The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson
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work and effort into this and Amy's the best. So I really hope this podcast becomes humongous and I don't know why it wouldn't because again, Amy is the best. So congrats to her coming up on this podcast. Speaking of the best, we have Derek Thompson from the Plain English podcast. Every once in a while he pops on and we talk about the future of everything. We have a gimmick for this. You've probably heard it in the past and we're going to do it again after we hear from our friends from Pearl Jam. ♪

Thank you.

All right, we're recording this on a Tuesday. Always fun to have this guy. I would do the future of everything concept, but he's on a little book tour. He's dressed up. Never seen him in a tie before. I'm just one of many stops, but I booked it super early. I'm pumped because future of everything is clearly one of the nine most important things you're doing today. Derek Thompson, host of Plain English, new co-author of a book called Abundance with Ezra Klein.

that came out this week, today. And I'm just going to say it. I feel like you lucked out that this didn't come out last year. Timing seems perfect. It's interesting. Ezra and I had a conversation maybe, I don't

I don't know, I guess a full year ago now where the book was being extended, right? Ezra and I were just, we were busy. I was doing my podcast. He was doing his podcast. We couldn't quite finish the book in time. The book was supposed to come out just before the Democratic National Convention of last year. And I remember thinking like, man, it's too bad that our book can't come out and shape the messaging for the Democratic Party in 2024. At this point, you know,

for better or for worse. And there's certainly a lot of worse if you're a Democrat. I think there's a moment right now where there's a lot of people asking, like, what's the future of the Democratic Party? We're polling at 29% according to CNN. It's the lowest percentage

overall approval for the Democratic Party in the history of the time series. A lot of folks asking, you know, where does the party go from here? What's the future of liberalism? And, you know, Ezra and I just happened to have been asking each other this question for the last two and a half years of our lives and put it together in a book. Came out about 14 hours ago. It's called Abundance. And yeah, it's been fun talking about it. That's awesome. Yeah, it's beyond how do we fix this, which is always a fun column to write our podcast to do.

after the election and then all the dialogue about where do we go? I don't even know. It's basically like, we have to fix this, but nobody knows how to fix it. And meanwhile, you guys have been working on

I mean, it's you have some solutions, but you're more trying to identify the problems and the problem areas and then possible solutions for those. Right. That was the original intent. Yeah, the original intent. Look, the book was always going to be a deep critique of the Democratic Party from two Democratic voters, a deep critique of modern liberalism from two guys who self-identify as liberal.

And one of our critiques is just that the Democratic Party and liberals have gotten out of the business of building. This is an organization or a movement, a coalition, that's gotten really, really good at spending money and at judging success by how much money you spend

But it's brought us to a world where California brags about authorizing $30 billion to build a high-speed rail system that does not exist. Just two weeks ago, the mayor of Chicago bragged about spending $11 billion building 10,000 affordable housing units. That's $1.1 million per affordable housing unit. I mean, this is pathetic. Democrats need to be the party

that builds things, and especially after 2024, which as you know, as everyone knows, was an affordability election. If you ask people who changed their mind between 2020 and 2024, why did you go from Democrat to Republican? Over and over again, it's groceries, it's especially housing, it's affordability, affordability, affordability. And really, if you take a close and honest look at the cities and the states that are run by Democrats,

They often do the worst on affordability. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, DC, where I'm from. I mean, these are some of the places that the working class are leaving and where you have really high rates of homelessness. And one of our ideas is that it goes back to housing. These places have gotten really, really bad at building homes.

And if you're going to call yourself the party of the working class and you cannot build houses for the working class, that is a major, major problem. And you probably do deserve to get your butt kicked in every few elections. So we're trying to change that. We're trying to change the soul of the Democratic Party to a certain extent, from a party that associates success with how much you spend to a party that associates success with how much you build. One of the themes you hit pretty hard is what changed from the 40s and 50s

And people trying to proactively come up with big picture ideas of how to change stuff, grow stuff versus where we are now, wherever the hell we are now. What changed? What did you figure out? What was so different about post-World War II and the way we thought about everything versus the way we think about everything now?

Yeah, it's such a good question. I really think it's the question, you know, because if you go back 100 years, you know, I love the story that we tell actually in the conclusion, which is a story about what a historian named Gary Gerstle calls political orders. And this guy Gerstle has a beautiful way of making sense of the last 100 years of American history. He says there's really been two dominant political orders.

And a political order is his term for a set of ideas that underneath the headlines and the scrum between the parties, both sides kind of agree about. So between the 1930s and 1960s, you had what he called the New Deal Order. And this was a response to an internal crisis, the Great Depression, and an external crisis, which was you had socialism everywhere and FDR needed to redefine liberalism for our age. And he said, look, we're going to spend a lot of money and we're going to build a lot of things.

But something happened in the 1960s and 1970s, and it's that America changed. There was a new internal crisis, which was stagflation. There was stagnation, no economic growth, and inflation. And you had this new external crisis, which was the Soviet Union meant something very different in the 1970s than it did in the 1930s.

And you really had this era where liberalism went from building a lot of things to blocking a lot of things. And liberalism got very, very good at putting up red tape and suing the state and suing companies to stop doing things. You wouldn't throw Vietnam in that? Oh, yeah. I would definitely throw Vietnam into it to the extent that Vietnam was a problem that LBJ couldn't solve with the set of political ideas that he had at his disposal that he inherited from FDIC.

from FDR, right? There was a period in American history where America just won wars. We just won World War I, won World War II. Korea was a little bit of a mess. Vietnam was a real quagmire, right? The first quagmire where we were questioning our ability to win on a global stage. And that caused a crisis, I think, in confidence in governments and institutions that was totally of a piece with this general era of, hey, we've had too much government for a while. How about the individual? How about the little guy?

And you had this era where there was this really important shift toward individualism. And what we're trying to say here in this book is that we kind of have to get back to building. Some of the biggest problems in this country, especially, again, you look at 2020, or 2024, the election. Some of the biggest problems in this country are affordability. And one way that we want to fix affordability is by building a lot more homes where people want to live. San Francisco, LA, DC, New York.

And doing that actually requires unwinding a lot of what liberalism has built up in terms of legal norms and legislation and stuff like environmental review. It requires unwinding a lot of that and getting back to basics. And so that's essentially what the book is trying to do. It's a getting back to basics book about how to build like old fashioned liberals to solve the problems of a new age.

Yeah, you go back to the 60s, 70s, all the stuff you mentioned, post-Vietnam, post-the assassinations.

And all the conspiracy stuff that started during that era, which it's interesting to see how we talk about this a lot when we do rewatchables movies from that era, like how the movies reflect the mood of what America was. Like we did a Vietnam movie war series that we did, uh, that we ran on Sean's big picture feed about all these different Vietnam movies, what they're actually trying to say about the disillusionment with, uh, with,

people toward government, toward America, toward war, like just sending this whole generation of people just to get killed or come back named or, you know, paralyzed or God knows what. And, uh, and it feels like it started there and then it never really rallied out of it. And you look at the big politicians that made it Reagan comes in the eighties and it's like, we're going to be the big American again. And we've got to beat Russia. Um, and all of these politicians have kind of captured the mood of whatever the country is, which, um,

is where we are now with Trump. But I do feel like 60s and 70s, something shifts. We don't trust government anymore. And I think that's part of why we can't fix any of this stuff because do you trust the people who would want to fix it? I don't trust the people in California right now with the fires.

like how they're trying to fix that. I don't think, I don't trust one person who's in charge of any of that. And that's a real thing. And I think a lot of people feel that way. Yeah. And I think you said two things there that I find really interesting. One is I took a class at Northwestern about the degree to which, it's exactly this, the degree to which

vibes of movies in certain eras are a reflection of the politics and geopolitics of the time. And one factoid I remember from that class was exactly about the 1960s and 1970s where they said, you know, look at the Dirty Harry movies and the Rambo movies. Those guys were fighting against a system. They weren't like...

They weren't a flavor of a guy defending a system, right? Like an honorable cop representing a series of honorable cops going back generation after generation. It was a guy fighting against the system. And I was totally in keeping with this idea in the 1970s that like –

this sort of collectivist era of the New Deal was just run amok. It was too much bureaucracy. It was too much the man trying to tell you what to do. The real heroes are the ones that push back against the man. And you can kind of hear echoes of that even in Reagan's own rhetoric where he says the scariest words in the English language are I'm from the government and I'm here to help. That was the beginning of this anti-institutional flavor that I think is still alive here in America. So what you said reminded me of that. But then going to this idea of like

What do you do about the fact that trust in institutions is kind of gone? And I'm going to try to be hyperbolic here, but it's very difficult. It's a fact. It's very difficult to find a single institution that hasn't seen an absolute collapse in trust in the last 30 years. The presidency, the Congress, the courts, science, big companies, tech companies, all

the police, I mean, the military, we're in an age right now where in order to be a successful politician and in order to be a successful political movement,

You need an answer for the age of anti-institutionalism. And one challenge I think for Democrats today is that, this is a little bit mean maybe, but as the cranks and conspiracy theorists somewhat realign into the Republican Party and folks like RFK who used to be on the far left are now on the right.

the Democratic Party has become the party of status quo institutional guys, people that are defending these institutions that aren't popular. And one thing our book tries to do in a lot of different ways is say, we gotta cut that out. We have to be able to point to the very, very clear failures of government and public health and regulatory bodies and say, these folks have failed.

