Chuck Klosterman Isn't Even Here Right Now

One of America's foremost cultural critics steps out of the writer's cabin and into the studio to predict the future of a game that seems too big to stop: What happened to the egghead prophecy of Peak Football? Is 11 minutes actually the perfect amount of hyper-connective, violent action? And, in a Post-Winning Era, will the relentless gold-mining of fandom threaten the NFL's dominance, as soon as 2070? Plus: best laid aquarium plans, killing your fake darlings, old love letters, the meaning of nostalgia... and becoming Don Rickles for Bill Simmons. • Read "Football" https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/704152/football-by-chuck-klosterman/ by Chuck Klosterman • Take a PTFO audience survey http://theathletic.com/survey26 for your chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  No one wants to see someone die on the football field, but the fact that it is possible does raise the stakes.

• 0:12Speaker 00

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• 2:19Speaker 01

  There were, I'm sure, certainly at Harvard, there were people, I'm sure, who had a very pejorative view of people who had my book in their room. I just, that's how it is.

• 2:28Pablo Torre?

  That is also true.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, that's how it is. I'm not, you gotta be self-aware, you can't, you know?

• 2:35Pablo Torre?

  But I was trying to figure out, like, when did I first become aware of you? And how was I most consuming you? And the answer, despite you being a writer I've long enjoyed, much to the protestations of the coolest kids in college.

• 2:48Pablo Torre?

  Bill Simmons. The pod, you've been doing that for like 20-plus years now.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  I would say the response I get from going on his podcast is about the same as releasing a book. And I'm not exaggerating. Like, the likelihood that anytime, if it's someone coming up in an airport, or I talk to a guy at the dog park, or whatever, the likelihood that what they want to talk about is that. You know, I mean, it's kind of, I, it's strange that you got written 13 books. I'm happy how they've worked out, I've had more success than I would ever dreamed. But I do sometimes wonder if I'm remembered, if I'm gonna be the way, you know, certain Carson guests are remembered.

• 3:26Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  You know, or certain, like, you know, certain people who are on talk shows, who are, you know, who... Because it's just, the magnitude of that thing is crazy.

• 3:37Pablo Torre?

  I've been on that show once, in person, and it still comes up all of the time, with strangers on the street. It is intense. It is intense. And so, the idea that you're here to talk about this book, which I enjoy, by the way.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:52Pablo Torre?

  Football. This is you also talking about what's in the psychology of this audience that I think you felt most acutely by sports podcasting.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I wouldn't go, no, if I, I don't know if I agree with that, because the audience for sports podcasting is not the sports audience. Podcasting is, in many ways, sports podcasting is built for the world of sports outside of the games.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  You can be the person who doesn't really watch games and yet is able to have a conversation that seemingly could be on a podcast.

• 4:24Pablo Torre?

  All of which is to say that this conversation we're having has been a long time coming. And we have known each other from afar for a very, very long time through the world of sports and sports media. But we never, we had plans, Chuck. We had grand plans that-

• 4:39Speaker 01

  We did.

• 4:39Pablo Torre?

  I blame you, honestly. If I may just immediately throw you under the bus. Like, we had plans.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we did. We were going to go to the Brooklyn Aquarium. Yeah. And, you know, it probably was me. It probably was me. Because I think, I feel like that happened when my life had kind of shifted. I think I had, what year was it I had kids, I think, already?

• 4:59Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, we were talking like in the 20 teens.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yes. Um, you, it's when you were, you know, you were on a, you know, around the horn and like you, you, you dress like a manatee or whatever, you know?

• 5:11Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  And it was like that, or something along those lines. And we were like, let's get high and go to the, go to the, the, the Brooklyn Aquarium. And it's like a good idea, but then I just, you know, I never got around it. There's this kind of this, there's a lot of people like that who I've made plans with, who I never ended up seeing. I lived in New York from like 2002 to 2017. And they're really, that's really bifurcated, that there was that first eight-year period. And that was a really incredible, crazy period. And then there was the second period where I was a married person who was raising kids and trying to sort of become maybe a little more serious about what I was doing as a writer.

• 5:48Pablo Torre?

  Well done. The, the bifurcation of your time in New York. It sounds like you have great nostalgia for at the very least, the first chunk of it.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  If nostalgia is injecting your own feelings into the past and misremembering the past, I hope that's not what's happening. I hope that what I remember is real. But it was just, the way my life worked out is so unlike, it's not like my dreams were fulfilled or it surpassed my dreams. I never had dreams like this, right? I never, I, I, I've mentioned this before, but like I used to, you know, like read Spin Magazine in college. So when I ended up working there, all my college friends were like, oh, what you always wanted to have happen has happened. And I was like, I never read that magazine with the idea that- There was a way to work there. Like, I never thought that. I never met a writer in my life, like an author, until I moved to Akron. Like, nobody, I mean, I came from a town of 500 people,

• 6:40Speaker 01

  but even in Fargo, I didn't know anybody who were writers. I didn't, I didn't exactly know how it even worked. You know, like, when I published my first book, I just, I just wrote it and then said, like, I wonder how to publish it. I didn't have an agent initially. I didn't know anyone in New York. It just worked out. I mean, as with everything, it's like the biggest factor probably is chance, but, you know.

• 7:01Pablo Torre?

  But, hold on, but New York and my nostalgia, my own potentially misremembered memories of New York media, pre-all of this [BLEEP], like, working at a magazine was the best.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, it seemed that that was the destination job, yes.

• 7:18Pablo Torre?

