← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
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- [01:55]
Sonny Bunch
My name is Sonny Bunch. I am culture editor at the Book and I'm very pleased to be joined today by Chuck Klosterman, who is the author of a new book titled Football Just. Just Football. And I I gotta say this is. We were talking a little bit before the show. This is. I'm. This is very exciting for me because I've been reading you for 25 years now. So this is. This is a lot of fun for me. Your new book is really interesting and I hope people check it out. Thanks for being on the show today.
- [02:23]
Chuck Klosterman
Oh, it's my pleasure thanks for having me on.
- [02:26]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah, I'm going to start a little bit oddly here, and I hope folks bear with me here for a second because I want to, I want to digress slightly. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, just died. Dilbert. I think it would, I think it's hard for people who did not grow up in a certain era to understand how big Dilbert was. And Dilbert, not even the best daily comic strip, right? Not even. Not even. But it was enormous. Millions of copies of his books sold, millions of calendars sold. There was a TV show, there was a Dilbert TV show. That could not ever happen again. I think it's fair to say that that sort of thing could not ever happen again because the world of media has changed so much just in the last 15 years, 10 to 15 years, the decline of daily newspapers, etc. Etc. The daily comic strip does not exist in that sort of monocultural form anymore. The premise of this book is at least partly that at some point in the future, possibly somewhat distant future, maybe after we're dead, football will be the same way. People will not understand how big football is. I guess this is my question for you. Is, is the foot. Is the future of football the future of the daily comic book? The daily newspaper comic strip?
- [03:47]
Chuck Klosterman
That's an interesting sort of comparison because, I mean, I'm not even 100% sure. I totally agree that nothing like the sort of Dilbert like phenomenon could happen, but I agree with you in the sense that it couldn't happen in exactly that way because, you know, daily comic strips were part of the daily newspaper and the daily newspapers disappeared. And the idea of the relationship people had reading a cartoon every day that then transferred into this thing, it's like, well, I mean, you saw things like happen with Garfield and with the Far side. Similar things happen. They kind of crossed into this different sphere. Kelvin Hobbs being an example of that. So something like that won't exactly happen. Will football go the way of the comic strip? I, I, I mean, I don't know. I, I don't, I don't really see that. They seem like, like very different things in the sense that it's not that people suddenly decided they weren't interested in comic strips anymore, it's just that daily comic strips are no longer part of people's lives. A generation passes having no experience with them. It seems archaic and quaint. I, my suspicion about this thing with football, and it is very interesting. You know, there's a, there's a, you know, like 11 different essays in this book, every interview I do, they really want to talk about this one, about the end of football. Because it seems so crazy, right? Like, in the present tense, it seems more plausible that football will actually just swallow up all the other sports and it will go from being the biggest sport in America to really the only sport in America. That. That's how it seems now, like in this moment. But of course, we're going to live in a very different. Well, you and I probably will not be living in a very distant future in 50 years. And. And that's going to play a role, I think. I think there are economic factors that will probably play a larger role, and then there'll be also the kind of the foundational erosion. And this might be the most important part of people's interpersonal relationship to the game. And what I mean by when I say interpersonal, I mean, like, not just something they see as entertainment or kind of a weekend distraction or like a fun thing to gamble on. They. The idea that people will not have the kind of relationship to football that is necessary for something to be so central to kind of a country's identity.
- [06:05]
Sonny Bunch
Let's talk about that a little bit, because we both have kids. You write about your. You have kids in your book. I have kids. I have young kids. My son loves playing football, loves going out there. He's on a flag football team. He's seven. You know, we've made it very clear to him, though, that he's probably not gonna play tackle football. That's not a thing that we. We are super into to him doing. You write about your. Your own kids and. And the general idea of, you know, classes of people becoming more and more uncomfortable with their kids playing football. Do you have to have that linkage between. Do you think, I mean, between playing as a kid and enjoying it as an adult or. Or not? Because I'll just say from my own. I did not play football growing up. I still watch red zone for 12 hours every Sunday. You know, that is my weekend. Do you think that. That breaking that linkage is going to kind of shatter things irrevocably?
- [07:01]
Chuck Klosterman
I don't think you have to play football to have that relationship. It's very clear that already we're in a world where most people who love football did not really have firsthand experience of it outside of maybe playing on the playground in fourth grade or whatever, which is. It's not really the same. It's not. It's more distant from real football than playing basketball on the playground is, or playing volleyball in, you know, PE or whatever, those are actually closer to the sport that we see as sort of a, like a, like a real kind of quote unquote, professional entity or whatever. Football is not really like that. But that's not what I mean when I say, like the relationship people have to the game. I mean, yes, for, like, I played, you know, a little in high school and a lot, and, you know, and. But that's. That is less what I'm talking about than the idea that football certainly over the last half of the 20th century wasn't just something that, you know, you played or didn't play. It kind of imbued the experience of going to high school and of going to college. And the. I, you know, some of the ideas we have about, like, oh, well, who does the prom queen date? Well, she dates the quarterback. Or if there's a movie and in the movie there's a football coach, soon as he's introduced, introduced, we know what his character is going to be like. In many respects, it was this idea that football is something that people understand in the United States, even if they don't play, even, in fact, they actively dislike it. That is what I'm really talking about. And that is something that I suspect is not going to be the case going forward in the 21st century. This does not mean football is not going to be loved. It's going to be, you know, I, I would guess over the next 10 or 15 years it will actually become slightly more popular than it is right now. But that doesn't mean it's going to be this way in perpetuity. And, you know, when a society shifts and there's going to be multiple shifts in America, probably faster than we're used to in the past, it's the big objects that have a hard time making that conversion. The small objects are more flexible, the big objects are brittle. And because football is sort of, you know, the end of the monoculture in many ways, as we even move further away from the possibility of that, I think that the kind of the, the, the economic elements of football are going to make it very difficult for it to survive in some kind of distant future. Now, I could be wrong about this. I. It's, you know, in some ways it's very easy to make a prediction that's gonna not come to fruition until after I'd be dead anyways. But, you know, this is, this is what, you know, like I said, like, everybody wants to talk about this part of the book. The idea of football ending. I think it's just so many people, it's like it can't be that way. It just, it can't happen. And they can make many, many good arguments against it. But the one very strong argument I have on my side is that nothing else in the history of the world has not had this happen. Like, there's never, there's never been anything that became super hyper popular and stayed that way for forever, you know, so it's, it's going to happen now. I speculate on one way that it could. Like the mechanics of one possible way. I probably will not be exactly right, but I have a sense I will be closer than a lot of people might suspect.
