Derek Thompson on the American Sports Plutocracy, the NBA’s 2016 Black Swan Event, and the WNBA’s Growing Pains

speed on Monday includes maybe the hardest that I've ever laughed during the rewatchables. It was me and Sean Finneson Chris Ryan, great podcast, another banger coming next week, Monday, Apollo 13. It's been one of the more requested ones that we've had over the last few years. So Apollo 13, give a few days to watch it. Go check it out and then Monday will have that. Next week, I'm off football next week, just seen up. The fantasy guys are coming on Tuesday,

Danny Danny and Craig, we're going to do the My Guy Fantasy thing, cousin Sal Thursday. We're doing,

“I think NFC went total over under, which we've done every year since 1872. And then Sunday will be”

the other conference over under. And I can't wait. I've been doing a lot of prep. I'm super excited. So we're doing one more ever greenish type of podcast today, Derek Thompson, who's fantastic, who hosts the Plain English podcast for us. We wanted to talk about everything that's going on with the billionaires of Mark Walter and just what's happening in professional sports right now. The Black Swan event of the 2016 NBA cab spike and then the WNBA,

the growth of the WNBA and how fast it happened versus the discourse about the WNBA. But we had a lot of

thoughts on this. This is a very fun podcast. I always love having Derek on. It's always great. So

“he's coming up next. We're in thick break, and then, ProJib.”

All right, we're recording this on Thursday, morning, Pacific time. Derek Thompson is here. It's been a while. It's my fault. I'm terrible at booking my own podcast, but he owes the Plain English podcast for us. He also has an excellent newsletter that has been very active this year. There's a lot of shit going on in 2026. But it seemed like a good time for us to connect because and look, I'm starting football next week. Next week is all football, all NFL. This is my last

kind of big picture of what the fuck is going on in sports and money and owners. And this has been one of the most interesting weeks. We've ever had a Los Angeles where we've two NBA teams that are both in flux for different reasons. You wrote about this recently about leagues and owners. I wanted to start there because I thought you had some interesting takes. But as you watch this from afar, what do you see him? Well, look, first off, it's a huge honor to be your big picture

about the fuck guy. I should probably begin there. Second, I mean, I'm watching the Mark Walter story, and I'm interested in it in so many ways. You had a great explanation the other day, Sam Coppelman talked a little bit about just how he seems, I don't know, you know, be sued for defamation here. But Mark Walter certainly seems to have used people's life insurance payments to throw around money

and illegally loan money to himself. And it's not like one or $2 billion worth of illegal

or improperly marked loan payments. It looks like we're talking about $15 to $20-$21 billion. If you

“need to make up $15 to $20 billion in a matter of six months, you need to sell a lot of highly”

prep price assets. And so that's why he seems to be on a selling spree selling the lake or selling the selling Chelsea selling anything he can sort of get his hands on. But I wanted to scope up and think more broadly about just how offended I was at a base level that this guy just sits on an asset to Los Angeles Lakers for 14 months. And it just appreciates by $2.5 billion under his butt. Like he does nothing and yet he comes away richer with this incredibly valuable asset. And as I was thinking about just

like why it made me so upset that rich folks got so much richer by buying and selling sports teams.

If you realize, sorry, by flipping a sports thing basically. By flipping sports teams, yeah, it may be

realized that while I am not like virulently anti-Billionaire, I do think that nothing makes me feel more like a socialist than when I think about how billionaires flip these assets. I mean,

basically treats sports like socialism. We cuddle professional sports, we create rules and laws

that practice the guarantee that team valuations can only go up in price. And then we allow rich people to buy these scarce assets, bully local governments to give them money. And then it conspire openly to cap and play benefits and we give them a tax break for all of this. Like professional sports is not a free and fair market. It is bill legal for you to open the 31st ice cream shop with a driving distance of you in Los Angeles. It is not legal for anybody

to open the 31st NBA team because the league is a cartel and it controls franchises. It creates

“artificial scarcity that I think that's good for fans, but it's certainly really good for owners.”

It is illegal for Microsoft and Google and Meta to get together and decide that, you know,

just because Microsoft had the worst stock performance in 2025, they should get the first overall

draft pick of like Stanford Computer Science grads in 2026. That's absurd. But in sports, it's completely standard practice. It is illegal for the airlines to get together and say, we're going to collude on prices and then share the revenue that we make as an industry. That would clearly violate anti-trust law, but it's professional sports teams come together to negotiate as a league for TV revenues and they divvy it up between the teams. So behind the scenes,

professional sports is basically a kind of socialism. They get all of these exemptions from anti-trust law and labor law and then how do the owners treat the use of these assets? They charge whatever they want for tickets. They try to drive up the value of these enterprises. They use the fact that teams are scarce to bully city governments to subsidize their stadium as by saying, hey, there's only 30 of us. We can run to Portland. We can run to Oklahoma City.

We can run back to Seattle if you don't give us the subsidy that we want. And then finally,

it's a cherry on top of all of this. And sorry, it's going on so long. But it's a cherry on top of all of this. The tax law allows team owners to amortize the price of a team over time, which essentially allows someone like bomber to pay a lower effect of tax rate than the janitor, sweeping up the bathrooms in the stadium that he owns. So my point is basically this. If the government is going to create the conditions for franchise valuations to only be able to go up and then local governments

are going to subsidize the stadiums that feed into these franchise values, it's just absurd to me that we don't like mildly socialize the other side of this. Like why shouldn't the city of Los Angeles own a little bit of Los Angeles leaders? Why shouldn't governments local state be able to benefit a little bit more by the fact that they are the home of these assets that the law has conspired to only drive up in price. So basically this is my this is my rant. I think that we already

treat sports like socialism and maybe we should just go all the way and socialize a little bit more sports. Well, there may people are making the same argument with big toned companies, right? That why doesn't I don't know California or the Bay Area or whatever get a 2% you did all of this here. We get a piece, we get a taste, we get to wet our beak because you built your business here, which I actually agree with. And especially if the city was invested in some of these bigger

companies as they're growing and we're seeing it now with AI, if they're invested from the get go then you know everybody wins. But you made so you the PC wrote recently, I'm going to summarize

“everything you just said. But these three bullet points that I think are really important will go”

one at a time. Sports leagues are legal oligopies. Oh, the gopies. Oh, the gopies. How about my speech dyslexia just kick it in for a minute say we're taking this are oligopies. Sports leagues are oligopies legal oligopies. Explain that. Yeah, it's it's like I said, you know, it is not legal for anybody to just decide that they want to create the 31st NBA team, right? Or, you know, the 33nd NFL team of the 32nd NFL teams are 32. Yeah, you can't just start.

You can't just start a new company in the NBA or the NFL. Yeah, we have this is our number. We're control of it. We can go down or up and that's it. All right. Second one is how sports leagues can collude on salary structure and employment. What's interesting is they've actually gotten in trouble a couple times for colluding. The NFL got in trouble once the NBA kind of gotten trouble once, but about, you know, you would see with free agents. Baseball was the biggest one.

“Where was that? I think it was 1987 when Andre Dawson was a free agent and all of the owners”

were like dude, salaries are getting too high. We got to figure this out and nobody got good offers

salary cap. The second apron is a really smart way to collude on salaries. And we've seen the

“ramifications of it and the players even agreed to it. But I don't know if colludes the right word.”

It's the word you use, but I don't know if there's another word. What's the word? Yeah, I think I mean, I think corporate loot is strong, coordinate is weaker. But in any case, it is, the fact of salary caps in sports. Well, potentially defensible on the merits of creating parity are very unique to professional sports. What's the salary cap for corporate CEOs? What's the salary cap for your lawn muss? What's the salary cap for someone who works as an engineer?