  Just the idea that, like, again, I worked at Sports Illustrated as a fact checker, then at ESPN the magazine, and those places either don't exist or are zombies, as I often say on this show. But the era in which there were expense accounts, the era in which the human editorial discretion was the way that decisions were made about what people talked about and knew about and covered. Like, the idea that there were these institutions with human beings, editors, who had money to spend and said, "Hey, Chuck, go away for several months and come back with this profile of someone," or this review, or this piece. That is, that is a world that I constantly am thinking about.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Well, but that's, it's interesting to me you say that because it seems to me, just looking around, that the world you're working in involves much more money, and it is much more, and there's much more money to be made. It is funny to me how when people talk about the magazine world of the 90s or whatever, they're always talking about expense accounts and how this guy did, you know, he was able, he had the expense of suit or whatever. It's what they always focus on, but that just, that wasn't what it was for me. I just, it was like, I wanted to write, and I wanted what I wrote to be seen by people, and I wanted to work at the highest level of this, and that's what it seemed like magazines and a handful of newspapers were. Like, it is, like, I mean, I've asked this to other people,

• 8:42Speaker 01

  and this, I know, it seems like an adversarial question, but do you in any way have regrets that you stopped writing? Because it's so, that's, that's something that's like... You know, I may be too rigid. Like, I can't really change. I still am doing, I'm writing this. Many people would say like, well, this book, you should make it into a 10-part podcast, or it should be like, it should have been a Substack, or should. But I want to do this. So it's like, how, what, why did this, why did you do that?

• 9:12Pablo Torre?

  So, so certainly, you know, coming from the Tony Kornheiser coaching tree, money, as he often says, is the answer all of our questions. But also, what I am nostalgic for, and I'll answer the question about like, do I miswriting in a second? What I'm nostalgic for is the separation that I had from the pressures of metrics and audience.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 9:37Pablo Torre?

  Like, the insulation of, I need to make this piece so that my editor likes it, was a different premise from, I need to make this piece so that I can dive into the comments section, or, I need to make this piece in such a way so that it's going to be read in a way that actually makes a dent in whatever version of like, the conversation is. So the idea of it being simpler, I miss. And the question of like, how do I write now, given the new premise and the new pressures of all of that? I find myself typing more often than I ever have, because this show ends up being, in the investigative episodes, the deep dives and stuff, like, structured and roadmapped, and structure is always, to me, it was the key to when my writing felt good,

• 10:22Pablo Torre?

  was when there was a structure and I knew what I was driving towards. And so I constantly feel like I'm writing, but the experience of, and I know you have a cabin at home, in which you get to like, truly be insulated, the experience of, I'm at a laptop, writing for myself, and I then will have to figure out, is this good enough to pass muster with the editorial structure of this magazine? Or with this publishing company? It did feel more pure, and that's what I'm more nostalgic for.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  You know, this might be like, one of like, the kind of the rare situations, where maybe like, our age does impact things a little bit. Because I, you know, I, when I was at newspapers, and I've mentioned this many times, it's just, it's kind of funny, and it's also kind of sad, is like, we used to have conversations like, if only we knew what stories were actually being read, all our questions would be answered. All we can do now is use our best judgment. If we actually had statistics, it would be so great. And who would have guessed the level of catastrophe that has been for media, you know? But there's also, like, this is a real, what your operation here, very impressive, but it's like a cooperative thing. And it's like, wow, it's great that we're all working together on something. And I am not like that.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  I like to do things by myself, have complete control over it. And then when I finally hand it over, feel like, well, this is, there shouldn't be any changes. This should be what it is.

• 11:43Pablo Torre?

  Were you a nightmare to edit?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  When I was young, absolutely. I would say as I got older, less so. When I was a young person, because I was also like,

• 11:58Speaker 01

  I felt like I thought about every sentence. So if they had an issue, I had three reasons.

• 12:05Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Why, you know, but I mean, I did. When I was at Fargo, I used to do this. This is, I guess I'm not ashamed of this, but when I was writing a big feature, I would always include something in there that was crazy. So the editor would be like, we gotta take that out. And then like, I'd be like, okay, fine. But these other four things, like I would, I would do that. I would, I would add something in there that I knew.

• 12:26Pablo Torre?

  You would have a fake darling that you would consent to the killing of.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. That was his only job, you know? Because it would be like, you know, every once in a while it got through. It'd be really interesting. But I mean, that was, but that, you know, that, but that was when, you know, I have, I don't,

• 12:44Speaker 01

  you look back on your life and it's hard to feel good sometimes, you know? Like, it's hard to feel good because you're looking back on it with the projection of who you are now. Like, I can't get back into the mind of who I was at, say, 25. No matter how hard I try, in some weird way, I'm just imagining myself now, but I'm, I'm less fat and I don't have a beard and, you know, but really I was a completely different person. The weirdest thing about writing books over a period of time like this is when you write that book, you are frozen in time. And for the person who only reads that book, they're reading about who I was when I was 28 and they understand me better than I do at that age. Because to me, I would never go back and read that book. I would be terrified, sort of, to have to confront.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Who I was, it's probably not a person I would like now.

• 13:31Pablo Torre?

