Colin Cowherd Podcast - Steph Curry The Most Impactful Athlete Ever? ESPN Dumps MLB, WNBA Needs To Embrace Caitlin Clark,

You covered for years, So I looked Sportico had a list today of the five most valuable franchises in the United States. Three of them are NBA franchises and one was the Warriors. Now, if I would have told you twenty years ago it's going to go Cowboys and Golden State Warriors, you anybody would have thought, what the hell happened? They were a mess for twenty years. I mean I grew up with them with Rick Berry in the seventies.

You know, they had some interesting teams Tim Hardaway, but it was just kind of a dead brand, which the Yankees were, by the way, in the eighties. The Don Mattingly years it was a dead brand. You can look back and there's a lot of people that can take credit. But I've thought about this. The Lakers were very big pre Lebron, and the Cowboys were big before Dak and most of these organizations that are listed the Celtics have

been big since Bill Russell. Yeah, but you look at the Warriors and as somebody that covered them, can you make an argument if they're a eight billion dollar franchise that seven and a half of that have been driven by Steph Curry.

That's all I got to covering them, Colin, is that I was just blogging about them as a fan on a fan site, Warriors World, back in the day, and I had other jobs that I was doing, and the guy running the blog said, you know, we can get a credential, and I said really, he says, yeah, nobody's going to these games. Like they're desperate for somebody to go to one of these games because they've got the beat writer and then they've got the other beat writer.

Half the time, those two beat writers are talking to each other and they're saying, hey, if you don't show up to practice, I won't show up to practice, and then we both get the day off like that was happening back then, and nobody would show up to practice and get any kind of story. It's been driven by Steph. It's been driven by more than Steph. I'm a little bit defensive on behalf of your guy, Draymond Green's legacy. I know he can annoy people, but I think because

he annoys people, they start rewriting history. I see people say, oh my god, Drayamon was drafted into the perfect situation. Nobody has been drafted into a more perfect situation. And I go when he showed up, there was no situation.

There was no situation to speak of. Nobody cared about this team, nobody cared about this franchise, Nobody expected anything good on twenty twelve draft night, and that guy was a second round pick, no guaranteed spot, and he had to scrape claw wrench jobs away from guys getting paid a lot more money with a lot more organizational investment. He became the best defensive player of his generation, which then merged with Steph Curry being the best offensive player

of his generation. And a lot of other things have gone right in between some other things going wrong. But it's a crazy, just miracle of a story. And yeah, I think you're right to hit on it that we almost take it for granted. We almost act as though this has always been a glamour franchise, they've always been here. It was not that way. They were Clippers North. It was different.

He pitched and batted too. You look at the great football players, Well, Mahomes was great, so was John Elway and Dan Marino and Brett farre and and they're there. I think you're I mean, Philadelphia has a push push. People are a little uncomfortable with it. Outside of Philadelphia. It's not changing football. It's just a really good fourth down play. Steph Curry has changed every single level of basketball.

Everything he's changed. I mean, I just I look at the shots being taken now, and like anything else, any cultural change, is that at some point they all go south. Like analytics for baseball, You're like, yeah, the game is more efficient. Oh wait, now it's more boring. Oh wait, three pointers the math are better than two pointers. Oh wait,

now it's boring. That's the way analytics all work is that these are TV products, and initially they make the game more efficient, and they work on a volume scale regular season, but ultimately analytics don't generally work in any sport quite as effectively in postseasons, and they generally aren't good for television. And so Steph, now there's there's a little bit of a Okay, we all fell in love with small ball and Steph, but now it's been copied so often, and people do it at such a much

more a poor level. They don't. I mean, Houston can't shoot and there I mean we got Wemby and guys shooting too many threes. Joel Embiid's never shot more threes. He shoots twenty nine percent. So but I do think Steph, more than any athlete of my lifetime, literally changed Muhammad Ali personality driven athlete. I think I think he was for a long time all Lee was what people looked at and went, oh my god, look how big you

get if you let your personality out. But I mean that's just my take that Steph Curry is probably one of one in a cultural it's changing of sports, esthetic and style of play.