And if we're going to be the party Democrats, if we're going to be the party of government, we sure as hell be the party that is obsessed with making government work. And that requires renewal, requires change and reform and being honest about where you failed. And so, yeah, I think that's a that's a huge part of of this little mindset shift that we're trying to have here. Well, you could feel it after the election.

When it was this great big reckoning that probably should have happened years earlier. Right. And then people, some of the stuff was, was, I don't know, kind of black comedy, hilarious where you're like, really, you're saying all this now, like you didn't realize that a lack of authenticity was maybe going to be a problem. You, this is podcast fault. Like you were not, you didn't have a better podcast front. Like, what are you guys talking about? This, first of all,

We need somebody who can inspire people from each party, right? Trump clearly inspired over half the country. That's why he won. So who's going to inspire people on the Democratic side? And we're going to talk about this when we do Future of Everything. But I was really surprised by everybody collectively going, whoa, now what? This didn't work. It was like watching, it'd be like if the Phoenix Suns ended the season. And they're like, whoa, whoa.

We finished 38 and 44. What happened? It's like, yeah, we were watching you lose games in real time. You're shocked now that that's your record. So it feels like there's a reckoning now, but you know, like everything else, it's going to depend on, can you find one, two, three, four people?

that will inspire people going forward. And I don't know. Yeah, Ezra and I have done a lot of podcasts with folks on the right. And I think it's really, really important to talk to the center right and the far right and be, I think liberals and maybe the left has gotten a little bit too obsessed with purity, a little bit too obsessed with this idea of if you're the wrong person, if you said the wrong word, that we're not going to associate with you. We're going to cut you out of the movement. Guys, at the end of the day, elections are popularity contests. And the job is to grow the tent.

And there's this question of like, who's going to be the liberal Joe Rogan in the 2020s? Well, you know, there used to be a liberal Joe Rogan. His name was Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan was a Bernie Sanders fan in 2016. And many things happened. And I don't want to just associate his political shift with just how he was treated by the left.

But something clearly happened where I think liberals started to say, you know, we shouldn't allow people or we're going to judge people who are in our coalition for showing up on Joe Rogan and talking to someone who we think is conspiratorial. Guys, elections have to be about persuasion. You have to be willing to talk to everybody. And, you know, I'm not, you know, Gavin Newsom is a complex political figure, but he's very, very good. I think complex is a compliment for that fucking guy. He's very good, though, Bill, at persuasion.

at putting his finger to the wind and knowing like when the moment has changed and the fact that he's starting a podcast and talking to steve bannon and charlie kirk whether or not that is a useful strategy for running the state of california probably not useful strategy for winning the democratic primary in 2028 maybe not but does it reflect the reality that you're pointing to this new reality that liberals are coming to terms with the fact that we have been too obsessed with

with only talking to ourselves, with this purity of insularity. And maybe in the next four years, our job is to build a coalition by accepting people who don't entirely agree with us, who sometimes use the quote unquote wrong word. It's really important, I think, to be more flexible about a big, big tent strategy. So why'd you name the book Abundance? I know the reason, but tell the audience. Yeah, so there's a...

The term abundance came from an article that I wrote three years ago called The Abundance Agenda. And basically, I was standing outside in February or January 2022 waiting in line for rationed COVID tests and just getting really fucking upset because I was like, we're two years into this pandemic.

We don't have enough COVID tests. Before that, we didn't have enough COVID vaccines. Before that, we didn't have enough masks or PPE. This pandemic has just been one scarcity after another. And as I'm like sitting in line and like, you know, moving my feet and getting really angry at the world, I was thinking like, you know, it's not just the pandemic, actually.

that seen this sort of crisis of scarcity, there's not enough housing in the cities that need it most. We don't have enough PCPs, enough general care doctors in this country because for a variety of reasons, we shrink the number of residency slots or cap the number of residency slots and thereby restrict the number of people that can become doctors to allow doctors to have a higher wage or at least had this law that did that a couple decades ago that's been really, really bad in terms of doctor

abundance. Over and over again, I just saw in clean energy and housing and healthcare, this really has been the century of manufactured scarcity, scarcity that we didn't deserve.

So I thought what we need to answer this is an abundance agenda. We need a movement that combines, say, elements of liberalism with the sort of fervor for national greatness on the right with this sense that libertarians have of trying to find bad rules that exist in the world and pull them out.

So I call it The Abundance Agenda. And yeah, long story short, Ezra Klein and I knew each other. He reached out. He said, I'm interested in these ideas. Do you want to write a book together? And I said, yes. And I think right now the concept of abundance is really interesting because Donald Trump ran to, by his own

by his own term, to make America great again, to create a golden age for America. But when I look at some of his policies, he says, "We don't have enough housing, so what we need is fewer immigrants," or, "We don't have enough manufacturing in this country, so we need less trade." Maybe he'll say, "Our debt is a big problem, so we need to spend less on healthcare." It just kind of seems to me like he has this less is less mentality.

you know, against that, juxtaposed to that, I think it's really interesting to think about liberals becoming a movement of more is more, right? A movement of abundance. And so that's where the idea came from. And that's how I sort of see it clicking into the news cycle today. Can I ask a super dorky writing question about what it's like to write a book with somebody else?

Especially if you don't live in the same place or do you live in the same place? We did not. No, we saw each other for a total of like maybe 11 hours in person. So it was somebody writing one chapter and somebody else is writing the next one and then you're sending the drafts and then somebody spruces it up, sends it. Like, how did you do it?

Yeah, we kind of broke the book down into two. We joked at the beginning of the process that the book might end up being a little bit like, remember the Outkast album, Speakerboxd, Love Below, where Andre 3000 took one half of the album and Big Boy took the other half of the album? Who is Big Boy in this? Not getting into that one. I guess I would like to think that I'm Andre 3000. Great, take it. But yeah, so we both basically wrote the introduction by...

I drafted it, sent it to him, he redrafted, sent it back to me, I redrafted. Same kind of thing with the conclusion. And then with the middle of the book, we kind of just had one person be the CEO of those chapters. So Ezra was kind of the CEO of the chapters about housing and energy. We definitely leaned a lot on his work on this chapter about how to make liberal governance better. And then there are chapters about science and technology. And I'm really deep in reporting on science and technology. And so I was the CEO of those chapters.

And so we did a lot of cross-editing, but I would say there's definitely, there was like a mutual understanding between us that one person was going to be the primary drafter of each individual chapter. - Is this an audiobook on Spotify?

It is, and in fact, just like Speakerbox Love Below, Ezra narrates the first half of the book and I narrate the second half of the book. So I guess maybe in this context, I am big boy because I think his CD came second in that album, that double album. But yeah, we recorded it separately. Free audiobook ad for Spotify. We're going to take a break, come back, and do the future of everything. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. State Farm helps you score an affordable price when you choose to bundle home and auto insurance.

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Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. All right, future of everything. This is a gimmick we try to do every six months. Little snapshot of where we are. So this is the first time we've done in 2025. And we usually do politics, sports, tech, culture. Might replace health for politics depending on what's going on. But you did your politics version. Mine was tied into it too.

With people asking what happens to the Democratic Party, where does it go? I was thinking what happened is a better question. And thinking about it almost like you would think about sports. You think like JFK dies in 1963. By the way, the file is allegedly getting released as we're taping this. Today. I thought it was going to steal my thunder. I'm never going to believe it until it actually happens. But how many Democratic...

candidates since JFK was assassinated. Do you feel like actually inspired people and started some sort of wave movement? I think Bill Clinton was genuinely inspiring in 1991, 1992. I was six years old at the time. So this is just my sense. I was in college. I can vouch for it. He it was a it was this it was a movement. We were in it. We liked them and it worked.

And then the obvious answer is when I was graduating from college in Northwestern, Barack Obama was an absolute sensation. And so I would say that Obama might have, at least at the moment for me, felt like the most movement-y president of the post-JFK era. All right, so that's, so for the rest, now other people could say, no, no, Jimmy Carter in 76. That was more of a Gerald Ford thing.