- [10:24]
Sonny Bunch
I do want to just dive into the, to this aspect of it because it is, it is really interesting. It's been a long, it's been a long preoccupation of this show. You know, we talk about the business of showbiz a lot. And the big business of showbiz right now is streaming. Streaming is where all of these companies are making their money there. It's where they're pouring all their resources. And most of the companies, all of the companies now at this point have realized that they cannot generate enough revenue via subscriptions alone to. To make the thing sustainable, they have to get advertising. How do you get advertising? You get people to sit there and watch your show. How do you get them to sit there and watch your show? You make it live. And the only thing that is live that is still incredibly popular on a national level is football. This. This is the thing which has a lot of really interesting consequences. One of them making football so valuable, as you note in your book, football becomes so valuable that eventually nobody can afford it and it starts to. Starts to collapse. I mean, I think this is a pretty. I think I'll just say, I don't really have a good question here. I'm just saying I think this is basically right. I do think that this is, this is absolutely what we are seeing play out right now. If you look at these rights deals, they are simply too big to sustain.
- [11:42]
Chuck Klosterman
I think for a. Especially like a super large corporation or for a platform. It's themselves, you know, these huge numbers. It's like they can still kind of justify. They can. They're like, well, simply because there's nothing else, as you say, there's kind of no other option, right? Where we're in this sort of system where it's like ads pay for things and that's why we see things on streaming or we see things on television and we need to have people watch those ads. How do you make them watch those ads? Well, you got to make something that's not skippable, like you say, that's live, but the numbers are just going to keep ballooning at the same time. The, you know what the NFL or, you know, the SEC or whatever, you look at the month that they will ask in return for, you know, the luxury or the ability to show these things. And I like, you know, I'm not, I am not one of these like, oh, it's late capitalism, it's the end of capitalism. But I do think that some of the things that are troubling about the way capitalism works are first going to be seen through these, you know, through sports. I think it could happen to the NBA maybe first, where as the numbers get larger and larger and larger, it, it's, it be it, it creates this thing that is, that is so kind of like such a hyper object, like so much larger than anyone's kind of one to one experience that there is just no room for error. That like a work stoppage. There was two strikes in the NFL in the 80s, okay. And when those strikes happened, you know, people really wanted those games back. It was a meaningful thing. You know, now football is much more popular than it was in the 80s. If there was a work stoppage now, it would be a huge deal. Okay. It would be like, people would be like, what am I going to do? How am I going to gamble all of these things? The work stoppage I foresee in a distant future will not be like that. It will be a different experience. And I don't think football will just poof, be gone, but I think it will really recede from the center of the culture.
- [13:46]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about gambling? Because there's a very interesting. There's a fun essay in your book about the rise of the kind of meta idea of football. You have football games like Madden or NCAA or whatever.
- [14:00]
Chuck Klosterman
Simulations. Video simulations, yes.
- [14:02]
Sonny Bunch
And then video simulations which have also changed how the game is played and how the game is watched. We can talk about that in a second as well. And then you have fantasy football, which, you know, I started, I started playing fantasy football in 2000, I guess so 20, 25 years now. And for me it's always been the kind of Yahoo or ESPN or whatever style mechanized. But, you know, I think you write in the book that you guys were, know, jotting down stats on paper and.
- [14:30]
Chuck Klosterman
And yeah, I see. I started, I started playing football in Fantasy Football in 1990 okay. And it was a very different thing at that point. I mean, I guess fundamentally was the same, but it felt different because it was a strange thing to do. It was really seen as something that guys who played rotisserie baseball, like fantasy baseball, which exist. Existed first, you know, like, they came fall and they had wanted to replace it with something else. So they started playing fantasy football. It was just touchdowns, field goals, and extra points. We didn't track yardage or receptions or anything like that because what you were doing is you were go, the guy who ran the league, the commissioner was going in the newspaper and like, just finding all the touchdowns and adding these things up. It was seen as very distant from the world of gambling because, remember, this is a time when, like, Pete Rose was getting banned from baseball. The I, you know, to gamble on football, you had to go through a bookie. It was definitely seen as something that was kind of for the degenerate. Degenerate, like, like somebody. Somebody who's like. But it wasn't seen as like a healthy pastime. Not that it is now, but it wasn't seen as an acceptable pastime. I think now in retrospect, it seems pretty obvious that either intentionally or accidentally, fantasy football was priming the pump for this world of gambling. We have now the idea that you're watching a football game and the actual outcome is not what matters to you. The spread matters. The performance of individual players matter. It's not. It's like a second. Almost like a second experience.
