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

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So we're doing one more ever greenish type of podcast today, Derek Thompson, who's fantastic, who hosts the plan English podcast for us. We wanted to talk about everything that's going on with the billionaires Mark Walter and just what's happening in professional sports right now. The black swan event of the 2016 NBA cap spike, and then the WNBA, the growth of the WNBA and how fast that 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 going to take a break and then project. Alright, 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 has the plan 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. 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 have 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 in? Well, look, first off, it's a huge honor to be your big picture of what the fuck guy. I should probably begin there. Second, I mean, I'm watching the Mark Walter story and I am interested in it in so many ways. It's a great explanation the other day. Sam Coppeman talked a little bit about just how he seems. I don't want to 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. It's not like one or two billion dollars worth of illegal or improperly marked loan payments. It looks like we're talking about 15 to 20, 21 billion dollars. If you need to make up 15 to 20 billion dollars, in a matter of six months, you need to sell a lot of highly priced assets and so that's why he seems to be on a selling spree, selling the Laker, 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 dollars under his butt. 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, maybe realized, sorry, by flipping a sports team. 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. So here's my hot take here, which I try to explicate in this article, is that American law basically treats sports like socialism. We coddle 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 conspire openly to cap employee 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 within 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. Yeah. 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 antitrust law, but 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 antitrust 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 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 Balmer to pay a lower effective 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 Lakers? 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 tank companies, right? That why doesn't, I don't know, California or the Bay Area or whatever, get it 2%. You did all of this here. We get a piece. We get a taste. We get 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, you, the piece you wrote recently, I'm going to summarize everything you just said. But these three bullet points that I think are really important, we'll go one at a time. Sports leagues are legal oligopies, I just said oligopies, oligopies, yeah, oligopies. How about my speech dyslexia, just kicking in for a minute, same routine, oligopies, sports leagues are oligopolis, legal oligopolis, explain that. Yeah, 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 33rd NFL team, are there 32 NFL teams or 32 NFL? 32. Yeah, you can't just start, you can't just start a new company in the NBA or the NFL. The same way it is leaked. Yeah, we have, this is our number, we're in 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 got in trouble once, but about, you know, you would see it with free agents. Baseball was the biggest one, whereas there was, 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, and it was very clear they colluded and they actually got in trouble for it. I would argue the 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 you didn't agree 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 collude 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. Yeah. But what's the salary cap for corporate CEOs? What's the salary cap for Elon Musk? What's the salary cap for someone who works as an engineer at OpenAI or SpaceX? 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 like the way to fix the NBA is to create, 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 the 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 blackjack 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. 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 had a big story yesterday about how YouTube is now getting aggressive against Netflix, they're 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 if you like here's the most you can make and you have to and 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 do you do? The threshold, why is there a threshold? 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 NBA arena because the guy Tom, Tom Dundan, aka Elchipo is 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 it the roof's going to fall and it's not this is an arena that was built in the last 30 years. Yeah, you can make more revenue from it, but the arena is fine. We all let go in there and 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 panic 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 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 whose defensive of billionaire ownership of these teams who says, look, Derek, like the benefits that you're talking about the antitrust 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 they're loving 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 a draft pick that totally rejuvenates their franchise. But you would think in this scenario, 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 like it's one of your favorite things to criticize. Yeah, you know, you use your own bills, your own fucking stadiums where you put it on the HBO advertisement. You've been singing this song for way longer than I have. Yeah, and so that's my point there. 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 move to Oklahoma City, for example, yeah, they're using their 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 of these exemptions. To free market law in terms of how the teams are constructed, but can charge whatever they want to sit in the in a 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 the fuck you are too. 