Nobody wanted to vote for him again. Ted Kennedy was supposed to be the guy and then it wasn't going to happen. And Carter, by the way, I love Carter. Carter was probably my favorite president, but I don't think it was a Carter movement by any means. You're a Carter guy. I just, I just pause there. It's just, I just think after the fact, I think you look back at Carter. I'm like, oh yeah.

Like the Malaya speech. I've talked about this before. I just, I, he just probably shouldn't have been president, but I liked how he stayed authentic to himself to the bitter end, even to the point that he was going to lose in 1980. Um, Sanders had a little momentum too, but you know, it was definitely niche momentum. Um, you can't say Biden. Biden was more like the anecdote. This is the only way this side can beat this side. So, all right, we got to go this, but

I guess the point I'm trying to make is two people in 62 years is not a good batting average. So when people say, well, all we need is we need to find somebody who can come in and whatever. It's like the batting average says you're probably not.

That's probably not going to happen. So what's plan B? And I wonder when we start talking about that, because even I saw Josh Shapiro was on Bill Maher show last week. And I think he's, you know, he presents very well. He's very well liked in Pennsylvania and checks a lot of boxes and maybe he could be the third guy.

It's just interesting to me that the batting average is so bad. 63 years is a long time, 62 years, and it's going to be 65 since JFK when we do the 2028 election. And you've had two guys that have inspired a party. So maybe that says more about the party. I think you put your finger on something pretty important. And tell me if you agree with this interpretation. We have a story in the book about how in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a legal revolution in

on the liberal side, where you had an amazing growth of lawyers in the 1960s, 1970s, who went into law in order to be progressives. They were like, I'm going into law for the Civil Rights Act, I'm going into law for environmentalism. Since then, Bill, think about all the lawyers that have run for president or won the presidency on the Democratic side.

Kamala Harris, lawyer. Bill Clinton, lawyer. Barack Obama, constitutional law professor. It's, I think since Jimmy Carter, it's just basically been a very long line of lawyers or people who you basically associate with lawyers. Hillary Clinton, lawyer, again. Democrats have become the party of rules and Republicans become the party of like bad boy outsiders, right? Like people coming in to crash the system.

And there's something inspiring about that inherently, about the idea of someone coming in from the outside to crash the system. In a way, going back to Dirty Harry and Rambo, that was the appeal. These guys aren't of the institutions that are boring and staid and sclerotic and broken. These are the outsider heroes.

And I think the Democrats do, to your very point, have an issue with being so legalistic, not just in terms of their outlook and how they think about process and politics, but also just who they put up to bat to become president. It's a lot of people who look like they're essentially auditioning to edit the law review rather than win a popularity contest among people that increasingly are going to be getting their information from TikTok and Instagram.

And I think that there's like a, you know, I didn't go to law school. My dad was a lawyer. So my best friends are lawyers. I'm definitely not anti-lawyer, but certainly law school and being a lawyer teaches you to, to practice a certain kind of care, right? A certain kind of carefulness. I think that kind of, that carefulness is actually a real, uh, kryptonite for political success these days. Carefulness makes you look like you're a phony, makes you look like there's strings attached to you. Say what you want about Donald Trump, but the man is, uh,

fantastically disinhibited, no strings attached. He says whatever comes to his mind. And there seems to be maybe in this age of social media and TikTok and people loving the performance of authenticity, something that's holding, to your point, Democrats back if they're essentially going to treat every presidential contest as who's America's next top lawyer.

Well, I think about when I was growing up as a kid and the Kennedys still had this outsize kind of hold over everything. Right. And to the point that Ted, people are always keeping their fingers crossed for him. And he finally ran in 1980. But this was somebody who, you know, accidentally killed somebody in Chappaquiddick.

and swam to safety and did a reporter for eight hours and somehow still tried to run for president. And then, you know, was in Massachusetts forever. Um, but people love the Kennedy's so much. They're like, yeah, well, it was a rough night. They, you know, they're like overlooking whatever. And then after he went away, just think about like 84 Mondale Dukakis, like, oh, just kind of way. And then Clinton shows up and he felt like just of the era, he felt

MTV, like he was on MTV and it made sense. You know, he just, he made sense to like all the people I was in college with. I was like, ah, I could see that guy. Um, and then Obama had the same kind of moment. So we're headed toward, if you're thinking like generation, generation,

this generation now, who's it going to be? But I think you're right. It's almost has to be somebody who's outside the box from whatever this weird prototype that they've created. Yeah. He's careful, not authentic. I thought this was the thing that killed Kamala. Now granted, Kamala was in a terrible, uh, terrible, um,

situation. You have a hundred days to run for president. Like in retrospect, that was crazy. And you're not allowed to criticize one of the least popular presidents in American history. The whole point of running for president is to criticize the guy who has the job and she couldn't do it. But, you know, I still felt like, like, I, I still think she should have gone on the Rogan pod. I think that would have helped her, but she was, they were so worried about

you know, putting out like what she ended up doing was SNL with Maya Rudolph. And it's like, cool. That's like the safest, easiest, most predictable thing you could have done. Whoever the next person is, I think has to have some sort of authenticity piece that's been missing for a long time. Yeah. And I do think that's why Sanders resonated even a little because whether you agree with him or not, he really believed what he was saying. Like he really gave a shit about it and it really stuck with people.

Bernie Sanders, love him or hate him, is fundamentally sincere. The anger that he has toward billionaires, the anger that he feels about capitalism, the frustration that he feels with the Democratic Party, none of that is faked. I was talking about this with Ezra the other day, and I don't know how you feel about this theory, that in a weird way, sincerity

or certainly the performance of sincerity is becoming more important in politics today. Kamala Harris struggled with sincerity. There was a sense of like, you're not Joe Biden. We tried very hard to make sure Joe Biden wasn't on the ticket, but also you can't criticize Joe Biden or say any way that you're different than him. There's clearly strings attached to you. You're not saying how you feel. You were on the team.

With Bernie Sanders, there's something really wonderfully sincere about his politics, even though they are not my politics. Donald Trump, he's a bullshitter extraordinaire, but I think there's something very sincere about the degree to which he hates elites. He's the Queens guy who never felt accepted by the Manhattan Club. And he...

hates those guys and has been waiting to have the opportunity to get back at them. And so when he talks about hating the liberal elite, it's not faked at all. And people can feel it. That authenticity just, it oozes out of him. And so I think you're right. I think the next...

big democratic leader is either going to be someone who comes from within the system, who has a very sincere critique of the system, Bernie Sanders style, right? I'm a senator. I've been a senator for a long time, but I'm not one of those guys. I'm not an insider. I can criticize the system because I'm so mad at it.

or are you gonna have a real true outsider, right? I don't know what the Donald Trump of the Democratic Party looks like. There's people like Mark Cuban who it's certainly seen like they're circling for a run. I think his vibe is very different than Donald Trump's, but you're going to see, I think, folks like him who are essentially celebrities, even reality show celebrities, who are not politicians, but have just dabbled a little bit in political communications, who jump into the race in 2027 and are like,

I'm not touched by anything the Democrats have done. I've never sat on a committee. I've never cast a vote. So I can criticize all the things that I'm mad about with California and D.C. and New York. I think it's either going to be like an outsider who's on the inside or an actual true outsider. Mark Cuban can't run now because they just bring the Luka Doncic trade up over and over again.

He is going to have to own that answer. They traded their best player. Why'd you sell the team? Why didn't you put in something they could have traded? It would be tough on. It's going to be amazing if the Luka Doncic trade is the most important political issue of 2028. Are you just going to be like a pig in shit? Is that just going to be like the best possible moment? No, because if it had been the Lakers, we're doing well. That would be bad. The real answer is we're not going to know for two more years, because if you look at the sea change elections, it's always somebody that came out of nowhere.

15 to 18 months before the thing. So, cause I always hear like the, you see the pieces or people talking about it. Here's a list of seven people. It's like, we don't know who the person is yet. The person is yet to materialize. Anyway, uh, we're going to move to sports, your future of everything for sports. The thing you're fascinated in is what?

I'm fascinated by what I'm going to call the end of the money ball era. So the first few decades, the 21st century in sports, if you were going to write some kind of history, I think you'd call it the money ball era, right? It's the era of analytics. And analytics proved so powerful, not just for producing wins, like Michael Lewis described in his original book, but for changing the game itself.

Right, in baseball, famously, singles reach an all-time low, strikeouts reach an all-time high, data's changed pitching and pitching angles and arm angles and launch angles for hitters, right, the three true outcomes are through the roof. And then in basketball, also famously, it's led to the rise of threes. As Morrie Ball took over and everyone recognized, three is more than two, so even if your percentage is a little bit lower, it's much more efficient. In both those cases, the sport was optimized.

