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Channels with Peter Kafka
Chuck Klosterman on Why Football Owns TV (and Why It Won’t Forever)
00:56:16
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- [00:00]
Chuck Klosterman
Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.
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Peter Kafka
Botox Onobotulinum toxin a prevents headaches in
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Chuck Klosterman
adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms.
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Peter Kafka
Alert your doctor right away as difficulty
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Chuck Klosterman
swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle
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Peter Kafka
weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection infection
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Chuck Klosterman
are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck
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Peter Kafka
and injection site pain, fatigue and headache.
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Chuck Klosterman
Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle
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Peter Kafka
or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications including botulinum toxins, as these
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Chuck Klosterman
may increase the risk of serious side effects.
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Peter Kafka
Why wait?
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Chuck Klosterman
Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. When you think of someone with ADHD, who comes to mind? Is it a woman in her 30s? Just this constant feeling of being too much, you know, too kinetic, too loud, all of the too anything and just really feeling like people got some kind
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Peter Kafka
of social rulebook that I never got.
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Chuck Klosterman
The Changing Face of adhd. That's this week on Explain It To Me New episodes Sundays. Wherever you get your podcasts. AI can fix Healthcare. I'm Henry Blodgett and this week on my show Solutions, I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Bob Wachter, author of A Giant How AI is Transforming Healthcare and what It Means for our future. Dr. Wachter was not expecting to be an AI optimist. What convinced him? Follow Solutions with Henry Blodgett wherever you get your podcasts. To hear more.
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Peter Kafka
From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. Today we are talking about sports and tv, which means we are talking about football, which is also the name of the new book from Chuck Klosterman. And one of the great perks of hosting a podcast is you get to talk to Chuck Klosterman about his new book every few years. Chuck's book is about football, which means it's about a million things, the future of TV and media, but also culture Today and politics and what it means to care about something so deeply and whether all of this is a good thing or not. I'm going to stop talking so you can hear Chuck talk. It's better that way. Here's me talking to Chuck Klosterman. I'm here with Chuck Klosterman, who's been on this show before. I don't think we need to introduce him. But you write books. What'd you do last night, Chuck? We're talking Tuesday, the day before this comes out. What'd you do Monday night?
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, Monday night I did a bunch of podcasts during the day. Then I went to Keane's Steakhouse and ate a large steak. Then I went to a bar and watched the national championship game.
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Peter Kafka
You did steakhouse pre game?
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Chuck Klosterman
Yes.
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Peter Kafka
That's impressive.
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, because I don't, when I'm doing publicity and book tours like this, I don't eat during the day. There's no upside to it. I eat breakfast and then I just wait till the end because I don't
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Peter Kafka
want some intermittent fasting, I think.
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, yeah, except I'm not doing it for health benefits. I'm doing it so like some terrible incident doesn't happen that ruins my life. Like, you know, it's like you get nervous and you're worried about things and it's like you're running around and you never know. So I just, I just go straight through.
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Peter Kafka
I do want to talk to. About your. I probably will not talk to you about your diet. The rest of this podcast we will talk about football, which is what you watched last night. It was national championship. Big takeaway from that game.
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, much closer than I anticipated. I, I thought that Indiana was going to work them. So it ended up being a really enjoyable experience to see a good national championship game. I mean, the takeaway is, I'm not breaking any ground here. It's like nil and portal stuff has changed everything in a way that whilst was predicted, was not specifically predicted in this way. Like everyone knew some school was going to understand this kind of new real reality and benefit from it. I think what the assumption was, it was going to be some kind of like second or third tier power who would suddenly kind of reinvent themselves. Nobody would have thought it was Indiana. I mean, I, I'm pretty sure that prior to the last two years, Indiana is the least successful Division 1 football program in the country. Over the last hundred years or so, it would have been like, it would have been the example you use, like, kind of as like the Jokey hypothetical. Like, let's say Indiana does this. I mean, so it is, it is probably like the most palpable, like a manifestation of how this thing completely shifted in such a short period of time. I mean, it's, it is crazy.
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Peter Kafka
But if none of this makes any sense to you, the listener, we will explain some of this because Chuck is talking about some things I wanted to ask him about later. Very, very big picture is Chuck has written a book. It's called Football. Why did you write a book called Football? What is the point of a book called football in 2026?
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, you know, I have been obsessed with sports and football my entire life, you know, and probably 20 years ago, I made like a kind of maybe an unspoken abstract decision. At some point. I want to do a book that's just about sports. And I think maybe my initial idea was that it was going to be sort of about basketball, but I realized that that's crazy. If you're writing about something, it's part of the culture. Like, football is the sport. It's the only one. It's also. I'm more obsessed with it. I mean, it's like the way it works, the way it operates, it sort of shapes this culture in a way that I think if you were trying to explain, if someone said to you, it's like, well, explain the last half of the 20th century through some idea, like, through, like some, you know, some metaphor, analogy. Like, football is the thing to pick. Like, it might not be that case for the 21st century, but it is for the end of the 20th century, and it is for the world we live in right now.
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Peter Kafka
It is the kind of thing that is such a truism that when you say it, you see, like, why don't I even bother saying it? Like, football is the most dominant thing in American culture, full stop. Even if you never participate in watching football, paying attention to it, you cannot escape it. It is the closest thing we have to monoculture.
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Chuck Klosterman
Yes. I mean, it is the end of the, like, you can say that. You know, I say I think a lot. It's like Taylor Swift and football is. But really, it is football. I mean, you, I, I, I, the stats in the book, it comes up a lot, but, like, you know, 2023 of the hundred most watched broadcasts on television in America, 93 were NFL games, and then three or four were college football games.
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Peter Kafka
I mean, and the rest are like presidential debates or the Oscars, like a handful of crazy big events.
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Chuck Klosterman
And, and in some ways it's like, well, people Go like, oh, I know football's real popular, whatever, and it's live. But that is a profound chasm for most of tv.
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Peter Kafka
The main reason for them to exist is to transmit football games.
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Chuck Klosterman
Yes. For network television, absolutely. Yes.
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Peter Kafka
And how would you describe the book to a normal person who's encountering it for the first time? Is this. It's not memoir, right? It's kind of memoir.