and he doesn't actually become a championship winning coach. The crazy thing about Steph is that he's been doing it for over ten years and he has revolutionized the NBA, and he's still the best at doing it. He showed people the way it could be done, he gave them the recipe, and he's still the best chef cooking it. I didn't mean to make a chef curry joke right there, but you see what I'm saying. That's unbelievable to do that, to be so influential and yet remain the best at

what you're doing. Now, the other part of it that you've said, the malign in influence on the sport with analytics, the optimization problem, I think that's real. There are these strange things where sometimes we like something when one person does it, but we don't like when a bunch of other people are doing it. I felt that way about Zachlow's writing. Zach Low probably the greatest NBA writer of

all time. He had a very particular sort of style that was highly informational and could be a little bit quirky, but was fairly dry. But the way he did it was great. But so many younger writers coming up and bloggers coming up, they wanted to be like Zach Low because Zach was the man. And I looked at what they were doing and I went, I don't know if I like you doing this. It doesn't work when you do it. This isn't a recipe that works when somebody else does it. It would have been better if you

went with something else. And maybe even a generation before that, Bill Simmons might have been that guy. Or I loved Bill Simmons columns. But then I'm watching people try to be a reverent and funny in the way Bill did it, and it's just this doesn't scale. This isn't what I want. This isn't what I want. I just want Bill doing it. That's what it feels a little bit like right now. In the NBA, where a lot of people loved watching those Warriors in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen, not everybody loved

watching these teams that emulated the three point shooting. As optimization takes over and now most of the shots are going to be three pointers.

female Steph Curry. She's taking shots women don't take. I didn't think there was anything to it, and when and then all of a sudden and she has this Angel Reese. You know, competition in college like Magic and Bird, it pivots to the professional league and it's fascinating. And Angel Reese, I think her success helps Caitlin Clark. I think it feels Bird Magic, although I don't think Angel is close to Kaylin as an influencer. Bird and Magic both had

they kind of ended up in the perfect cities. Bird in kind of tough guy Boston and Magic and you know, showy Los Angeles. But it was funny because with male sports, I feel sometimes I feel bad for Caitlin Clark in the WNBA that people are trying to explain her popularity nobody ever had to explain Steph Curry. It was just did he just shoot from thirty four feet off balance and make three in a row? And there's part of me that feels sympathetic to the WNBA and part of

me that doesn't. First of all, I feel like when you're young, when Bryce Harper came into baseball, he went through an Andy duframe tunnel for about three years because he was flashy, right, and baseball doesn't like flashy. So Caitlin's not the first athlete the deal with this. Tiger Woods had the deal with a lot of comments and a lot of traditionalists pushing back, and the network only shows Tiger, So Caitlin's not the first to go through it.

But I do think the WNBA has gotten to a point where I want to say, girls, girls, she's the female staff just embraced the hell out of her. You're getting on private jets. So I tried to be I tried to defend the WNBA initially, But how does that land for you? Because I think they've gotten to a point where I'm finding it hard now, Like, if the chippy play continues, you may just lose me as a viewer.

with what you think your value is. And there was a ton of resentment towards her, and a lot of people in that league seem to get caught up on this whole versus is problem. You know, there are people that can really grapple with what is, and there are people who get really stuck on how it ought to be and they're just fixated on it. It ought to be. It ought to be Asia Wilson ought to be a

huge superstar. Asia Wilson ought to be the person Nike is promoting because she's the best player in the league, and she is the best player in the league. But that's just not what it is. People are interested in Kaitlyn Clark. They like watching Caitlin Clark Asia Wilson's game. It's more analogous to a Tim Duncan. People are not as interested in that. You can say there's a racial element of that. Okay, I don't know what to do with that. We can't just replace Caitlin Clark with somebody else.

She's the person who showed up for this particular job of being Caitlin Clark. She's the one who's resonating. And we can either benefit from what it is, or we can tear apart everybody who's into it and make everybody feel bad about it and try to stop it from happening. That ladder move seems completely insane to me, and yet it's entirely infected a lot of the coverage of the WNBA from people who support the league at least support it, you know, in quotations, because they're not helping it when

they go about it that way. And even the Time magazine and even some of these publications that covered it's like they're scared, they're worried if they're not giving enough attention to the other players.

So the truth is basketball's history. The WNBA should take a deep breath and realize Basketball's history is best score. Alex English led the eighties in scoring in the NBA. Alex English. There have been so many players Kiki Vandaway I don't remember a basket he just never missed. But there are players that are just aunt is dynamic and fascinating. Kobe was fascinating, but a lot of the bigs like and that's something we just have to be honest about.