  I was going back, trying to find our previous emails, which again date back now more than a decade. And I was cringing, not at the emails that you wrote, but the emails that I was sending to other people. I don't want to be the person that I used to be, not only in the writing I've done for public consumption, but like the private, especially sometimes the private writing. I cringe at that.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  On the one hand, it's like, it had to happen for you to be who you are now. I think of that, might do, it's like, all these things in the past that maybe make me uncomfortable. It was like, that had to happen. But there is not a person alive who somehow finds an old love letter they wrote. And they're like, "That was great work." Like, "I can't believe this didn't change your opinion." Like, you'd never like that. And it is, it's like, you're looking at someone who is not you, but it is you. We want to believe that fundamentally, we are the same person our whole life, in some kind of deep way. And in maybe the deepest way we are, but, you know, it's just, it's an interesting thing, yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  One thing that I like about football is that even as it changes, and no sport adopts technology more, and nothing evolves more and has changed, there are aspects of it that cannot get away from the way it used to be, the old ways of thinking. And, you know, I think when I was, when I was 20, I only cared about what it would be like when I was 50. And now I'm 50, and it only seems to make sense the way things were when I was 20. And that just proves I'm a person who has the inability to really live out, like, live in time, like, to live in the present. I can't do it. People say, like, "Live in the present"? I've never done that.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  I'm only living in the past and the future at all times. I'm not even here right now.

• 15:41Pablo Torre?

  So in that way, the book that you wrote here, Football, what would the version of this book be if it was Chuck of 10, 15 years ago trying to do this? How different would it have been?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Quite a bit different. The fact that I'm like, I'm smarter now, I'm a better writer now. And yet, there will be a certain kind of person who will always be like, those early books are better because they can really feel there's a person there. Like, you see this with bands all the time. It's like, they mature, Paul McCartney matures and he makes, you know, flaming pie and he's like, this music is better than the early Beatles. And like, no one else thinks that, but he does. Because what he looks back on is something that was like, that's when I was 22 or whatever. It was just natural, you know? Now, I'm actually thinking about it. But what's in the early Beatles recordings is this kind of aliveness that just could never be replicated or whatever.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  So if I wrote this book, maybe, I mean, 20 years ago, for sure, it would have been more confrontational, more bombastic. It would have been more an attempt to persuade people to believe what I believed as opposed to being like, this is an interesting way to think about this idea. It may contradict the way you think about it now, but just consider this. Because it may sort of shift the way you sort of view this reality, this reality of football. So, I like, I think it would be terrible, to be honest.

• 17:01Pablo Torre?

  How often are you surprised, though, that people really like something? Are you perpetually realizing, oh, [BLEEP], like, my radar is quite different?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  That's a really hard thing to answer because I've been doing this long enough with having the good fortune of having a certain level of notoriety or readership, that I think it's now very difficult for anyone to read my books in a straight way. I am always most interested in reviews in other countries because they're not, they don't have an idea of what I am or what I'm supposed to represent, or, I mean, particularly the people in the media industry or in the publishing industry. Like, those are people who sort of have a fixed idea of like what I do and how I am.

• 17:45Pablo Torre?

  So you want someone ideally to tell you what they think, having never read like Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, or listened to you on Simmons's podcast, or anything?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what, those podcasts I did in Simmons have been huge for my career, and they have been detrimental to the appreciation of my writing, absolutely.

• 18:01Pablo Torre?

  In what way? Tell me.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so if you like a book, like when Fuck Rock City came out and no one had ever heard me speak, if they like that book, the voice they're hearing from that book is the best version of their own voice. That if you don't know anything about the writer, but you like the work, what you're hearing is exactly the way it would be presented by yourself. So it's, it is like this weird sort of bargain, kind of. It's like, in order to be a successful writer now, I have to do this. If I want to sell books, I have to go on these podcasts. Like, there's a, like, there's a thin sliver of writers who can make a living doing this, and even thinner slice, who can just like, I put the books out, and that's how it is. It has to be like, they have to have somebody who had some commercial success, and the perception within the publishing industry that this work is

• 18:46Speaker 01

  so great, we gotta do it. For me to, to do this, I'm not sure how people would even know this book existed if I didn't do this, because people don't go around bookstores anymore, just browsing covers, and yet I know that the, it's probably has a somewhat negative impact. Like, or, or for, for example, I said, say I say something on, um, on a podcast that the person is really bothered by. It's not really pertinent to what I'm writing about or anything else, but they're like, this guy is a blowhard, and he doesn't understand this, he's uninformed, he's uninformed about...

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Luca Doncic, or whatever it is. What do you go, well, then they're gonna transfer that into everything. I mean, like, in some ways, it's like the writers who have been dead for 100 years, they have the advantage. Because all that is there is the text.

• 19:36Pablo Torre?

  You're saying Herman Melville could not have survived in the sports podcasting era?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  He'd always be like, he overrated the whale. You know, sperm whales aren't even the biggest whale. But even Herman Melville is like, that's a real interesting example. Because with him, like, we do know a little bit about his life. He was on a whaling ship or whatever. So sometimes, I always mean more like if, I don't even know if this happens anymore. Does anyone just randomly read a book from, you know, the 1920s? And they just like, you know, but if they do, and they don't know the author, they just come across it in some library or archive or whatever, they're actually having the experience the author probably intended. That these are the words you're supposed to read, and the meaning you get comes from the collection of these words. And that will probably never happen to me again.

• 20:27Pablo Torre?

  Is there, just so I get a sense of how you want people to imagine what you sound like? Is there a figure in culture where you're like, that's the guy whose voice I want people to think I have?