- [16:04]
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- [17:03]
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- [17:33]
Sonny Bunch
It's really interesting. I was trying to think, as I was reading this essay, I was trying to think how this mechanism worked in my own head, because I've seen the same thing kind of happen, happen to myself. And I, I do realize that what fantasy football does is it takes away the rooting interest in the, the, the team. It takes away the rooting interest in the piece of laundry. Right. And it makes it kind of a more general thing. Now, I care about all of the NFL, not just what's happening with the Packers.
- [17:58]
Chuck Klosterman
Say, well, and plus, you care about individuals in a way you might not have in the past, that you might care about the packers backup tight end. Is he. Does he have value? Does he have underrated value? That's not something you would previously have thought about. Even if you love the packers. It would just be like, do we have a good enough backup tight end? It wouldn't be what his performance is, you know.
- [18:18]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah. And then, and then we get to, then we get to the rise of sports gambling, which is now, you know, it's. There's a million apps out there. It's right there in your pocket. People are doing it all the time. You write that you don't, you don't do it that much. You, you're, you're not, not a total degenerate gambler, but you, you do dabble sometimes. How has that changed the way we talk about football with each other? I mean, this is, this is the interesting thing about this essay, is that it doesn't really change necessarily how you watch the game. The game is still the game, but it changes everything about how you talk about the game with friends, strangers, whatever. It's like it's a whole new experience.
- [19:01]
Chuck Klosterman
I mean, it's very strange to say this, to say that in a certain context, gambling enriches football. It seems like a weird thing to say, right? It makes, you know, it's, it's, it's like taking something that's like a vice and saying that somehow it has added value. But in a strange way, it does. It creates almost a second channel of conversation for people Just sitting around talking about these games. Like, you know, I don't think I write about my kids too much in this book, but I do mention that there are times when I find myself talking to, to other parents. You know, our kids are together and I'm talking to like other dads usually. And we often talk about sports, but the conversations are like, they're kind of bifurcated. It's like in one way we're talking about, oh, you know, who's going to win the national championship. But then there's this other conversation about, well, what's the line? What's the line supposed to be? Are you making any prop bets? Did you lose money in the semifinals? It's like this, like we're still talking about football, but it's a different kind of conversation. When you do wager on a game, say you're wagering on a game and the point spread is four and a half and it's a close game, you're watching something very different than the vast majority of people engaged with that contest because you're watching it in a completely different way. The real game becomes completely secondary to whether or not does a team have a chance to get a backdoor cover here? Like, you start, you think about possessions late in the game in a very different way. Like, oh, it's like, you know, is it possible that, that this team will start throwing the ball every down? Does that increase the chance that I didn't get a pick six and get back into this? It's like it's completely divorced from what's really in theory important about the game.
- [20:50]
Sonny Bunch
You know, what happens when we hit the tipping point where more people are concerned about that secondary game than, than the game itself. Because I feel like we're not from it. It does the. And maybe this is just a function of all the sports gambling ads I see, all the conversations I have. I'm the exact same way I like when I'm with my son's friends and hanging out with the dads, we're talking, what's the line on that? Oh, four and a half. Yeah, that's, that's crazy. It is. It feels like we are very much, very rapidly approaching that point where this is the thing that becomes the thing and the game itself is just a way of getting to that thing.
- [21:25]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, as with many things kind of, that would kind of be classified in this category. It would have a short term benefit for football and a long term detriment. In the short term. It would increase interest, particularly among casual fans, among people who are really interested in the process of gambling more than what they're actually gambling on. Okay. And that's going to, you know, that's going to spill into people who might normally have no real investment in this. It's like, you know, it's like. I think a lot of guys, you know, they start gambling because it's like, oh, it's. It's Tuesday night, they're watching, you know, a Mac game on television, and they're like, I want to feel something. I want to feel like I care about this. So I'm going to go on my phone and I'm going to throw some money in this, and then I'll just. I want the juice. I want to feel the juice or whatever. So, like I say, in the short term, like in the short term, the interest in football is going up because of this. The risk, though, is that that moves people's, again, kind of interpersonal relationship away from the game to the thing that's. It's ancillary sort of supporting, you know, the supporting rod for it or whatever. And that kind of ancillary distraction that can be replaced by something else. That person could start, you know, loving football because they love gambling, but then realize, oh, actually, you know, I'm. I'm better at gambling on Premier League Soccer, you know, and that's. That's maybe where their interest goes. Whenever you take. I mean. Okay, I'll just start by saying this. We talk about the popularity of football. Everybody understands it's the most popular sport in America. Like, I mentioned this in the book and I've mentioned in every podcast, like, in 2020, three of the hundred most popular broadcasts in American television, 93 were NFL games, and then three or four more were college games. There's just nothing like this, right? Like, it's. It's. The interest in. This is just, you know, wide sweeping. And people are always trying to describe why this is. And part of it is, is that football has this strange, I guess, somewhat paradoxical advantage where it does not really think about the individual. Like, the players are almost faceless automatons on the field. You're just watching this clash of colors. You don't have the relationship to NFL players the way you do with NBA players. It's just that. Not. It's a different thing. You know, even baseball, the. You know, it's like they're always looking for, like, you know, can, oh, Johnny become like, the face of the league? That's a real big deal. The NFL doesn't need a face of the league because what people like is the actual thing. Like, because football divorces itself from the individual and is only the collective, it becomes the thing we like in totality. And that is why football is so central. I particularly say in the last half of the 20th century it was this way to understand society because it was a reflection of that. Things that move the interest in the game away from the game, celebrity gambling even to some extent fantasy football, like the over time that actually does hurt the game. Now it doesn't seem like that way now because we're kind of in, I guess, you know, this still kind of the apex. You know, the apex of this. All these things are coalescing to make football seem so dominant that it's just going to erase everything else. But I don't know. I don't believe that that is going to be true in the future.