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Chuck Klosterman
There's some aspects of memoir in it. There's some aspects of history. There's a lot of. Kind of media analysis, kind of sort of cultural analysis. I mean, almost all the things I do in the various books I've done or whatever, there's some of that in this. It's an amalgamation of all of those things. What I'm kind of trying to do, in a way, is it's kind of a gimmicky conceit, but it's true. It's like I'm imagining some future reality where football has receded and it's no longer the center of the culture. And people look back at this time and be like, wow, it was so crazy that thing happened. Why did it happen that way? And I imagine them trying to explain,
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Peter Kafka
like you writing a boxing book in 1920 or 1920.
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Chuck Klosterman
But. But this could even be. Yes. You know, although in a sense, we still. We still have a relationship to that. I think that with football and the way sort of discourse changes, it's going to be a different thing. What they are going to impose upon the meaning of football will be sort of the reality of 2070 or whatever, and it's going to be wrong. And it's just. Because it always is. When you try to do that, you can't. If you have to be in the experience to both understand it, both from kind of an analytical way, but also from like a tactile way, the emotion of it. So I'm kind of writing this book with this idea that this future person is going to wonder, what was it about football that just made it capture the world like this, or capture America specifically? Now, it is a complicated thing, because when you write a book about a subject like this, there's like, well, okay, do you have to be a football expert to like it? Do you have to? Well, and the answer is no. But then it's like, does that. Do they not want that? Would they own. You know, can you be a complete novice? I would think so. You know, I'm trying to really kind of split this kind of complicated difference.
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Peter Kafka
And there's a bunch. And you're doing A lot of stuff. Right. You're doing who's the greatest football player of all time. I'm gonna back it up with stats and arguments. But let's also discuss race. Let's discuss brain injuries. Let's discuss television. Let's. Let's start with tv, because this is a show where we talk about TV and media. When you watch the game last night at a sports bar, were you watching the game on television the whole time? Were you checking your phone? Were you doing other stuff? Is this. Imagine we're trying to explain what watching football is to someone in 2070.
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, okay, so I was sitting actually at the bar. So the TV is right in front of me. So me and the person I'm with were both facing the television. We are talking about the game and about other things, because that's something football allows. Yes. There's a ton of downtime. And, you know, there are. You're. You'll. You watch a play and you kind of think about what it means and you speculate on what the next play could be. But there is this opportunity to have sort of this, you know, ancillary conversation. I am watching the game. I'm. I guess, you know, this is a very. It's an interesting deal. It's like I'm promoting this book called Football. So now I'm watching a football game. So now I'm hyper aware of, well, what really is happening here. In a way, maybe, that I allow my unconscious to control a lot of. Now. Now it's really in the front of my mind. Yeah.
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Peter Kafka
So you're actively thinking. And when you're watching it at home, like, is this. We talk a lot about the two screen experience. I think Matt Damon or Ben Affleck or both of them said on one of the many interviews they did for their new Netflix show that they are. Netflix is telling them you need to restate the premise of the show periodically in a Netflix show, because the assumption is people have their phone out and are doing other stuff. And so you need to remind them of that. Football has its own sort of version of that. Right. They're constantly resetting it. They assume you've walked out. They assume you're not paying attention for a while.
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, I mean, but when you say the big difference in this is that. So they're talking to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and they're saying you're creating something. So you have to factor these things into the creation. You have to, in some ways, do this very. For them, I'm sure, or any Filmmaker, like kind of almost a troubling thing that, that the. The exposition needs to be more embedded in there because you just have to work from the premise that they can't follow a narrative that is unclear. And so what they're really saying is, you got to think about this, this new thing. What is incredible about football is that this is, of course, all an accident. I mean, football is created just after the Civil War. It evolves in its own Way for 70 years. It then intersects with the rise of television in the 1950s, and everything about it changes. It turns out that football is perfect for television and that television is. Becomes really the central experience of watching football that, you know, I. One of my points in this book is that unlike other sports, football is a completely mediated event. Even when there's no media involved. Our understanding of the experience of watching football is the television experience.
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Peter Kafka
And watching a football game in person at the stadium is just a weird artifact that some people still do, but it's not the point.
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Chuck Klosterman
Okay. There are hundreds of reasons to see a football game live that are valid. The experience, the sense of community. You feel like maybe you're supporting the team and affecting the outcome. You just like being in a large group group. It's kind, you know, it's. It's a. It's a neat thing to see, but one reason that you can never use is I really wanted to see the game better. To see the game and to understand the game, it has to be through television. No one in a football stadium, including the coach and the players, can see the game in the totality of the television viewer. And it's. That is.
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Peter Kafka
I mean, you know, the best seat at home is your couch. Well, the best seat for the game is that is your couch at home.
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, I might even go a step forward. Really. The only seat is that like, you know, you're sitting in the stadium. There's going to be moments where a play happens right in front of you, and you will have this unique vantage point, and only you as the person who is there will be able to experience that. And that alone can sometimes be special. But 99% of the time, what the person is doing is seeing the. The event live and in their mind instantly, without any attempt, you know, with no need of agency reconstructing that into the television experience. Now, I know it comes with multiple
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Peter Kafka
angles and wide shots, close ups particular,
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Chuck Klosterman
the central shot, the shot from midfield downward. You know, the, the. The shot that you. That most of football is displayed through. Not the best shot to see the game can't see the free safety, quarterback drops back, throws the ball deep. There's an instant of unknown where it's like, is the receiver open, is he covered, is he throwing it away? But that millisecond is part of what creates the creative tension that there is a, there is a, there is. And again, these are not things that we're thinking about while we're doing it. One of the advantages sports and football in is it sort of allows the consumer to act as though it is, you know, almost a spaced out situation, totally passive thing. I just like watching these games. I like to have a beer and relax and sit on my couch. But I think that there is a lot of kind of profound semiotic things that are happening which makes television like. I mean football is the ideal television show. There is no constructed television show better than the way football operates in my. Like this. I mean, now this is kind of an interesting thing. You can't really have a, like an objective argument over how does it feel for everyone. But the statistics would indicate that what I'm saying is more true than false.
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Peter Kafka
You spend time in the book saying, well, there's all other ways to experience football besides watching tv in addition to watching on TV video games. You spent a bunch of time talking about that and the fact that, you know, for a lot of kids that may be the only way they experience football or certainly the only way they're going to experience football for some period of time. They're more likely to be playing Madden or some version of that before they watch a game.