• 20:38Speaker 01

  No, my voice is who I am. It's like, I don't, I don't want to be someone different. They'll say, oh, you sound like Quentin Tarantino, or you sound like Mitch Hedberg, or whatever. All these things, all these things, fine, I don't, I don't, I'm not offended by any of it. But at the same time, that means that what they are consuming is in some ways distanced from what the work is.

• 20:59Pablo Torre?

  I love that you have now preemptively argued with like a half dozen different potential listeners of this conversation.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Everything I say, I imagine someone hearing it. Everything I write, I imagine someone reading it. It's terrible to do that, you know? Like, a real artist isn't that way. A real artist doesn't do that.

• 21:17Pablo Torre?

  Wait, what does a real artist do?

• 21:19Speaker 01

  A real artist is in some ways myopic, I think, in that they are thinking about, how can I express this thing regardless of how it is consumed? I think also, like a lot of times when you specifically hear an artist talking, how disinterested they are in response to their work, that's often a sign that that can't be the case, kind of, you know? Because if they're really disinterested, it wouldn't even occur to them to bring it up as something they don't worry about. Like that Thelodius Monk quote is like, "The true genius is the person who is most himself." And that is what I'm trying, like with this book, that's what I'm trying to do. Like, I'm trying to be like, I need to take the way I think and feel about this and transfer it to the page as closely as possible.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  I have to somehow wall off this idea of how it will be received. And yet, I'm doing it in public.

• 22:08Pablo Torre?

  The reason I was even looking through my email archive in the first place is because I realized, over the years, that I had been thinking, when I think about the evolution of football, I've been thinking about this, this talk I went to in Brooklyn in 2010, like February 2010, that Malcolm Gladwell spoke at-

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I was at that one too, right?

• 22:26Pablo Torre?

  And I didn't realize, until I was looking through my email archive, that you were also there.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Okay, here's the thing, I was supposed to be the first person.

• 22:34Pablo Torre?

  You were late.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  I was late, I got stuck on the bridge. And, to his credit-

• 22:39Pablo Torre?

  I think you were kind of stoned also, maybe?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  I know, I don't think so. I don't think I would, I mean, I'm in public. Well, you know, it's like, that would be a complete disgrace. I would never possibly do that, that's an insane accusation.

• 22:53Pablo Torre?

  But that's when I first saw you in corporeal reality. I was like, oh, that, by the way, and my reaction to you showing up as you are, in that way, I was like, nah, this tracks.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Well, but Gladwell, to his credit, it's like, he went first when I was late. And I, like, you know, that was a, like, there was really no comparison between the level of interest of, like, from the people who were there. But he goes first, and then I get there, right when he's finishing. And he makes this statement where he's like, "In 25 years, no one will eat red meat and like, no one will play football."

• 23:25Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  And then I got up there and I was like, "In 25 years, and not only will I be watching football, like, I might be eating the guys after they die. I'm doing both of these things."

• 23:33Pablo Torre?

  Again, just- Time and place demographics. Brooklyn 2010, Malcolm Gladwell at this event. And he expresses an opinion that at that point was certainly edgy, but also closer to what the conversation was indicating, which is that the NFL was getting over its skis. That football was, and Mark Cuban, by the way, it's funny. Like, we watched, you know, Mark Cuban on the sidelines of the college football national championship game as his Indiana Hoosiers. He's now like the, he's now the [bleep] Phil Knight of Indiana. As he's there, previously, he had said as Dallas Mavericks owner, "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered," about football. Like, football is getting way too big. And so I thought of that, and I thought of how,

• 24:18Pablo Torre?

  I was looking up the timeline, like, October 2009, months before Gladwell and you gave your talks. That was when Goodell, Commissioner Roger Goodell, insisted the NFL is studying the problem of concussions. And in December of Odine, that was when Greg Iyalo, the NFL spokesman, told Alan Schwartz of the New York Times that, quote, "It's quite obvious from the medical research that's been done that concussions can lead to long-term problems," end quote. And then, fast forward 15 years, and the decline of football as we stand today could not have been more inaccurately prophesied.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  And all the CTE stuff has dissipated from this conversation. You hear it much less, which is also an interesting thing. I mean, like, because it doesn't, from watching the game, you wouldn't think there would actually be a lot fewer concussions. I will say, I'm surprised that when they said, "We gotta change the way kids tackle," or whatever, I was like, "That's never gonna work." And it kinda did. I mean, the guys did adjust, you know? And I think that there was this idea that the way the public would react to the information or reality of CTE would be more dramatic. What it did do is in some parts of the country, this being one, the Pacific Northwest being one, it's like, it's rarer and rarer for parents to let their kids start playing football, you know?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  So that, in some ways, a fraction of what they said happened. But, you know, the way football has sort of changed and become... For many people, something they don't have a personal relationship with it. It's just kind of a distraction and entertainment thing. They didn't play, their dad didn't play, they didn't have friends who played, which I think for a lot of people, they're much more comfortable with. Like this kind of bifurcation that like, well, football is something played by people I'll never meet, and I can kind of follow it.

• 26:04Pablo Torre?

  But I want to actually explain. What you explain in this book, which I hadn't really understood so clearly, was why football became so culturally ascendant as an entertainment product.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:17Pablo Torre?

  Because on one hand, it is violent, and that's the thing that distinguishes it from basketball and baseball and soccer and all that stuff. But your analysis of like, why football as a television show is so astride everything, and it's not close.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  In 2023, 93 of the top 100 watched broadcasts in the United States were NFL games, and like, three or four more were college games, yeah.

• 26:42Pablo Torre?