- [24:55]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah, I don't know. And it is the thing football does have going for it. And you talk a lot about this in one of the early essays is how good it is on television, how we actually only understand football through what we see on television. It's the sport that is best enjoyed at home. It is. It is hard to watch a football game in a stadium. I've done that multiple times. Not nearly as much fun as just watching it at home and getting the replays and having the advertising breaks, not just sitting there in silence in the stadium or the pulsing sound or whatever. What is it about football that translates so well to television? And why do we always kind of think of it as that sideline view? Here's the line of scrimmage, and this is where the play is going. Why does our brain do that?
- [25:48]
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- [26:50]
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- [27:05]
Sonny Bunch
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- [27:19]
Chuck Klosterman
My belief on this is that, you know, we saw football starts in the 19th century. You know, it kind of changes and evolves on its own for, you know, 80 years, 70 years or whatever and then intersects with the rise of television. And of course, football has invented, with no conception that such a thing as television will even exist. Television comes into being and nobody really thinks this is going to be the perfect vessel for football. They're thinking like, oh, we can show baseball, we can show the Kentucky Derby, boxing on Friday nights. But as it turns out, at least in my belief and I, that in this almost unconscious, really kind of semiotic way, the experience of watching football on television is ideal for both sides of the equation. It's ideal for football and it's ideal for television. And it has to do with sort of all these kind of contradictory things, the constant stopping of the action. Like I, I, you know, this keeps coming up because this question gets asked to me a lot and I always note how, you know, in 2011 there was this Wall Street Journal story that's still referenced today, particularly by people who don't like football. And they will say like, you know, they found that in a three hour NFL broadcast there's about 11 minutes of action, which seems like, like a, like a dooming statistic, right? That, that like this, this huge window of time is, is absorbed by the watcher and they're really only seeing 11 minutes. Like if you were pitching football as a new idea to someone, like I got this idea for a sport and you said, well, takes three hours and there's really only 11 minutes of action. They'd be like, no, that's like, that would be enough to stop. But as it turns out, 11 minutes within a three hour window is perfect if it's football because the moments of action in football, the six seconds of play, you know, six second or seven second play or whatever, it's this like Hyperkinetic, kind of very super violent, intense, complicated thing that gives the illusion, creates the, Maybe it's not even an illusion, it just creates the sensation of almost like, you know, intense, dynamic, non stop action. But yet there are all these breaks that allow us to consider what we saw and what we will see and the reasoning for why what we just saw was done and possible reasoning for what we'll see in the future and the ability to look at your phone, have a drink of your beer, talk to the guy sitting next to you about the game or about something else, or to think to yourself about something totally unrelated and then re engage when the play starts again. It's like football is just accidentally perfect for the experience of sitting in front of your television for a long time. And you know, it could have never been done on purpose. Like there's so much effort that the people who make television put into the idea of like what can we make? People want to watch this thing we're presenting them and they really think about the content, what is the content of the thing that they're saying. But the key is the form. It is the form of how that content is presented. And the form of football is perfect for television.
- [30:33]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah. And it's, it's, it's interesting because television itself does not seem to be going away. People are still in front of their television, but how they consume it does seem to be changing. And football itself has seen some real changes here. Right. I, like I mentioned Red Zone briefly. You don't, you don't talk about Red Zone really in the book very much. But it is, it is taking that 11 minutes of action and turning it into three hours of action. Like you know, two discrete three hour blocks of action. And I always, I'm kind of fascinated by what that is doing to my own relationship to, to the game and to my kids relationship to the game. Because I, they experience football in a very different way than I experience football.