It was solved like a math problem. And I think it's notable that, by the way, this didn't happen for football, right? Football dominates ratings for many reasons, many, many reasons. But one of them, I think, is that football is so freaking complicated that it's constantly evolving and changing rather than being optimized toward like a single endpoint. So that's the recent past. And my observation slash prediction here is that the era that we're entering into is an era in which Moneyball is exhausted.

Data analytics teams are exhausted. There's no more advantages to eke out with just being more nerdy about math. And the sports are going to push back against the nerds. And so in baseball, we're already seeing this, right? We're seeing pitching timers and pitching clocks and bigger bases and fewer defensive shifts. Essentially, we're creating human rules to push back against the mathematical machine.

And now in December, and you know much more about this than I do, but Adam Silver on Fox Sports says they're now talking inside the commissioner's office about the fact that there are too many threes, too much homogeneity in offensive strategies. They're asking Joe Dumars to come in and he's already in, but to look at rolling out new rules. And what I think is really interesting about this is how it's going to change the conversation about sports. I think we spent so long

optimizing for team winning that we denuded what made sports interesting. This is an observation from my friend, Connor Sen. We've lost what made sports interesting.

And the last piece to this is we sort of move into an age where we're going to fight back against math and there's going to be more sort of human driven interventions to make sports interesting and diverse and weird again, rather than everything accumulating toward the same style is, you know, maybe two years ago I came on your show and talked about the, um, the Bravo sports fan, right? The idea that the conversation around sports is becoming bigger and

than sports. I think this is going to be a new topic or a bigger topic of conversation. This sense that

Math fixed sports in a very specific way, and now we need all hands on deck to push back against it. Because especially with baseball and basketball, the ratings are down. They're losing out to a sport in football. It's too complex to be optimized. And so I think you're going to have a deeper conversation about how do we make sports weird again and push back against the math nerds. So that's my prediction.

Did you hear the thing Goldsberry and I did about the schedule last week? No, tell me. We did basically about how the NBA, the schedule is wrong and they need to move it six weeks so that it peaks in June and July, all the way through July.

And get away from football as much as they can. If they can shorten it even better. I do wonder if we're heading, because I think with the success MLB had when Theo Epstein came in and changed some of the things they were doing and added the pitch clock and all things that would have seemed crazy 10 years ago, and they really worked, I think has been pretty eye-opening. I thought you were going with the future stuff, what was going to be after math and

which I think is going to be AI. And I don't think a bunch, I don't think a lot of people have talked about it yet. And it's not AI the way you think it's for drafting and scouting. I think there's going to be all these AI programs that captures demeanor, facial expressions, the ways your eyes are, how, how you stand, um,

whether just these crazy things that would be like, this guy is more of an alpha because our AI program followed him and tracked him as he walked around a basketball court. It's going to be, I think we're headed toward weird fucking minority report shit like that. Bill, what you're describing is Bill GPT, right? You're the body language doctor. And what you're saying is I'm picking up- I'm going to be replaced. Right. I'm picking up on a bunch of like just subtextual clues. Like I can just kind of see like that guy when he scores-

makes a face that tells me he has the kind of determination to get much better between the ages of 19 and 23. So he's worth bumping up 10 spots in the draft. Right, they're in March Madness watching people on the bench. And it's like, that guy's not paying attention to his coach. The AI program doesn't like that. I genuinely think we're moving that way. And I don't think the teams, it was just like what happened with math in the 2000s. The teams all had the analytics and they weren't sharing them. And there was a six, seven year stretch

They knew how people were doing on corner threes. They knew how the plus minus, they had all that shit. They just weren't sharing it to us. I think AI is the next thing because AI is guys, you were, I think you came on maybe two years ago when we really started. And even then you came on again six months later and it had already shifted.

I just think the profiling of AI is going to be a big thing. That's not my sports thing, though. I will say, if every team has access to AI, you're going to have the same thing happen that happened with Moneyball, is that every team is going to think the exact same, and that advantage is going to get arbitraged to zero. But it's going to be a five-year run where some people have it, some don't. Okay.

Okay. And they'll get the advantage. It's like in baseball when they cared about defensive metrics for like five years and only a few teams cared. And then it evened out and everybody cared. So it's like who are going to be the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets of using AI to automate body language doctoring? That's the next step. Not just body language doctoring. I should have mentioned this too. Running style. Yeah.

trying to guess like how somebody's frame is, how they move, whether it's football, basketball, baseball, do they move in a way that could be susceptible to injury later? And then the AI program has all this stuff from like, there's Mookie Betts. He never gets hurt. Why does he get hurt? What is different about his body than like Giancarlo Stanton? I think we're going to have all this stuff and I think they're working on it now. That is not my sports thing though.

I agree with you. Math, we're moving towards something new and maybe it's a hybrid of 19 things. So, and I don't even know if I'm right on this a hundred percent, but I feel like I'm 90% and maybe I'm five years early, but I've been thinking about the MBA. I'm going to call it a labor glut just because you like when you like phrases, like memorable phrases. The MBA is getting older.

in a way that is having an interesting effect now on rosters and talent and how young talent can break through. The league is just really deep. And I've talked about this a bunch, but I actually went and I looked at it trying to figure out, are we deeper and are older guys staying longer? And could this actually like fuck up the league a little bit? Like we're too deep. One of the reasons I was thinking about it is there's like this really good six man of the year race this year.

usually there's like two six men. I'm like, ah, Jamal Crawford, like Lou Williams. This year, there are like these game-changing six men all over the place, right? You have like Nas Reed, you have Ty Jerome, you have Peyton Pritchard, you have Beasley on the Pistons. Every team kind of has somebody awesome. And then if you look at the bench, there'd be these games where

Like Denver yesterday, two guys, Jokic and Murray didn't play. They beat the Warriors anyway. These other guys stepped up. They have Russell Westbrook, who's just kind of, all right, Russell, just have an old school, crazy triple-double where you have seven turnovers. Like, sure. So I went back and I looked up how many guys who have been in the league 11 plus years are still relevant. And the number was 50. Wow. Wow.

This is 11 years or more. Now, LeBron is obviously the most. He's 22. CP3 is 20. KD, Horford, and Conley. KD's not on a playoff team. The other two guys are. They're in their 18th year. Russ, Brooke Lopez, Batum, DeAndre, 17th year. Curry, Harden, DeRozan, Drew, 16th year. And you go on down. And it's just a shitload of guys. The Kawhi draft, that draft had Kyrie, Kawhi, Vucevic, Butler, Valanciunas, Klay Thompson, and Tobias Harris all still playing.

And I was thinking about when I was a kid, and it's funny because we just did this episode on Celtic City. John Havlicek retired and he played 16 years. He played from 1962, 63 season to 78. It was like, oh my God, Hondo played 16 years.

This is just where we're going now with the league. And you think like guys like, you know, that like Giannis is a year 11 or he's a year 12 guy. Jokic is in his 11th year. Here's who's in their 11th year. Aaron Gordon, Embiid, Wiggins, Marcus Smart, Randall, Levine, Nurkic, Capella, Dinwiddie, Grant, Clarkson, Bogdanovich. So my question is, they actually really need to expand.

Because if you have this older class of player that you just didn't really have before. So then I was like, well, they must've had it before. So I went back to 2014 top 26 guys in total minutes for the 2014 season, all 29 and under top 50 PR guys that year, only eight guys who were over 30 and the top 50 minutes per game that year, only three guys were 30 and over.

Zach Randolph, 39th. Kyle Korver, 42nd. David Lee, 50th. Those are the only guys 30 and over. This year we have top 50 minutes per game, 13 guys, 29 and over. Top 50 PER, 13 guys, 30 and over. So it's not that many, but it's where the league's going. And we're just headed toward this league now where you can have a 16, 17 year career and it's not crazy. So does this mean we could have 40 teams? Like...