  Right. It's still something that I don't think people have really internalized, the fact that college football is the number two most popular sport in America.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 26:49Pablo Torre?

  And it's not close.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's pro football, college football, a huge drop-off, probably basketball, and then an argument.

• 26:57Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Really. That's really what it is.

• 26:59Pablo Torre?

  I want you to explain that for people who don't intuitively understand.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Well, okay. First of all, this is a tough thing to, this is part of the difference between being on a podcast and writing a book. Like, if I could really easily explain what I wrote over those pages in a conversation, the book wouldn't need to exist. So, you know, football begins in the 19th century and involves, as it does, and collides with television's rise in the 50s. And the way it is, like, television is a, it's the perfect vessel for this, and I don't think anyone would have thought that. Certainly, nobody who invented football had a conception of a medium that didn't exist. But there was that, you know, that famous Wall Street Journal article about how in an NFL football game, you know, there's three hours of broadcast and only 11 minutes of action. And that seems like such a death blow to a descriptor of football, right?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  To someone, like, if you were trying to present it as a new sport, the idea that it's a three-hour event, that there's only 11 minutes of action.

• 27:55Pablo Torre?

  That was the implicit, like, fact that needed to be, like, cut down, that Cuban, and everyone was criticizing.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  But the fact of the matter is 11 minutes seems to be the perfect amount. Because- What we consciously say we want from entertainment and what we unconsciously want, I believe are very different things. And the, the way football works in that it has these little brief, you know, four to seven second windows of hyperkinetic violent action. And then these breaks in between that allow us to sort of have this cerebral relationship to what happened and what might happen. And, you know, this is almost the ideal experience for something to be popular on television, particularly over time. Because the intensity and the complexity of any given football play can create the sensation that you're watching something super dynamic.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Like almost as though it's happening too fast, especially late in the game when a team's in a two minute offense or something, it almost feels like there's too much to absorb. But really, it is those breaks that allow us to have like a cerebral relationship to this game that I think most people almost refuse to even like recognize. Like they would never say this, why they love football. They would say like, I love the Houston Texans, or, or it's like, I just like to sit in my couch and have a few beers and relax. But nothing is really that way. And I, I think that the reason football works so well on television, better than any other television product, is kind of a profound thing.

• 29:24Pablo Torre?

  The glory of this is in some ways accidental.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Oh, mostly, mostly.

• 29:30Pablo Torre?

  But like the idea that 11 minutes of football allows you to have built in distraction time.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  That's, it should be a flaw.

• 29:37Pablo Torre?

  Which, which accommodated commercials and now our phones. Like, of course, the NFL didn't foresee that, pro football didn't foresee that.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  And I think it involves psychology and sociology of understanding the meaning of football, but it's not a blood sport. I, I don't believe that people who love football vary, I mean, there's a fraction of people, I'm sure who do, but for the most part, they don't want to ever see guys get hurt. There used to be that thing, you know, on ESPN where, you know, where they, where they were like, they would.

• 30:06Pablo Torre?

  Jacked up.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Exactly, you know? But even that, it wasn't like you didn't, they weren't going to show one of those if a guy got paralyzed, right? It was the idea, like football, what, what people like about it is the game, it is the strategy, it is sort of the like, like the atmosphere and all of these things, but those things. Would matter less if it wasn't, if there wasn't the possibility of real injury. I mean, like, it's like, we don't, no one wants to see someone die on the football field, but the fact that it is possible does raise the stakes. It's like a guy climbing Mount Everest. You know, that may be like the, like, the apex of his life and the apex of mountains or whatever. It's like, he wants to do this. It will give his life sort of meaning. He doesn't want to die climbing that mountain.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  But if there was no chance that he could die, it's not a meaningful thing. Football, in some ways, is more meaningful, not because, uh, uh, that, you know, guys get hurt, but because they could. And they know it. And we all know it. We're all sort of complicit in this understanding.

• 31:14Pablo Torre?

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• 32:18Speaker 03

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• 32:49Pablo Torre?

  So the thing of, okay, peak football and how you go from Malcolm Gladwell is very wrong in 2010 to I'm looking ahead and I'm seeing the trend line of all of this and this is heading to a place of unsustainability. What is the argument for this thing is going to collapse?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Every cultural issue is really a technology idea and every social issue is really an economic idea. If football recedes from the culture or kind of becomes this niche thing, and I think that I feel like that will happen at one point, I think it's going to be for economic reasons because that's really what creates social change. It's always money in some way. But like when we're talking about art, it's often the technology that really does it, even though we don't think of that, we don't want to think that it's the, you know, like podcasting is a great example of this. Part of the reason podcasting kind of usurped what used to be the magazine world is the ease in doing it. People would have maybe liked the more passive experience of listening to people talk as opposed to the active experience of reading it if that would have been an easy thing

• 33:56Speaker 01

  to do, but all it was was like talk radio, that was the only option and it would have been impossible for you, I think, say if it was 1995 for you to do what you do and become a sports talk radio host.

• 34:07Pablo Torre?

  Correct.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  When society changes, big things have a harder time adjusting than small things and football is the biggest thing. So in just a straightforward sense, it's like as the world changes, it's going to be harder for this to adapt. I have a suspicion that the way advertising works now is going to be seen differently in the future. I think some people think that I'm claiming that so like advertising never works on anybody and it doesn't, like that's not, it's, I do think though that we are overestimating the value of advertising and it costs a lot to advertise in football games, right? Because it's your one option, it's the one place where people are maybe going to watch those ads. And I think if, as there's going to be a realization at some point that the amount

• 34:50Speaker 01

  that we're spending on advertising, we can't just keep inflating it every time there's a new contract available, if you're Fox or Prime or whatever. So at one point they're like, well, the number's not going up this time. The number's staying the same. And it's like, oh, my gosh, what's what you know, the NFL is not that it's too big to fail. It's too big to stop. It's got to get bigger. It's got to get bigger. What are we going to do? But maybe we go to 22 games or whatever.