- [31:15]
Chuck Klosterman
Yeah, I, I've talked to people in Ohio who don't let their kids watch Red Zone for that very reason. They're like that they're going to get a, it would be, it would be like if you're trying to get your kid interested in music. So all you did was play the hooks to great songs. Like you played the hook to the Boys Are Back in Town. Then you played like the hook to some popular, you know, Taylor Swift song. Then you play the hook to Van Halen's Panama and they were just constantly hearing the hook over and over and over again. It wouldn't really give them a sense of what songs are like now. I watch the red zone all the time. A big part of it is because there are no, or I guess now very few advertisements. Like you don't see those commercials. And that makes a big difference to me, just as someone who's kind of, you know, watching it, you know, and, and it also gives you a sense. It gives you kind of almost. I mean, global is the wrong word because it's only happening in the United States. But it feels like kind of a global sense of what's happening in the league. You get to see kind of all the players and all that. But it is a. It is a change away from sort of what the, the, I guess the original expectation of watching a football game was. I think people feel this too. It's like they watch the red zone. Maybe you do this, you watch the red zone all Sunday and then you watch the Sunday night game. And it does seem to be moving a lot slower, like, like straight, like, like the amount of breaks, you know, you notice them. But I don't think in any way the red zone is, is. I don't think that's a long term downside for football. I think that it. Because you're still, your mind is still operating. If you understand the football and follow it outside of those hours. It almost like your mind builds in the other games, like, or the games you're not seeing or what you're not seeing. I mean, that's, I think, always a big part of football is that there's a lot that we can't see. Like that main shot from the sideline that. The one that we see on television, you know, 85% of the time or whatever. That's not the best way to see the game, even on television. Like, you can't usually see the free safety. Sometimes you can't see the corners. You know, sometimes when the ball is thrown deep, there's this kind of microsecond where you have no idea if the guy is open or he's covered or the ball is being thrown away. I think it probably creates a sense of tension in your mind. Intellectually, you're not maybe aware of it, but there's like this fully unknown thing. These are the things that, that when described, seem like problems, but in practice really are what we want from the experience of watching television. That's why I put that essay first. I mean, it's like I had some nervousness about this because there are, you know, when I write books, I want them to be Entertaining. And I want to be fun to read. I want the. You know, it's like. I was like, if someone's going to read about football, they don't want, you know, some kind of turgid thing. Like they want, like, you know. But I felt like I had to sort of describe the relationship between football and television at times in a way that, I don't know, kind of skews toward almost like academic language. But, like, it had to. I had to explain this because I really think this is the key to everything.
- [34:22]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah. I will just say it is not dry or turgid and does not feel terribly academic, but I'm. I'm an awkward person to ask about this because I. I tend to. I tend to be. I tend to read that sort of thing anyways. But this is. Trust me, for anyone who's listening out there, you. You will not be bored reading this book. It helps a lot if you're a football fan to read this book. But that being said, it is very much a book about the idea of America, the idea of media consumption, the idea of, I don't know, sports and competition, and also just. It's a book about thinking about how we think about things. There's. You have a line in here. I'm going to botch it from memory. I can't find it right on my notes here. But you have a line that you say something like, I'm constantly arguing with myself in my head. Like, I'm. All the time. I'm arguing with myself every minute of every day. And one of the things I love about your books, including this one, is that these all feel like you kind of working out your ideas and how. How to think about thinking about things. That is a. That is just a really. It's. It's. It's in. It's entertaining to watch. And it is also, I think, helpful for those of us out there who are also trying to think about how we think about things.
- [35:39]
Chuck Klosterman
I think about writing. Say I'm writing about football like I am with this book. The way it seems to me is that everything I've ever thought or felt or believed or questioned about football is like a ball of yarn in my brain. And the process of writing is pulling the string and straightening it out. That's what writing is. It's taking all the things that in my mind are combined and intersected and intertwined. And, you know that I'm not actively maybe thinking about any of them, but I'm always thinking about all of them in some way. And so that's like. That is kind of the way I do. I mean, I appreciate you saying that. At the same time, you know, I feel like if I, If I heard that about someone else, I would be like, well, you're not supposed to figure out what you think when you're writing. You're supposed to know already. Like, you're supposed to come to the keyboard and be like, this is what I want to do. But that's not. I'm just not that way. You know, I love football, and I think this, I think that's reflected in this book, but I don't think it's an attempt to persuade people to like it. Like, like, it's, that's just not how I am. Like, I'm not. I, I, Yeah, I'm interested in ideas. I'm not even. I'm not interested in, in the, in, in sort of like the conclusions necessarily people pull out of those ideas. I mean, because I'm interested, but that's not essential. What I'm more interested is the questions themselves, you know?
- [37:08]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah, no, it's. Again, I really hope people read the book. That's. That's my main thing here, is to get people to pick it, Pick it up. And it's interesting that you say you're not, you're not trying to convince people to like football. I think that's true. I don't think that is not. That is not the aim of this book at all, but it is. You have, you have a line. You're talking about how popular football is. I got it. I have to set it up a little bit because I'm kind of jumping midway into the quote, but it. Quote, we recognize it's a statistical truth that football is very popular about how reality works and the. And true things need to matter. True things need to matter is, I think a very. Is a fundamental way to understanding this book and a lot of the stuff you write because, like, it is a truth that football is important to the country. It is a truth that football is very popular to the country. This is just how it is. This is the world in which we live. And trying to divine what that truth really means, I think does matter. I think it matters to. I think it matters to, you know, not only how we understand the country, but also how we understand each other and everything else that is going on in the world.
- [38:20]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, it's almost like the acceptance of that truth. Okay, so the. Even if we can't fully explain it, we first at least must accept that it's true. You Know, I mean, I talk about this a little in the book when I. There's an essay in there about Canadian football. And, you know, in the 90s, when I was a journalist, newspaper journalist, I was obsessed with postmodernism. And there was like a whole class of guys like me where we just wanted everything to be postmodern. That's all we cared about. It was like, everything. How can we find the postmodernism in anything? Anything we saw that was interesting, that suddenly must be postmodern. And then all of a sudden, the world became totally postmodern. And then we were all like, well, it's not our fault, you know, because. Because when I was doing it, it was like an interesting thing. It was like an interesting way to think about things. It didn't seem like a practical, functional thing. So in some ways, this book. When I say, like, true things are important or whatever, what I'm really. What I'm saying is that, like, yes, I am looking at football and I. I am interpreting things, you know, and. And I am projecting things.