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 Fandall before the football season begins every team is undefeated. Everyone believes it can be their year. Also, you can wager on some of this stuff too. With Fandall bet on everything bet on over unders for win totals division conference. You can bet on teams against each other. Like for instance, you can bet on the Cleveland Browns winning more games than the Atlanta Falcons and get plus 200 odds. Kind of fun. Then you get to root for the Browns with no quarterback from who will win it all. The Super Bowl. I'm talking about or the conference or the division just to betting on season leaders. Whatever you want. This is the time. This is this is it. This is football future season. Fandall is all the ways to bet on the season for it even begins get your football futures bets in right now on our friends at Fandall visit Fandall.com/BS to get started. 21 plus select states are 18 plus DC Kentucky or Wyoming game problem called 100 gambler call 888 789 7777 or visit CC PG dot org slash chat Connecticut. So 0809 2010 when I had my page to 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 and I wrote a bunch of pieces because you can 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 like these teams don't make money and and we're headed toward like a great reckoning here. And what was happening in oh nine in 2010 like there was 10 like eight to 10 NBA teams that were available for like not that much money if you remember right like. Paragraph Memphis for nothing 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 lead had to take it over they could not find. The 30th iron I remember writing about do they need to have contraction do we need do we have too many teams we can't support all these teams and the mantra over and over again was yeah this is 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 talk to me and said. You completely miss 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 they didn't understand it and now it's going to be like why they're like watch the values of these teams what happens you go from. The words I think we're 450 in 2012 to now 450. Now it's 4.5 just to get in Vegas who they thought was gonna be 7.5 Vegas will get 9 billion They're gonna get 9 billion. This is why Iger and Kushner Maudable to the Lakers because they were like there's no way of Vegas expansion 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 adope in 0809 in 2010 making it's oh, I don't know this leak 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 on to it People understand the tax breaks they understand the value of these things and that You know, it's like 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 Or I don't know where this goes. I don't know how the franchises get. I don't know if we picked peak value There was a story yesterday about YouTube is gonna do all the local TV games They're gonna bundle them up almost like Sunday ticket for NFL and they're gonna get one point to but 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 gonna 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 circled a little bit by Sam in 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 where 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's 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 me 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 football there's Taylor 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 not so interesting Based on top everything you just said the people that are trying to aggressively get into sports from the media side Right Through all these streamers with a bunch of and 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 I Amazon looks at it as like the more sports we have eventually there's gonna be QR codes and every commercial and even during games And people are just gonna be on Amazon buying stuff where they're watching on their 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 scheme Um, and that's so they've all figured out Netflix has figured out the same thing like Uh-oh, 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 gonna make them not cancel us? Now you get NFL games We have they have like six doesn't matter you if you like the NFL you need Netflix so um Where we were 15 years ago to now What's interesting beyond the pro-sport stuff is the college things in complete flux And you talk about artificial scarcity 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 um football specifically i wonder if that's the next place where real money's gonna go Now that we have NIL now the way of colleges who are completely outside of their comfort zone for Holy shit like we have to pay these people now you have you've the Dartmouth people unionizing What is all the rich guy money gonna 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 absolutely be the next step. I wonder if we're already seeing it right the NIL our era has involved a lot of incredibly rich people paying in through michigan through indiana 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 professional sports acquisition or been you know It's an ego thing though. You're like i'm a huge 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 than you can conceivably spend in your life Money is not much valuable anymore Like it's status that's valuable. It's status that feels scarcer that 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 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 and like a morgan stanley wealth management page Right like that is what's really really valuable knowing that that i that i've got the these invisible keys 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 fame you have that attachment to the college town or in many places to the to the larger state or even the region in a 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 at win and advancing the playoffs and If 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 paid in lots in yesterday Yeah They have the best offensive player Maybe since we'll chamberland Um Who they've already won a title with who they've really screwed up the last three years with They've paid lots and they drafted in the second round right who 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 said he's 30 years old they made the team weaker than it was last year and they move and and It's like well, we might get the martyrosan. 