Russell Wes Westbrook's game. I've said this before. In his prime had of pay to watch him play. He couldn't shoot. I didn't love his handles, But sweet mother, a vertical jump the guy was like it was popcorn in a hot skillet. He was flying through the air. So the NBA is so caught up on well, she's the leading score people like different and no other woman shot thirty three footers. It's that simple.

makes basketball sort of fascinating to me. That's why I wrote the Steph Curry article in twenty sixteen. There's this ineffable charisma of stardom, of superstardom, that you just know it when you see it, and we're not always sure about all the elements you need for it to happen and for you to really pop in the way that Michael Jordan did, in the way that Alan Iverson did, in a totally different way, in the way that Steph

Curry did. And the people who do it are worth billions of dollars to the league and to these sneaker companies. And then there are players who are effectively at the same tier or level that just can't and just don't, and there's just something human about it, and it just is what it is, and you're just going to make yourself miserable trying to figure out how it ought to be and change reality.

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and want into sub stack in podcasting. So you're a network executive, you get to pick five, either events or sports, to have huge contracts with everything going forward in twenty twenty five, you can consider everything like the NFL you're gonna have to pay a fortune for. So you get five. Now you can include events every four year, events, you

can include leagues, whatever you want. You get five. Put them in order of what you Ethan Strauss, the new head of programming for Blank, would do, Oh my.

started to make some inroads. If you gave me, if you let me be a dictator to run NCAA men's basketball, oh I would be very intrigued with that. If I could change it and do it in accordance to what I thought would make money and grab the culture I happen to believe. And this might be sacrilegious. The tournament's too big. I think it's too big a tournament. I think. I know a lot of people would say that's why I like it, and it's what the gambling is about.

But it's devalued the NCAA regular season. I might pair it back to thirty two teams. I might make it a little bit less. I'd make the season try to matter more. I'd try to make those events ten pole events. Because college football has done really well over the last decade. I know there's been a little bit of slippage in the ratings. Maybe they I don't know, oversaturated a bit with the expanded playoff, but they've done really well. College

basketball hasn't. I want to make college basketball more event and less inventory. I think that's where it can really make some hay and be a counterpoint to the NBA, which is just too games. How do I make what we're doing big events that cut through the noise. It's hard because it's like hurting cats with all these different conferences.

But if you made me dictator and gave me the rights and the ability to completely control the schedule and how it goes, I think that's one that's a little bit dormant, where there's an appetite for it, but it's just got a little too much NBA disease of too many games and your regular season doesn't matter when you've got this big, single elimination tournament that I know we love and I know it's called March Madness. I want a way to preserve March Madness as a thing well

making those regular season games matter. So that's the dream property for me. I'm sorry I couldn't rank them off the top of my head, but that's one where I've looked at it and I'd said, man, if they could just do it different, they could really make this an even bigger thing in the culture. Because as much as we love March Madness, college basketball has never mattered less in my lifetime than right now. And that's a and it doesn't need to be that way.

I do think the NIL is going to keep maybe not Cooper Flag, but it's going to keep like mid late first round guys in college for a year. So I actually think that's highly beneficial for the NBA and college basketball. Stay with tom Izzo for one more year,

then leave after your sophomore year. So the you know, the NIL gets a lot of pushback, but my take is it's actually going to be good for college basketball, and I think and and in turn good for the NBA, who doesn't have to be abysit every player that comes in. I mean half these guys come in. They can't even drink at the Rich Carlton Bar, Like it's ridiculous. They're just kids that forget learning basketball. There EQ isn't close

to being ready to travel with drown men. So I think women's college basketball, if all these were stocks, is one of the biggest buys.

the NBA. We can keep the forty minutes, but other things need to be in alignment because that's what's getting in the way of the development and making it less of a reliable pipeline to NBA superstardom. If we can get these guys playing the same sport that they're going to be playing at the next level, I think that helps everybody on both sides of it. So that's that's one of the other things it comes to revitalizing the men's side.

just a mess. Nobody wants to touch it. Soccer, the World Cup, now globalization takes place, has never been more popular. We become more of an event culture. But things are cyclical and so right now. In my opinion, baseball speeds up the game. Defensive shift is gone Otani to the Dodgers, Harper Phillies, Soto, Mets, Judge, Yankees, Ronald Lacuna, Braves. All the best players and most interesting players are all in the right markets. ESBN a couple of years ago, signed

a seven billion dollar deal. I think it was it was around there or it was seven years, three billion dollar deal with TNT. For hockey, there's not a single iconic hockey franchise in America. Maybe the Toronto Maple Leafs. In North America. There's not a single recognizable superstar hockey player. You don't have to love the Knicks, Warrior, Celtics, Lakers, Lebron Steph these are household names. I do not understand it. I think Jimmy Pataro or whoever is in this process

has made a big mistake, stiff arming major League Baseball. Like, guys, it is significantly more relevant than hockey.