Where does this go for the workforce? Well, you made me think of two very different things, but I love this idea. So first, a labor glut. If there aren't enough spaces for all the extraordinarily talented NBA players in today's league, a couple of things can happen. One is that you rapidly add more teams. But the other is, I wonder, like,

Could we reach a point where there are simply so many exceptional basketball players that a second league becomes popular enough, can populate itself with enough extraordinary- Like the ABA 60 years ago. With enough extraordinarily talented players. And it doesn't even need to be

the exact same as the NBA. It could be a three-on-three league, a four-on-four league. It could be a different kind of sport. But what you're saying is there are so many essentially B-plus to A-plus basketball players between the age of 19 and 40 that there aren't enough spots for them on an NBA court. And

And you can either add NBA teams, which will in some ways maybe dilute the quality of the NBA, or you can have an entirely separate product that some of these players actually go to. Maybe it's funded by Saudi money. Maybe it's funded by UAE money. Maybe it's just some other- It's a six-team league. Right, some other way for 19-year-olds who are like, I'm really good, but I'm also probably, my peak might be winning sixth man of the year. Am I better off-

competing for six man of the year for the next 12 years of my life? Or should I be the star of a new league that is funded by some petro state? I'm not even trying to defend like Saudi funded leagues. Live NBA. Yeah. I'm more sketching out a prediction rather than saying what I hope happens. You could absolutely see something like that happen because to a certain extent, what makes it work in golf is that there's just enough

very good golfers that are basically in this very crowded top tier. So that's one possibility that we could definitely talk about. The other is this question of where does value flow

in an NBA where it's just not that hard to build the Houston Rockets, which is to say where it's not that hard to build a team that's exceptional and eight players deep and probably gonna get the third or second seed in the Western Conference. There's just enough, there's enough talent for maybe 20 teams to be the Houston Rockets. Where does value flow in that world?

And it makes me think like, you know, it's a total cliche to be like, you know, coaching matters. But is it possible that like coaching matters more in a world where there's, as you put it, a labor glut around the B plus A minus player? Like, for example, in a parallel universe where every NBA basketball player was Quinton Grimes, right? Every player was just a clone of Grimes. Where would value flow in that league?

There'd be no value in being Quentin Grimes. Literally everyone is the exact same player. The value would entirely be at the level of the coaching quality. And so in a world where you have just so many very, very good, but maybe not super duper star, you know, um, guiltless Alexander stars, but just a bunch of like top 50 style players, um,

Is that a world where actually coaching is incredibly valuable? Where owners should be paying 20, 30, 50 million dollars to grab Spolstra and bring it to their team. Because it's just that game changing to have a coordinating genius at that level rather than just accumulate a bunch of really talented athletic 6'6 guys. Quinn Grimes is a great example. Yeah, because I was thinking...

Well, like I used to do the trade value column when I wrote for ESPN and it was always, you know, I had trouble getting past 30. I tried to get a 40 or, you know, and the 30 to 40 guys, I was like, ah,

And then when I did the exercise this year, I'd like easily got to 75 and had a bunch of honorable mentions. But you think about how the league works. Like you mentioned Grimes, who was buried on Dallas, goes to Philly, some guys get hurt. And now all of a sudden he's turning himself into a $50 million guy. Where you look at Austin Reeves on the Lakers, where LeBron goes out of the lineup for a couple of games and all of a sudden he's averaging 30. The Celtics have Pritchard, who if a couple of guys get hurt, he could just come in and be awesome. And it just seems...

the deepest it's ever been. And there's also the LeBron piece of it too, whether he's an outlier or not, because the stuff, you know, he's breaking every record. Is this just like a Brady situation where you almost have to put them over here because he was so devoted to the conditioning and everything else just to get his body ready. That's all he cared about for 365 days a year. Some rules maybe went toward his way a little bit like it did with Brady.

And you can't replicate that? Or is that the sign of where we might be going? Because Durant's in year 18 and people are going to try to trade for him this summer. But then the flip side would be Paul George, who's in 2011 draft, whose body is now breaking down, which is a little more traditional of what we're used to.

So, I mean, it's just one of those things like if Giannis is a free agent in a year, Giannis was in the 2013 draft. He's got some miles on him. Are we in the new NBA or the old one? What is the aging process? I think it's going to be a big topic over the next five years. And this is exactly where Bill GPT comes into the picture, right? You're saying we need some technology for scanning physiology, right?

and saying, you know, you have a Kevin Durant body. No, you have a Wen Bon Yama body, or you have a Paul George body, and you could somehow, from that scan, maybe have some kind of prediction matrix for their likelihood of getting injured. I'm not sure, to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure such a thing is possible. Like, I don't know.

It's not obvious to me that Paul George's leg injury in the Olympics, that horrific dunk where he had the compound fracture, I'm not sure there's any AI that could have possibly predicted that. It might have just been a totally freak accident. But I do think it's possible that at the level of how a body fits together, or even at the level of genetics-

Well, there's that. But then there's the other piece about like, let's say I'm thinking about signing somebody who's been in the league eight years and I take all the video of when they were in college and first two years of their league and how they moved and how they jumped. And then I'm able to take the video of them last season and have the AI program look at it and be like, what do you see?

If you looked at Embiid in Kansas versus Embiid at the Olympics, it's no contest. It looks like two different people. And AI would... So maybe that's the way I could go. Anyway, I think we're headed toward interesting times with longevity. The last time I felt this way was the end of 2000s because I remember Gladwell and I writing a lot about like, where's this going? And then we saw where it went. Now I feel like we're moving to this new version of something. Before we move on, what...

What was your prediction with Gladwell in 2000? And how did that prediction hold up now that you're in the world of 2025? - Well, because it was a lot of the stuff Nash and some other people were doing that decade. I remember we wrote one piece about it. It just seemed like there were real factors in place to extend careers.

The dieting, the training, the equipment, the ability to study yourself on video. There are all these little things that were just going to help you grow and the guys were starting to use it. You know, and I think JJ, JJ has done a great job as the Lakers coach this year.

And he's kind of a new version of a coach that I think you kind of need to have with the way the league goes, where he's like really analytics. He's really video. And he's like a workaholic. And it's this new version of the kind of guys that have succeeded in the past. But you watch the Lakers. They're like impeccably prepared for these games. And what do you last question from me on the sports side? Because I am so interested in this.

this angle of what does edge look like? In 2005, edge meant Moneyball. It meant we have the nerds and you don't. So we're gonna understand the value of on-base percentage and you won't and that's why we're gonna win even though we spend three times less than you. But now everybody understands Moneyball and everyone understands health and everyone understands personal trainers and everyone understands you probably shouldn't eat a lot of sugar and sleep is very important and heart rate variability, this and that.

When you look at sort of the next generation of smart guys running NBA teams, like the JJ Reddicks, is there some other thing you think they've unlocked, some new edge that they're starting to peel back that maybe 10 years from now will be the conventional wisdom whose value is arbitrage to zero?

There's probably some biometric stuff in there too that I think some of the better teams are doing. To me, you basically have all the data possible, but we've had it for a while. I think people are getting better at figuring out what data matters. And sometimes it's simple. It's Joe Mazzola taking over the Celtics and being like, if we shoot 53s a game, we're going to make between...

15 and 20 of them. And if we make 20, we then become unbeatable. And if we make 15, we're probably going to win anyway. So this is how we're going to play. And everybody on our team has to be able to play this way. We can't have a bad apple. Every single person on the team has to be able to shoot. So that's like a philosophy crossed with math, right? Which I think is the next evolution of this. Before it was, like, if you look at some of the stuff Daryl was doing 20 years ago, it was like

Shane Battier, we have all these stats that say when he plays, his team's better. There's plus minus, there's defensive stuff. I remember I asked him once, why don't, do you have stats that tell you how good somebody is defending the low post?

And I think he said back to me, this is why we have Chuck Hayes. And I'm like, really? And he's like, yeah, Chuck Hayes is really good at this. So those are the advantages, but now everybody knows. We gotta take one more break. We still gotta do culture and tech really quick. All right, we'll fly through this because you're on your book tour. You wanna do culture or tech? Let's do culture. Okay, go ahead. I wonder if you're gonna agree with this. So we've had the golden age of TV. We've had the platinum age of TV.

I want to try to name what's happening right now in the world of prestige television, which you know very well. And I want to call it the gilded age of television for reasons that some people might violently disagree with, but it's culture, it's taste, that's okay. So gilded age. Gilded means thinly covered with gold paint, but not actually gold.

And the reason I think that this era of television is gilded is that I think we've reached an important inflection point. Prestige TV today looks so fucking good. Like, if you compare the cinematography and art direction of the best shows of the 21st century, The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, avant-garde shows like Twin Peaks, if you compare their cinematography to...

White Lotus or Severance or 20 minute continuous shot episodes from The Bear?

Television looks unbelievable right now. It's like a movie. Even better, that episode of Severance about Gemma was more technically impressive than some of the most beautifully shot movies I've ever seen. And I feel like maybe we don't even talk about how lucky we are to live in an age where prestige TV is so next level sumptuous. And yet-

And yet, I think this era of impossibly beautiful art direction and technical achievement and gorgeous cinematography is coinciding with this other very important trend, which I'll summarize as, I think we've lost the plot on plot.