- [39:26]
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- [39:27]
Chuck Klosterman
And it's not like I'm like, there is a. A creative aspect to this, but it can't be that. I look at football's popularity and say, like, well, actually, it's not real or it's real, but here is my decision. Like, this is why I think it is like, you know, or why I wish it was like, you know, a lot. A lot of new criticism was extremely meaningful until it got to the point where it was just sort of like. Well, it's almost like you were rewarded for having the most irrational, illogical conclusion of what something meant. It was just. It became this, like, it went. It went too far, which was absolutely fine as long it was just theoretical, but then it became something else, and. And, you know, and now I have a lot of regrets about that part of my life in terms of how I sort of viewed art and the world and politics and a lot of things.
- [40:25]
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- [41:25]
Sonny Bunch
Like this as a follow up question. It's often very bad, but can you just drill down on that a little bit more? When you say you have regrets in terms of like, what you. The response to the criticism, the criticism it itself spawned, the impact it had on the world, what do you mean?
- [41:41]
Chuck Klosterman
Okay, I'll just kind of like use this, like, little example. You know, there was a. When the Beatles recorded songs, sometimes there would be like, lyrical mistakes. This is especially true late in their career. And sometimes, you know, George Martin, the producer would go back and say, like, we should fix that. And like John Lennon once said to him, like, the suits will love this. What he meant, like, the pseudo intellectuals will love this mistake I made. Like, it was almost like, it's funny that people are going to take this really seriously and extrapolate these meanings when actually I just, you know, saying the wrong word or whatever. And you know, that's great. But then, you know, at one point Charles Manson decided that the Beatles are telling him to like, start a race war, right? So like, it's all, it's totally fine to be like, well, I don't care what the meaning of this is or, or I will allow this to be whatever you want. But if you do that, you are giving up the right to say, well, you can't take this to mean anything. You know what I'm saying? It's like a lot of the, A lot of the way I was in the 90s when I thought about culture and I just, you know, I was just consumed by, was this thing that was like, well, you know, absolutely everything is completely subjective. And that even if it, and if something seemed objectively true, there was all like, I would have never said this out loud and I would have disagreed if someone accused me of it at the time. But I think that there was part of me who was like, if I see something that seems objectively true, can I somehow invert that to, to disqualify its reality? Like, I, I don't, I. This, this is not like, obviously this much to do with a book about football, but yet, in a way, it has a lot to do about me. And I am the person who wrote the book, I guess. Is that. That my interest? Some. You know, I bet you can relate to this. I mean, it's like this happens to people. It's like your interest. Your interest in an academic idea or a hypothetical idea or something that can theoretically be argued, becomes so intense that you want it to be imposed on everything you encounter. I think a lot of conspiratorial thinking is sort of connected to this now because I'm also extremely. Like, I. I'm part of that, too. Like. Like, I. Like, I am. I am drawn to conspiratorial thinking. I. I have this aesthetic distance from it. Like, I know that it's. I know the problem with it. I know, you know, it's. It's still, to me, something that's just fun and interesting, but I also recognize that it can be harmful. And when I look at society now, and I don't want to get into it too much, but it's like, to me, like, the idea that postmodernism is no longer something people talk about, but the way the world operates is bad.
- [44:47]
Sonny Bunch
My main takeaway from this is that your next book is on conspiracy theories, because I think that would be great. That would be. Is that, you know, that would be. That would be a real fun.
- [44:56]
Chuck Klosterman
Okay, here's the deal. If you went into my library, you would see, you know, many books about conspiracy theories. You know, I don't know if that's still something that exists in the book world, because that is one thing that has been completely absorbed by Internet culture. Like, there are some things that are still in the world that we can, you know, like. Oh, the idea of, like, suburban malaise or whatever. The idea that, like, people living in the suburbs and have sort of a. Like a wonderful yet empty life, that's still like, a literary idea. If you're interested in that idea, it's got to be through books or it's got to be through film. Okay.
- [45:33]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah.
- [45:34]
Chuck Klosterman
But if you're interested in conspiracies, that is no longer. Like, that's not what you get a book for. That's what you go to the. To Reddit for or whatever. So, I mean, a book about conspiracies would be, you know, it's like. Like, kind of like a lot of those, like, Thomas Pinchon books or whatever. It's like.
- [45:49]
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- [45:49]
Chuck Klosterman
I don't know if I. That seems like something that. That Again, you know, is like a central idea of the past, but a different thing now.
- [46:00]
Sonny Bunch
Back. Back to football. Back to football. You know, it's interesting, all this, all this talk about, you know, what things could mean, you know, what. How you define them. The central reality of football is final score after 60 minutes, right? It's like that. One of the appeals of football is that there is an outcome, you know, ties notwithstanding. There is a. There's a. You've got, You've got the. You've got the numbers there on the board. And it does feel, at the end of the day, there is something kind of comforting to that. Even if your team doesn't win, even if your team blows a 21 point halftime lead to, to their crosstown rivals, like that. That is a. That's a thing. That, that is. That is real and rooted and we can all just kind of agree on, which is nice.