good a sport it is. It's just a reality that there are certain parts of the country where hockey seems very very relevant, and there are certain parts of the country where you will go years between anybody mentioning the sport in your midst. I like what baseball has been doing. It's a little bit to bring it back to the Bezos thing. I don't know if everything they're doing is gonna work, but it's hard to hit a target without

aiming for it. And when they go, we're speeding up the game, We're making the bases bigger, We're doing this. We're doing that. It's at least a concession that we have a problem, we're trying to solve it. We care about you as the fan, we want your business. And they did some great advertising for it with Brian Cranston's narration and now they've got the box office stars and they've got the Otani thing going. Look, it's strange to me. I think baseball gets culturally short shrift. It's not as

glamorous as basketball is. But people will say things about basketball that are just as true of baseball, and they won't say it about baseball, like, oh, basketball so international, so global? They go, okay, what about baseball? No, no, no, Well wait a second, is Japan, Korea? These aren't other countries far away Latin America. I mean, baseball is still very popular. I think we just have it locked in

our heads that baseball is the aging grain. Dyings sports agree and these other sports are on the come up, when in reality, all the inventory sports I would call them,

have basically the same issue. You know, there are events sports like football, where they're very rare when you know when they're going to happen, and they cut through all the noise in the culture their events, and then there are inventory sports that made a ton of money in the cable television years still make a ton of money but might not be as relevant to that end of the business now where there are so many games that you have them on the background of your life. And

that's baseball, that is hockey, that's basketball. They're all facing the same issue. And I think baseball became almost the archetype or the example of decline in that respect that was afflicting the other major sports that had the same issue, and it's caused some people to overlook some of what baseball has going for it. How Yeah, the World Series recently have been more watched than the NBA Finals. I think that would surprise some people.

The numbers and the attendance went down. Alabama had an attendance problem with Nick Saban. Now Fox and the ESPN step in and say we're financially going to control the sport. College football is now a buy Baseball today is a buye and I think it's a huge misstep by ESPN to break off talks. I just I can't believe what I'm watching.

I think they called it Volter, And Logan Roy does this speech saying, oh, it's all so different. You know. You know in the past they said people didn't want to go to the movies, but we built up the movie theaters and it turns out they do. And he goes through this whole speech and basically the idea of the speech is that it's not all about trends. Trends are part of it, but sometimes it's just somebody with a vision saying this is what we're going to do.

This is what we're going to be doing. I have the money, I can see it. I'm putting all my life force behind it.

become the big property it was. There had to be a guy who saw it, who knew it could be. So that's how I feel about it. And I think there's some potential there with baseball, and hell, there could be some potential there with hockey if they do it right. If they say let's start building rinks in the suburbs of southern California and Florida. Who knows, but you've got to try, You got to aim for that target.

good new Yorker magazine. He was very well read, very learned guy, and I just I thought he was fascinating and we would go up and talk. And I remember going to him and saying, John, there is this sport UFC and it's big in Vegas in LA I think you guys should buy it. I said. It is more organized than boxing. They've gotten rid of some of the eye gouging and some of the real brutal techniques involved. They've cleaned it up. It's more corporate. And it's again,

it's not a pit bull against the beach ball. It's like boxing. It's got you know, weight classes and size dimensions where you get even fights. And I said, John, I think this thing. I think this thing is huge. And the takeaway from John and many at ESPN is it's too brutal. It's too raw. There's too much blood. Let's talk Red Sox baseball. And I remember when I was I'm not picking on anybody, but I can remember

there was a commercial one time. I was driving to work at the other place and they were talking about Florida playing Florida State and the commercial red at that company and the Gators from Tallahassee and the seminoles from Gainesville, and I literally called the Boston went guys, you sound completely tone deaf to southern college football fans. You don't even know where they play. And so I think your point. And by the way, I'm not saying Fox or other

networks haven't made mistakes. I'm not picking on anybody. But I do think when you grow up in the Northeast is that you don't follow college football. You didn't initially get UFC. It was I can remember having bosses that like that, that really considered college football niche and baseball everything. And I do think I argue this for years with friends.