• 35:14Pablo Torre?

  But just but just that premise, the idea that there may be a day, a CBA negotiation that results in a media rights deal that involves player salaries going down is currently unthinkable because we have not seen it in our living memory.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  If there was a major work stoppage in football, it would be perceived as a calamity. People would be like, what am I going to gamble on? What am I going to do with my life? This is everything. It was everything to me, whatever. You saw this during COVID, like they had to play these games, right? They had to play these games, even though like colleges were not, no one was in class, but they still didn't play college football games. And in the future, I don't think that it will be the calamity it would be now because people are little by little, losing their real personal relationship to football. They see it solely as an entertainment distraction more and more. It's not something they played or their dad played or their friends played or any of these things. It was it's like it was only this thing that, well, we all watch football on the weekend. That's just kind of what we do.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  And when that stops, it will not be a disaster. We'll be like, oh, well, there's something else. And the way football has structured, the way the NFL is structured, it can't, it's not made to bear that scenario. It's it can't contract. So I'm not saying that football is going to be just wiped off the planet like a meteor, you know, killing the dinosaurs or whatever. It's like, I do think that the dominance it has in the culture is limited. And I and I think it's probably two generations. So I'm thinking like 2070.

• 36:47Pablo Torre?

  Do you think that the popularity of football, the monocultural status it has, is itself?

• 36:55Pablo Torre?

  A defense, though, against some of that erosion, that people want football and will want football decades from now because it's the thing people care about.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Okay, so, right now, it does seem impossible, right? It seems more likely that football would take over every other sport, more so than it would sort of receive or disappear. But, the one thing, it's like, kinda irrefutable, is, nothing else has ever been like that. Nothing else has ever been the biggest thing in the world and stayed that way in perpetuity. Like, for football to continue to be the last vestige of the American monoculture? I mean, I would love that, I love football. But, that would be an incredible exception. If that were to happen, if football is, like, plays the same role in culture as it does

• 37:46Speaker 01

  now in 2070, or if it's even bigger, that would actually be sort of a kind of an end of history argument.

• 37:53Pablo Torre?

  My personal view is also economically driven on this, which is to say that there is so much money available in sports, and on a relative basis, it is so, so valuable to every other media property, that I think what we're seeing now, the term I keep on returning to is fracking. It's sort of like, there is this sense that there is yet more money to be mined from sports. And, what is happening is that there are decisions being made to extract that money that thread in the actual, like, water system and the viability of what sports are and why they have become so valuable in the first place. And so, the way I think about it is, like, whether it's frankly gambling, whether it's

• 38:36Pablo Torre?

  private equity, I'm thinking of these ways in which the reason to care about sports has always been premised fundamentally on teams winning games or losing them, and now, the money seems to be in these pockets that turn into these financial instruments that actually create a conflict of interest between your interest in whether a team, as a team, is winning or losing, effectively these micro interests and incentives and bets and decisions you make that are not in favor of, oh, this helps winning, but in other stuff, which does erode, like, the whole primacy of, like, why this is special.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Not totally, but mostly do agree with you on this. I mean, I, now, in the short term, it's interesting because like, I have many conversations like with other fathers in situations where it's like, they're talking about there was like some meaningless game that was on and they were like, "I put some money down, I wanted to feel something, I wanted the juice or whatever." So in some ways, maybe gambling is inflating the idea that like, a match game between two teams that are under 500 could still be watchable, right? So in, like many of these things, like the short-term benefit is going to lead to a long-term detriment. But like, you know, the things that make a casual fan more interested are not the thing that makes the person who loves the sport care about.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  I mean, I love college football more than pro football and the things I love about it have to do with the history of the sport and the culture around it. The idea that when, you know, you're watching, you know, Kansas play Missouri, in some weird way, you're rooting or rooting for or against the kind of person you imagine who goes there. Like, all these sort of things, in a way, like, like the regional quality of it. And that's gonna be taken away, that's not gonna be how it is. We're professionalizing this, and again, you can't tell a kid like, "Well, you know, yeah, don't, don't take any money now because, you know, in 40 years, no one's gonna care about college football." Like, you can't do that, but it, it's gonna happen.

• 40:38Pablo Torre?

  So what I don't dispute is that the reason people like cultural products, such as professional football and college football, are because there is a version of it that they fell in love with, and that might even be, to my view, the best, most fun version of the TV show to exist. The thing that economically, college football and pro football both refuse to do, of course, is shrink the pie, is shrink the amount of money available. And so, I was thinking that one of the most underrated stories is the fact that the University of Utah just took all this private equity money. And the reason I say that is because it feels increasingly like-

• 41:21Pablo Torre?

  And this is the think piece I am mentally writing. It feels like we're entering a post-winning phase of sports.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 41:30Pablo Torre?

  Private equity, their main-

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Well, I don't even know if it ties into private equity so much, but your overall idea is absolutely true.

• 41:38Pablo Torre?