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 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 then to to have them with a week in roster when you're competing in sanatonia and alkalma city and the next like You you basically just Hand cuffed him and handicapped him so at this point just give up fucking trade him Um, but that's an example of the other side where If you have the asset you don't 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 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-- Make fun of you. They call you a cheapo. They make fun of you. I mean, that's the risk. But at the same time, you have the chance to become a hero in 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 nuggets, if 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. I can be the savior that this city needs. And so even there, this is why I compared like being a professional sports owner to sitting down at a blackjack table where all the cards dealt are kings and aces. Even if you mess it up, even if you get Yokech and only win 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 Will Chamberlain or something like that. Maybe Larry Bird, you still can sell the team for a 30, 50% premium. And that speaks to just how uncompetitive this space is. That the Yokech thing is devastating. 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 signing like, can you just explain this? Just succinctly and 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 let's say it's like, oh, I bought a house, it costs $5,000 a month to live here. You're paying $40,000 a month. Oh, I am. Okay. And then I'm able to take that $40,000 price and be like, I'm getting $40,000 a month for my house. It's now worth this. People like it is. Yeah. I'm getting $40,000 a month. But I'm the one paying myself with the rent. I think that's kind of what Mark Walter did. Yeah. And I was actually thinking also last night, but not at a dinner party, just me and myself and my computer about Bill Simmons metaphors for the Mark Walter scandal. And let me explain to you 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 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 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. Walter has been telling all these people that 3% 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%. So 40% 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 is 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, Katie Baker, at the ringer's done a nice job covering this, the mechanism is that the loans didn't go from the insurance companies straight to all those other ventures. He was lost today. He was lost today. He was lost today. He was lost today. He was lost today. A third party entity, exactly. So this is the way I could do. There's a rule that says that Bill Simmons cannot send his friend house any money that he makes from his successful sports gambling. For some reason, the city of Los Angeles says that Bill Simmons can't send the process seeds of his gambling to house. Okay. Big proceeds. I'm doing really well right now. Yeah. It has been favorable. And house is like that sucks because I hear that Simmons is way up in the last nine months and I would like some stake money, right? Here's what 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? 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 into their 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 and he's selling everything he can touch. So like made off was just a Ponzi scheme where he's just taking money, claiming he's investing it and just pure Ponzi scheming 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 got into trouble. It definitely feels illegal to me. Like I think he's going to jail. Like if I had to bet if there were fandal 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 some weird code because he always knew if the walls come in, I'll just flip one of my teams, right? Now he would have initially flipped the Dodgers if he hadn't bought the Lakers, but he was able to get the Lakers so he can flip them and now I'm sure he's flipping his Chelsea steak now. But it's almost like 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 that people love. And that's where, and now if I'm a Dodger, I've been torturing Dodger fans of my life. They're like, they absolutely hate me. They can take it. I'm like, hey, where do you want me to mail the giant asterisk for your two back titles? You want me, your home or your office? But he bought two titles with these money. Like this is why I feel like it's such a bigger story in 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 in 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 looked 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 to switch money? What's going on here? And I just feel like how do 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 as certainly as conspiracy adjacent as I get, there's one thing that you said that's not entirely accurate. 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 Rossorkin 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." End quote. That is Andrew Rossorkin writing about Mark Walter buying the Los Angeles Star Trek in 2012, 14 years later, the Fed sees 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 inches. 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 that was throwing around insurance money so blatantly, it was reported on by literally the most 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 regulation is 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. I do wonder whether this might be a kind of canary in the coal mine. Well, it's an every 20 years thing, right? We went through this with real estate in 2007 and the mortgages. It was the same thing. I was like, "How did we not see this? What were we doing?" Then there was this moment, and that's why I think this Mark Walter moment here, I do think it's going to lead to, wait, 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. It was interesting. Sammy on the pod the other day, I thought one of the best things he said on the pod was how his Guggenheim investments thing was basically like, it was this optical illusion with Guggenheim where he's not actually. Oh, that part was unbelievable. I had no idea. He was like the grandson of Guggenheim or something and he's like, "No, no, he's just grabbing the name. We're going to take a break and I want to talk WNBA with you." So we wanted to do one more thing based on Rich Guy NBA stuff that I had been thinking about a lot this summer, because it's the 10-year anniversary of a true Black