Like, Severance, I like the show more than our mutual friend, Annie Greenwald. But there's no question that, like, from a plot momentum standpoint, some of its episodes grind things down to an absolute halt. Like, White Lotus, I love the show. The first four episodes of this season could have been 90 minutes in terms of what it set up.

plot-wise. Last year, I remember we talked about the fact that it seems like almost every single prestige miniseries has at least two to four episodes in the middle of it, which is half the miniseries, where nothing happens, right? We're presumed innocent, the guy gets a heart attack, and then 45 minutes later in plot, he's bouncing up. He's fine. He's fine. He's running a half marathon. He's totally good. He just had a heart attack because Kelly needed to stretch the plot to eight episodes.

like something weird has happened here where it's almost like we've gotten too good at cinematography

at the same time that storytelling has really fallen off a cliff from an efficiency standpoint. We now just accept as television viewers that entire hour-long episodes of expensive, famous, well-reviewed, critically acclaimed television will just have nothing happening on the plot front. And so that's what I'm calling the gilded age of television. It's golden on the outside, but from a plot standpoint, I think we actually have like

a crisis of screenwriting, a crisis of forward momentum that's partly created by the fact that the incentives of television economics today calls for making things longer rather than making things efficient. Well, it's funny because it's come around because in the 80s and 90s, they always had too many shows too. They would do...

you know, the police dramas, a show like NYPD Blue, they tried to do 22 episodes of those. 90210 Melrose Place, they would have 32 episode seasons like that. And these were, you're basically on a soap opera schedule. And then I think when the cable started to have success and Sopranos was like 13 episodes, it tilted, right? And then it was like, oh, shorter, better. And then, you know, the network was over here trying to make as many as possible and the cable was over here.

I thought where you were going was, and I think it ties into what you're saying. I think we've entered the white noise era. I think the reason people don't care about what you're saying that much is because a lot of times the show's just on as they're doing two or three other things. It's like how you talked about the NBA. You kind of know what's going on with the NBA, but not really. I've watched shows.

This would actually be a funny website. I've watched shows where if I had to take a quiz after, I've watched entire shows, like 10 episodes. Like I just watched, what's that show? The show with James Marsden and Sterling K. Brown, Paradise. I watched every episode of Paradise. If I had to take a quiz and you asked me like, what's this person's name? What happened in episode three? I think I would get like a 50.

But I watched every minute of it. But I didn't really watch every minute of it. It was a great show to have on. It was a home run. And I would look up every once in a while. And I think Netflix knows this. I think Netflix has figured out like some of their shows are just kind of like, have this on as you're doing other stuff. Isn't that the Meghan Markle show in a nutshell? It's interesting. I don't know what happens in that show.

As I understand it, absolutely nothing. But it's interesting that the way these two ideas can fit together, like Prestige TV as white noise and Prestige TV as this visually sumptuous product in which no plot is actually developing, is...

They're kind of the same idea, right? It's kind of, you know that TV channel, maybe on cable systems that have a ton of channels, where it's just like a burning log, right? Like it's popular in Sweden to just like turn on the TV and just have like a log. It's just a fireplace, right? In a way, like that's what a lot of television is. It's gorgeous.

You look at it, it makes you feel good, but you don't actually have to attend to the plot specifics because it's just really operating at the level of vibes that unfold throughout the television series. It's the old way we used to watch SportsCenter, where you just say, I'm just going to throw on SportsCenter and it's just going to run on a loop for four hours. And now people do that. I do this with, I'll go to Pluto and I'll be like, all right,

Cheers channel. I'll just throw that on for two hours as I'm doing something. Like I like how it's almost like different than listening to music, but not really because it's just sound that's happening and occasionally you look up and occasionally you look up. But I really do think

I think you've stumbled into something because the degree of difficulty for keeping our attention has gone down so far. Like we're doing these White Lotus recaps, right? And I agree with you. If you just watch those first four episodes and you're not 100% locked in watching, you're basically just on vacation in Thailand and nothing's really happening. But we have to actually watch it to figure out. And there's like a lot of stuff buried in there

But I don't know if most people watch TV to look for that stuff anymore because they're just entirely in wondering who the murder is going to be. Yeah. And there's a way in which if you're going to have a show like White Lotus, that's going to be whatever, eight, maybe 10 episodes long. I don't know how long this particular season is. There's a sense that like,

It reminds me of, I used to watch House all the time when I was younger. And what I loved about House is that I could always take a nap in the middle of House. I could watch the setup and then I could fall asleep between like minute 15 and minute 52 because I knew how the diagnosis was presenting itself. I understood the symptoms. I knew they were going to click through

a bunch of false diagnoses, and then at minute 53, House would have some eureka moment and he would say, "Oh, it's lupus. "Oh, it's this brain blood barrier situation." - Yeah. - And with shows that are designed to be little mystery boxes,

There's a sense that the audience has that's like, I'm going to understand the nature of the mystery in episode one. I'm going to have the mystery solved for me nine hours from now. So in the middle, it's like, what do you do? And I'm not taking anything away from the wonderful television detectives that The Ringer and other places employ. But I do think that from the perspective of someone who is not paid to analyze television,

It's honestly just like a lot of beautiful images. Beautiful white noise. Beautiful white noise where the plot is moving very slowly. I mean, Tim Ratliff basically was on SSRIs for like two and a half hours, just like falling asleep. I was like, we can probably move this character forward a little bit. Not just waking up and going into naps. You know what's different than this? Adolescence on Netflix. And I think one of the reasons it's being so well received, it's excellent.

is it's just, they're not doing this. It's four episodes and they put a ton of thought into how they did it. And I actually like Paradise. I thought it was good, but I just, I think it's more like we're just damaged by how much TV

We were all watching, especially when we were all stuck inside that this is just kind of how it goes now. This is why Temptation Island on Netflix is going to do great this week. Look up every once in a while. They're in the temptation tank. Still being tempted. I'm going to look up. I'm going to stop sending the seabull. I want to see what happens. Now we're back. All right. Mine, I'm not positive this is going to work, but I do feel this way. Everyone's talking about how video podcasts are new talk shows, which by the way has happened

years ago. I don't know why this became a narrative recently. I think the video podcasts are getting better because the equipment's getting better and more people are putting thought into how to do them. But we've, I mean, we were doing video podcasts at Grantland in 2012. Like it's just, everything looks better. The cameras are better. The studios are better. Everything's better. The question is what happens to actual talk shows? Because we always hear about video podcasts, new talk shows. And it got me thinking like if Kimmel and Colbert and Fallon and Seth Meyers

are the old school traditional late night talk shows, right? This format that we've had since the 1940s, basically. But then the new versions of them, I mean, Mulaney's trying to do something on Netflix now. That's like a little 12 episode once a week run. Greg Gutfield is on Fox News. Andy Cohen, I guess that's a talk show. First Take is sort of a talk show. They talk sports for two hours. It's regimented. It happens even though it's not like a Kimmel type show.

But then you think, and I include myself because I had a failed talk show on HBO, HBO, Showtime, Apple, Peacock, TBS, ESPN, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Fox, Comedy Central, multiple times have all been launching talk shows over the last 10 years. Like it's the old model vice. None of them made it. And if one of them made it, I'm forgetting. I, Desus and Mero had a moment on vice and went to Showtime and then that one broke up. But for the most part,

This has been replaced by pods over the last 10 years. And it's almost like we're finally realizing it. Um, and I wonder like when Kimmel and Fallon and Colbert leave, what happens to those time slots? Hmm.

i have three responses one is that you're describing i think a really clean generational difference i'll bet if you looked at the average age that abc and nbc are giving their advertisers for those late night shows i'll bet that average age is going up and up and up not only because

of younger people moving toward non-cable bundle options, but also because to your point, 20 somethings and 30 somethings, 40 somethings, if they're doing talk shows, they're doing talk shows on YouTube. They're looking at their laptop screen. They're not necessarily opening up. They're not going to TV and waiting until 1130 in order to get the talk shows. That audience is going down for the TV, but all those shows do really well on YouTube.

And that's what's kept them sustainable because they have awesome, huge YouTube footprints and social footprints. And that's how the shows have stayed relevant and in the conversation. So my first response was going to be that you're looking at a generational difference. The second response was going to be that...

I think new media and old media are going through a period of becoming more like each other, right? The late night shows are becoming more like YouTube podcasts at the same time that

the YouTube podcasts are becoming more like late night shows. - Right. - In the way that they film, in the way that they cut, in the way that they sometimes mix a little bit of interview with a little bit of play. And even sometimes this is literal, right? When ESPN wants to add a new whatever it is, late morning, early afternoon show,

They're not necessarily launching something from scratch. They're going straight to YouTube and saying, "Pat McAfee, we're just going to take your YouTube show and just basically simulcast it on ESPN." I wouldn't be surprised to see some YouTube networks start to try to take shows that maybe failed in the cable bundle, but then might work with the economics of YouTube because it's very different than the economics of cable.