I said, my negotiations with Fox have always been pretty easy, and I said one of the reasons is they're near Hollywood, and they're what they would call talent friendly because this is the world they live in, and they you know, they live in southern California. This is the home of entertainment and stars. So they're really good at negotiating with

on air people that it feels like family. It never gets personal, you don't always get what you want, but it does feel different, whereas a lot of sports companies in the Northeast feel like sports factories. You go to work, you punch a clock, you put in over time. Here's management and down there is the workforce. And it doesn't feel like that for southern California. It doesn't feel like that for maybe Netflix based in California, it doesn't feel

like that for Fox. So I do think where a company is located has an influence on the culture within the company, if that makes sense.

and I had an experience. It's a self serving example, and forgive me for it, But in twenty sixteen, I was reporting this story for ESPN, the magazine, and it was back when magazines, I think, had a bit of a higher status. And what's in the ESPN the magazine's a big deal, and it was a big deal to me, so I wanted to do my best story. I had a story about how Nike had screwed up the contract for Steph Curry and Steph Curry had wound up with

Under Armour. Great story, and Nico Harrison how up to be Steph Curry's handler during that time and was in this infamous meeting where everything went wrong. Somebody else called it Steph Stephan. Somebody else put up a PowerPoint. It was repurposed materials from the Kevin Durant pitch meeting. It was a disaster. And so I had this story and I was telling them. I was saying, the sneaker industry, it's a big deal. People are really into the sneaker

culture and these guys make billions of dollars. And it's not just about Michael Jordan. This is a big thing. And the people at he has been the magazine were very smart and they handled me wonderfully. I'm not trying to criticize them, but I'm saying that I was younger back then. They were a little older than I was, and they had this idea of this is how we cover basketball, this is how we cover the NBA, which you're doing right here. I don't know what to do

with it. It's about the sneaker business. That's not what we do here in Connecticut at ESPN and they cut the story from the physical magazine and then they put the link up there and it became and I know it's self serving, but it became the most read English speaking sports story of the year because it connected and there were a bunch of people who do care about that kind of thing. People are fascinated by business. People

were really into sneaker culture. It just wasn't the sort of stuff that people in Bristol were focusing on every day, and so they missed it as a relevant story. I think that happens all the time. I'm sure I do it. I'm sure I miss really big resonant things just because I'm one person and I'm going to see the world through my own taste.

obviously a massive issue. Inflation was a massive issue. But I think that is something I think about this all the time, and I tell my staff this all the time. Let's try to avoid confirmation bias, just because I want something to happen. Like Sam Darnold, I loved his season, but I kept saying on the air, I can't unsee for interception games, the New England disasters, it's ill rear its head, and eventually it did so. So that's something I fight, but I'm guilty of it constantly. Do you

do you find yourself like the transgender issue. For me, I just I never thought it would have that impact. I remember being in a discussion though. I went and had a beer with some friends. There's a place in Manhattan Beach called the nine hundred Club. It's kind of a private club, really neat, cozy, almost feels like a

ski lodge. And it was about a month out or two months out from the election, and you know, guys were talking about stuff and I was kind of eavesdropping, but half watching, you know, an NFL highlights and half listening, and I couldn't believe they had kids. I couldn't believe how passionate they were. And these this is southern California, these are not like These are not like Midwest alt

right conservatives. It's not the crowd. And I remember walking out that night and thinking, man, I am just detached from this. Have you had something like that?

by how the Democrats overperformed in that election. And so as I share your exact sensibility where I'm endlessly curious about the public because I can't predict where they're going to go. I live in the Bay Area. How would I know what normal people are into and what's going to be motivating to them. And I don't look at them in a condescending way when I learn it either, I just go, Okay, well, this is what's motivating to people?

This is what they care about. I do not believe you'll hear people use that term voting against your own interest. I don't believe that's a thing. I think your interest is what you're voting on. If you're more interested in culture than you are in economics, you're not voting against your own interest. If you're voting against something that would help you economically. Your interest is culture, and that's relevant to what you care about. I respect that, I understand that.