Swan NBA event, the 2016 cap spike, which I don't think we could wrap our heads around in real time, and the legacy of it, there's a couple of different legacies. One is it led to Durant going to the Warriors, which swung the 2017 title, they won, 2018 title, they won, 2019, they made the finals. And then, 2002, because they were able to do a sign-in trade with Durant, get D'Angelo Russell back, that led to D'Angelo Russell being traded in Minnesota for Wiggins and a pick, and Wiggins ends up being the second best guy and the 22 team that won the title. So just that cap spike, now, would they have won a couple titles, even if they didn't have it, and Harrison Barnes was instead of Durant, maybe, who knows? But that cap spike swung all that stuff. It also swung things against the Cavaliers a little bit. LeBron 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, Joe Kebnoa in Lance Thomas, for $147 million for four years, which was a ton of money at the time. Portland had Evan Turner, Alan Crab, Myers-Lenner, and Festus Isili, which they signed basically for $200 billion, so you had these teams that, what they thought with the cap spike, which they did wrong, was, oh, we're going to have all this money coming in, but the teams will be prudent. They're not going to shoot their wad. They'll know, like, don't spend this all at once, save it, roll it over, because the players unit is like, we're not staggering the cap stuff. Like we're not doing that. That's not going to be like, the money's in there, the money's got to be in there. So they signed this immediate 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 eight thirty Davis 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, one hundred and 88 million combined, which leads to them bottoming out and finally getting LeBron, but also getting draft picks and being in retreat for AD. So it had all these different 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 Walter, 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, sixty-four million, like, just chef's kiss. 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 flatlined or declined, 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 encore 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 Mory Show. So, 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 Kyrie demand that trade from the CAHPS? I think it's 2017. Kauai, Anthony Davins, James Harden, and James Harden, I call it pre-agency. That pre-agency is pre-agency. So what I think, a legacy of the 2016 cap spike and the reaction to it was, was that 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 free agent window, which we used to only be able to talk about for a few weeks a year, and it's spreaded across the entire year. So in February, there's like a tweet, or a podcast comment that's like, so and so stars unhappy. And then in March, someone asks the star, hey, are you unhappy? And they give, like, a little bit of a tepid response. And then in April through July, we 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 Warriors dynasty and the crazy deals that are handed out, and the invention of the Supermax and the 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 it changed 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 secret legacy of the 2016 cap spike. It's weird, because we launched a ringer a month before this black swan event, right? And, you know, I'd, podcasts are also taken, even though podcasts had been, I had my podcast 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. 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 joke or ask for a Denver trade, right? That's. I was just thinking that I was like, don't, don't get ahead, Derek. like yeah. - Yes. - That's the easiest podcast topic about time. - By the way, you would have listened to it. We would have painted out, would have laid out the last four years of Joker. Joker is under contract, that's not, but this is the pre-agency phenomenon. There was more ramifications with this, 'cause I'm glad you brought up the pre-agency and how it combined with the discourse really changing. It also shifts the Lebron thing a little bit because Lebron goes to Cleveland in '14. No, it's not a black swan event, but it's like, 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 countdown that night and Lebron was a finals game or an Eastern finals game. And Lebron had like a weird first half or I forget what the timing was with the lottery, but they came out and he was just kind of weird. I remember saying on TV, I think he was rattled by Cleveland getting the 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. So they 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 that are spending a ton of money, Kyrie's there, Kevin Love's there. Like they're, they're going to be battling go and stay and then go and stay trumps it and gets the rant. And that ends up to him going to LA. It also sets up the Westbrook thing where the rant leaves OKC. They have, this is the best young team. Destiny win a 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. Um, and then it also Miami, they do a panic move with Hassan white side. Is there allow we can't lose Hassan white side? Here's a ton of money. They spend 148 million over four years on Hassan white side and 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 2000 and 2023 finals. So, uh, and then Boston was able to get out 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 was only like three or four teams that had a chance to want to 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 10 teams. That's where they want to be. So Denver getting crippled with, with Joker, whether they had to trade paid Watts or not, I 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? >> This is that, it's eight in a row. One question that I remember talking about with some friends is, like, who's championship in the last eight years is the most legacy altering. Like, if Yokech had never won a championship, if Yanis had never won a championship, if LeBron James never won a championship once in Los Angeles, if Curry never won a championship other than, you know, that crazy year when Iguodalo won finals MVP and then all the Durant years. Like, it maybe think like, I mean, you could also maybe even say the same about SGA. Oh my God, SGA doesn't have a single championship. Or, it makes me wonder, like, in this age of parity, with so many exceptional historically