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Chuck Klosterman
There's a real possibility that a kid will play Madden before he ever goes outside and throws a football around.
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Peter Kafka
Do you think that the rise of football, video games has changed the sport in the way that TV has?
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, it has changed in a lot of ways. One, it has really amplified the strategic understanding of the game from a schematic level for people because the introduction of, you know, when, when John Madden got involved with that video game, his whole thing was verisimilitude. They were like, oh, we want you to endorse this game. You know, it's going to be like this seven on seven. It's kind of like football. And he's like, no, it's got to be 11 on 11. I'm going to give you the Oakland Raiders playbook. I want you to build the plays off this. It's got to be real. And what has happened is that you know the language of football when you watch a game. Now a lot of times analysts will use language that Would have seemed really surprising to hear even in the 90s, you know, but they can do that
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Peter Kafka
in terms of specificity, the calling of
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Chuck Klosterman
play, what's a wheel route, the lexicon of things like that. Yes. You know, it's like there's almost this assumption that you, like, you probably wouldn't be watching this game if you didn't understand this to some degree also. And I think this is less of a football point and more just sort of like a. Just interesting. Is that because, you know, things like Madden and EA College Football, these games are, you know, simulations. They're like these active simulations where you are a participant in the simulation. You are doing all these things. Things happen in these games that can't happen in life. And bizarrely, over time, they do. I mentioned in this book that, you know, there's this one, a friend of mine, Michael Weinrier, but he's the only guy I play EA College football with. But we've played just, you know, hundreds, I'm guessing now thousands of games. And early on, he would often do things with his quarterback that to me would just drive me crazy because I was like, that can't happen. You can't have a guy run to his left and throw the ball across the field in the opposite way. Sidearm body doesn't work like that. Yes. And now Patrick Mahomes, does it often? Many guys do it often. Like things that we now see as incredible plays in football were once impossible plays in football, a disallowed play, something a coach would bench you for. But it began in these simulations that, you know, these things that we see now happened once in this fake world.
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Peter Kafka
I think it's kind of interesting. I would just because I grew up in the area where video games were still kind of niche and nerdy. And you would think there'd be some sort of disdain for football, video games from real football. But whenever you see clips of players doing anything in a hotel room, they're playing, they're playing Madden or a version of that, or they care about, you know, how their representation on Madden looks. It's fully part of the ecosystem.
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Chuck Klosterman
And that's not super surprising. When you think of a player who's 22 or 23, it makes sense that he's really. But what is even more fascinating is that it has, to some degree, especially with younger football coaches, impacted things like time management. Like when you play a college football game or you play Madden or whatever, it very often comes down to figuring out, like, well, okay, when do I call timeout? When do I spike the ball, all these things, you know, that these people have a sophisticated understanding of this. At 13, you know, Andy Reid is one of the best coaches in NFL history. There was a long stretch of his career where he got hammered for terrible time management. You're going to see that complaint. Well, actually, you won't see the complaint less because it will happen less. The complaints will happen just as much because the audience now is hyper aware of it, you know.
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Peter Kafka
We'll be right back with Chuck Klosterman, but first word from a sponsor.
- [19:04]
Chuck Klosterman
This episode is brought to you by Trace Minerals. Most people aren't getting the minerals they need to support optimal movement. And your body doesn't make them on its own. That's why Trace Mineral drops delivers over 70 essential minerals to help restore what your body is missing. So if you're choosing just one supplement, make it minerals. Trace minerals. Minerals. Keep you moving. Save 20% on traceminerals.com with CodePodcast. Hi, this is Kara Swisher. And this week on my podcast, on with Kara Swisher, I talk to California Governor Gavin Newsom. While he hasn't officially announced or run for president yet, he's telegraphing it all the time. It's exhausting.
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Peter Kafka
He's also got a new book out,
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Chuck Klosterman
which is what you do when you're running for president.
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Peter Kafka
It's called Young man in a Hurry.
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Chuck Klosterman
I recently interviewed him live in San Francisco. Have a listen. The problem with the Democratic Party so often is we appear weak and we've got to be stronger and we've got to be more assertive. And so that's, you know, it's the spirit, I think, that is required of this moment.
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Peter Kafka
I've known Gavin Newsom since he was
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Chuck Klosterman
mayor of San Francisco a million years ago, a million hair gels ago. And he's a really interesting and compelling politician. He's done a lot of things in his career and this one, this run for presidency which is going to happen, is among the most interesting.
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Peter Kafka
You can find a full conversation wherever
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Chuck Klosterman
you get your podcast and on YouTube, obviously. Be sure to follow and subscribe to on with Kara Swisher for more. This is what President Trump had to say about why the United States is at war with Iran. We sought repeatedly to make a deal.
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Peter Kafka
We tried.
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Chuck Klosterman
They wanted to do it, they didn't want to do it again.
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Peter Kafka
They wanted to do it, they didn't want to do it.
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Chuck Klosterman
They didn't know what was happening. Not the best explanation for a war of choice, sir. I'm personally a do my own research kind of guy. But let's ask AI why we're at war with Iran. Chat. The United States attacked Iran in 2026 because it claimed Iran posed an imminent threat, particularly due to Iran's advancing nuclear program and missile capabilities, and aimed to reduce Iran's ability to project power in the region.
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Peter Kafka
Wow. That.
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Chuck Klosterman
That was a better explanation. Thanks, Chat. But fitting that AI was more clear than the President of the United States because it turns out the United States is using AI to fight the war in Iran. The future of war is AI, and that future is now. Here you can find out whether or not you should be freaking out over in the Today explained feed.
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Peter Kafka
And we're back. Gambling, sports betting, which again, growing up was on the margins of not just sports, but sort of society, right? Like, you could only legally do it in Las Vegas, in Atlantic City, and you might know people who did it, but it was really considered subterranean and the networks wanted nothing to do with it. And of course, all that has flipped around since 2018. And it's wild that it's still not in a handful of states like California and Texas, but it's omnipresent. You seem ambivalent to positive about it, which is not where I thought you'd end up.