It opened AI or SpaceX. Right. Salary caps are unique to a cartel like professional sports. And

I could absolutely make an argument for why salary caps and why this kind of coordination

makes sports better. I'm not trying to argue that the way to fix the NBA is to make it possible

“for there to be like 90 teams, 200 teams and so you have to do some kind of like promotion”

relegation system like you have in soccer. It's that we have a set of rules that even if they make the product of sports better, also have the near inevitable outcome of only driving up the underlying asset of team valuations, which essentially turns them into a mechanism for the already very rich to be able to sit down at like a black jack table where all the cards they are dealt are kings and aces. And so even if even if I love professional sports for all the weirdnesses

of these rules, let's be honest that like we're creating a way for billionaires to get much, much richer even if they do absolutely nothing. And I do think that that is like a little morally outrageous. Yeah. I'm so used to it because it's been my whole life of salaries and salary caps and thresholds and not that you don't really step outside and think about how crazy it is, like for instance, YouTube and Netflix right now are battling like Lucas Shaw, a big story

yesterday about how YouTube is now getting aggressive against Netflix. I'm going to start paying creators more. And I was thinking like imagine if we had like a creator salary cap, how mad

“everybody would be. Here's the most you can make. And you have to in all of the people who pay”

creators and podcasters and TV talent, whatever. This is the threshold you can't make more than that. People would be like what? What are you doing? Yeah, the threshold. Yeah. Yeah. But in sports they do

that. And then the third piece, which you know, I've been complaining about forever, but you

you wrote sports stadiums are legal ransom against American cities. We're seeing this now in Portland. Portland, a city that's been a little topsy-turvy over the last 15 years and somehow has to pony up for a new MBA arena because the guy is Tom Dundin, aka El Chippos, going to hold them hostage. And meanwhile, I know a bunch of people who either live in Portland or have gone to that arena a bunch of times. Everybody's like the arena is fine. It's not like at the roofs going to fall.

And it's not this is an arena that was built in the last 30 years. Yeah, you could make more revenue from it. But the arena is fine. We all like going there. It's built for basketball. It's pretty cool. We don't really need to blow it up and knock it down. But this is the biggest leverage that these owners have over and over again as well. I don't know what's going to happen if you don't do this and then everybody pay an X because nobody wants to have that on their resume that they lost the team.

Seattle has been it's 20 years almost since Seattle left. And that has been the looming threat over all of these cities or the Rams leaving St. Louis. It's just about you don't want to be like them. And it allows these people who are already rich to extort the cities. And then it's just going to keep happening, I guess. What happens? Apparently it's just going to keep happening. I mean, I can imagine someone listening to my opening rant who's defensive of billionaire ownership of these

teams who says, look Derek, like the benefits that you're talking about, the anti-trust exemptions that you're talking about. These are necessary to make American professional sports great to create the parody that makes these leagues popular and beloved by local teams. If we took them away, the NBA would be unrecognizable. The NFL would be unrecognizable. They would be much less popular. And they are serving local populations who want to root for these teams over and over again

and have some hope that, yeah, even if the Tennessee Titans suck for two years, they might get

then like, okay, well, at least hopefully the owners of these franchises don't use all these

“benefits to bully and rant some local governments to get tax breaks and financing for their”

stadiums by threatening to move their team somewhere else. Yeah. But they do this all the time. It's like their favorite thing. It's one of your favorite things to criticize. You know, use your own bills, your own fucking stadiums, where you put it on the HPU advertisement. You've been singing this song for way longer than I have. Yeah. And so that that's my point. They are, it's not just that the law creates what I call artificial scarcity. There's only

30 teams either pay us or miss out because there's no 31st team who's moving back into Seattle.

If we would just Oklahoma City, for example. Yeah. They're using their their artificial scarcity

to pressure local governments to subsidize stadiums. Despite the fact that economic evidence seems to suggest there's very little financial benefit that flows from those subsidies. So I just think you can't have it both ways. You can't have socialism behind the curtain. And then free market capitalism in front of the curtain so that these billionaires can benefit from all these exemptions to free market law in terms of how the teams are constructed.

But can charge whatever they want to sit in a stadium seat to charge whatever they want for television revenue to buy and sell the teams in the open market, that that is the imbalance that to me seems quite unethical. Yeah. And plus you get all the ego stuff out of it. You go from nobody knows who the fuck you are to. Oh, you're the guy owns the Warriors. You're the guy who owns the Patriots. The Bill Simmons podcast is brought to you by Fan Dual before the football season begins.

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88.79 777 or visit ccpg.org/chat. So 0809 2010 when I had my page two column and I had my pocket. I really just did this in my column but I became more and more fascinated and educated about the business of sports and especially in the NBA. I wrote a bunch of pieces because you could feel this NBA lockout coming and the people I was listening to and I was getting more and more sources back then because my column had elevated. I wrote my basketball book and I was hearing

yeah this is going to be bad. Like these teams don't make money and we're headed toward like a great reckoning here. And what was happening in 2009 and 2010? Like there was 10 like 8 to 10

“NBA teams that were available for like not that much money if you remember. Like Paragot Memphis”

for nothing that the guys got the sixers didn't cost really anything and nobody wanted to buy the New Orleans which seems crazy now. This is less than 15 years ago where they couldn't sell the pelicans. The league had to take it over. They could not find a 30th fire and I remember writing about do they need to have contraction? Do we need to we have too many teams? We can't support all these teams and the mantra over and over again was yeah this is a losing business. It's a

feeling business and I was writing about it and I was like the players don't understand they're going to kill the goose and I didn't understand it correctly and after they did the lockout somebody smart talked to me and said you completely missed this. I can't believe you fell for their bullshit. I was like what do you mean? It's like these teams don't lose money. Even if they lose money you get to write off with all your taxes you get so many different tax breaks you get to

amortize so many different things that even if you're losing money you're not losing money and they use this against the players in the union and they didn't understand it and now it's going to be like why they they're like watch the values of these teams and what happens? You go from the warriors

“I think we're 450 and 2012 to now 450 million now it's 4.5 just to get in. Vegas who they thought was”

going to be 7.5. Vegas will get 9 billion. They're going to get 9 billion. This is why I

team is worth 9 billion dollars it's insane it's like I don't even think it's a top 35 TV market

but that's the price to get in now so they pulled this huge rope a dope in 08 or 9 and 2010 making it so I don't know this so you could but meanwhile they knew what they were doing the whole time and now I think the interesting thing to me about this moment right now is people are onto it people understand the tax breaks they understand the value of these things in that you know it's

“so that's why like one of the reasons I want to have you on is I feel like we're at a real”

fork in the road right now where I don't know where this goes I don't know how the franchise is get I don't know if we pick peak by there was a story yesterday about YouTube is going to do all the local TV games they're going to bundle them up almost like Sunday ticket for NFL and they're going to get 1.2 bit there's just more and more money coming to the league and it's the

first time I'm like I don't know what the ceiling is are we going to tap out what is the ceiling

I'm not sure the ceiling exists I think recognizing that the ceiling doesn't exist is what motivated Josh Kushner's call to mark Walter to buy the Los Angeles Lakers I mean this is circle the little bit by Sam and your previous conversation but Josh Kushner's a smart guy you know people have feelings about him because of his last name this is a savvy investor who's grown right his venture capital

“firm by a lot of money but he understands that there's a huge difference between everything you can”

invest in in software and sports teams software is competitive software has national competition open AI versus anthropic versus Google versus Microsoft it also is international competition all the American companies some of who make what are called closed models are competing against these Chinese AI firms that make open weight models that are often much cheaper and therefore you have a lot of price competition in a field like artificial intelligence for Josh Kushner's super

invested he's thinking how do I balance this portfolio where do I go to look for an industry that's the opposite of software that's not competitive that has artificial scarcity where the law literally says you're not allowed to make the next proverbial AI company it's against the law to compete against all the AI companies that exist you can't make the 37th that sports sports has artificial scarcity sports has rules that say unless all the billionaires who own the NBA

teams collectively decide to create more teams you're not allowed to compete against the billionaires right it's a fantastic bet to place your money somewhere that's the opposite of computer land which is hyper competitive right you want to put your money in sports which is a closed system of zero competition from the outside market and so it's hard for need to imagine a world where sports remains as central to that withering phenomenon of the American mainstream like

monoculture is absolutely fading away like what is left there's sport ball there's tailor swift and there's like a movie that Christopher Nolan makes every few years like that's what's left of the fraying monoculture and so the ability to get purchase in a piece of that monoculture that again cannot be grown without the express permission of all the people who are already owners in it that's a really really fantastic business and Josh Christianer knows what he's doing