good players who only have one championship, 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 think about the sport or this individual so differently. I think it's probably Yokech, because I agree with you that he might be, like, one of the 10 most talented NBA players of all time. And what on earth would we say about the Denver franchise, that they had one of the 10 most valuable players, the most talented players of all time, and never won a single championship. But I wonder what you think is like the one championship, and it's like holding up the most, like, legacy weight. >> Well, there, I mean, this has been the recurring theme of the week, right? It completely changed Dirk's career. I look at this stuff I wrote about Dirk 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 a lot of ya butts with him. It's like, oh, you can't compare him to Kobe. He only made three first-team NBAs. Oh, that was a weird time in 15 and 16 when they, you know, they lost in 16 in the finals. Oh, he only won those last two, 'cause the ranch showed up. And they would have yet butted him to death. >> Right, he only won the first, because love and Kyrie were out. He only won the second three because the finals MVP. >> That's interesting, yeah. >> Couldn't stay healthy. You can't build a team around a guard to say, they would have yet butted him to death. And then 22, he just lays the smack down, and it's just gone. But all the discourse just disappears. Joker, I think we would have blamed the teams. Yannes statistically was so great. I just think it would have at least, he's at least Carl Malone Charles Barkley area, right? To rant weirdly, you know, if he doesn't go to go and stay and get those two, but I mean, he made one finals in OKC in 2012. Let's say he goes to Washington during the cap spike and just never gets back. We just remember him as a superior offensive forward and for all the team USA stuff. But couldn't build a championship team around him. But yeah, I would say, Curry, who would you say? >> I think I'd say, Yokecch, I love the case for Curry. I think that's a great case. I agree with you that if not for the 2022 championship, if that was the year that the Warriors won the last, you would not, you would talk to that indefinitely, right? Did he ever win a finals MVP before that fourth champion? >> He was ranked on the two. >> It was he would dollar, derand, derand. >> By the way, he should have won in 15. That was a top five. >> I'm just, yeah. >> Right, I'm sort of ventriloquizing the takes by people who aren't me, like in this world, which Curry didn't win in that year. But look, I mean, if not but for that championship, we would talk about differently about all sorts of things. I mean, the J's in Boston, we'd say, what do they ever accomplish? They got close, they got close and close and close, and then everyone at championship. I think LeBron's, the last third of his career would be seen much more. >> If he doesn't get the bubble one, it was like, all right. Yeah, he said the greatest career of all time, but he hasn't won the title in the last 10 year. Yeah, that all went well. >> I mean, I think you'd even say that Sam Presti, you'd say, God, like how can someone so talented never win the big one? >> Maybe he's pressing the answer, you know? >> Where it's like, oh, so he's so good at putting together a team, never won a title. But it's interesting because, yeah, championships now are just so evenly distributed, that if you don't make it in your little window, your entire legacy is rewritten. I do think it's a really powerful part of modern basketball, that makes it super high stakes. So everything that I said earlier about how I think that the league is set up to only push up asset values, I think that's true, but in many cases, these rules are doing what they're intended to do, which is to spread the peanut butter of championship, possibility quite thin across the entire league so that you never quite know who's going to win here by year. >> There's one other thing with the cap spike, 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 State getting to rent, puts them in this five-year run, where they're just, they're in the finals every year, they're playing a hundred 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 just, you're just moving more. Like everybody agrees on this, the old guys, like my friend Eddie Johnson is like, oh, we did, it's just not. Like we can watch the games now, it's just harder to play basketball now. And Durant 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 Durant was only there for three years, but then had in 16, OK, so he got to the brink and got to game seven of the conference finals, but he ends up breaking down. Clay Thompson is like the Blues Brothers car, making it to the middle of Chicago, and then all the tires fall down, and he gets hurt literally in their last finals 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. you're just 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 playup 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 Celtics had where they're like oh we lost in round one time to reboot but meanwhile these guys are resting their bodies and you know able to whatever these guys never got the rest and I don't think we're ever going to see that again so to talk about like parody and eight three years in a row I don't think we will ever see a team make five finals again I don't you could give me one B you could give okay see I think the way basketball has played I think it's impossible if it happens it's going to be 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 Sam Presti is the best general manager and in maybe in sports certainly in the NBA the team that he's built is extraordinary chat is not women Yama right but because of salary cap rules chat and women Yama are going to make awfully similar salaries and so given a certain amount of money do I want that money going toward women Yama our 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're relying on a semper five skinny guy yeah exactly you you you went exactly where I was headed um 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 um Joker bitches Lebron's Tom Brady's players who are goat status or near goat status in their sport playing much much longer than anyone has been has been able to play and it seems to me that like be as sports science and injury risk rises at the same time we're going