So I think something that we're going to see, I mean, it's obviously already happening right now, but something that we're going to see is that these things are going to blend. The next Jimmy Kimmel is going to look a lot like a successful Netflix or YouTube experiment with someone like John Mulaney. At the same time that Netflix is so very clearly just trying to have the next Jimmy Fallon with John Mulaney, right? So I think we're going to see these success models come together. Or do they even try, though? Or do they just say, you know what? These three are the last three, right?

Because Jimmy thought he was going to retire the last contract he stayed. And it's like, at some point, if that show leaves, if he decides he's done, I don't even know how you replace it. Do you just throw somebody in there? Because we've seen... I just don't know what happens. And maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it just gets all replaced by video putts. Yeah, this is where it'd probably be useful to phone a friend and get Curtis on the line here. But I will bet that just...

Thinking of these broadcasters as institutions, institutions tend to be quite defensive, right? They have bureaucracies built up around certain products that they have, right? One product is late night. I don't know how many people work for Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel. It's probably, is it hundreds? It's certainly over 200. Yeah.

You're not just going to lay 200 people off, especially when you have a cultural footprint that's thriving, as you said, on YouTube. It's an it's a loss for you. But you need you need to find the face of a show like that. The key with Jimmy was he got built up as that show because they just didn't cancel it. And he was able to get all his reps and build himself into an actual brand and took a couple of years. Yeah. Would anyone have the patience to do that in 2025 when you're, you know, battling YouTube era and the YouTube economy?

I don't know for sure, and I don't understand the economics of this perfectly, but here's a scenario. You're NBC. Do you place a call to call her daddy? Do you place a call to one of these podcasters? It's like- Call her daddy. He's like, I'm already making a shitload of money. No thanks. I'm going to be on every day. I can do once a week. She has money. One, she can do once a week. She has money. Does she have the kind of cultural imprint that

someone has when they're the face of NBC or the face of ABC. Maybe it doesn't matter. - So that's the difference. - Maybe 10 years from now, no one gives a shit about being the face of NBC or ABC. But Jimmy Kimmel, he does a lot more than just host a late night show. He hosts the Oscars. He is the face of ABC. He's at the up fronts talking about all the offerings of his network to all of the advertisers. - But that's a bonus. The question is could that exist again?

with the way the infrastructure is. - I'm saying maybe you offer, you ask, is it Alex Cooper, that's your name? - Yeah. - You tell Alex Cooper, you say, "You're already one of the most important people for Gen Z. "What if we made you one of the most important "celebrities in the world? "What if you were the face of Hollywood? "That's what you have on offer? "If you do one show a week for us, "you can also host the Oscars, "you can also talk to these." Maybe she says yes, maybe she says no, but I think that's the prediction that I guess I'm making is

The next star is going to come from the talent folks at ABC and NBC looking at the top 30 podcasts saying who's like under 35 here that we can get to be our face. And you're going to continue to see late night on TV and talk show podcasts on YouTube continue to become more and more like each other. Or it's Greg Gutfield. Tech. Tech.

I don't know the answer to that. I was hesitant to do that one, but I think it's, I feel like we are, that might, those three guys might be the last guys. Interesting. Because I don't know how you'd be able to build up the bench and make them as big as that generation because I thought when those guys all were building their shows, the model was still there. Now you saw Stewart come back to The Daily Show and reinvigorate it and show that you're going on. But he's also over 50. Last one, tech.

- Should I go first? - Yeah. - Okay, there's a positive take here, and I like to be positive, so I do want to shout out something right now that we've talked about before on this show, which is the state of GLP-1 drugs. Had a guy on my show to talk about all of the research that's coming out now, that they can look at hundreds of thousands, millions of people at Veterans Affairs who've been on GLP-1s now for several years and say, "Let's take a look at this huge observational study "and see what is the effect of GLP-1 drugs on everything."

And Bill, it's freaking wild the positive effects these drugs are having on people's lives. It's not just helping people lose weight. It's not just helping people become more cardiovascularly healthy. Because inflammation is so bad for our brains and one effect of rapid weight loss and the way that this seems to work inside of our system is that it reduces cellular inflammation, is that it seems like this is reducing rates of dementia

and Alzheimer's, and even some symptoms of schizophrenia. I mean, we have found this like lever in the body that seems to have basically a positive effect on everything. And so this is not my way of saying everybody get on an Eli Lilly drug, like it's not a pharma ad. I'm just saying we are at this really exciting moment

of having accidentally discovered this Gila monster venom that we synthesized into a diabetes type two drug that we found had effects for weight loss and now we're doing more research on it and it's very difficult now to find a single station of human health that GLP-1 drugs don't seem to help.

I mean, it's not great for muscle retention. That's really important. Muscle retention is really important as people age and people lose a lot of muscle on these drugs. But it's really interesting to me the effects it seems to have on cardiovascular health and psychological health. So I want to shout out the positive effects of that because I like to be positive on the show and in general. And my tech prediction is...

is a negative one. I want to talk about our brains for a second. We were doing so positive there for one second. That was great. Feel free to jump in on positivity if you want. But this is a subject that I think is near and dear to your heart. So brains. So for the last few decades, something really cool has happened to human intelligence. Sometimes we think of IQ as like this natural ceiling to our intelligence. And the good news is that's just not true.

because there's this famous effect in global IQ that's called the Flynn effect, F-L-Y-N-N. It's named after a researcher named James Flynn. And James Flynn did these global studies and found that average IQ scores had increased all over the world for the last few decades thanks to better nutrition and better education. But a few years ago, that improvement started to wobble. And my hot take now is that just as in the last few years,

The, I think, true conventional wisdom about smartphones was that they were contributing to a mental health crisis among young people. I think the next conventional wisdom about smartphones is they are making us stupid. If you look at- I'm so fired up about this one. This is a great one. If you look at literacy scores and numeracy scores for teenagers, they're going down, not just in the US, in the UK, around the world. But Bill, it's not just teenagers.

I use smartphones all the time. - Adults. - You use a smartphone all the time. If you survey adults, their numeracy scores are going down. Their literacy scores are going down. On the podcast Plain English, just the other week, I did an episode on what I call the decline of reading.

by a variety of measures. Americans read much less than they used to. They read fewer books, they read fewer magazine articles, everything has become chunkified. Everything has become really, really fast. You look at it, it's an X post, you move on with your life. And I think what's happening is that intelligence, which is a really fuzzy thing, is partly about concentration.

You can't really be smart if you can't concentrate on an idea for a long time to see all of its little nooks and crannies. I think that smartphones are basically taking a wrecking ball to our concentration. And as a result, I think we're going to find over the next few years of studies that average intelligence around the world is actually in clear decline. Now, here's where I think it gets even weirder. AI is coming. AI is really smart.

And this world in which our machines are getting exponentially smarter while we're getting linearly dumber is a weird future to be moving into.

And I think what we're going to see at the level of students and at the level of young employees and even just overall adults is there's going to be a major schism in how people use AI. Some people will use AI to consume information, to make thinking easier. And some people will use AI to do deep research. If you, Bill, wanted to ask ChatGPT, which has this function called deep research where it can write like 10, 20-page papers based on a prompt that you give it,

Give me all the information about the smartest physiology of endurance among professional athletes.

what should we be looking at if we're trying to predict 20-year careers for basketball players, whether it's shoulder physiology or how knees fit together or overall body type? And it can give you a list that is annotated with citations that makes you smarter about how to be not just body language doctor, but the Bill Simmons that's trying to predict the next great hidden gem. Some people are gonna use AI,

to consume, but some people are gonna use it as a tool. And so not only are smartphones gonna make us literally dumber, I think we're also going to see intelligence inequality grow as AI increases the return to curiosity, while at the same time it accelerates the decline in deep thinking among a huge group of people. - It's really good. I have one thing to add. - Let's do it. - This is a sub-theory that I've had for a while that I think I've told my wife about. I don't know if I've said it on the pod.

I think people who text too much, that starts to become how you talk and just how you write.

And just, and sometimes I'll meet people and I'm like, whoa, just their vocal patterns. I'm like, that's a person who texts a lot. It's like excited, thrilled, great. Like just like all these like exclamation point language. And you just think like, oh, that's somebody that probably can't put together nine straight sentences in a row. Because you're buying, when you're texting a lot, you're just, you're doing shortcuts and you're just trying to get the fastest possible thought out emotion. Yeah.

just trying to get it to somebody and then move on to the next thing. So it goes back to what you're saying. It's not just like the attention span is dropping. It's also how we're communicating. We're taking shortcuts to that. If you're taking shortcuts to how you communicate, how are you going to communicate well? I mean, I believe... I worry about this with my kids the most because I still feel like... I feel like my daughter is like a really good conversationalist, but she also texts a lot. And I'm like, is this going to like ruin her brain at some point? Yeah, I...