“and I think that's why he has been for a while so desperate to get into sports well it's also”

interesting based on top everything you just said the people that are trying to aggressively get into sports from the media side right they're all these streamers but much of them they're Netflix and YouTube and Amazon people who just seem like they have competitive advantages with how they can study the behavior of stuff and they're seeing sports as this vehicle a Amazon looks at it is like the more sports we have eventually there's going to be QR codes and every commercial and even

during games and people are just going to be on Amazon buying stuff but they're watching and they're iPad they're watching on Prime and they like something and all of a sudden they're buying a lawnmower

as they're watching like you know the third quarter of a spark scam and that's so they've

all figured Netflix has figured out the same thing like we're licensing all this content we're making a bunch of stuff but how do we get the consistent behavior of somebody coming here what's going to make them not cancel us now you get NFL games we have like six doesn't matter if you like the NFL you need Netflix so where we were 15 years ago to now what's interesting beyond

well we have you know hundreds of colleges that play sports but we only really have what 25 to 30 in football maybe in basketball there's more because it's easier to have a competitive team in basketball but football specifically I wonder if that's the next place where real money's going to go now that we have NFL now that we have colleges who are completely outside of their comfort zone for holy shit like we have to pay these people now you've you've the Dartmouth people you need as

what is all the rich guy money good move to colleges and try to give it some sort of you know financial cohesion cross with the artificial scarcity couldn't that be the next step here it could actually be the next step I wonder for already seeing it right the N.I.L.R. era has involved a lot of incredibly rich people you know paying in through Michigan through Indiana

“you know bankrolling these teams that you should not pay their their players at all that are now”

paying their players with the money from folks who maybe sometimes are invested in professional sports but other times might have just missed out on a professional sports acquisition or been you know it's an ego thing though you're like yeah Michigan booster and I'm rich all right

fine here's some money like let's go get a quarterback but ultimately it's not a sustainable thing

it's a year to year ego purchase is like buying a car right and I think this is something that that we see among rich people that you know once you have more money then you can conceivably spend in your life money is not what's valuable anymore like it's status that's valuable it's status that feels scarcer it feels more tenuous that might not exist five years from now and so you think like how do I buy status how do I make a long-term purchase that ensures that three five ten years

from now I have the kind of status that I want tomorrow well that's when you start thinking about well if I'm the owner of a sports team yeah if the thing that I own is synonymous with this college town with this city well then that is that's worth more to me than numbers that appear in a spreadsheet like a Morgan Stanley wealth management page right like that is which really really valuable knowing that that I that I've got the these invisible keys to the city but so I can absolutely imagine it

continuing to grow and not only in professional sports but also in college because I mean these these universities are not only incredibly rich but you you have that local thing you have that attachment to the college town or in many places to look to the larger state or even the region in

“the case something like University of Alabama and I think that that becomes that feels more valuable”

than than just holding your money in a spreadsheet in the sky and there's a competition piece to it too right you you have some successful business you make a lot of money you just become one of the rich guys that everybody hates right but you buy a team now you have all these people on your side and they're all we're all rooting for the same thing we're rooting it win and advance in the playoffs and if it all happens you're one of the reasons because you did a good job

owning the team look at Denver right now Denver trades Peyton Watson yesterday yeah they have the best offensive player maybe since Wilth Chamberlain who they've already won a title with who they've really screwed up the last three years with they had Peyton Watson

and they drafted in the second round right for no money and it's like the dream pick where you've

“turned him into some sort of asset you know he's good he's an athletic wing you know you need him”

what happens they trade him they have this this yoke a jazz set he's 30 years old they made the team weaker than it was last year and they moved and and it's like well we we might get tomorrow to rosin it's like cool if I'm a nuggets fan how am I explaining this to my son like yeah we have Joker but we're worse than we were last year so what's gonna happen with their ownership is the nuggets fans are gonna fucking hate them like we had this once in a lifetime asset

that we made we won one title with we should have won three and now we're not I mean it almost to me makes more sense to trade them at this point than to to have them with a weekend roster

when you're competing at San Antonio and Oklahoma City in the next like you basically just

handcuffed him in handy captain so at this point just give up fucking trade them but that's an example the other side where if you have the asset you know take care of it man talk about vitriol that's about as bad as it's gonna get yeah it's high stakes for sure I mean if you if you mess up you're on the front page of the local newspaper you're on the front page of ESPN they talk about you for hours and hours in first take and they call you well they make fun of you

to become a hero the next few years and I mean it's a little bit of a you know

“cry your way to the bank situation because if the owner of the nugget sit the owner of you know”

mavericks if they want to sell their team after potentially making a catastrophic decision they're still going to make an unbelievable amount of money because there's some billionaire outside the door who's thinking I can be the savior right I can be the savior that this city needs and so even even there this is why I compared like being a professional sports owner to sitting down in a blackjack table where all the card still are kings and aces even if you

mess it up even if you get yoke it and over when one champion with championship with him over

his entire career even though he's basically got the passing of magic johnson and the scoring

of of well chamberliners to me like that maybe Larry bird you still can sell the team for a thirty fifty percent premium and and that speaks to just how uncompetitive this faces that the yogurt thing is devastating and and we're also concurrently watching it with the last year's a curry where and in their case they actually spent money they just made bad picks Denver's afraid to go over the apron for him and they're like well you go over the apron there's all

these ramifications nobody cares your team as we just saw with the lakers the prices are going up and up and up and up it's funny I was at a dinner last night and they were asking me to explain the mark Walter thing because they knew I'd done a podcast line and that could be just explained this

“just to simply in a way we would understand and I was like I think this is a good way to explain it”

I buy a house I then form an LLC with somebody that's renting the house for me I charge five times with the house with the rent per month would be to live in the house so would say it's like I bought a house it costs five thousand a month to live here you're paying forty thousand a month oh I am okay and then I'm able to take that forty thousand price to be like I'm getting forty thousand a month for my house it's now worth this people like

it is yeah I'm getting forty thousand but I'm the one paying myself with the rent I think that's kind of what Mark Walter did yeah you know it's funny is I was actually thinking also last night but not at dinner party just me myself and my computer about Bill Simmons metaphors for the Mark Walter scandal and let me explain to you how I how I understand it and then explain

“sort of how I was going to explain to your audience like using you as a main character here of course”

not assuming you're you're a piece of any kind of insurance fraud so as I understand it basically

like you've got Mark Walter owning this conglomerate that has life insurance companies and Delaware life Delaware insurance law has a rule called section 1305 that says that your investments cannot be too concentrated in one person's company and you can't loan that money to yourself without um marking it without saying that you've done so and there's a limit to how much you can loan yourself and so this was the part that was explained to me by Andrew Garonto who's a

university of Texas legal economist yeah Walter has been telling all these people that three percent of his loans were in the so-called bucket of affiliated investments that is to say loans that come from his life insurance companies when it was dug into they realized it was actually

more like 40 percent so 40 percent of the loans that he is making to sports teams to other

parts of his companies are coming from this life insurance pool this insurance float and you think how in the world did the regulators not see this like there are insurance regulators how did they not realize that this guy owns a life insurance company and it's just taking the money and throwing it into everything else that he owns the reporting that's been done by some people Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Katy Baker at the ringer's in a nice job covering this the mechanism

is that the loans didn't go from the insurance companies straight to Walter's other ventures he was Washington through a third party entity exactly so it's kind of like so this is this is the second do it's kind of like there's a rule that says that Bill Simmons cannot send his friend house any money that he makes from his successful sports gambling like that's it for some reason like the city of Los Angeles says that Bill Simmons like can't send the proceeds of his gambling

to house okay big proceeds I'm doing really well right now yeah it's been favorable and

like some stake money right here's you do you send the money to your neighbor and you call house