to see more like long tail phenomena we're going to see more extraordinary athletes blow out early but we're also going to see more players like Lebron James or you know know that joke of itch be able to extend their primes 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 in the locker room to celebrate a 50 point night you should value sleep you should you should stretch you should use the sauna like all that yeah there's 40 different things and so and so what makes forecasting something like this for is difficult is that on the one hand um it does seem like they have the potential they have dynasty potential um 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 um plus the running up and down the court which the spurs and the thunder uh do so well that the risk of catastrophic injury is rising too so it a very very hard bet um 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 um I think if you look at a lot of the injuries a lot of it is oh I did oh now I'm going and it's that quick burst step which by the way is happening in my least favorite sport pickleball these people that 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 want really want to do that um just to put a cap on this they the 2015 cap was 60 was 63 million and then the 2016 cap was between 88 92 million um 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 um 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 gonna be harder than ever it's gonna be harder to stack teams second aprons made that impossible now um San Antonio is going to have a day of reckoning in three years he's like when we took less so look look he took a little less but he still makes a lot of money and so we'll deal in Harper and so we'll castle and you know it's it's just can be really hard to manage all that we're seeing with okay see okay see lost dork they lost Aaron Wiggins they lost Isaiah Joe and they're just kind of doing this with younger guys they have hoping those guys will still be able to do it um one more break and then WNBA quick we were texting about the WNBA last week and you had a lot of theories I've already talked about some of my theories um and I'll piggyback on what you say but you have the floor and then I'll go well where should I start um I think one issue with the WNBA is that you know I've heard you talk a lot about how the WNBA 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've got great basketball and a point that I've heard you make both on the show and as you're texting 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 exes and owes of WNBA 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 WNBA 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 WNBA is the subject of sexism and objectification 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 WNBA has become more like everything else in mainstream media and it reminds me of this theory that I've been working on about like sports media and commentary and internet so I was talking to I'm brief aside and this will absolutely come right back to the WNBA I was talking to someone recently who works in broadcast news and we were talking about how you know as more journalists become independent pod 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 reference this earlier right fewer people I think in the from from our conversation about private credit and 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 they would buy and 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're 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 zone defense or is it more interesting to ask whether the people who like Sophie Cunningham are good or evil well 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 was six there were six on the previous day there were three and if you want to know what the story is about I can guarantee you they were not about the excess nose 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 Most people most of 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 as it relates the WMBA, I agree with you that WMBA commentary is unhealthy. And I certainly agree with the players who have an issue with their-- 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 a piece with the unhealthiness of all modern media. It's that the derivative market of sports commentary has 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 100,000 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 Caitlyn Clark? Exactly. Boom. Send that into your editor. You got one. 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 batted back and forth over a net, right? And we know who's on each side just batting it back and forth. And they don't really care what the topic is. They just kind of move around to different things. So it's like, oh, are people arguing about trans athletes in high school, throw the volleyball up? And then they just go at it for 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 ESPN broad-- 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 was fucking awesome. Again, she's a rookie. She's basically 1980 magic Johnson. Really special. There's never been a guard quite like her, whether it has her change of pace stuff and her passing. Somehow more fun to watch in Caitlin Clark, who I thought was previously the most fun college women's play I'd seen. And you have this awesome setup where you have all these teams have these different identities. Vegas has Wilson, who's the best player in the league. I'm not sure about their guards. You have Golden State, who's like this kind of built out of an AI lab. But they're just really good defensively. You don't really understand how they're doing it. Minnesota is the most talented team in the league. Indiana's the 2005 Suns, the way they play. They're up and down. The Liberty have some famous players that everybody knows. And they're headed toward these awesome playoffs. And yet, everybody's just batting the volleyball around. 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 WMBA 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. They just they have more unforced 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. We go back. 