- [46:42]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, I mean, nice, but also it's like, I suppose, in a sense, comforting, but like, like Bill Parcells, the longtime coach, he had this phrase he would often say, and he was like, you are what your record says you are. So basically anybody, anytime he was like, when he was an analyst for a while on television, anytime would be like, anytime someone would say, like, well, you know, like, the Bengals have lost three of the last four games, but like, you know, Joe Burrow actually looks like the best quarterback in the league. There was an officiating issue in one of these games and he'd be like, I don't want to hear that you are what your record says you are. Okay? That is, you know, now there's a thousand ways to disagree with that. It's not really true. You aren't actually what your record says you are all the time. But it's an impossible thing to disprove in the context of what we're supposed to believe about football. I kind of compare it to like, somebody who only cares about one thing. They only care about what does the record say or what does the outcome of the game say. That's like playing tennis against a wall. Like, you're never going to beat it. It's always going to be perfect. It only has one issue. And in football, particularly if you're a football coach, it is acceptable to see the world through that lens, that it is totally acceptable to say, like, well, you know, I don't. Do the ends justify the means? Well, I don't know. They do if the ends mean winning this game. You know, let's.
- [48:07]
Sonny Bunch
You, you. You have a. You have a chapter about Dallas football. About the Cowboys, America's team, North Dallas 40. There's a lot of really interesting stuff there. First off, I'm actually. I live in Dallas now. I'm a transplant. It's. It's an interesting place.
- [48:21]
Chuck Klosterman
I thought this show was about Hollywood. I thought it was. You're in Hollywood now?
- [48:25]
Sonny Bunch
No, no, I'm going there. See, it's, you know.
- [48:28]
Chuck Klosterman
Oh, okay.
- [48:29]
Sonny Bunch
Aha. Aha.
- [48:30]
Chuck Klosterman
Okay.
- [48:30]
Sonny Bunch
We're traveling. No, it's. But it's. But it's interesting living here in Dallas because I will say I expected moving to Dallas for there to be lots of Cowboys fans. It turns out college football is still. Even. Even in. In Dallas. College football is very much still the thing.
- [48:48]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, really high school shouldn't be. I would. I would have thought even. Because, you know, it's. Obviously that's hyper localized. But anyways, go ahead. I'm not going to argue with. About you're living in Texas. Why am I arguing?
- [48:59]
Sonny Bunch
No, there's a lot. There is certainly a lot of high school football. We. There are. There are enough kind of transplants in my specific neighborhood that we're not all.
- [49:07]
Chuck Klosterman
Super.
- [49:10]
Sonny Bunch
Highlands, Lake Highlands football, you know, which is where we. Where we are people. But it's. But it's interesting. It is interesting.
- [49:17]
Chuck Klosterman
You.
- [49:17]
Sonny Bunch
You talk a little bit about the changes to the college sport, and again, the biggest change to the college sport is structural. I like paying the players, which I think almost everyone agrees now is good and justified. Like, I. It always struck me as weird that there was so much pushback on this for a long time, paying players, getting paid who are, you know, at risk of getting injured, losing future revenue, whatever, that's good. The way it has worked seems to be really on the verge of destroying the entire sport of college football. And I, I don't know how to square that circle of like, yes, players should get paid. Also the way they're doing it is terrible. And it is. It is fundamentally changing what college football is and, and how it works, which again is. I don't, you know, I don't. I don't know what the solution here is. What is. What is. What's. What is to be done?
- [50:13]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, I mean, this is. It's gonna be hard to sort of describe all of this and without, you know, talking for two hours. But like, so at some point, again, just because of the sheer magnitude of the numbers, the idea of getting a free college education for playing football became insufficient.
- [50:33]
Rocket Money Advertiser
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- [50:33]
Chuck Klosterman
The idea that what the amount of revenue that these football games were earning for the institution and for all these things was so great that the disparity was too much. And that just saying to a kid it's like, well, you get to go to Stanford for free. That's, that wasn't enough, right. So they thought, well, we're gonna go toward like the Olympic model. Well, you know, the, the nil thing where guys can get paid for the, like the, their kind of individual value. So someone like Johnny Manziel or Tim Tebow or these really super high profile guys who sell thousands of jerseys in the student bookstore, it's like they should get some of that. And that's what it seemed like it was going to be a really good idea, you know, for 20 minutes. And then eventually it changed completely. It just became this thing that's like, well, okay, well this is, this is a, this is a professional league. And like I've said this kind of joke a few other places people go like, oh, you know, it's college sports now. It's the Wild West. The Wild west had more rules like you, you could get shot for doing the wrong thing. There are, there's literally no oversight on this at all. And now it's becoming this strange thing. Like I'm not sure you know when this is going to air, but like, okay, so the national championship has not yet been played in college football, but Indiana is in the game and I suspect they're going to win. They've done an amazing job. They've underst understood or like, you know, their coach understands this new reality better than anyone else. But I think it's very easy to understand for people who've spent their life following and loving college football how sort of awkward this feels that like, you know, if you had said this was going to happen, if you had told people 20 years ago this was going to happen, they might have said like, yeah, well this is going to be sur. I'm sure there's going to be some team that's going to surprisingly be good. Now you would have never thought it was going to Indiana. I think that there was a belief for a while that the schools like Texas and LSU and Alabama, like, and usc, like those schools who had always been dominant, would become more dominant. It now seems to be the opposite. It's going to be this complete leveling of the sport. And when I mean leveling, I mean like the distance between, you know, J. James Madison and, and Ohio State's going to, you know, become less. And here again in the short term that's going to be positive. Like the casual person likes the