So I think that was one where where I was I was surprised, and then you try to learn more and try to see about, Okay, why why did that happen? Why are people maybe a little wigged out still about the January sixth stuff At that particular time, I think that was motivating. And I also think obviously the Dobbs decision and abortion that happened a few months before that election, and that seemed to be galvanizing. And so you learn a little bit and I think that that's healthy. But people,

for whatever reason, do not approach it that way. Often they approach it like, well, the public, I either completely know what they're going to do, They're going to do what I want them to do, and then when it doesn't happen, they're idiots and they're bad and this country is bad. I don't like that reaction. I much prefer I much prefer going, Okay, what's going on? Why did you people feel that way? And where are you feeling it. I'm really curious about the different parts of the country.

It's amazing to me that the county that's to the east of the county I grew up in, to the east of California. I think it's Imperial County. I should know that because I grew up there, But it's I think something like eighty five percent Hispanic on the border, and it made this massive shift towards Trump. Nobody would have predicted that, nobody. So the elections are just this real object lesson in understanding attitudes out there that.

read them almost obsessively. I remember I was listening to Tim Cook, a CEO of Apple, saying the first thing he does for an hour every day is read emails from people about his products, good or bad. I used to love emails, and I couldn't tell you how many times I would use an email, and I would use it either as a topic or as a reminder of what people cared about. So I think there is I think I don't. I am fascinated. That's I've said before.

There's three days every four years. I'm jealous of political talk show hosts the day before an election, the day of the election, the day after the election. I wish I was doing their job, not mine, because it's just fascinating to watch the American public and what matters to them.

And sometimes I'm detached. I remember years ago, I had this driver that occasionally a company paid for when I went to Chicago, and he had been Bernie max Driver, the legendary comedian, one of the funniest people ever would and I was just fascinated. And I think Ocean's eleven had been out, and I just would ask him endless questions about Bernie and just how fascinating he was. But I found that this driver, I guess, I guess you call him a personal driver show for whatever you want

to call him. It was suv how in tune he was to the economy by being a driver. And he would talk about, oh, oh, traffic is brutal, economy's great. And I'd never thought about the economy, but his belief based on what time was the traffic, what days were slow, what days were busy, what was the activity at the airport.

And he'd been doing this for thirty years. He was an older guy, and he was like you, he goes, I could tell you without looking at the stock market, without looking at the housing market, I can tell you how the economy is by traffic flow. And it really I must have had three or four long conversations with this gentleman, and it really it was like, man, people like you have such a heartbeat of how this company is moving. And I find those people fascinating. I think

they're in every neighborhood in this country. They generally aren't going to Twitter, they don't need to get clicks, but these people that drive people around, These people that work in restaurants, the lady at the diner, what are the tips, Like, are people buying the more expensive thing? I mean, these people that work at restaurants, these people that work at

movie theaters. They know what's happening with the economy. You know, there are boots on the ground people, And I think sometimes we overlook those kind of people.

traversing the country. I felt like I understood the country better when I was a beat writer covering the Warriors, just because I'd be in random towns, random overs, random cabs, a lot of people listening to Rogan. That's all. I got a sense of how big Rogan was. A lot

of people listening to you. I'm not trying to flatter you, Colin, but I did remember going, man, a lot of them are listening, listening to the herd out here, and you get a sense of people because I think a lot of people don't even understand the bubble that they're in. And understanding it, I think is important to being open minded. We're all in it. I'm in it, you're in it, but you have to know that you're in it to

start questioning things and start wondering about some things. And it's one of the reasons why I've really enjoyed I'll give a shout out to Mark Halprin's YouTube show two Way, where yeah, he'll have opposing perspectives and he'll have Spicer from the Republican side and I'm drawing a blank on the guy from the Democratic side, and they'll talk about the news of the day. But what's really crazy is he'll bring up just random people to the floor and

you'll have random viewers of his debate something political. I saw a debate happening between somebody whose perspective was that Trump couldn't be elected heus of January sixth, and somebody's saying that the media was over hyping it, and at some point Mark broke in and he said, look, we're not going to settle this today, but we're going to stay on this because this is the only place in America where this is happening, at least in a way

that everybody can see it and regular people have unpredictable political opinions. That's the crazy thing when I watch where somebody will have two right wing opinions and one left

or vice versa. It's just hard to imagine because I think in media especially, we're all talking to each other and we're all seeing what we say, and we're just forming this consensus like that, and a lot of people aren't plugged in online, they don't go about it that way, and they often have more idiosyncratic viewpoints because of it.