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, I guess what I my take on this is this, you know, I started playing Fantasy Football in 1990. Okay. That was the earliest kind of stage of it. It was, you know, rotisserie baseball had existed, but the idea of fantasy football was kind of this new thing. And that was at the time when the idea of gambling was seen as having no relationship to fantasy football. It was seen as like, that's what degenerates did, like Pete Rose banned from baseball for the idea of just like, they didn't seem connected. Well, now it. Either on purpose or accidentally. It's very clear that, like, fantasy football kind of primed the pump for this. This idea of like seeing. Watching a football game and the. The actual outcome is not what you're interested in. You're interested in the spread or the individual performances. Now, do I think that gambling in this legalized way is bad for society? I would say probably for the obvious reasons, for all of the predictable reasons, particularly the sense that, you know, it's on your phone and you've put your credit card number in so the money does not seem real. Like, even if it was just a situation where you had to feed dollar bills into it, everything would change.
- [23:18]
Peter Kafka
You're taking an addict, something that's addictive. For some people, gambling at Marrying it to your phone, which is addictive for some people, seems like an obvious way to get in trouble.
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Chuck Klosterman
But for football, it is good because it adds a different context for conversation about it. When I have a conversation with other dads when we were hanging out in some scenario, you know, I have kids now, so I'm often like at a dog park or something, we'll talk about sports a lot, and then there'll be this other conversation about gambling, and we're still technically talking about football. But this is a whole different thing. It has a different context, a different meaning. It has says more about the person all of a sudden. Like, some could argue that's a weird argument for gambling being good. Like, it's fun to talk about, but so much. If we look at football as a form of entertainment, a distraction, something to consume, to sort of occupy ourself in a way that isn't, you know, just fictional, still part of the real world. You know, I think gambling does make it more interesting. Now. I.
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Peter Kafka
This is by the whole pitch for. This is the pro gambling pitch from the gambling companies, from the sports leagues who again, stayed away from sports betting legally as much as long as they could not. No, no. It improves the game. It adds stakes. If you. It takes a game you weren't interested in and makes it more interesting. Yeah, this is their argument and you seem to go for it. Well, or you think it's an invalid argument.
- [24:38]
Chuck Klosterman
I don't know if that. To me, their argument is essentially. It's like people should have the freedom to do what they want with their life. They have agency. If they want to take this risk, it is their option.
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Peter Kafka
No, no, they say it's better. They say it improves the experience of watching sports to be betting on it.
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Chuck Klosterman
I mean, certainly there are people who feel that way. I mean, you run into somebody and he'll say, like, oh, yeah, you know, it was like I was watching the Mac game on Tuesday night, and then it was kind of dull. But I put some money into it because I want to feel something. You know, I want the juice or whatever. So for that person, it does. I think a lot of people know who do a lot of gambling, they even have, like, they have sort of a mixed feeling about. I think it does bother them that suddenly the game seems meaningless if they're not gambling on it, you know, but for me, as somebody who doesn't really put money into it, I don't have skin in the game or whatever. I find it a fascinating thing. I find that the idea, like, last Night Indiana was an 8 1/2 point favorite. They did not cover. But the meaning of eight and a half points in a spread suggest that the gambling markets believe it will be a blowout. And that's different than saying, well, I think Indiana is going to win easily. It's like I find it to be much more intriguing than I would have thought. I was definitely against the idea of this. You know, I just thought kind of in kind of an ideologically, I kind of thought this is bad. And like I say socially it probably is, but. But for each individual sport, I think that there's one thing that is weird about it is the idea of prop bets, because prop bets really shift the meaning of what you're saying. The idea.
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Peter Kafka
Explain what a prop bet is.
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, a prop bet is like you're betting on whether or not a specific receiver will have more or less than 3.
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Peter Kafka
Will this player do this specific thing? And sometimes it doesn't have to be sports related. Will they get kicked out of the game or whatever. And then these are the things that the gambling sites push the hardest because they're the worst odds.
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Chuck Klosterman
Well, and also they are the most ripe for corruption because you only have to get one guy. And especially, you know, if like, you know, you say three and a half receptions, you pick the under, you know, it's like he just has.
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Peter Kafka
And there's. The scandals we've seen so far in sports for the last few years are about prop bets. A player taking themselves out of a game so their stats go down.
- [26:59]
Chuck Klosterman
And in some ways this is like the real relationship to fantasy football because that's what fantasy football was, this idea that instead of watching the game, you were watching the parts, you were watching the components. And that is a. Is a big shift and it's a big mental shift. And I think fantasy football prepared people for that. Like I said, I don't think this was necessarily conscious. On the parts of like the casinos, the betting sites didn't exist. It's not like they were like, we're going to push fantasy football because, you know, 30 years from now this will exist. But that's what worked out. That's how it. That's what happened. Yeah.
- [27:30]
Peter Kafka
The other big change in the last decade besides sports betting is you mentioned earlier, nil. It's for college sports. Names, image, likeness. Shortest version is it allows those college athletes to get paid, which again was verboten and, and is now considered standard. I got head faked at the beginning because of the name, name, image, likeness and some of the initial Coverage said, oh, this is going to go to attractive athletes, like female gymnasts or something, and they're going to make money selling.
- [27:56]
Chuck Klosterman
And that sometimes was true.
- [27:59]
Peter Kafka
And I missed the major point, which is it allows, because you can now pay players, any college program can go ahead and sort of assemble the best possible team with very little financial restraint.
- [28:11]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, no financial restraint. I mean, people say, like, oh, it's. The Wild west is like, the Wild west had more rules. You might get shot.
- [28:17]
Peter Kafka
And this is. And this is the story about Indiana. Indiana didn't. Every team is buying their way into it, but Indiana bought a bunch of good players.
- [28:25]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, for them, it was more the use of the portal, the idea that you could just move players around. He. The coach was at James Madison and he built a good program there. And then he went to Indiana and brought the best guys. It's just like a. I kind of lost my transcript. What was the question?
- [28:43]
Peter Kafka
I would think that this would be something you, Chuck Klosterman, would be very uncomfortable, the idea that you can assemble teams this way. The flip side would be it's the only morally correct way to have college sports, which is to pay these people who are risking their. Their health, generating a ton of money for other institutions and not getting any money themselves.
- [29:04]
Chuck Klosterman
Yes, I guess, you know, in these broad strokes, I mean, it is initially with like the nil stuff, the way it was sort of sold was that, you know, guys like Tim Tebow, guys like Johnny Manziel, these superstars, you know, they're selling thousands of jerseys in there, you know, like the. In like the school bookstore or whatever, and. And like, they are famous. And these universities are having this benefit, and like, those guys should benefit. But that lasted for about eight seconds, and then it became like, oh, well, if you can pay guys for their legitimate worth, you can just say, we think you're worth this, so we're just gonna give you this, you know, like, I believe it's Arkansas at one point just like, put a letter out to their boosters and said, like, we need linebackers or.
