Bobbleheads on Spikes: The (Selfish) Case for Rules, with David Epstein

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is I think this is a moment where we need some like public corruption heads on spikes right after this ad Hello you it's glow time on magic radio Join me got one at breakfast with me Harriet Scott We're on magic radio with Nikki Chapman Gabby Roslyn and me email Gedroich and what a team we are We're all on magic radio playing the best variety from the 80s to now It's glow time on magic radio Another party invite Well, here's a way to make their big day feel even more special the small shops in Etsy You can discover thousands of original birthday presents Like zodiac theme finds for your friend who's not into astrology But promise that this is the year she taps into being an Aries from the personalized to the practical We've got you covered with millions of active listings to choose from birthdays. Don't celebrate themselves Shop at Etsy.com and discover your perfect find today What if you could feel more confident Finally go after that promotion and feel great about inspiring other women It all starts by recognizing your worth and talking about your wins with confidence That's why galaxy chocolate has created the unhumbled project in partnership with the charity young women's trust To bring you free confidence training get the pleasure you deserve from the incredible things you do Take the training today search galaxy chocolate the unhumbled project I Did just want to explain for people who haven't seen your previous appearances on this show sure that we've known each other for a Very long time we're friends. We're colleagues dating back to sports illustrated and also you are not related to Jeffrey Epstein I'm not related to Jeffrey Epstein, but it did cross my mind that I should name Like my YouTube channel the Epstein files or something if I just want oh, yeah Haven't been able to bring myself to do such a thing you're leaving SEO optimization on the table I know I even filtered my own last name so that people can't use it in the comments, but they find They're very clever. It's a creative constraint. They find clever ways to get around that What is it like being David Epstein these days author of by the way inside the box? How constraints make us better a book that I really enjoyed reading and listening to over the weekend if you're still asking about the Epstein last name It's like it's like the Jewish Smith. I mean, it's a pretty common last name Which is a saving grace I have to say like I was alphabetized for Exams in freshman physics in college and I was next to another David Epstein, you know like fortunately There's a lot of us out there that doesn't make it Great when I walk my son to school and we go past people holding signs that just say Epstein I'm like they're not rooting for us But but the idea that you had to filter out your own name from your own comment section Because you know what people are gonna say despite the fact that this is your third book and your sort of uvra here is Established you are not the notorious sex trafficker and pedophile You are in fact the guy who had ridden the sports gene in range both studies of like human performance and performance science I often call you the greatest sports science writer in America as I always say out of all three of us There about as many David Epstein's in your physics classes. There are such people I suppose that's right It's an interesting time to be an author because the other thing that's happening is that I'm looking at the news and I'm like, oh, yeah, did you get your anthropic payment? I absolutely did I got my unique ID that said your work has been pirated. I got some of the I got several mailings saying that this work has been pirated that work has been pirated It's the largest copyright settlement in American history the AI company anthropic forced to pay out a whopping $1.5 billion after a judge said it illegally pirated more than 7 million digitized books to train its AI model I'm pretty sure this one's not even out Based on some questions that I've asked somebody has uploaded it already I think the number of people who have been pirated has been pirated I think the notice I got said that my books had been pirated on this site called libgen This is like the porn hub of books. I yeah, I guess so Had never thought of it that way Pablo, but I suppose the x videos of books excuse me. I'm getting a notice in my ear that I'm just characterizing and I guess anthropic just like pulled a huge amount of books down from there and Digested them so those were books that were pirated in the first place and then they kind of like Repirated them or just downloaded the pirated version so you can file like a claim and you know You'll probably get like I don't know if it's up to 3,000 or 3,000 per pirated work But a small price to pay for contributing to the sum total of human knowledge in the form that we all must consume it in Which is to say via a large language model, which is again for those not reading the news The good guys the good guys Yeah, it's hard to know In the anthropic narrative Open ai sam altman bad guys anthropic the white knights who just happened to be Vacuuming up the written word to a degree that uh, yeah, there has been a 1.5 billion dollar settlement You know when I first started interacting with tech people Some years ago like after I started writing books and they would use that phrase You don't hear it as much anymore, but information wants to be free And it's clear to me that that was just a justification of stealing stuff, right? Because it's like They weren't about to give you their code or their social security number Like mark Zuckerberg built like big ass trees in front of his house So you can't see like his information doesn't want to be free, but that's this ethos they have That it's like okay to steal stuff if you're making something cool And in the cases where I think it was with meta where they said we could legitimately get rights to some of this stuff It'll be too slow So they just pirated it instead But I understand why they do it because again if you look back at some of the six real successes in more recent tech history like Things that I use a lot like uber was it ignored sort of Taxi regulations whereas some other rideshare companies tried to play by those rules And youtube ignored like copyright infringement early on and so if you just flout all the rules early on Nobody cares until you get big enough, right? And then you just like pay a settlement in retrospect That was the year behind mark zuckerberg in college when he was moving fast and breaking things Yes, moving fast and breaking things and the question around the rules He is breaking happens to be conveniently enough a real Key part of