“and you tell house hey house just walk by my neighbor's front door your money isn't an envelope”

just by the door so the regulator can't see you sending the money to house at all because you're giving it to a neighbor right right that seems to be what Walter did so successfully and also so allegedly fraudulently he knew exactly what he was doing he was taking the insurance float he's taking the money the people are paying and there's life insurance premiums and he's sending it straight to all of his companies but to confuse the regulators he doesn't send it straight

to the Dodgers he leaves it on the front porch of his the proverbial front porch of his neighbor's house so that they can't see where the money is coming from that seems to be what's happening and now that he's been caught out he needs to replace 20 billion dollars and he's selling everything I can touch so like made off was just a Ponzi scheme where he's just taking money claiming his investing and just pure Ponzi schemeing it this is different because it's not a Ponzi scheme but in a weird way it is

because he just kept gaining wealth and being able to buy assets that he knew he could flip

“if he ever gotten a trouble it definitely feels illegal to me like I think he's going to jail”

like if I had to bet you were a fan do odds on this I would say he goes to jail or please out or something would be like minus 200 but it does feel like he cracked somewhere code because

he always knew if the if the walls come in I'll just flip what are my teams right now he would

initially flip the Dodgers if if he hadn't bought the lakers but he was able to get the lakers so he can flip them and I'm sure there's he's flipping his Chelsea stake now but it's almost like he you buy a house with cash and like oh well if worst case scenario I'll just get a bunch of mortgages and take money back out of the house but he's doing this with sports teams of people love and that's that's where and now if I'm a Dodger I've been torturing Dodger fans of my life

“they're they absolutely hate making ticket I'm like hey where do you want me to mail the giant”

asteris for your two back titles you want me to your home or your office but they he bought two titles with these money like this is why I feel like it's such a bigger story than the bomber story because it's swung the competitiveness of the league it's swung two titles it's swung best players leaving teams and going to other teams it's going to cause a lockout next year and this is just the baseball not to mention you know some of the other places but I'm just

I'm dumbfounded I know like journalism is not in the greatest spot these days and we have less people you know we have we have less money funding the kind of people who would look for you know how to find a story like this but I'm amazed we all it's like we all kind of look the other way not realizing what was happening it's like oh yeah oh he must have a lot it was like he must have a lot of money but nobody was like huh how does he have this much money what's

going on here and I just like how did we not figure this out sooner I want to take that thought and spin it forward into what's not quite a conspiracy theory but it's certainly as conspiracy of Jason as I get um there's one thing that you said that's not entirely accurate okay we did know that he was using insurance money to buy the Dodgers this is an article that I found published in 2012 by Andrew Osorkin in the New York Times quote using insurance money which is

typically supposed to be invested in simple safe assets to buy a baseball team the ultimate toy for the ultra rich seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen and quote that is Andrew Osorkin writing the Mark Walter buying the Los Angeles Awards in 2012 14 years later the Fed C is Walter's computer are we sure this isn't more common if insurance regulators didn't see this what else are they missing where else is private credit and private equity

deep deep deep into the plumbing of the American economy in an industry of massive significance to the US our lives even geopolitics private equity and private credit own major stakes in insurance companies and are behind tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in financial support

for artificial intelligence if regulators missed a $20 billion discrepancy at one company

famous financial journalist in America 12 years ago and how much do you want to bet that the private equity flowing into some of these data centers and chips is tip top and accurately classified I do not want to take that bet and I'm not accusing any private equity or private credit firm of doing anything illegal I have no idea I'm saying if the state of insurance regulations which

we've had for us so decrepit that it can't see a fraud done by someone who basically put on a

shirt in 2012 saying I am buying the Los Angeles Dodgers with insurance money please don't investigate me for fraud where else could we see a little bit of slippage a little bit of improperly classified insurance float being used to make loans and to finance other parts of the economy this is not an accusation this is not a claim I'm just saying like let's be real here it's probably not the case that Mark Walter is the only person in the entire planet who realized

you can do this with insurance money to get much richer so I do wonder whether this might be a kind of canary in the coal mine well it's in every 20 years thing right we went through this with real estate in 2007 and the mortgages and it was the same thing I was like how did we not see this

“right what we're redoing and then there was this moment and that's why I think this this Mark Walter”

moment here I do think is going to lead to it's kind of the voila moment that this whole era didn't have and now it does because this was like a major dude and it was interesting Sammy on the pod the other day I thought had one of the best things he said on the pod was how his good height and investment thing was basically like it it was this optical illusion with Guggenheim where he's not actually oh that part was unbelievable like I do I do like he was like the

grandson of a good time or something it's like now he's just grabbing the name we're going to take a break and I want to talk to B&BA with you so we wanted to do one more thing based on rich guy and B&BA stuff that I had been thinking about a lot this summer because it's the tenure anniversary of a true black swan and B&BA event to 2016 capspeck which I don't think we could wrap our heads around in real time and the legacy of it there's a couple different legacies one is it led to

Durank on to the Warriors which swung the 2017 title they won 2018 title they won 2019 they made the finals and then 2022 because they were able to do a sign and trade with Durank get D&J Russell back that led to D&J Russell being traded in Minnesota for Wiggins and a pick in Wiggins that's up being the second best guy in the 2022 team that won the title so just that capspeck now would they have won a couple titles even if they didn't have it in Harrison Barnes was instead

of Durank maybe who knows but that capspeck's among all that stuff it also swung things against the Cavaliers a little bit the Brown ends up going to the Lakers and that kind of swings that title and it just has all these different ramifications on that end the other thing

“that happens is the comedy and that's what people remember some of the contracts”

the next sign Courtney Lee Jo keep Noah in Lance Thomas for

for a 147 million for four years which was a ton of money at the side Portland had

Evan Turner Allen crab Myers Leonard and Festa Cecilie which they signed basically for $200 billion um so you had these teams that what they thought with the Cavspeck which they did wrong was oh we're gonna have all this money coming in but the teams will be prudent they're not going to shoot their wad they'll they'll know like don't spend this all once save it roll it over because the player's union's like we're not staggering the cap stuff like we're not doing that that's not

like we the money's in there the money's got to be in there so they signed this to media deal they get all this money and none of the teams can behave themselves and they do some of the

“dumbest things and really like fucked up like I think one of the reasons Z-30 Davis leaves”

the leaves New Orleans is they lost guys but ended up replacing them with Solomon Hill and each one more for four years and 82 million and you go on and on it's just it leads to Brad Beale signing his first extension which leads to the second extension it leads to the lakers Clarkson Dang and Mazgoth

four years 188 million combined which leads to them bottoming out and finally getting the

things and it really did become the NBA's Black Swan event so let's talk about that first but then I'm wondering are we in the middle of potentially one now here with the second apron and Mark Walther

“but go back to 2016 first I think 2016 Black Swan event is an awesome subject I was doing some”

research on it for the last few days I'm interested not only in the fact that it results in the Golden State Warriors dynasty being extended and these absolutely hilarious contracts being handed out I mean

Mazgoth four years 64 million like just chef's case there's also the response to or the backlash

to the cap spike in the 2017 CBA right you've got the invention of the supermax and there's also some rules that are changed that loosen up the free agent market and I was looking into that and I had this theory and I wonder how you think about this like one of the ideas that you and I have batted back and forth over the last few years is that sports fandom has really changed in the last decade as ratings have flatline your decline and as people watch TV a little bit less

but as commentary has grown and podcasting has grown more people's relationship with sports becomes akin to what you and I call the Bravo Sports fandom effect people more interested in the gossip than the on court play and I have a theory that in a very real way the 2016 cap spike and the CBA changes that came out of it was like a secret author like a secret parent of this shift like a father revealed years after by a DNA test in the Mori show so that the cap spike

leads to supermax deal loosened extension rules in 2017 and what happens in is in the aftermath you've got the free agency window extended and stars in agents start to realize that you can negotiate extensions early and demand a trade whenever you want so when does Kai read a man