- [29:44]
Peter Kafka
Right, again, again, all this stuff that you would be scandal that would get a team banned from Sports. In the 70s and 80s, having the boosters pay the players is now condoned and encouraged.
- [29:55]
Chuck Klosterman
The complex part about this is, like, especially when you say, like, it's the only. This is the only moral thing, right? Because in the present tense, to the college kid, you can't say like, well, you shouldn't make money if you can. If someone sees you as having value, you know, you should be able to receive that value.
- [30:11]
Peter Kafka
And people are making money from your labor.
- [30:14]
Chuck Klosterman
But what I think is sometimes, again, you can't expect kids to think this, but these sports operate really as wider institutions. And as this happens, like right now, initially, there's almost a spike in interest in college and football because it's very interesting. It's like, who would have guessed Indiana could ever be in here or whatever. The casual fan likes to see that. But this is going to drastically change the meaning of college sports. And there could be, over time, like, it's going to, I think, be catastrophic for it. Now, here again, like, you can't tell a kid. You can't tell a kid, don't make money, because in 40 years or whatever, things are going to be.
- [30:55]
Peter Kafka
You think it'll be catastrophic for college sports because.
- [30:57]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, it'll be catastrophic for college sports because we're professionalizing in a sense, like, you know, and what was great or is great about college athletics were all these qualities that could never be applied to a pro situation. There was a huge regional quality. History mattered more, in a sense. When you say we're watching, you know, Wisconsin play Ohio State, you were, in a way, rooting for the kind of person you sort of suspect goes to those institutions.
- [31:25]
Peter Kafka
You know, it was Catholics versus convicts.
- [31:29]
Chuck Klosterman
Yes, that was more like the actual, actual players, you know, but.
- [31:32]
Peter Kafka
But it was still heavily cultured.
- [31:35]
Chuck Klosterman
Just the idea sort of that, like, that college sport, you know, I mean, I. I've said this many times, but it's like, it just. It is disturbing to me that the idea of getting a free education at, say, the University of Texas is now not only seen as, like, not enough, but like, you got jammed, you got ripped off. Like, everyone has to do what's best for them. But football is fundamentally a collective idea. It shuns individuality. And that is one of its strength in terms of the role it plays in culture as kind of a value or whatever. And they are now making it into a situation where it is sort of every player for themselves.
- [32:18]
Peter Kafka
I thought. Cause I thought this for a long time about that college sports was just not correct, that I thought it was abusive. And I thought what we should move to is, all right, University of Wisconsin has a football team or a basketball team, and all those kids who participate get the ability to attend the University of Wisconsin or some other college because in a lot of cases, they probably couldn't swing University of Wisconsin on their own and definitely couldn't do it if they're doing 60 hours a week playing football. But that's separate. We're not going to pretend they're going to school here. They represent the school. Maybe they'll come to campus, but we're going to stop pretending they're students and we'll still give them an education one way or another, however they want to achieve it. But we're just going to formal disconnect the idea they now just represent the school in some way and stop pretending you're going to see this guy in your psych class.
- [33:04]
Chuck Klosterman
I mean, the quarterback for Miami basically said a couple weeks ago, it's like I've taken no credits, like I'm not in college. Right, Right.
- [33:11]
Peter Kafka
Yeah, I was, I. Because I really had not followed and I saw it was a six year senior.
- [33:14]
Chuck Klosterman
Yes.
- [33:15]
Peter Kafka
And I was googling how was that possible? And the answer was he went to school somewhere else for four years and came here.
- [33:21]
Chuck Klosterman
And you know, it's like, I, I understand that argument. Right. I've all. It's always been easy to understand that it seems weird that somebody who earns money for someone else gets in return. But you know, what might be morally good or morally positive in these, in like a specific case is going to end up destroying the thing that made it exist in the first place. I mean, would it be better off to equitably reward these players if in 25 years college sports don't really exist? I mean, would that, like it's that, that is. Or they're going to exist in a way that have absolutely no relationship to what made them pop? I mean, like it's. I sometimes think that, like, you know, when you look at sports leagues, it's very tempting to say, look at any situation that involves labor in the same way that we look at say the NFL players union, the same way we look at like the auto workers union or whatever it's like. And it's a different deal, like things have different qualities. And a lot of things that are seen as draconian because they don't seem to be on the side of the labor force are different in sports.
- [34:37]
Peter Kafka
Partly. Right. Because they're entertainers to us. We also say believe and know they're playing a game, even though it's incredibly difficult and very high stakes, but they're playing a game. And I think it makes it hard for people to understand the idea that they should be worth a lot of money.
- [34:50]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, they're playing a game and we have to care. The consumer has to care. It is not as though that there is some sort of unalienable right that if you're very good at a sport, you're supposed to be able to make money from it. Like sometimes you'll notice this with like, you know, a player will complain like about having to deal with the media or whatever. They're like, I don't see why. Or a coach will say like, why should I have to do, you know, a sideline report with a reporter or whatever. There's nothing to do with my job. But like, like your job exists because of this, right? It's all part of it. It's. We. I, I think that a lot of the things, a lot of the changes that have happened to college sports have been something that is kind of a strange thing to say. It's like it thinks too much about the individual and not about the collective. That the fact that these things are not about people, they're about a group.
- [35:44]
Peter Kafka
You know, the other big change I think in the last 10ish years is 10 years ago, if you were talking about football in a room like this, it'd be very reasonable to say football is gonna go away in the near future because of brain injuries and that it's just morally and also legally this is just not sustainable. And other sports are gonna, are gonna eclipse it because people will have their kids play it. Cause they won't have the chance of brain injury. That discussion has almost entirely gone away. And occasionally, you know, you'll see someone with a funny looking helmet and say, why is that the case? And oh, it's to protect their head. Head. But if you look at this, if you look at it for a second and do any reading, you realize that there's been no meaningful changes in the way head injuries are treated. Right? People are just as likely to get injuries playing football now as they were tonight. So the sport didn't get safer in a meaningful way. We just stopped pretending that we cared about it or stopped caring about it.