this book. Yeah, which has to do with again. It's called how constraints make us better That is the subhead and I think a bit of the through line in this conversation is We're watching all of the time now Incredibly powerful incredibly wealthy people the people who are in most control of whatever is happening to us these days They are deciding that rules as a concept Are things they can opt out of if they feel like it's necessary Yeah, or maybe even not necessary if it's just something they want to do This is a terrible thing in the long like obviously it feels bad when we see it in the headlines, but What the research shows is when it becomes apparent to people that the rules don't apply to everyone and I don't think any Not to be polyannish. It's not like everyone ever thought the rules applied perfectly equally And I do want to establish like the case that you make is not You're a bad person if you don't follow the rules because rules are what we are taught to obey in school and therefore we must obey them Yeah, no, it's like for 150 years The shared prosperity of the modern world has been built upon agreed upon rules that applied equitably enough That people believed in them and were willing to sacrifice some of their own freedom To play by these rules and it was good for everybody And now I think we're being hit over the head almost on a daily basis with the law not applying in certain cases And what the research suggests will happen is that that will lead to these long-run trust issues between strangers Trust between strangers and GDP per capita are like very highly related if you look at all the countries in the world Because strangers stop collaborating when they don't trust as much So in a recent Pew survey just showed that the u.s is the only country where a majority of adults say that other people have bad morals and Modern prosperity is built on trust between strangers like A few centuries ago people only did business in their kinship networks or in their religious network And so it was much more contained or with people that they personally knew And so the engine of prosperity for more people and by the way like as as bad as things may feel like they're going globally Since 1990 you want to guess how many people per day on average have been lifted out of poverty since 1990? What are we at? 118 000 per day People have moved above the international poverty line on average since 1990 so Shared prosperity the engine has still been going But that has been very much built on the fact that we have built structures That allow people to collaborate with strangers allow people to start businesses despite what their name is or who they know And all these other things and it's all built on trust between strangers and functioning bureaucracy Large functioning bureaucracy. I should say I like how you've written a book at this moment in time where you're like, you know What is underrated rules and bureaucracy? I didn't necessarily think that but like this I mean the the work that I really leaned on was by this nobel laureate named Douglas north the paradigm in the 60s when he was starting to do his work was that Tech innovation is the real the assault driver of shared prosperity and what he showed is actually that it's usually social norms Or political structures or legal structures that change first that enable This kind of innovation and collaboration between people that gives rise to innovation. And so it's actually what he called institutions As he framed them constraints on human behavior that give rise to this long-run prosperity And allow people to trust one another. Yeah, I want to quote from your book because in in your discussion of north you quote him And this is the opening line of his most famous work quote Institutions are the rules of the game in a society or more formally are the human lead devised constraints that shape human interaction Yeah, and quote which is to say that we're talking about Rules and not the department so much no and north by the way says that these are basically perfectly analogous to sports rules Where so he has informal constraints informal constraints the informal constraints are social norms the formal constraints are like legal laws So on a soccer pitch You have the lines and the rules that are the formal structures But then you have these informal like you know, one team will kick the ball out of bounds if another guy gets injured so it's this overlapping of social norms and explicit structures That combine to allow people to trust and engage in collaborative behavior And arguably both ends of that are under attack And so the prediction that north's work would make When social norms that constrain people's behaviors start to falter and when Legal structures look like they don't apply to everyone is that strangers will start thinking other people are bad Which is exactly what we are starting to see So he won the Nobel for this in the early 90s some of his acolytes just won another Nobel for the same thing We're like walking right into the thing that he said you shouldn't do where you regressed from what's called an open access order where people can access All sorts of parts of society and government without it mattering who they are to what's called a natural state Where like it really matters who you know if you want to get something done And implicitly in that by the way, he makes an argument that big government is a necessary kind of symptom of shared prosperity and this is like a delicate thing because because you're now advocating for what doge Was trying to trim allegedly Of course, there's like bloat in the government, right? There's no question. So I don't want to minimize I don't want to minimize that because bureaucracies often grow to the point where There it seems like their goal becomes just perpetuating themselves, right that happens At the same time what north showed was that if you want people to have impersonal access to things and you do You don't want it to matter that it's poblatory or david ebstin Dealing with our friends and cronies or to get what we want. You don't want it to matter who you know Then you have to have a a kind of large Impersonal bureaucracy so that it's these people that you don't know that are vetting your application or whatever it is And so it's a necessary outgrowth of these more equitable rules that you'll have an expansive bureaucracy basically well The thing that you mentioned before that brings us to sports in a non metaphorical way is the notion that actually there was Before douglas north came along this popular idea that technology was responsible for all the prosperity that we were benefiting from The speed of innovation. Yeah, and it reminds me of again this anthropic lawsuit Yeah, in which the argument for why you should have all of