pro experience more than the collegiate experience. College sports are very strange. Like, you know, you talk to somebody. I taught a semester of school in East Germany, and it was these kids in Leipzig. And one of the. When we talked about sports in any way, the thing that they just found baffling was that Americans like college sports or it's just. It's a very American thing. It's not something that you see everywhere and around the world. It has all these, I mean, to me, incredibly charming aspects. Like there's a regional quality to it and a historical quality. And the very interesting idea that if, say, you know, SMU is playing Texas A and M, in a sense, you're rooting for or against the kind of person you project who goes to those schools, even though that's not the case for the players. The players go wherever they get the scholarship. But, like, you know, you, you know, if, if, if Duke is playing, you know, Mississippi State or whatever, there's like, it's like, it's a stark sort of difference between who you kind of think is this kind of person and that kind of person. And I think that's going to be lost over time. I think that that's going to disappear. I think that one of the great things about college football is the diversity of the way the games is played. Like a flexbone team against, you know, like a team that likes to play a pro set versus a team that likes to play, you know, an air raid. They're like these completely sort of alien ways of playing that sometimes collide. When you watch the NFL, you don't see that the teams fundamentally play the same way because they have all these great athletes, and there's no way that you can't fool anybody or trick anybody. That's going to happen to college football as well. It's going to become less interesting. And I think over time it will hurt college. Like, I mean, college football, you know. So, like, when you say, like, you know, I don't see anybody who's against paying players. I mean, when you, when you say it like that, of course it seems weird to say, like, yeah, I don't. I don't want these kids to, to get paid. You know, the money should go to the university president. That, of course, makes no sense. What I wish would have happened, which of course is impossible, and it's like, naive of me to even say, but when they saw this huge amount of revenue, there are so many things that they could have done that would have been good for the sport as a concept. I don't think anyone who goes to a college should have to pay to watch the football team play. I. I can't believe that that is the case. Like, you're paying tuition to go to, you know, Florida, and then you also got to buy tickets. Everybody who goes to college should be able to watch that team for free. Anyone who's an alumni of a. Of a. Of an institution should be able to buy tickets incredibly cheap. I mean, incredibly cheap. $5 or something. You know, like, there are. They could have made. They could have done things with. With. With their relationship to television with these huge deals. They could have even said, like, this money. This. In a way, like, again, this is a naive thing to say, but it's like the amount of money doesn't have to be this great. We could actually use less advertising. We could make the game feel faster because we don't. This money doesn't have to go somewhere. Like, we could still live in a world where it is an amateur thing and that the people who are the best at this amateur endeavor eventually move to the professional level. I mean, no, everybody listening to this is saying, like, that's crazy. That's stupid. He sounds like someone doesn't know what he's talking about. I realize this is impossible because I also live in the world, but I'm saying it wasn't this thing where it was like, we got to give these kids money, because otherwise it's just. It's like, it's unfair. I mean, I guess I'm glad that they do. I don't. Certainly don't blame them. I would never blame a kid, you know, who gets offered $450,000 to play receiver for Texas A and M every. I think that's. Take it. Like, absolutely take it, but for the health of the sport over time. It's not good. And anybody who thinks it is good is confused about why. Sports are in many ways different than a lot of other professions. You know, a lot of times we think about labor issues in sports, and. But it's done in this. Like, you know, it's kind of like when they say, like, you know, if, you know, if you're a hammer, the whole world is a nail. Like, if you're really interested in labor and the idea of labor and law and all these things, you know, you look at a sports league, the, you know, the. The NFL players union, the same way you look at, like, the union for factory employees or, like, guys who work in car factories or coal miners, and it's not the same. These are different things. Like, the most important thing for the NFL or for college sports or for high school sports is the overall health of the entire organization, not the benefit to any individual. But that goes antithetical to the way the world is moving.
- [58:00]
Sonny Bunch
Yeah. Yeah. All right. We're. We're running. We're running long here. Running up against the time here. I always like to close these interviews by asking if there's anything I should have asked, if you think there's anything we should have discussed about football, the world.
- [58:11]
Chuck Klosterman
Oh, no, I just appreciate you asking me questions at all. I mean, that's. I. You know, it's. There was, like, Penguin, my publisher, like, was not super stoked about me writing a book about football because. Not because it was me, necessarily, but because football books traditionally are not that popular. I mean, when you. There's, like, a cliche about this, you know, which is that if you want to write a book about sports, you know, make sure the ball itself is small. Like, read about golf or baseball or tennis. When you get. The ball gets larger somehow. Like, the kind of person who loves football doesn't want to read about it, and the person who hates football doesn't want to be told that they should care. But I just feel real lucky that I was able to do this, and I hope it does, you know, get to people who just, like. Not only like. Like watching football, but, like, like thinking about it. I hope there's enough people to make this work.
- [59:05]
Sonny Bunch
I will say again, I think folks should check it out, and it is. It is an extremely good way to help clarify your own thoughts on how we think about football, because I do think. Look again. Football, as you say, 93 of the hundred most watched shows a couple years back, football games, like, it is. It is the thing that we. We have. That's the last remnant of the monoculture. And understanding portions of it is. That's. That's an important. That's important. It has to be, because if it isn't, then what. What am I doing with my life? All right, Chuck, thank you for being on the show today. I really appreciate it.
- [59:42]
Chuck Klosterman
My pleasure.