I thought he'd like waste it. And it's just odd. Like I wouldn't, you know, not now it's like, not only is that never not seen that massive, but it was just, it was strange how,

when you're a younger person, what, what sort of what you think is the maximum amount of money that you could spend your average. Well, the numbers were way lower. Yeah. The numbers were way lower back then too. I remember one of my friends right after college started, got a job and he was making like 55,000 a year. And we were like, Oh my God, 55. He's going to like be able to get his own apartment. It's going to be nice. Like, you know, it was, I mean, my, my first job I was making 7,000.

$17,000 or things, 17,500. But a lot of my friends were still in college, right? So it seemed like, you know, that's why we've often mentioned that episode of Friends from the first season with the Hootie and the Blowfish concert. Oh, it's a classic one. That actually was a very smart piece of television because when you're that age, a small gap in wealth is a completely kind of transformative thing in a way that's much greater than

Okay. The difference between you and Jeff Bezos is massive, right? And yet...

How different do you think your day-to-day life is than his? It's probably not that different. It probably isn't. I would say it's hugely different. How? How? What is he? What do you think he's eating? What, like a $2 million breakfast? He's like probably eating a breakfast pretty similar to yours. He's probably walking in the same way you do. He probably watches a lot of the same entertainment. I don't think, he definitely doesn't walk. He's probably walking on like a treadmill.

He's probably walking on like a fancy space age treadmill with like two bodyguards next to him. There's actually probably a higher likelihood that you would be recognized walking than Jeff Bezos, that you're a public figure. Yes. People know what Jeff Bezos looks like. Some people do, but I think more people would recognize someone who was on television and who was on a podcast several times a week. I know Jeff Bezos is bald. I don't know. I gotta say, I don't know if I would necessarily, if I saw him at a Starbucks,

would know who he is. But like, there are tons of middling personalities on ESPN or that I would immediately recognize just because you, so, so I get what I'm saying is that like the difference between, you know, me making $17,500 a year and my friends having $4,000 total was probably in some ways, almost as great as the difference between you and Jeff Bezos. Well, what was the, what was the first number you made that you were like,

I can't believe I'm making this much money to succeed in my wildest dreams. So I was working in Fargo and after four years there, my salary had went up to $21,500. And then I went to the Akron Beacon Journal who had a union. So there was an amount that I had to start at and I think it was like $45,000 or $46,000. So it was actually doubling my salary.

And so I was like able to buy a computer, which I had never before had in my house, you know? And it was just like, it did seem like sort of like, like it was a life changing amount of money. Cause my life, I guess did literally change, you know, but, but now, you know, you, I mean, every year you live and every year you make money or whatever, this thing changes in your mind. Yeah. When I got hired by ESPN, I remember it was like 75 K to rent a sports comp for them.

And I thought like I hit, like, I just couldn't believe it. Especially I was my early 30s at that point. But I was like, oh my God, like we're going to have money to go out to dinner on a Saturday. It was, I was like, I just couldn't believe like it worked out to the point that I got to that number. You know, it was like,

I did it. Took nine years. Now I'm making $75,000 a year. I was so fucking excited. Well, it's such a complicated deal because, okay, you have kids, right? And you want them to not believe that money can buy happiness because we all know that it can't. The richest people we know are very times miserable. And,

And yet at the same time, when everybody, anybody, you, me, anyone tells the story of their career, there's always these moments where they're like, I was so excited. My mind was blown. I was now making X amount of dollars. I now had the secure, like, I remember one of the big things was that I was like, well, now if my car breaks down, I can fix it.

where before I was like, I don't know what I'll do if my car breaks down. I will just have you off again. You know, the security, all these things. So like you don't, to tell someone that like money has no impact on your happiness is totally lying. That's a total lie. But you also don't want someone to sort of believe that that is a

a guarantee or the catalyst to it. It's a, it's a really, uh, I don't know. I, you know, it's like, well, I saw it, I saw it with my son this summer cause he did this internship and he got paid for it and he got, he brought home his first paycheck and he was holding it like it was like a deer head. It's like, dad, it's my paycheck. Like he made it, I'm going to spend this. He was all excited about it. So I don't know if that feeling goes away for anybody. We'll see if Jeff Bezos would be like,

What's his wife's name? Lauren. Lauren. I bought the Celtics. I'm now the Celtics owner. And like, he gets invigorated by that, but I think it's, I think it's in play. All right. We went long enough. I think. I think so. That was good. We hit almost everything. We didn't talk about the George Clooney, Brad Pitt interview. Yeah. I wanted your thoughts on that, but whatever. I didn't see that. I saw that it ran, but I haven't seen it yet. I'll get, let's end on this. Here's my last question for you. Travis, Kelsey, marrying Taylor Swift.

Will that be the biggest, most attention-filled wedding since Princess Di got married to Prince Charles?

Oh yes, definitely. I think. So yes. So that would be the biggest wedding in 44 years. Yeah. There may have been some Royal weddings in there that mattered. I don't know. Um, but it will be a, I mean, certainly in the United States, that will be a huge deal in a way that like, you know, and, um, you know, it's like a, could they pay per view it? Well, I think, I mean, it's something like, I mean, yeah, I, you know, you know, um,

You never want to say like, oh, this is a transactional relationship. There's some element of transaction. I mean, there are two pre-existing famous people who are now in this relationship and they seem to be pre-conscious over how

That relationship is received and understood by people. So, I mean, it would be pretty mind blowing if they had a private wedding. That would really be crazy. I think it would be, uh, I think that it would, it would be in some ways the smartest thing they could do, but I don't think that's what would happen. Go private. Is the princess die wedding, the biggest wedding that you could remember since you've been alive?

Yes. Yes. That was the first time I think it ever, it ever dawned on me that it was sort of like that people were that interested in other people getting married. I mean, you know, I just, you know, I, it was for me too. Yeah. But here's the question though. What's number two. What's who's the silver medalist. Wasn't there some huge marriage on a fucking soap opera?

Like on Dates of Our Lives or something? Oh, Luke and Laura on General Hospital? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That one. I feel like that one was talked about almost as much. Can I throw out this candidate? Sean Penn and Madonna.

I felt not obviously on the lady die or princess die or the, uh, Luke and Laura level, but the Sean Penn Madonna wedding, I remember feeling that was a big deal. Cause there was the helicopters and it opened up this whole paparazzi conversation. And I knew they were together. I don't remember anything about their wedding. A lot of times, you know, it kind of shows you the difference that we're kind of, because like, to me, like, Oh, I, uh,

Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson's marriage was a big deal because I remember seeing that's a good one because I saw photographs of you know I you know somebody was wearing a space helmet there and it was on like a like on the beach or whatever you know but I was also interested in still was interested in Motley Crue then or whatever

So like I wasn't as interested in Sean Penn or Madonna at that time. So I was like, well, I probably did get married. You know, it's the way you always tell how big these things are. It's like, you know about it and you don't care at all. Like you have no interest and you still hear the information. And those, that's like the soap opera marriage I mentioned, like I wasn't watching that show. I couldn't remember the names, but I do know people care. I do remember people being interested in that. That was the,

Apex Mountain for soap operas. All right, Chuck Close, do we have anything to plug? No, not right now. Nothing going on. Just me. I'm just writing away, working away. Say hi to everybody in Portland for us. Good to see you. You bet.

Thanks again to Chuck. Thanks to Kyle Creighton and Steve Cerruti for producing. As always, don't forget, New Rewatchables is coming Wednesday night, not Monday night this week. And as for this podcast, I'm definitely doing one Thursday and I'm a game time decision for Tuesday. So I will see you one of those two days. Enjoy the rest of the day.