  Oh, it's, I think, a broad thing. With private equity, the reason why it jumped out to me, and I want to connect it to everything else, too. The private equity thing, it's their prime directive is just growth. It's a financial incentive. Is the bottom line better? It's not to win more games. Like, the whole premise of there being an irrational booster, or an irrational owner, who wants to break salary cap for convention rules, or just fund things because they love them. It's only going to be worth it to them if they're obsessed with the team, and winning a championship, and getting to celebrate on the sidelines, as we saw this week with Mark Cuban. If we replace that irrationality, that love for these products, for these heirlooms, with a financial calculation, because the money just needs to keep getting bigger,

• 42:22Pablo Torre?

  that's going to [bleep] help break sports.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Tell me this, let me just get your opinion on this. This is like, a little off-topic, but like, okay, so, the championship cup in the NBA, okay?

• 42:32Pablo Torre?

  Oh, the in-season tournament?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, okay. Does it seem like the guys kind of play a little harder in those games? A little bit?

• 42:38Pablo Torre?

  A little bit.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  A little bit does, right? Yeah. And, you know, but they don't like to play in the All-Star game. And they don't really like to play on Christmas that much anymore. And like, we all kind of have always lived with this idea that like, the playoffs are going to be different, the intensity is going to ratchet up, or whatever. When you really think about that, isn't that bizarre? That the expectation that when these guys play basketball, they're not going to care all the time? I mean, the amount of money that is there? The fact that they're the most competitive people in the world? The fact that they're the elite people? Like, isn't it kind of strange? Shouldn't the reality that which they live in be enough motivation to play hard all the time?

• 43:19Pablo Torre?

  So, that's a clear idea of what I really mean, which is- It's not post-winning so much as it is like a post-maximum competition. It's like you want to believe that in every circumstance, the people that you are watching, who you care about so viscerally, like it's inheritance from your grandfather, that they are trying as hard as they possibly can at all times. And so are the people who are funding it. So are the people who are coaching and managing it. And what we're seeing, whether it's the rise of gambling, whether it's the rise of private equity, whether it's the rise of load management.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Well, that's maybe even the bigger part.

• 43:59Pablo Torre?

  It's all speaking to a goal that's not trying to compete as hard as you can at every given moment.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  But what I think is even stranger, and the reason I brought it up to you, is how this idea of maximum competition, that was considered an insane thing to demand, to expect. Like, in other things, I know these aren't the same, the stakes are different, but it'd be really weird if there was like the best neurosurgeons in the world like had load management. You know, and then sometimes we really work on the brain. We really care. That's a strange thing. But in sports now, we've actually grown accustomed to the idea that, you know, that this is how it is.

• 44:37Pablo Torre?

  Some games don't matter. That some games just don't matter.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And in some reason, why I think one of the advantages football has is that even in a preseason game, you can't coast because you will go to the hospital. You will not exist. So football forces people.

• 44:53Pablo Torre?

  Those are the stakes.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not that someone could get hurt, but it's the physicality. The physicality demands. It is too dangerous.

• 44:59Pablo Torre?

  It's a check on a lack of effort.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 45:12Speaker 05

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• 45:39Speaker 06

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• 46:12Speaker 07

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• 46:50Pablo Torre?

  There's one part of the book that I wanted to read a bit because

• 46:57Pablo Torre?

  it's interesting and it speaks to a view that I don't know if I share. This is what you write about football and the sort of prophecy that it may in fact collapse one day. And you wrote, "Football is an ethnocentric game, beloved in only one country. This is not what we want. Football is violent, and its violence is sometimes praised. This is not what we want. Football is an exclusionary activity exclusively played by men. This is not what we want. Football does not reject toxic masculinity. This is not what we want. Football celebrates the ability to ignore injury and accept pain. This is not what we want. Football rewards domination of the weak. This is not what we want. Football shuns individualism and identity. This is not what we want. Football is authoritarian and militaristic. This is not what we want. Football is hierarchically controlled with objective outcomes. This is not what we want.

• 47:42Pablo Torre?

  Football is uncomfortable, uncompromising, demoralizing. This is not what we want. Football from a structural vantage point is fascist and reactionary. This is not what we want. Nothing about the culture of football is what we want or what we are told to want or what we are supposed to want."

• 47:58Pablo Torre?

  And it's a beautifully written paragraph, but when I read it now today, I'm like, I think we want all that stuff more than what we realized.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Well, okay, yeah, when I'm using the we that, you know, there's the we like we're here. There's the editorial we and there's also the kind of the we it's like everybody but us. Right. But I mean, I do think that everything about football seems to run counter from what we are sort of conditioned to see as the enlightened way to view the world. You know, yet I love football, right? So does that mean those ideas are actually what I do want? It's a hard question in some ways because some of the terms in there are not terms you really want to identify with what your desire is. But there's the conscious desire and then there's the unconscious desire. And that's the one that matters. The conscious desire is the person who talks in public. The unconscious desire is the person who walks away and is like, well, okay, not really though.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  You know, and I, I, I do, I, I think about that, like part of the incredible thing of football is that it just, everything that is sort of central to its aesthetics and ethos is so against what you're supposed to feel or want.

• 49:07Pablo Torre?

  It's why in 2010 Malcolm Gladwell, I think, was gesturing towards the end of this thing.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:13Pablo Torre?

  And meanwhile, I think it is incontrovertible that the descriptions you gave of football here in all of its sort of, you know, power dynamics, I think those are all accurate. I just think that whether it's the hypothetical faculty lounge or the coastal pockets that we are coming from, or whether it's broadly America. I just think that our tolerance for that is actually vast in ways that I underrated. And the question that I'm sort of like left asking myself, because you mentioned Damar Hamlin and the almost fatality.