I want to be careful when I make these critiques because it's such a familiar critique. Like basically every generation, when I was doing research for this podcast, the end of reading, every generation accuses young people of using whatever communication technology is available to them for like destroying their brain. What's different. This is so important. What's different about today is that we have very clear, not just American, but international data that reading is

and numeracy scores are going down for both students and in some places for adults. And I think that the way, the communication technology that's available to us just has to shape the way we think. I mean, to go back say 2,000 years or 4,000, 3,000 years I guess, like ancient Greece, people used to just

to casually memorize the Odyssey. They could just hold the Iliad in their head. I think I'm pretty smart. I think I'm really good at memorizing. I was an actor before I was a writer, so I had to memorize long parts and Shakespearean monologues.

I can't get even close to memorizing the first 0.5% of the Odyssey, but people's minds used to be like capacious in a different way to be able to just hold memory. And now we have writing. We've been able to outsource memory to computers and pages and tweets. And so we don't need to remember everything because we can read it. We can look at our notes.

But now we have something new that's come along. Some way of very efficiently sort of chunkifying all communication in this battle royale for our attention such that we're very good at grabbing people's attention briefly, but not very good maybe at holding their attention for a long period of time if there's a complex thought that we need to untangle. And so I do think that

The TikToks and Instagrams and Twitters of the world don't just shape how we pay attention. They do shape the way we think. And I think the early returns to their effect in our thinking are pretty scary. Well, I'm going to get grim as well with my last one. So remember when COVID happened and there was this whole wave afterwards where it was like people have been telling this is going to happen for years that the next pandemic was coming.

That you have to be ready. And then people are like, look at this article in 2017. They laid out, look at this in 2009. They laid out, we knew this was, why didn't we know? I feel, I hope I'm wrong, but I feel like the next pandemic is actually going to be a massively crippling tech hack where the best, and it's going to be somebody who has bad intentions. The best way, like think about what's the best way to disrupt America other than all the easy ways to do it.

Um, it would be to disrupt how we use all of our digital stuff for like a long period of time. If we lost the ability to communicate, to be able to pay for anything, to be able to consume for entertainment, to be able to turn on our alarm, to protect our house, all of these different things. If somebody just incapacitated us in the worst way possible for like a week,

What would happen? And I know people think about this and worry about this, but now it's like, I just feel like with AI and all the stuff that people just seem to be getting better and better. When you think the old days of like just...

logging onto AOL in 1999 and how easy it would have been to just hack anybody's emails back then. And now we have all these buffers and different things and the iPhone and the iPad, they're constantly doing updates and, oh, you got to add this because they figured out some way to hack this. What happens if we get hacked and it's like a COVID level hack where we just get annihilated tech-wise? Is that conceivable? It's the first time I've ever started thinking about this.

I've thought about this a little bit, especially as I've talked to people in AI who think about once we develop or if we develop something like AGI or even super intelligence, what is that technology likely to be used for? And one thing it's likely to be used for, you could say, is breaking encryption.

So how is that going to be used? What happens if China develops an incredibly sophisticated technological tool for breaking encryption and threatening the internet systems that you described? I certainly hope that the first expression of, example of the technology is not to bring down something that is national. That's very hard. There's so many different systems and so many redundancies to sort of hack the entire American internet.

But what's scary and maybe more plausible to me, because I think this is such an important thing to talk about, is folks, say, in China, spending a lot of time thinking about what internet systems are most vulnerable. If we want to prove the threat of our technology, what we should do is not try to eat the entire elephant. Find the weakest part of the elephant.

and take it down to prove to the American government that we have the goods that could potentially take down everything. So let's say, for example, that they discover that, you know, whatever, like some internet system in Portland on the West Coast, something in Seattle, they find a weakness in so that they take down like an energy grid in like, you know, suburban Seattle or something. That's a situation where they're essentially sending a warning signal and they're saying,

don't make us upset, or we'll do that but worse. - Right, or we'll take down the West Coast. - And that's a world where we're really in trouble because we have interests, for example, in China not invading Taiwan.

humanitarian interests in Taiwan not falling under the power of the CCP, but also some of, most of, the vast majority of the most valuable semiconductors manufactured in the world are manufactured in Taiwan. So if there's a blockade of Taiwan, we would have a real crisis in terms of not just electronics manufacturing around the world, but also AI itself. So what if China

wanted to make sure, wanted to make sure that America wasn't going to intervene in some kind of attack. And they said, "We're going to threaten the American government and say, 'If you intervene, we're going to bring down a system.'" And Donald Trump says, "I'm blustering. I don't believe you. That's not gonna happen." And they say, "Okay, watch this." And they press the proverbial button and something happens in Portland or Seattle or a pension system in Cleveland. And that's the clear demonstration of, oh, holy shit,

They've developed an encryption breaking technology that's powerful enough to at least demonstrate the possibility of doing real harm. Now they've developed a sense of leverage over the American government that has enormous geopolitical implications because now our interests can't be purely expressed in Taiwan. We are in some ways, you know, we're incentivized to cower to China for fear that they're going to do something.

This is one reason why not only people in the US government, but also many of the people at the Frontier Labs in San Francisco are so obsessed with holding the technological frontier in AI. It's because if you lose the technological frontier in AI, either on the offensive or defensive side, you do potentially risk losing the ability to uphold American values where they are in American interests. Right.

I think of the movie War Games from a million years ago when the computer got started. I always thought they were playing chess and then decided to almost take us to the brink of a nuclear war. I was like, oh, computers are scary. That was like 1982. Now we're like 17,000 levels beyond that. Because I was thinking, do you take money when you leave the house now? Do you have money on you? Cash, you mean? Yeah. No, everything's my phone. Yeah.

Just think about that. Think how crazy that is. Yeah. Cause I was one of those people. I always wanted to have like a hundred dollars in cash in me at all times, the matter, the matter what age I was, or at least 40 bucks or you just never know. I just always wanted to make sure I was covered. And now it's like, do you need, when do you use cash ever? Unless you're tipping a Valley at a restaurant or a hotel or something, you could get through a month of your life without ever bringing out a dollar bill or a quarter.

And what happens if that just goes away for two weeks? It is unbelievable. So a slight preview. We're doing a series on Plain English that we call Plain History, which is history episodes. And I'm working on one. It's going to be big. I think it's going to be cool on the moon landing. And one of the coolest things about the moon landing, there was no internet.

in the 1960s. - Right. - How the fuck did they get to the moon in less than a decade without an internet? Imagine, let's say, if NASA, sorry, yeah, if NASA was hacked by the Chinese Communist Party and NASA was like, "We're not gonna have any internet for the next decade, "but we still wanna get a rover to the moon "or a rover to Mars." - Yeah. - We have to do it. No Excel, no Google Docs, no email,

This isn't like an unsolved problem. We literally did it 60 years ago. We developed a technology to not only land a man on the moon. The craziest thing is having the part of the spaceship orbiting the moon while Neil Armstrong is walking around that we have to then take off from the moon and hook up with this thing orbiting around the moon and then blast us back to Earth. Built all of this without...

and internet. It's unbelievable. So I am not, of course, rooting for a world in which NASA and the U.S. government's technological capabilities are catastrophically hacked by the Chinese Communist Party. But I suppose the silver lining is we could still get to the moon without the internet. We know it because we did it. And the other silver lining is I think there's a lot of people focused on this.

and worried about it, but it did. What's something I was thinking of? All right. Well, that was a depressing ending. Derek Thompson, abundance. It's out. You and Ezra Klein, you can listen to it on Spotify. You can buy it in a bookstore. You can buy the ebook. You can do all that. How, how long is the book tour? What are you doing?

Uh, we're in New York right now. Next is Boston. You're home. Um, yep. Our talk is, uh, is that first Paris church in Cambridge? Um, and then we're going to DC and then LA, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta research triangle. Oh my God. Do you negotiate all of this with, with your wife?

She signed off on this? I told her. Did you just have a kid? We have a 19-month-old, and it's been made clear to my wife that she gets a really, really nice gift after all of this. That's great. Maybe an island. Certainly a beautiful piece of jewelry. That's great. Certainly a beautiful piece of jewelry. All right. Congrats on the book.

Thank you, man. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you. All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Derek Thompson. Good luck with your book, Derek. Thanks to Saruti and Gahal and Kyle as well. Don't forget, you can watch this as a video podcast every time on Spotify. You can also check out the Bill Simmons YouTube channel if you want to see clips and full episodes. And I'm going to be back on this podcast on Thursday. See you then.

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