“that trade from the cap i think it's 2017 kawai uh this is a thing yeah uh James Hardin”

i call the pre agency it's pre agency so what i think a legacy of the 2016 cap spike and the reaction to it was was that it it created pre agency and pre agency itself i think is an incredibly

powerful phenomenon is like a sports media thing because it's taken the pre agent window which we

used to only be able to talk about for a few weeks a year and it's spread it across the entire year so in February there's like a tweet or a podcast comment that's like so and so stars i'm happy and then in March someone asks the star hey are you unhappy and they give like a little bit of a type of response and then an April through July we'd come up with all sorts of trades that team can potentially do to move the star the free agency calendar becoming replaced by pre agency

as a as a gossip market that changed basketball it changed the way we talk about basketball like if you go to ESPN or these podcasts they love to spend so much of the year talking about potential star movement because it's plausible because at any given moment now stars can just demand a trade and so i would argue that even beyond the uh warriors dynasty and the crazy deals that are handed out and the invention of the supermax and the uh second apron that a lot

of this falls out of the 2016 cap spike but maybe the most important change from the perspective

of fans is that change the fans and the commentarians relationship to basketball because once player movement and gossip became evergreen it changed the way we talk about the sport it just made

“gossip a bigger part of the way we think about basketball so i think in a way that's like a like a”

a secret legacy of the 2016 cap spike it's weird because we launched a ringer a month before this black swan event right now and you know and i'd podcast or also take even though podcast had been i'd buy pockets since 2007 but there weren't a lot of them i don't think they were determining dialogue about the sport really until the mid 2010s there was more we were certainly a part of it um and what's a better part like i could have done it today instead of having you on

i easily could have done the should joker asked for a temperature right that's i was just thinking that i was like don't don't get a head direct but like yes that's the easiest podcast topic about time that's by the way you would have listened to it we were saying it out would have laid out the the last four years of joker joker is under contract that's not but this is the pre-age see phenomenon um there was more ramifications with this because i'm glad you brought up the

thing a little bit because lebron goes to Cleveland in 14 another it's not a black swan event but it's like it's whatever what's a baby it's a baby black swan event Cleveland winning that

“2014 lottery and now having one more trade piece to go get somebody and i think i remember doing”

count that in that night in lebron it was a final scam or an eastern final scam and lebron had like a weird first first half or i forgot what the timing was with the lottery but he he they came out and he was just kind of weird i remember saying on tv i think he was rattled by Cleveland getting a lot and then people got mad at me but i was like he was clearly already thinking about Cleveland getting the lottery winning the lottery and then they win it so now it's like holy shit like we

could get Kevin love with that pick say do it and he has this amazing setup in Cleveland

and the black swan event flips that right he has they have all the contracts are spending a ton of money kyries there Kevin loves there like they're they're gonna be bad only go and stay and then go and stay Trump's it gets the rant and that ends up to him going LA it also sets up the Westbrook thing where the rant leaves okay see they have this is the best young teen destiny winner title but the cap spike allows the rant to go somewhere else to be for a title

“i think he probably stays if that doesn't happen and then it also Miami they do a panic move”

with Hassan white side is there now we can't lose the sun white side here's a ton of money they spent a hundred forty eight million over four years on Hassan white side in Tyler Johnson three years later they miraculously flipped the white side contract to create space so they can do the sign and trade for Jimmy Butler who then takes them to the two thousand and two thousand twenty three finals so uh and then Boston was able to get our whore for two which allowed them to

start their nucleus of their run had but um i think a lot of what's happened with the NBA the last few years is a response to how crazy 2016 was and um trying to basically we've talked we've heard the word parody right in the NBA this is the closest they're probably going to get to parody because you still have dumb people running certain teams you have owners that don't give a

“shit whatever but i think what really scared them was there's only like three or four teams”

that had changed to win a title there for three years and that's where they don't want to be right now we've now we've moved toward you move it look at it the season this year can make a case for like nine or ten teams that's where they want to be so Denver getting crippled with with joker whether they had to trade paid what's or not don't think they did but Denver not having a super team nobody basically having a super team is where they want to be i think the last seven

eight years it's been what eight years of different NBA champion eight or no it's eight in a row one question that i remember talking that with some friends is like who's championship in the last eight

years is the most legacy altering like if yoke it had never won a championship if yannis had never

won a championship if the brun james never won a championship once in Los Angeles if curie never won a championship other than you know that crazy year when igradala won final MVP and then all the grand years like i maybe think like be cut i mean you could also be even say the same about s_g_a_ oh my god she doesn't have a single championship or collage it makes you want to like like in this age of parity with so many exceptional historically good players

who only have one championship yeah they're all one championship away from having zero yeah and i was thinking like who's one is the most valuable like who's one is the most like load bearing legacy bearing if you took it away we would we would think about the sport or these or this individual so differently i think it's i think it's probably yoke it's because i agree with you that he might be like one of the ten most talented NBA players of all time and what on earth would we say about the Denver franchise

that they had one of the ten most valuable players or most talented players of all time

and never won a single championship but i wonder what you think is like the one championship

it's like holding up the most legacy weight well there i mean this is been the recurring theme of the league right it completely changed earth's career i look at the stuff i wrote about dark when i did my book versus then 2011 happens and it's just a flip right and it's one of the best things about falling the league i would say it's curry because i think without that it's just

you know three first team on bays and oh that well that was a weird time in 15 and 16 when they let you know they lost in 16 in the finals oh he only won those last two because the ranch showed up and they would he yeah butted in the death and then he only won the first because love and kiri were out he only won the injury and then he was even fun as a bp that's interesting yeah couldn't stay healthy um you can't build a team around a guard to say they they would he

had butted in the death and then 22 he just lays the smack down and it's just gone the other

“discourse just disappears joker i think we would blame the teams um yannis statistically was”

so great i just think it would have at least he's at least car on my own Charles Barkley area right to rant weird the you know if he doesn't go to go and stay get those two but i mean he made one finals and okay see and to that's 12 let's say he goes to Washington

they're in the caps mike and just never gets back we just remember him as a superior

offensive forward and for all the team USA stuff but like couldn't build a team good and build a championship team around him but yeah i would say kiri who would you say i think it's at your getch i love the case for kiri i think i think that's a i think it's a great case i agree with you that if not for the 22 championship that if that was the year that that the Warriors won the last you would not you would talk about it and differently right he did he did he ever win a final

MVP before that four championship it was right was they were dollars right by the way he he should have won in 15 that was yeah right i'm sort of i'm ventriloquizing the takes by people who aren't me like in this one was kiri didn't win in that year um but look it would i mean if not but for that championship we would talk about differently about all sorts of things i mean the the jays and boston we'd say what do they ever accomplish they got they got close

“they got close and close and close and then everyone championship um i think i think lebrons”

the the last third of his career would be seen much more of the most if he doesn't get the bubble one it was like yeah all right yeah he said the greatest career of all time but he hasn't won a title in the last 10 year yeah that i mean i think you you'd even say that sand pressed it you'd say god like

how can someone so talented never win the big one make you see him press these the answer you know

we're like oh so he's so good to put together a team never want to title but it is interesting because yeah championships now which is so evenly distributed that like if you don't if you don't make it in your little window like your entire legacy is rewritten i do think it's a really powerful part um um part of of modern basketball um and makes it super high stakes um so you know everything that i said earlier about how i think that the league is is set up to only push up asset values

“i think that's true but in many cases these rules um are doing what they're intended to do”

which is to spread the peanut butter um of championship possibility quite thin across the

entire leagues that you never quite know who's gonna win here by year there's one other thing with the uh

with the caps bike it's like a hidden thing and it might just be a theory i don't know if i'm right but i think i'm right golden stake it in Doran puts them in this five year run where they're just they're in the finals every year they're playing 100 games every year during a time when the sport is really starting to change when it's becoming harder to play there's more running there's more tax on your body you're chasing out shooters all over the place you're you're just you're just

moving more like i everybody agrees on this the old guys like my friend Eddie Johnson is like oh we we did it's just not like we we can watch the games now it's just harder to play basketball now and Doran allowed the warriors to basically play from october to June for five straight years with huge miles on them and what happened like all of them broke down like Doran was only there for three years but then had in 16 okay see got to the brink and got to game seven the conference finals

but he ends up breaking down clay tops and is like the blues brothers car making it through the middle chicago and then all the tires fall down and he gets hurt literally in their last final game right curry gets hurt the next year and this is something Steve Kerr this is one of the reasons I think he's so passionate about a shorter schedule he's like to do that five years in a row like it's impossible nobody you can't it's like it's like playing eight seasons if you think every

play up so I do think weirdly Durant going there even though led to more titles for them also led to the dynasty breaking down because they didn't have that one year like the Celtic side where they're like oh we lost and round one time to reboot but meanwhile these guys