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 in 10 footers. I'll do respect to Stewie, but the way she plays was kind of the whole league. And now you have these magical guards all over the place. And even recently, there was that high school player that that video was going around. But this high school player who was just getting to the basket and could 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 offer shoulders. But the discourse around the league should be like, holy shit. The fever or averaging almost 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 leagues good now. Nobody is talking about this. Nobody, I think 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. And then finally, I mean, that's college too. There's just not enough good officials, you know? And sadly, they have probably the worst ones. But then 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 about four to five times higher ratings than the typical WNBA game. Now it's like a 20, 30% difference. Yeah. 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 like, what to say because the people that were there the whole time are kind of mad that they're newcomers. Yes, 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, an encyclopedic sometimes even, even Bill Simmons' understanding of like who the greatest players were in the 90s versus 2000s versus today, right? Then there's the Katelyn Clark generation. That's the next concentric circle. And that's this huge surge in viewership over the last few years. And I called the Katelyn Clark 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 Indiana, fever, all Katelyn Clark. Two of those games should be said are against Angelries. She was compared to Steph Curry when she entered the league. I like the Steve Nash comparison more. Way more commercial standpoint. Yeah. 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 is 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 circle of people. You've got, perfect. You've got the volleyball circle. People who treat what's happening in the WMBA as a discourse hammer to knock other people over the head with with posts on Instagram and Twitter and everything else. And that's where the Sophie Cunningham stuff comes in. And you know, brief a side like I built. Can we just, can we spare a moment for Chuck Loeschman? What a call. Like that guy predicted Sophie Cunningham's political career. Was it hours or minutes? No, it was like three days before. Yeah. Chuck Stradamus. That man needs like all time 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 time or by him. Chuck Stradamus, man, 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 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 that'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 giving the league issues. And what they need to your point, I agree with you. 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 and in Prasario, who's not afraid of the limelight. And not afraid to get into the volleyball court and bang some spikes everyone's somewhere else. Listen, we haven't had this happen in 40 plus years, right? You have this, eat. The last time this really happened was the NBA. When you go from the NBA, tape the lane games, just the fourth most successful of the four professional sports. The biggest stars were Dr. J and Kareem. Kareem 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 'cause the games weren't on enough. And then Bird and Magic show up, they get cable, all of a sudden the games are on all the time. And then Michael shows up in 1984. And in basically a four year spin, the league blows up when we have the slam dunk contest in '84, 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 Laker Celtics in '84 finals and you have all these little events leading to it. It's kind of what just happened in the WNBA. WNBA three years ago, Golden State and Portland, we're gonna be the two expansion teams. I think Golden State was at like 35 million or maybe something like that. Portland ended up being 50 million. The guy who was gonna do 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. Back's out. They don't even have the money for the Portland team. And they couldn't even figure out we wanna expand and we can't even find a city, right? This is pre-kate on this, this three years ago. Now you fast forward it. And it's like now they're gonna over expand. They'll probably ruin that part. But the league, the franchises are seven times worth what they're worth. And you have real stars that people can point to. And yet, like Olivia Miles, I just looked this up as you were 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 Caitlin and Ezra Wilson, right? And Olivia is like the one they should be getting behind it. Nobody 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 cram our best players down 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 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. That 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 about the discourse around it. 'Cause in 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 God, like how did they fix their running game? Oh, I see. Like how did the Rams revolutionize the passing game again with their tight end sets? But when it comes to creating national stars, I'm not sure the NFL is-- - Well, they don't want that. - Would you say they don't want that? - They just want the quarterbacks. They don't want anybody else to, you know, they want everybody, that's why they have everybody to keep their helmets on before they get off the field and all the shit they do on that end. They want the players to be disposed. It's fucking roller ball, right? It's like, oh, James Conn is getting too big for roller ball. We have to get rid of the rules and get rid of them. And the nine quarterbacks are the stars basically, but the franchises and the product is the star, which is what the-- - So I guess here's my question. If you build what league do you think is doing the best job? Minting new stars. And I say minting new stars. I would say the NBA. - The NBA stars. - Yeah, I would say the NBA. When the new guys come in, you feel it, you know who they are. They market them correctly. 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 WMBA. 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 that David's turn a little bit, it's probably an X-Player. Would be my guess. I don't think it can be a faceless person. It's probably an X-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. They might have Minnesota versus Vegas in Round Two, and they might have Indiana versus, they might have Kaitlin versus Olivia Miles in the finals. If that happens, if they fuck that up, but that's like casual fan should care about that. And again, I couldn't stand the WMBA watching it for 20 plus years. I thought it was terrible, but it's completely changed and it's fun to watch. But yeah, I think when you think about, this all happened so fast. 