- [36:39]
Chuck Klosterman
The kind of like the strange thing or the almost diabolical thing is what appeared to happen for a while is every time there was sort of a scientist who would bring information about that, the NFL immediately hired them. You know, so like a lot of these, which is a brilliant.
- [36:51]
Peter Kafka
And they, and they did a settlement with the players. The players signed away basically all their rights to complain about this for like a billion dollars, which seems like a lot of money, but then you divide it up by the number of players a number of years, and it's not.
- [37:01]
Chuck Klosterman
What is surprising to me is that when this was happening, they were like, we got to teach kids to tackle differently we got to teach defensive backs to hit differently. And I thought, this is impossible. But it did work. There is less like you. There was also, I think, you know, it is weird. Weird how? How, like, sometimes it does seem like the discourse is able to imbue actuality in a way that shouldn't work. It seemed like during the period when this conversation was constantly being, you know, discussed, there was a ton of guys who would get hit, kind of follow the ground and not move, and they would be like, I want. You know, and in the past, that never happened. Right. You got up and tried to walk off the field or walk back in the huddle, and all of a sudden they stopped doing that. Now, now, it can't be that those guys are not having those kind of collisions now. It's just that somehow, because it's no longer the thing we constantly talk about, it affected their behavior. We have those blue tents on the sidelines. Guys will fight to stay out of that tent. Like, they don't want to go in there because they know if they do, there's a chance that someone's going to look at their eyes with a little pen light and their pupils are going to be moving in a way and say, you're done. You know, so it is.
- [38:11]
Peter Kafka
And they DM beside because they used to celebrate, oh, it was a big hit, took the guy's head right off and then cut back on all of that. Or video. Video games used to highlight. They moved away from all of that. They still have vicious hits. But the other thing that's happening is that, again, I'm no expert here, but my understanding is a lot of this damage just happens from normal hits that players go through on every game that are not spectacular. That if you're at a defensive lineman, offensive line, you're getting slapped.
- [38:35]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, no, you're talking about micro concussions.
- [38:37]
Peter Kafka
Yeah.
- [38:37]
Chuck Klosterman
And micro concussions.
- [38:38]
Peter Kafka
Add those up. Yes, you get real brain injuries from that, but there's no way to prevent that and still have football.
- [38:44]
Chuck Klosterman
Exactly. It. It can't be the sport if you remove that aspect of it, because you
- [38:49]
Peter Kafka
can't see a micro concussion gets to play on.
- [38:52]
Chuck Klosterman
What's also very complicated is the only way to test for CTE is for the guy to be dead than to slice his brain up and look at the proteins. The only people that they do this on are people that they suspect might have cte. So, of course, they almost all do. It is. It is hard. It's a hard thing. I was. Did a podcast today, and we were kind of talking about like, you know, it's interesting. Troy Aikman of the Dallas Cowboys retired because of his concussions. You know, now he's a broadcaster. And I think there was a time when it was like, well, what if we start seeing Troy Aikman's speech? You know, what will that, how will that impact things? You know, but that hasn't happened. I mean, it is hard to understand how some guys are affected by this in a way that prompts them to commit suicide by shooting themselves in the chest. And they leave a note saying, I did this so you could look at my brain. There's something wrong with it. And then there are other people who have seemingly had experienced more contact and have no signs of it. Now that you can say like, well, that's just how medicine works. You know, not everybody works the same. But then that starts bringing in interesting questions about agency. Like, you know, if, if there's a hundred percent chance that if you play football this is going to happen, then it's very easy or at least plausible to say like, you can't do this. We can't do this. But if it seems capricious, well, then he starts asking all these other questions. I mean, the whole thing about violence in football, I, I do, like that's part of this book because it's like, you know, people don't watch football as a blood sport very rarely. I mean, there are some. I'm sure there's exceptions to this, but for the most part, when people are watching a football game, it's not like they're looking for a wreck. They don't want to see someone die on the field, certainly. And yet what makes the game meaningful is that the possibility of that this shared understanding that this could happen, you. That this is a violent thing where you could. It raises the stakes of every individual thing. So people like football for the strategy and sort of for the history and for all of these things, but it needs to have that aspect in order to still be football. And that is where sort of the com complexity comes in.
- [40:58]
Peter Kafka
We'll be right back with Chuck Klosterman. My day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink, then straight to the gym. Pre K pickup back home to meal prep.
- [41:09]
Chuck Klosterman
Time for my fire station shift.
- [41:10]
Peter Kafka
One more Celsius.
- [41:11]
Chuck Klosterman
Got to keep the lights on when
- [41:13]
Peter Kafka
the three alarm hits. I'm ready.
- [41:14]
Chuck Klosterman
Ready Celsius Live fit.
- [41:17]
Peter Kafka
Go grab a cold refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now@celsius.com.
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Chuck Klosterman
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Peter Kafka
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Chuck Klosterman
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Peter Kafka
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Chuck Klosterman
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- [42:30]
Peter Kafka
And we're back. You played football growing up. You've got kids. At least one of them is a boy. That kid wants to play football. Would you encourage it? Discouragement.
- [42:38]
Chuck Klosterman
It. Well, he's not going to. He has no interest in it. Would I encourage it? I don't think I would encourage it. Would I discourage it? I don't think I would do that either. I will just totally be honest with you. You know, in a marriage there are compromises. My wife would never allow it. So it almost be off the table because, you know, there are some things that you couple debates and it's like we meet in the middle, but there's some things you don't really meet in the middle on and so, so there would be. So no, but you know, let's say I was a single parent or whatever, you know, and he loved football. Well, loves something, you know, you want to support that. Of course you'd be like, well, I wish it was something else. I wish it was track or something. You know, I don't like the fact that you're putting, you know, your great brain at risk. But at the same time, what if you love skateboarding? There are 400,000 concussions a year from skateboards. And those are just the reported ones. I would guess the real number might be three times that. But what's different about football is that there is this huge audience. So it kind of makes us socially complicit. Like the audience for rodeo is much smaller. Guys are riding bulls. It is more dangerous to ride a bull than it is to play wide receiver. At least for. At least for eight seconds, you know. But it's a small niche thing or it's only a certain kind of person. And it's part of a different culture. And you can go a whole year and not even know a rodeo happened. But football's not like that. Football is something where, you know, when the super bowl is on, there are people who don't give a shit about it who are going to sit in front of the television and watch this. And that is. You know, that's. It's like. It's. It's like when it's. It's a. It's almost like the sports risk is penalized. Like, we're. It's penalized for being popular. It's a weird way to look at it, but it's kind of true.