it on my pizzas. I love that. So I'm gonna throw something out there because you have a great sense of media and you've created your own media position. So Jeff Bezos, you know, the founder of Amazon, who, by the way, there's an old story in Seattle where I'm from, that years ago when Jeff Bezos was pitching Amazon to the top names at Microsoft, that the Microsoft guys came out of the meeting and said, we just met the smartest person we've ever met. Like he was. Jeff was,

really he was a next level thinker. And so he buys the Washington Post and the business is broken. And the most important part of media to me has always been not resources, but trust, and the newspaper industry especially has lost trust. So he comes out and he says, you know what, We're going to change things at this company. He says, We're going to embrace in our op ed section, personal liberties and free markets, and of course the predictably

precious media. People at the Post are outraged. The business is dying. It's been dying for twenty years. When a business is dying, you have to change things. My takeaway is, well, guys, what you're doing is not working. You were given the keys to the kingdom and you lost the try the American public. And here's a businessman saying, well, we can go belly up or we can do it my way. So I defend Bezos. Here your thoughts on what he said and what transpired.

And then maybe you can disagree with Bezos's approach and say making the Washington Post like the Wall Street Journal won't work or it's self serving or whatever. I want to just give people an object example of what I'm talking about. Because everybody is accusing everybody of bias and political bias all the time. There's this critique of the Washington Post that they were biased for the Democratic Party. But I really don't think people understand the extent of

what we mean. I'm gonna I wrote this article about the Post. I've been criticizing the Post for a while. I draw a distinction by the way, I think The New York Times has been a very useful paper, whatever people think of its biases. I would not say that about the Washington Post, even if some people. They're certainly talented, and people have gotten angry at me for that. But

here's an example of what I mean. The day after the Biden debate debacle that ultimately got him shoved out of the presidential race, right that was the biggest news day of the year, and I remember it. I remember going to the Washington Post and going, well, I want to know what the insider gossip is. This is the Washington paper of record. What is going on? I took a screenshot of the front page of the Washington Post the day after this debate, where Biden's meltdown was the

biggest news story of the year. The top story on the front page is justices strike down obstruction charge used for hundreds of January sixth rioters. Latest from the Post what Trump said with his very fine people comments versus what he meant. There's something about how elephants have been orphaned as babies and returned to the wild, and there's something about Baltimore's revived Redline will be the light rail system.

More says those are the top headlines. That's crazy, that's insane. Yeah, and there were left leaning or Democrat leaning publications that actually covered the news. If you don't do your job, somebody is going to do it for you. That's the lesson I take from it. The people at the paper

were not doing their job. They had such a group thing going on there where everything was about Trump, and everything was about all pulling in the same direction to defend the party to the extent when the party actually fractured and Biden totally collapses, they can't even cover the story. So if you're not covering the story and I can't rely on you to do that, then what are we

really doing here? And Bezos realized he was running that kind of operation that just couldn't tell people what they wanted to know, and he obviously wants to change things.

So that's what drives me crazy about how this is all played out, how we can't even discuss that this you know, this publication was just in a really bad way, and now you've got you know, you're kind of subject to a lot of journalists thinking that, you know, people who aren't the show, who've been propped up by the show, the Bezos, Billions, assuming that they are the show, and you're not the show. You're not and you're certainly not the show if you're not going to do what people want you to do.

and to coach the Lakers. It's a big brand there's a lot of opinions, and I think the lack of self awareness among the print media especially and traditional media is really out of whack. Bill Maher often says this, the idea that you could not discuss the concerns about the wu Han lab, the idea that Joe Rogan was taken to the woodshed because he suggested what we were all seeing during the election, that Joe Biden has a significant cognitive decline and it's oatmeal and it's getting worse

every six months. And then then Jake Tapper's now writing a book acknowledging, oh there was a cover up. Well, I mean it was if you discuss that in the first two years of the presidency, it was considered mean spirited and it was a wacky conspiracy theory. And the lack of self awareness between the traditional you know media

that guys, we're watching things happen. You know, there's that kind of a now iconic piece of John Stewart going on Stephen Colbert, and Colbert just can't just lacks complete self awareness, just can't embrace it. And so and I'm no a fan of Trump, but you know, I I've kind of come to terms with I get Trump voters. I completely, absolutely get it. And when Bezos makes this move, it's like, guys, the business is broken. Yeah, it's over.

to be right all the time. It's impossible you do the you know where Colin was right, where Colin was wrong. People don't love Charles Barkley because everything he says is true. They love Charles Barkley because they know that everything Charles Barkley says is what he's thinking.

at NPR and I listened occasionally to NPR. Yeah, there's there's no question where it's leaning, there's no question where it's coming from. And I'm a subscriber to the New York Times of the Wall Street Journal. I love media. I can read Anne Culture, I can read Ben Shapiro, I can read Bill Maher. I go all over the map. I just I'm curious. I want all sorts of media.