• 49:47Pablo Torre?

  If Damar Hamlin or the equivalent were to actually die in a game in the present tense.

• 49:55Pablo Torre?

  I don't think that would be that big of a problem for the NFL. I used to, and now I'm just like, I don't think it would be.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  That's a specifically interesting case because, okay, as it turns out, when I saw the event happen, it was like, boy, that didn't even seem like he hit the guy that hard. This can kill a guy. Then it turns out, well, it's this incredibly rare issue with his heart. The likelihood of it happening again is infinitesimal. It's just this weird thing. And he survived, and he came back, and he's good, and all these things, you know? If it turned out that he had died due to this sort of very rare issue, cardiac issue, I do think it would have been surprisingly easy to sort of recover from that. I think that like, the thing that I used to always kind of think about is that like, okay, let's say the Super Bowl happens, you know, and let's say a guy dies in the Super Bowl.

• 50:42Pablo Torre?

  Right, right.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Like, you know, particularly in this kind of event where that would be particularly interesting because there's so many people watching it who would never watch football in any other situation, you know? But all those things, you know, those ideas kind of that, that, that football, you know, like you say, we have like a vast tolerance for it. And certainly there's social evidence that it might be true, right? But I would say like, for you, I don't think you have a vast tolerance for it. I think all of those things, in almost any other scenario, you would say unacceptable. You would say that is an, but you accept it in one spot.

• 51:15Pablo Torre?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 51:16Pablo Torre?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  So maybe it's not vast, maybe it's specific. And if it is, then the meaning of football actually exponentially increases. If it becomes the one place where those ideas cannot just exist, but flourish and be an acceptable thing to care about. This is why football is what it is. I'm glad you read that paragraph. That's a key part of the book, I feel, you know?

• 51:39Pablo Torre?

  It's also me realizing that like, this is why football is also this thing that people should be fluent in. It's our language, just the practical.

• 51:54Pablo Torre?

  And political and sociological motive of like, this is a passport to talk to the largest number of people available in our country. And if you abdicate that, that language, because it feels uncomfortable in all the ways that that paragraph explicated, then you're also surrendering the ability to reach and communicate and plausibly be American.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  I think people in a way cannot escape football in a way they can escape religion. Now, it's become very difficult to escape politics, but there was a time when you kinda could, you kinda can't now. So now it's like football and politics are these things, and that has its own kind of meaning.

• 52:32Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Like, you know, it's like, that sort of says, it's like, the thing that is most associated with the down-the-plate middle of America is the thing I hate. So, what do I hate?

• 52:42Pablo Torre?

  I think it's the most dangerous political position to have.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I can't imagine someone running for president and, like, you know, and someone says like, "So, the Super Bowl is coming up, sir. Do you have any rooting interest in this?" And they'd be like, "I'm not watching it. I can't fathom that."

• 53:00Pablo Torre?

  But this is, it's part and parcel with the danger, the danger zone that football is entering as the decades perhaps get closer to 2070, which is that there are so many other reasons to value this sport. And the question is whether the sport's fundamental, whatever, its magic, its essence, the thing that gives it its cultural potency, can be protected from people using it in ways that undermine the whole reason we care in the first place. Whether that's, again, the financialization of everything, whether it's just the over-expansion of it into quadrants of this risk board that don't really care

• 53:40Pablo Torre?

  about it, whether it's the fact that it's now so popular that it's being cosplayed in ways that make it uncool.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  I mean, it is, yeah, you know, this has been a great conversation, really fun. But what's interesting is I think that we fundamentally agree, but we have a key difference, which I think that you are outward looking and I am inward looking. So like, I think you are looking at the world and seeing all the ways the world could [bleep] this up. Like, there's like this thing that, that, that, that there's, there's all these, almost like these forces, these dark forces doing it. And to me, it's sort of like, well, it, it has more to do with the, the individual feeling to this thing. And granted, all those things you're talking about shape that, but I think it has to do almost with the perception of those things. Like, like, I'm just surprised that we're kind of agreeing so often, where I think in a lot of ways, like, our experience with this is very different.

• 54:31Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Or, or, or sort of like, and, and, and I guess, I suppose, somebody could say like, "Well, that's, uh, that's proof of football's value." That these, that you can have these two diametrically opposed ways of looking at it and still come to the same conclusion, which is that somehow, this thing with all these problems must be protected. Like, we must protect this thing.

• 54:50Pablo Torre?

  Yes, exactly. I think what it proves is that if we were to ever go to an aquarium stoned, we would be insufferable for every other person there.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Well, I'm, I probably would be more likable than I am now, to be totally honest. I mean, I, I don't, I don't think there's a situation where people are like, "I don't want to hang out with this guy if he's high." That doesn't seem, there's many situations where people don't want to hang out with me in the every other scenario, but not in that one, you know?

• 55:22Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 55:28Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

• 55:49Speaker 06

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 56:22Speaker 03

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• 56:47Speaker 08

  Mattresses have been made of foam for a very long time. So have pool noodles. Purple thought your spine deserved a little more innovation. The patented Gel Flex grid flexes to cushion pressure points, supports your spine, and pulls excess heat away. Gel for cooling, flex for comfort, grid for support. Because waking up shouldn't require a recovery period. Better sleep starts with Purple. Visit purple.com or your local Purple showroom and speak with a sleep genius today.