- [44:23]
Peter Kafka
I met Ahmad Rashad, okay, great Vikings receiver, six years ago, and I had to make small talk for a couple minutes. Are your kids going to play? Are your kids play? And he looked at me like I had horns. And I interpreted that to be, of course my kids are not playing. I'm rich and successful. My kids have. There's no upside in my kids playing, playing football other than, I guess, of pleasure. But he looked at me like that was an insane question to ask.
- [44:44]
Chuck Klosterman
I mean, it is. It is strange because that would have suggested that if the young Ahmad Rashad had come from a really affluent family, you know, he would have been like, oh, you know, I. I'm gonna pursue. You know, I'm gonna get on the channel.
- [44:56]
Peter Kafka
That's one of the things you were hearing a decade ago was that the football was going to be played essentially by the underclass.
- [45:03]
Chuck Klosterman
That's. There is real truth in that. I mean, that especially in places like the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest, there is this increasing sense that certainly, like you say, like, would, you know, would you encourage it or discourage it, the idea of someone encouraging their kid to play
- [45:18]
Peter Kafka
football, particularly the same places where the soccer leagues no longer allow kids to do.
- [45:22]
Chuck Klosterman
Heading. Exactly. Because they're concerned about that now. There are different, you know, there are places in Texas, there are places in Georgia, there are places in Alabama like this. This will never probably happen. Or it'll be, you know, like they'll always. In fact, as that kind of sentiment grows, it will be inversely proportional there. Like. Like the fact that kids are not playing football in the Northeast, anywhere except Jersey or whatever will.
- [45:43]
Peter Kafka
Makes it more even. Yes, it will take.
- [45:46]
Chuck Klosterman
It will take on a kind of this kind of political meaning. This, you know, which it already has. But, like, that will be expanded. It's a. And it's. And, you know, and like, there's going to be this future time where there's going to be people who watch football and people who play football, and they're going to have absolutely no relationship. And it's already that way. Like, it's. Football's already becoming a game where a lot people who watch it, not only that they didn't play, none of their friends played, their dad didn't play, their grandpa didn't play. It's like it was. It's this thing that's only a form of entertainment. It's not that different than a video game or whatever. And when that happens, that's when the sport does become extremely fragile.
- [46:24]
Peter Kafka
So that's where I wanted to go. So you start the book and we just talked, like, we started the interview, saying, this is obviously the dominant thing in America. It will not be that way at some point in the future. At the end of the book, you have spell out your scenario. So for how football goes away, essentially as a. As. As the dominant mainstream sport, give us the synopsis of that argument.
- [46:46]
Chuck Klosterman
Football is not just like the most popular thing or like, too big to fail. It is too big to stop expanding. It has to constantly get bigger. The financial demands of it, the amount of revenue it has to make could only go up. The NFL only operates from this position, is like, how can we stretch out further? Can we even swallow up all the other sports? Can we expand into Europe and all of these things? And right now that's a successful thing because football is.
- [47:14]
Peter Kafka
The more they make, the more people consume, the more people spend on it, including, most importantly, the TV networks and streamers who need it.
- [47:21]
Chuck Klosterman
And. And like, the depth of caring is so deep that, like, if, you know, there were labor strikes in the 80s, if one, you know, and that was a big deal then, but football was not as popular then as it is now. If. If there was, like, if football went away this fall for whatever reason, people be like, what am I gonna bet on? What is my life gonna be like? Who am I? What's my identity if I'm not, you know, a fan of this team or whatever? You know, I always bring this up, like, you really saw this during COVID That was one of the moments of COVID It was like, we're still playing college football. No one's in their class, but we gotta play. We gotta play these games. We can't not play them. So it's really brittle. It's a system that has to keep going. But I think at some point there is going to be a change. Change probably in advertising, that it's not that advertising is going to disappear. It's just that what it costs for, to buy an ad to show during a football game is going to just become. It's not going to be worth the trade off. Like it's, it's going to be perceived as something that's like, it's just, you know, it's.
- [48:23]
Peter Kafka
And when advertising won't go away, but you'll. The idea of spending however many millions of dollars or super bowl maybe that'll stop. However much money it costs to have an ad on television will seem ridiculous compared to the bang for your buck you could get by spend that on chat, GPT ads or whatever.
- [48:38]
Chuck Klosterman
Or maybe not even ridiculous, but just like not the best buy. I mean, like you might remember there was like a Super bowl commercial way back that was like in 1984. It was a representation of the book. 1984. Yes.
- [48:50]
Peter Kafka
The most famous ad of all time.
- [48:51]
Chuck Klosterman
Yeah, yeah, that kind of ad. You don't even see them in the super bowl now, as much like there are still big, high profile ads in the Super Bowl. But for the most part, when you watch the super bowl now, most of the ads are kind of regular, right? Because the cost of producing that commercial and all the things that go with it, it's just like, like it's kind of really perilous. So let's say there gets to be a point when the, you know, Fox or Prime or who's ever carrying these games gets to a point where it's like, okay, time to renegotiate our contract. And for the first time, the number doesn't go up. Maybe even the number goes down. Like it doesn't disappear. But they're like, we can't keep, you know, this ballooning cost, we can't keep doing that. Well, the NFL's in this weird position. They got to take their best offer. The players are like, no way. There's no way we're going to take less money. There's no way we're going to start playing 22 games just because you're not making enough money from CBS or whatever. We're going to strike or the owners will be like, we're going to lock them out. Because this put, you know, that was kind of what happened to baseball one time. And if that happened now, it would be this sort of like this American calamity where people would freak out. But as people have less and less of a personal relationship to the game, when this happens in the future, they'll be like, well, that's an entertaining distraction. I can replace it with something Else. And it's just not because something has to be part of your life for it to be so important that like, I will, I'll do whatever I can to keep it going. Like, you know, I. The comparison I use is like horse racing, right? So horse racing in the 1920s, along with boxing and baseball, where it was the biggest sport and what happened with boxing and what happened with baseball is kind of complex. And you can kind of talk about with horse racing. To me, it's very straightforward. In the 1920s, the average person still had a real relationship to the culture of horses. Like they, like they had a blue collar job and horses were still doing some of the labor, or their dad had a horse farm or like, they definitely saw horses all the time. The horse was part of the world in which they lived. That is no longer the case. Now horse racing is just for people who own horses and people who gamble on it. That's really all it is.