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 matriote and three waiters and three bus boy. 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 a 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 has 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 the WMBA 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 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 to 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 gonna be, that's gonna be a really important part of this job as the WMBA just becomes a much, much more visible part of the sports landscape. - Yeah, and leaning into the things that are good but I don't think this is hard, but it's important because when you, when you, when things change just fast for anything, you've gotta have some sort of plan for like, this is change. 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 had 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 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, like Angel Reese on Sunday, have missed a game-winning layup against the fever, right? In the moment it happened, you're thinking, oh my God, this is gonna 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 gonna take shit too, and this is just how it's gonna go. The shit they're taking now is not the right kind of shit. You wanna take shit for players not performing well, like what would be in the finals? Or somebody trying to bolt from a team after claiming that they were gonna stay there and stuff like that. You don't want the political stuff, not awesome. By the way, Sophie Cunningham, really good role player. Yeah, and you said earlier, you know, Caitlyn Clark is- Good free indeed. Like are off the bench, good energy. Like I don't have, I haven't heard anyone say that. Yeah, great energy, a good role player. Caitlyn 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 half-ish of the year. And how much of that is these, a little bit of attention coming off of her. I don't know, not in her head, but it's possible. I mean, you know, in a kind of, this is an imperfect comparison, but in a kind of, you know, dremondish 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 Dremont was a part of that team. And Dremont took a lot of the attention and media energy, maybe off of Stephs. He could focus on what he 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 getting six articles written about it on Fox News every single day, but different athletes responded different things. And I think that for Caitlyn in particular, clearly something has changed. In the last, you know, seven to 10 weeks. - The Steph thing's a good example 'cause what was the book on Steph as this career started or a sand when he had the 2013, '14 with the Warriors? Be super physical against him. - He's delicate. - Beat him up, knock him down. People do the same thing against Caitlyn and it's like, oh, it's a race war. Oh my God, what's going on here? It's like, well, they're trying to get in her head. They try to do Olivia Miles too. The problem is nobody can hit her because she's moving out of the way. She's like fucking Barry 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 save that for next time 'cause that's a pretty interesting one to a brewing battle between the streamers. What do you have in the podcast this week? - I couldn't 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 on-- - That for students. - LinkedIn posts, student test is 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 m-dashes 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 pretty nuts. And in some cases, pretty horrifying. And yeah, folks like Panggram are really important for helping sort of clean up the AI slap of the world. - I gotta say the m-dash was a big loss for me. I was a big m-dash guy. - I love m-dashes, I know. - I probably was m-dash-heavy if you go back and read my pieces. So now I write it. It's like, today I write through your m-dash. I was like, no, this was part of my style. I'm a big m-dash guy. - I love them, you know, it's tough because I'm gonna 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 toward 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-summarize and oversimplify everything. Let's get a lead to things like, you know, an 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 the more complicated reality is that it's gross because humans just like us voted on it in post-training. But yeah, the world's gonna become a lot sloppier in the near future and it's important to have janitors out there cleaning up the slab. - And yet somehow this isn't the biggest fear with where AI goes because the security, you did it. - Tip of the ice piece. The cyber security piece is the single scariest piece of wherever it is. - Yeah, everyone change your passwords because-- - Yeah, you're a big monster. - You're a big change your password's guy right now. - Not until this week. God, 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've become convinced that that incredibly boring conversation is now, man, it's a moment. The level of AI sophistication, especially from open weight models the next few years, that can do a really, really bad job in fishing attacks or hacking into 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 plan English with us four years now? Five, four, five? Four years in the fall, four years in November. - Oh, man, you're doing a great job. I love working with you. Oh, it's always fun to have you on. I have to go on yours. We gotta come up with some dumb reason. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - We had a like a sports records winner, but I still want to do the LeBron thing. But we gotta come up with some idea that I can guess on yours. - All right, I'll do it. - All right, thank you so much. - Thanks, man. - All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Derek, thanks to Gehau 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 Harden, sorry, didn't get to talk about your three years for $97 million extension. Holy mackerel. I can't believe how much money you've made over the years. Congratulations. And enjoy the rest of the week. I will see you on Sunday. 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