I don't think we're ever going to see that again so we to talk about like parody and the

eight straight years in a row I don't think we will ever see a team make five finals again I don't

“you can give me one be you can give okay see I think the way basketball's played I think it's impossible”

if it happens it's gonna be when you're choosing yeah it's yeah it's it's the density of talent that the San Antonio spurs have under 25 is just unbelievable I mean I think Sanpress he's the best general manager in in maybe in sports certainly in the NBA the team that he's built his extraordinary chat is not women yama right but because of salary cap rules chat women yama are gonna make awfully similar salaries and so given a certain amount of money

do I want that money going toward women yama or chat it's not particularly close and I think the

gap between women yama and chat is larger than the gap between sort of the guard set of the thunder and the guard set of the spurs so as fantastic as Presti's job has been I think the spurs are set up to be an absolute juggernaut for the next decade but they were lying at about 7 or 5 skinny guy exactly you you you went exactly where I was headed we're in a weird period of athleticism and injury risk where injury risk is rising and also

player excellence at extraordinary durations is rising as well so like you have at the same time the phenomenon of more injuries and more joker vitches, lebrons, Tom Brady's players who are goat status or near goat status in their sport playing much much longer than anyone has been it has been able to play and it seems to me that like as sport science and injury risk rises at the same time we're gonna see more like long tail phenomena we're gonna see more extraordinary athletes

blow out early but we're also going to see more players like the bronjames or you know know that joker vitch be able to extend their crimes so much longer than they were able to in the 1980s 1990s not only because of advanced sports science but also because of much less advanced understandings like you probably shouldn't smoke a cigar after you win a basketball game every time you probably shouldn't be drinking beer you know in the in the in the locker room to celebrate a 50

“point now you should value sleep you should you should stretch you should use the sauna I all that yeah there's four need”

different things and so and so what what makes forecasting something like this for as difficult is that on the one hand it does seem like they have the potential they have dynasty potential and also because basketball is just as you said so much more it's it's a more muscularly violent sports is more violent on your muscles and your tendons than it used to be with this sudden sprinting out to guard the three-point shot of this sudden collapsing plus the running up and down the chord which the spurs and the thunder

do so well that the risk of catastrophic injury is rising too so it a very very hard bed but man those two western teams look so so stock for the future it's the stop start stuff that's the most dangerous that they have to figure out they're doing a lot of studies in this now I think if you look at a lot of the injuries a lot of it is oh I didn't oh now I'm going and it's that quick burst stuff which by the way it's happening in my least favorite sport pickleball

these people might don't work out that much and then they play pickleball and you're just lurching back and forth and it's like your body doesn't really want to do that just to put a cap on this

they the 2015 cap was 63 million and then the 2016 cap was between 88 92 million

and that was why we had all these different things happen but I wonder like you talk about being both injury prone and being able to play longer than ever two things that are just incompatible with one another I just feel like to play basketball like this with more smart people understanding how to put a team together but then the variance of three

“pointers and how lucky you need to be for four straight rounds in the playoffs”

I just think it's going to be harder than ever it's going to be harder to stack teams second aprons made that impossible now San Antonio is going to have a day of reckoning in three years it's like when be took less so like he took a little less but he still makes a lot of money and so will Dylan Harper and so will castle and you know it's it's just gonna be really hard to manage all that we're seeing with okay see okay see lost or

guys they have hoping those guys will still be able to do it one more break and then W and be a quick

we were texting about the W and be a last week and you had a lot of theories I've already talked about some of my theories and I'll piggyback on what you say but you have the floor and then I'll go

“well first I start I think one issue with the W and be a is that you know I've heard you”

talk a lot about how the W and be a now is at a point where it has so much of what the league has wanted for decades they have stars for national celebrities they've huge mainstream attention they got great basketball and a point that I've heard you make both on the show and as you're testing back and forth is that you know somehow people are talking about basketball less than ever

the basketball itself less than ever and I was thinking to myself you know why aren't people talking

about the gameplay the X is in O's of W and be a basketball why are people only interested in talking about the controversies or the most outrageous political statements made by the players and you know one theory that I think deserves to be taken seriously is that there's something wrong with the W and be a itself and I don't want to rule that out I don't want to rule out the fact that I think the

“commissioner leaves a lot to be desired I think the W and be a is the subject of of sexism and”

objective occasion that is of a piece with the fact that it is a women's sport as opposed to the NBA but there's another theory that I wanted to workshop with you because it's related to something I've been thinking about for a while which is that one thing that's happened is that the W and be a has become more like everything else in mainstream media and it reminds me of the theory that I've been working on about like sports and media and commentary and internet so I was talking to

pre-versight and this will absolutely come right back to the W and be I was talking to someone recently working broadcast news and we're talking about how you know as more journalists become independent pot podcasters and substackers it's accelerating this long-term shift from people reporting on what happens in the world to people talking about other people's reporting right fewer people talking about the thing itself and more journalists talking about the conversation around the thing

yeah and you you reference this earlier right fewer people I think in the from from our conversation about private credit private equity fewer people digging out the truth about what's going on with all these billionaires their businesses and as I was talking this broadcast journalist I said you know maybe this is a ridiculous metaphor but what comes to mind in a weird way is the 2007 housing crisis because in the 2000s the US had a housing boom lots of people got these

mortgages some of them shouldn't have gotten them banks realized that they could take the mortgages including the crappy ones and package them together to create a market called derivatives it would buy in sell securities made up of mortgages that other people made other people originated and they would sell these more valuable securities they were called derivatives and that I think is what's happened to all of national media we are selling derivatives fewer people are out there

originating the news fewer people are reporting or even analyzing what's happening in the world

directly and more people are talking about other people talking we are basically in the derivatives market

a commentary and this is partly driven by consumers like what's more interesting bill is it is it more interesting to ask whether Sophie Cunningham can play his own defense or is it more interesting to ask whether the people who like Sophie Cunningham are good or evil or here is one way you can investigate that question do you know how many fox news articles there were about Sophie Cunningham this Wednesday this Wednesday there were six on the previous day

“there were three and if you want to know what this story is about I can guarantee you they”

were not about the exes and us of zone defense they included headlines like this quote Sophie Cunningham supporters rally in Indiana while displaying what makes America great two days earlier Sophie Cunningham supporters rally in Chicago while protesters showcase what's wrong with America like most people most the time don't want to talk about the thing we want to talk about people talking about the thing

and so that's my theory of media and my and as it relates to WMBA like I agree with you the WMBA commentary is unhealthy and I certainly agree with the players who have an issue with there where I certainly have space for the players who have an issue with their commissioner and want to change the league but the unhealthiness of WMBA commentary is I think

of sports commentaries become bigger than the market of direct sports commentary itself

“and nowhere is this more obvious than in the WMBA where it seems like the ratio of people who”

want to talk about Sophie Cunningham's politics is like ten hundred thousand times larger than the share of people who want to talk about what they're actually seeing on the court talking about the WMBA as a sport rather than like some discourse token so that is my theory or do black players hate Caitlin Clark exactly boom send that into your editor you got one um I have a lot of thoughts on this obviously and I've talked about some of them but

what you're describing is basically think of it like a volleyball that gets battered back and

forth over in that right and we know we know who's on each side just batting it back and forth and they don't really care what the topic is it's just kind of move around to different things so it's like oh it's our people arguing about trans athletes in high school whoop throw the volleyball