- [50:54]
Peter Kafka
People who watch the Kentucky Derby once
- [50:56]
Chuck Klosterman
a year, well, they, but even that, it's like it's, they're not really even watching.
- [51:00]
Peter Kafka
No, they're going to party and wearing
- [51:01]
Chuck Klosterman
hats and it's like, like it, if, if, if they, if they had their little Kentucky deer party and then when it happened, it was actually dogs, they wouldn't be any different. They might like it more. They might be, oh, it's cute, or whatever. I suspect my sphere, I mean, fear might be a overrated word because I will be dead and all this stuff. And I know this is, you know, we're taught, we're not talking literal life or death, but like, I think that football is going to put itself in a position where, where it's too big, it's, it's tentacles are too far, it's so wide. And people will be like, well, okay, I guess we'll choose something else. And when it collapses, something that size collapses hard, it kind of implodes on itself. Now I know people hear that and they're like, well, that makes no sense at all. It seems more likely that football will swallow up every other sport in America and we'll only have football.
- [51:52]
Peter Kafka
But I would go the other way. I would think, and this is where I've been wrong. I, you know, write about what's happening with TV versus the Internet forever. And the main thing that's been happening with TV is the audience shrinks and shrinks and shrinks for everything for super obvious reasons, because everyone can do things on the Internet. And that's something that distracts them more than TV or It competes with tv and football is the one thing that is resistant. There was a couple years in the Trump era where football started to shrink and I was like, well obviously this is the same thing's happening. And there were defenders saying no, no, it has something to do with the Trump, the first Trump admin and how people were watching debates instead of oh, and also Tom Brady was out for a seat. I'm like, these are all just coping exercises. It's clearly it's going to shrink like everything else, like the Grammys, like the Oscars, it has gone back up. There's a little bit of a Nielsen explanation about when the numbers are up, but at minimum it's still, it has not decreased. It is as powerful as ever. Do you think that's just literally what we were talking about at the beginning, that this is just somehow accidentally built perfectly as a TV consumption device?
- [53:00]
Chuck Klosterman
That's part of it also. This is another thing that seems paradoxical but like in every other sport, for example, if you're, you know, the NBA, Major League Baseball, you know, it's like you're always trying to like, how can we better feature the celebrity aspect of this? How can we make LeBron feel like there's someone in their life? Like the social media presence of these things really. And football is the exception to this. Football, you're watching this game, you're really just watching a collision of colors. You can't even see those guys faces. Outside of the quarterbacks, the 20 most popular guys in the NBA are much more famous than the 20 most famous non quarterbacks in the NFL. But that is also its power. What people like about football is the game is the thing. It is not all these ancillary things that we use or organizations use or institutions or leagues. However you look at it, in order to say like, well, how can we sort of capture this casual person? How can we sort of get the interest of the person who's not really invested? What people still love about football is the actual thing and that is its uniqueness. And I think that, that you know, if, if the best argument someone could make kind of against my like doomsday scenario is that the thing itself is what matters. And if it's the thing, the, the, the trappings around it will just be shifted to fix it. Like we'll just somehow fix it. But I mean, you know, I'm, I'm not one of these big like, oh, capitalism, we're in late capitalism. This. I do think some of the problems of capitalism are easy to be, are easiest Seen through sports leagues. Who are these, like, smaller simulations of society? And, like, what's happening with the way money operates in pro and college football is like. It seems precarious to me because it seems to be changing in this kind of. The financial side's changing in an exponential way. And I can't see how, like, when society shifts, it's the big things that can't. They're not nimble, the small things. Can you.
- [54:57]
Peter Kafka
Last question for you. If I take away football from it, you can't watch it on tv. You can't bet on it, can't consume it in any way. Do you, Chuck Klosterman, no longer have football in your life? What do you do with that void?
- [55:08]
Chuck Klosterman
Well, you know, it's. This is going to be a. Kind of a sad thing. But, you know, sometimes there will be a period of the summer when there's no football and. And the NBA season is over. And I only follow baseball super casually. And in a way, I do feel, like, a little free. It's like. Because here's the deal. I know it is insane to put football over things that really matter. My son, he loves playing Magic the Gathering, and I'll take him to this store in Portland and he can play against other people. And that happens on Sundays, you know, And I'm never going to be like, you can't do it. I want to watch this football game or whatever. I would never do that. It's so. So it's wrong for every reason. And yet my mind is consumed by all the football games I cannot see. I'm here in New York, right? I'm promoting this book. I flew out here on Sunday. What is the irony of that? I spent the entire flight wondering what's happening in these football games. Like, I am enslaved by it. I've enslaved myself. There's no one oppressing me. I give it to myself. But I am psychologically enslaved by my compulsion to follow things that also just disappear instantly. Last night in the football game, I'm watching the game and I'm also. It was late and I'm texting with a couple other guys. We're all watching the game at the same time. And the quarterback for Indiana makes scores a touchdown. He runs a quarterback draw, and he. It's a great run, you know, and my friend texts me, like, well, there's another epic play I won't remember in three months. It's like. It's true. It's true. It's like these. I care so much about the game. That's coming up that I haven't seen. And then as soon as it happens, it just disappears. It goes into the air. But maybe that is also part of it, the fact that it just kind of keeps coming at you. It just keeps coming. It's like these things seem important and they happen. And maybe they weren't that important, but this next one is important. Oh, that one came and went too. I guess it wasn't that big deal. I can't even remember it. But what's coming this fall, it's like it just, it keeps re establishing itself as this future thing I have to know about.
- [57:18]
Peter Kafka
Almost like something you were compelled to write about book about called Football. It's by Chuck. It's out now. You should go buy it. Thanks, Chuck.
- [57:25]
Chuck Klosterman
Thanks a lot.
- [57:27]
Peter Kafka
Thanks again to Chuck Klosterman. Thanks again to Charlotte Silver who produces this show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring this show to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. See you soon. Oh.
- [57:52]
Chuck Klosterman
Thirty years ago, blinds.com broke the mold and made custom window treatments easy for everyone. Over 25 million windows later, we're celebrating
- [57:59]
Peter Kafka
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- [58:01]
Chuck Klosterman
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