But the inability for kind of these mainstream media is to acknowledge they are completely out of whack, like even like right now, even with Trump and Elon Musk doing all these moves, well the truth. And I was thinking about this the other day. I'll throw this a Yeah, obviously I don't want to get over my skis too much. But if you look at Europe and what has happened to their economy, it's bloated, heavy bureaucracy. I mean, you can go read about the last ten years of Germany's economy.

Too many regulations, too much bureaucracy and now it's stuck in the mud. It used to be a powerful, a more powerful force. And so I think what Trump is saying is what we don't want to do in this country, and I got about six months to turn this stuff around, is we don't want to be Europe. We're going to cut bureaucracy, We're going to cut spending. We want to be nimble and twitchier. So I kind of I'm interested to see how it plays out. I don't agree with

all the moves. The media is just has come on the side of this is ending democracy, and my take is there are too many smart people that don't agree with that. Where are you on the Trump musk? Rapid change? Rapid changes that are happening very quickly. Okay, Okay, so you said a lot right there. One thing is I think it's important to admit what you don't know. I think if people get so invested in trying to show that I have the best take on politics, I'm so

smart that they pretend to know things they do. I do not know how our vast federal bureaucracies function. A lot of them I don't, And right now there's a

fog of war quality to everything happening. Every story is like that story where from the musk side, it's Politico is getting paid a gazillion dollars by the government, and then it's, well, no, they're not really, but there's some function called political pro and they've got a subscription and it adds up, and maybe it's a little loosey goosey. There's this fog of war where it's really hard for me to track what's happening.

they're doing it. That it's illegal, that it's misguided, that it's going to end bad. Okay, let's just accept that premise. Hypothetically. What is your alternative plan? Because I don't think anybody believes that our federal government, which just to service it, we're paying unbelievable amounts in just the interest on the debt in order to get it functioning. Nobody believes that it's completely efficiently run and all the money is being

spent efficiently. Nobody believes this. Nobody literally believes this. So tell me what should be cut. If you think they're doing it wrong, then tell me how it should be done right. What you know, what aspects shouldn't get as much money? Where could we become more efficient? If that's happening, I haven't seen it, or at least I haven't seen

it at scale. And I think that that speaks to the problem and the predicament much of the Democratic Party and the media that the sympathetic to them are incurrently, which is this ability to criticize, but not an ability to present an alternative vision. This ability to say that this Trump issue set is bad or appeals to our basis instincts, but no ability to say, this is what the country should be, this is how we're going to thrive, this is how we will be great or great again.

I can live with a little bit of that because you can always remember, you can recalibrate. You lose it to midterms. I mean, this thing's not going to last forever. Trump's polarizing, so he's going to lose people along the way. But my take is, not only is there no plan, but there is. Once again, it's this almost derangement syndrome where there's nothing that he's doing that works, and I don't believe that to be true, and that's what the media is feeding me.

And it would be crickets. And I think one of the reasons that that side of things has fallen into this this sort of paralysis of never needing to articulate a vision is I think they had a significant advantage. I think that they did have a near monopoly on media,

certainly legacy media. Yes, Twitter was on their side. Twitter was run by like minded people and it was this messaging apparatus, so if they had a problem with what the other side was doing, they would just mirror what each other was saying and it would be very effective messaging wise, we're in a new reality. Love him or hate him. Musk has this powerful network in Twitter x as he calls it. He's in government, so he can message what he's doing and get his version of it

out there. You can say that there's a conflict of interest there, you can say that's a dystopia, you can say all these different things about it. But it's powerful and you're going to do You're gonna have to do more. You're gonna have to do better than just saying he's bad, he's a Nazi, or Trump is a Nazi or a fascist, or any of the sort of messaging that might have worked in twenty seventeen. But we're in a new reality. Demographics are shifting. The Democrats are losing young men to

a crazy degree. I'm sure you've noticed this because even in our business, Colin, it's not necessarily politics. Purely, the customers people care about are young men, and they're going the other direction. I just don't think it's good enough to sit back and criticize. I think you need to have something of your own to sell.

at probably too long. I find fascinating body.