“up and then they just go at it for you know months and somehow the WMBA got thrown into this and this is”

what I've said on previous pods they have desperately needed for the entire year some sort of advocate who is a person in charge maybe it's a player maybe it's an owner maybe it's the lead broadcaster the USB number I don't know who it is but somebody to just be like what are we doing you guys are talking about the wrong things here are the things we should be celebrating and talking about like last night Olivia Miles is fucking awesome again she's a rookie she's basically 1980

magic Johnson um really special there's never been a guard quite like her whether who has

her change of pace stuff and her passing she's the the somehow more fun to watch in Caitlyn Clark who I thought was previously the most fun college woman's poor had seen and you have this awesome setup where you have you know all these teams have these different identities Vegas has has Wilson who's the best player in the league not sure about their guards you have golden state who's like this kind of like built out of an AI lab if they're just really good defensively

you don't really understand how they're doing it Minnesota is the most talented team league Indiana's the 2005 sons the way they play they're up and down the liberty have you know the some famous players that everybody knows and they're headed toward these awesome playoffs and yet everybody's just batting the volleyball round on top of they're going away to do the world championships in September during the 10 days right before NFL season kicks in

and just squandering this awesome opportunity to just have WMB games when nothing else is going on except for college football I don't care about the world championships just send the college players whatever like they they they just they have more enforced errors on top of the commissioner

and on top of the dialogue about it and I've never seen a league that needs somebody to just be like

dude we've never had players like this you go back like I was looking at the MVP's there were always forwards and centers for the most part right and this was the league this is why I didn't like it at all for the first 20 plus years it was just people posting up and 10 footers like I'll do respect to Stewie but this is the way she plays was kind of the whole league and now you have these magical guards all over the place and you know they they even recently

there was that high school player that that video was going around but this high school player who was just getting the basket and can do all these things that we didn't know female guards could do and they're not celebrating the guards and they're not celebrating Olivia specifically

“Caitlyn's playing better because I think she finally has the way to the world off her shoulders”

but the the discourse around the league should be like holy shit the fever or averaging about 90 points a game but this was a league that you take two games to score 90 points you have all these guards you have spacing you have shooting this league's good now nobody is talking about this nobody yeah no I think yeah when you when listening to the player criticisms of the officials excuse me of the commissioner I feel like there's like three

categories there's like they want an advocate for the players who speaks back to the political discourse that emerges around the sport there's all sorts of complaints I think very valid about the officiating about the lack of consistency around the officiating that's college too like there's just not enough good officials you know and sadly they have though probably the worst ones but there's also the commercial piece I mean ratings are getting harder

to really pin down but I was looking last night four or five years ago the typical NBA game had

yeah I mean it's WNBA ratings have like doubled to tripled in the last few years and I think one

other really interesting thing about a sport like this that experiences like a popularity surge where it's not just that you have emerging debates about certain players in the relationship to each other but you have entirely new populations entering the sphere of WNBA fandom that it creates a weird dynamic and I was thinking about what's this because the people that were there the whole time are kind of mad that they're newcomers yes and I and I get

“that I mean I see like sort of concentric circles of WNBA fandom I think the first circle has to be”

the one that you just said there's a long time fan base millions of people who've been going to the games and following the sport and watching on TV who know the players and have you know and encyclopedic sometimes even even build siminsist understanding of like who the greatest players were in the 90s versus 2000s versus today right then there's the Caitlyn card generation that's the next concentric circle and that's this huge surge in viewership over the last few years and

I call it the Caitlyn card generation here but I know it's I know that it represents more than just her but it's also the case that the five most watched regular season games this century are the following one fever at Chicago two fever versus Las Vegas three fever at New York four fever at Minnesota five fever at Chicago all in the end of fever all Caitlyn Clark two of those games should be said are against Angel Rees she's she was compared to Steph Curry when she entered the league

I like the Steve Nash comparison more way more commercial standpoint she's really like magic

“Johnson she's a passing savant who's also a social phenomenon and so you have this tension I think”

between circles one and two but then you've got and this is really where I think the shit

it's the fan you've got the third circle and that's a circle I was referring to in my previous

comment you've got the above circle you've got the perfect you've got the volleyball circle people who treat what's happening the WMBA as a as a discourse hammer to knock other people over the head with posts on Instagram and Twitter and everything else and you know that's where the Sophie cunning him stuff comes in and you know brief aside like I built can we just can we spare a moment for Chuck Loachman what a call like that guy predicted Sophie cunning him was it hours or minutes

no it was like three minutes before yeah Chuck Stradamus that man needs like Alzheimer a new

nickname for all time that was incredible I don't know if he put it out in the world and then

it happened or I don't know if she saw it and was like yeah or it was just the all-time coincidence but it was an all-timeer by him Chuck Stradamus man um unbelievably impressive but I do think to wrap this up I do think that those three groups don't get along well all the time on the internet or maybe even I sometimes we see in the the physical world and that's another interesting challenge that for the moment seems somewhat unique to the WMBA because there is no other sport that is

as prominent as a mainstream piece of entertainment it's also growing so quickly like the WMBA is like pickleball growth plus NBA viewership and so like there's something about the change that

“comes with that growth that I think is also um giving the league issues and what they need to”

your point I agree with you um they need a leader who is an advocate who understands the commerce that is made possible by the growth of the league and I think it's like a little bit combative who's maybe not just a bureaucrat but someone who's willing to be a David Stern type personality an impresario who's not afraid of the line line and and not afraid to get into the volleyball court and banks and banks and spikes everyone's so well listen we haven't had this happen

in 40 plus years right you have the the last time this really happened was the MBA when you go from the NBA tape playing games just the fourth most successful of the of the four professional sports the biggest stars were Dr. J and Karim Karim had the goggles on nobody could connect with them and then you had people like David Thompson and people in cities that you might have seen them on TV twice a year because the games were not enough and then bird magic show up they get cable all

a four year span the league blows up when we have the slam dunk contest in 1984 but four years is not a long time but we go from this leagues in trouble people writing about it's too black it's

too violent it'll never catch on these guys are overpaid all that I wrote a whole chapter about

this in my book two by 1984 it's like the NBA it's cool wow what happened here this is great and then we get lake or Celtics in 84 finals and you have all these little events leading to it it's kind of what just happened to the NBA the NBA three years ago golden state in Portland we're going to be the two expansion teams I think gold state was at like 35 million or maybe something like that Portland ended up being 50 million the guy who was going to do the the Portland

team he wanted to name them the RIP City royalty and for some reason the NBA is like you can't do that facts out they don't have they don't even have the money for the Portland team and they

couldn't even figure out we want to expand we can't even find a city right this is this is

pre-catern this is three years ago now you've fast forward it and it's like now that now they're going to over expand they'll probably ruin that part but the league the franchises are seven times worth with their worth and you have real stars that people can point to and yet like Olivia Miles I just looked this up zero talking she belongs to Adidas no signature shoe like Olivia Miles is having like a Michael Jordan type of season and bird and magic would be Caitlyn and asia Wilson right

and Olivia is like the one they should be getting behind it then what even knows who the fuck she is other than people that watch the league and my wife doesn't know who she is unless I'm

“watching the game but they've done such a bad job of like you need to know who this person is here”

commercials here like we're gonna cream our best players down in your throat they're doing the opposite and they're letting the discourse be what decides the league and how people talk about it which to me is bad leadership you have to take control of the of the car like somebody else is driving your car and it's the discourse yeah I couldn't be more I think I wonder what American sport really succeeds along the criteria that you're describing it really succeeds in terms of

both creating national stars and creating a product that people really want to analyze as a product and not just talk with the discourse around it because an interesting way I feel like football is best at the latter like people are interested in what happens in football and understanding like how offense changes and how defense changes and right god like how how how did they fix their running game oh I see how like how did the the Rams revolutionize the passing game again

with their you know tight-ends sets um but when it comes to you know creating national stars I'm not sure the NFL is what they don't know what you say we say they don't want this okay they just want the quarterbacks they don't right they don't want anybody else to you know

“they want everybody that's why they have everybody keep their helmets on before they get off the”

field and all the all the shit they do on that end they want the players to be disposed it's fucking rollerball yeah it's like oh oh James Con is getting too big for a rollerball we have to

get rid of the rules and get rid of them um and the and the nine quarterbacks of the stars basically

but the franchises and the the product is the star which is what this is so I guess here's my question if you built what league do you think is doing the best job minting new stars and I say minting new stars I was the best stars yeah I was the NBA the when the new guys come in you feel it you you know they are they market them correctly um they have a whole system in place now right we know like Cooper Flag comes in people have opinions on him they know

what he looks like they know who he is they've seen him a little bit in college they get these guys every year this should be the WWE I don't know how they fix it but it's gonna start with a new commissioner but what you said about somebody who's an advocate who's not afraid to David Stern a little bit it's probably an ex-player would be my guess I don't I don't think it can be a faceless

“person it's it's probably an ex-player who's willing to mix it up but the best thing that can happen”

to them is having an awesome playoffs which they have the chance if some of the matchups can align like they you know they might have Minnesota versus Vegas and round two and they might have Indiana versus they might have Caitlyn versus Olivia Miles and the finals if that happens if they fuck that up but that's like casual fan should care about that and again like I couldn't stand the WWE watching it for 20 post years I thought it was terrible but it's completely changed

it's like having a restaurant in your local neighborhood that all of a sudden becomes the best

restaurant in America or considered that way and people aren't descending on it and people want to eat there from 5 p.m. to 11 at night and you're just like we just have a matrix in three ways and three bus boy what oh shit we're sold out again tonight oh my god and they're just not prepared

“this is my point I think that they are in part of victim of their own success I want to be clear”

about in part because to say they're just a victim of their own success means that I think the commissioner's office is done everything right that the officiating has been top notch that their advocacy for players who are you know the subject of racist or sexist taunts or some political discourse has been perfect I don't think any of that but I do think that some of the problems

of the WWA is facing is the unique result of being maybe the only sport in America at this

level of popularity that is growing as fast as they are and they're pulling in audiences that are incredibly different and sometimes like just genuinely don't seem to like each other and yeah that's that's that's a tough problem to solve and it probably needs I like your idea of the commissioner being an ex player because it needs someone who has authority who has the trust the players but also someone who just like is not afraid to be their own representative their own character as they're like

an advocate of or emblem of the league when they maybe go on to television even go on to Fox News

“to represent the league and what it's all about I think that's going to be it's going to be a really”

important part of of this job as the WMBA just becomes a much much more visible part of this sports landscape and lean into the things that are good about I don't I don't think this is hard but it's important because when you when things change just fast for anything you've got to have some sort of plan for like this is changed like the way people talk about it even like I think that the one criticism I would have with WMBA fans is let real sports fans argue about the league

the way we would argue about other sports right like I think there's an actual MVP argument with miles against Wilson Wilson's a heavy favorite like she's average in 26 and 10 she's the best player in the league but Olivia carried the links as a rookie when their best player was out they have the best record by far and if this was the NBA we would have led three podcasts about this by now like should Olivia Miles be the MVP oh no she can't you get Wilson and it turns into like

a Jordan versus Carl Malone type of MVP thing but we're not having those conversations and then

“you know they there's still some criticism stuff that I think because social media is so unfair”

to some of the players that it makes people ease up you know like Angel Reece on Sunday missed a game-winning layup against against the fever right and the moment it happened you're thinking oh my god this is going to be on social media for three days because people love piling on her but there's a thicker skin that needs to develop that this is just part of what it's like now you guys have way more fans and viewers and you're going to take shit too and this is just how it's going

to go um the shit they're taking now is not the right kind of shit you want to take shit for players not performing well like what when be in the finals or somebody trying to try to bolt from a team after claiming that they were going to stay there and stuff like that you don't want the political stuff not not awesome by the way Sophie coming in really good role-player yeah and you said earlier you don't care that Clark is pretty indeed like a like or

up the bench good energy like I don't have I've been in anyone say that yeah great energy a good role player can't think Clark as you said has really had a fantastic last few months after a

little bit of an inconsistent and pretty inefficient shooting performance for the first you know

half-ish of the year and how much of that is how much of that is these a little bit of attention coming off of her I I don't know not in her head but um it's possible I mean you know in a kind of this is an imperfect comparison but in a kind of you know dream on dish way there's sometimes when you know certain athletes need certain types of personalities to play with them in order to really explode like Steph was not Steph before Drainman was a part of that team and Drainman

took a lot of the attention and media energy maybe off of Steph so he could focus on what he but really made him great it's possible that Caitlyn's sort of experiencing a little bit of that I don't know that I would want to play for a team that was you know getting six articles written about it on Fox News every every single day but you know different athletes respond to different things and I think that for for Caitlyn in particular clearly something has changed in the last you know seven to 10 weeks

the Steph things a good example because what was the book on Steph as his career started or a San when he had the 2013-14 with the Warriors be super physical against him he's done with it beat him up knock him down

it's like they're trying to get in her head they tried to do Olivia Miles too the problem is

nobody can hit her because she's moving out of the way she's like fucking bear Sanders but anyway

“all right we covered we hit everything I think we wanted it we didn't hit YouTube first Netflix”

maybe we'll say that for next time because that's a pretty interesting one to to a brewing battle between the streamers what do you have uh what do you have in the podcast this week I think podcast about what's going on in the AI economy talk to the CEO of pangram which is this company that tests writing to see if it's written by AI and it's becoming this huge cultural phenomenon because when you test it and then for LinkedIn posts yeah student essays about history

even some prominent politicians posting on Twitter or substackers it turns out that all sorts of famous people are using AI to do half or even all of their writing and whereas it's very difficult for an ordinary individual sometimes to tell the difference between AI writing and human writing

unless it's really clear stuff like someone writing with a bunch of you know M-s and always saying

it's not X it's Y this is a software that has a really really sophisticated algorithm for telling the difference between human and AI writing and Bill just the sheer amount of modern or future media that is going to be artificial because it is made with and made by AI is is is pretty nuts

“and in some cases pretty horrifying and yeah folks like folks like pangram are really important”

for helping sort of clean up the AI slot of the world I gotta say the M-s was a big loss for me I was a big M-s bag I love M-s I know I probably was M-s heavy if you go back and read my pieces so now I read it's like today I read through your M-s like now this was part of my style a big M-s bag I love it you know it's it's tough because I want to extend this forever on AI writing but some of the reasons why AI writes quote unquote like that is because during reinforcement learning

with human feedback you've got this AI that is tested on humans and it is trained towards whatever the humans want and so if what humans really want is incredibly simple summaries of complex ideas from AI then AI is going to like over summarise and oversimplify everything that's going to lead to things like you know in abundance of it's not x it's y sort of negative parallelism summaries sometimes what AI is putting out there is gross

because it's artificial sometimes is more complicated reality is that it's gross because humans just like us voted on it in post training but yeah the the world the world's going to become a lot sloppy are in the near future and it's it's important to have janitors out there cleaning up the slope and yet somehow this is the biggest fear with where AI goes because the security you did the cyber security piece is the single scariest piece of

yeah everyone everyone change your passwords because yeah you're a big change your passwords guy right now not until this week god I found I found that conversation to be like the most boring conversation you could possibly have with another individual is like someone comes up to you and says you ought to have better password security but I become convinced that that incredibly boring conversation is now men it's moment the level of AI sophistication especially from open

weight models the next few years they can do a really really bad job in fishing attacks or

“hacking it to mid-sized companies I think it's worth everyone taking password security very seriously”

unfortunately because personally I think nothing would be more boring Derek Thompson how long have you had playing English with us four years down five or four years in the fall

four years in November oh man you're doing a great job I love working with you it's always

fun to have you on I have to go on yours we got to come up with some dumb reasons yeah yeah we do like a sports records one or but I still want to do the lebron thing but so we we got to come up with some idea that I could guess on yours all right thank you so much thanks man all right that's it for the podcast thanks to Derek thanks to Gahau and Eduardo as well don't forget to check out the speed rewatchables and prepare for Apollo 13 on Monday I'm gonna have a

podcast for you on Sunday hopefully a lot of good stuff maybe some things will happen James Hardin sorry didn't get to talk about your three years for 97 million dollar extension holy macro I can't believe I'm much of money you've made over the years congratulations and enjoy the rest of the week I will see you on Sunday must be 21 plus in president select states for Kansas and affiliation with Kansas star casino

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