these AI companies all these llms hoovering up all of the written words humans have made Despite all of the intellectual property the would-be intellectual property laws around it is because if we don't do that We will lose. Yeah, we will lose in fact not just to other competitors, but we will lose to china Yes, china china and so they make the argument Implicitly and sometimes explicitly that letting tech move as fast as humanly possible is always the right thing to do right and and Technological disruption or so-called creative destruction to use the economist term Has led to all sorts of incredible things What norse point was was that it's preceded by these institutions or norms and legal structures that allow it to happen in the first place And the idea that if we just take you know, take all bounds off of these Tech leaders and that will lead to shared prosperity magically is totally a historic like Take the original tech supernova of the world, which was the industrial revolution Have you read hard times by charles dickens that did not automatically lead to shared prosperity It led to children pushing coal mining carts with their heads for 12 hours a day And it took different social structures around that when I was here before and we talked about AI Yeah, we brought up a book called power in progress Those guys won the Nobel prize since we talked about it those authors. You're welcome. Yeah, the ptfo Is why because of us the Nobel committee was listening and Their main argument is they they do a thousand year history of technological innovation And what they show is that tech innovation absolutely does not automatically lead to shared prosperity Sometimes it leads to increasing misery and it totally depends on the institutional structures the rules of the game of society And right now I think what you're seeing is some of these leaders saying like no, no We can't have any of those bounds. No, don't regulate us because it'll slow us down Yes, you're shackling the great men of our time if you are regulating artificial intelligence What if you could feel more confident Finally go after that promotion and feel great about inspiring other women It all starts by recognizing your worth and talking about your wins with confidence That's why galaxy chocolate has created the unhumbled project in partnership with the charity young women's trust To bring you free confidence training get the pleasure you deserve from the incredible things you do Take the training today search galaxy chocolate the unhumbled project All right, I got a quick stat for you most employers are sorting through something like 250 resumes for a single job opening which is a lot of scrolling a lot of guesswork and also a lot of time So if you're hiring I have some good news you can now review all these resumes and applications faster Thanks to zip recruiter zip recruiter has a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested qualified candidates first And today you can try it for free at zip recruiter.com Slash ptfo and here's why that matters zip recruiter's matching technology is already great at finding qualified candidates fast But now the people who are actually excited about your role rise right to the top So you're not just sorting through resumes. You're seeing the strongest most engaged applicants first And it gets better candidates can even tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job So you're getting more than just bullet points You're getting personality motivation and a clearer picture of who might be the right fit Cut through the standard and get to the standouts with zip recruiter four out of five employers who post on zip recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day And now you can try it for free at zip recruiter.com slash ptfo That's zip recruiter.com slash ptfo meet your match on zip recruiter The notion though of Sports I come to this now of course because a lot of our reporting on this show and you are yourself an investigative journalist by trade by training and a lot of what I've Been turning our attention to as a show has been the billionaires who run sports And how these are not merely metaphorically tech people. They are actually the people who ran some of the most monopolistic tech companies in u.s. History and steve balmer now, of course the owner of the clippers and uh, my good friend you're good Also the former ceo microsoft bobblehead over there. Oh, yeah, we do have the steve balmer bobblehead. Let's hold on me Bring that we have it Only only good friends the first person to acknowledge that we not only have the koala entered bobblehead We also have the steve balmer. He's got a bobble a bobble a bobble feet. Oh, yeah Oh, he's got a bobble everything. We might we might leave him there on top of your book If you're steve balmer, it's like everyone's got a bobblehead. You need more things than bobble. Yes. Look at these Elbow's bobble. You gotta be the best But but the point of this is now Not merely the richest owner in all of sports in the world And not only the richest owner in the mba by far He is somebody who in our reporting has embodied what it means when you decide These rules that are meant to enforce something like fair competition Are things that we ought not abide by Yeah, and that's really bad. I mean, I think one point that you've made that's important that Maybe not everyone understands unless they've been following really closely Is that all the owners of sports teams are obviously incredibly wealthy But balmer is incredibly wealthy To those people right he's like off the charts wealthy. So the analogy I was thinking of was Like Half the world lives with a legal system that was created in in England Including us in the u.s. And it was created Because the king had too much power and eventually there was this wealthy merchant class And they started to have some more power and the king wanted to borrow money from them to wage wars and all these things And they were pissed about not getting paid back sometimes. So they got together and said No, we're gonna leverage our power and now we're gonna put some constraints on you And initially the king was like bummer. I'm not gonna be able to borrow a lot of money. It actually led to the reverse where Now people were willing to lend money because there was a stronger parliament And they felt like they could get paid back and all this kind of stuff But it was these other richest people in society who saw the richest person in society and said we need rules To constrain that guy And doing that led To shared benefit for all of society. And so it's it feels like a little bit of a microcosm You know, I don't want to like Compare the origins of our legal system necessarily to the NBA salary. Yeah, the NBA salary gap But it's it's this microcosm of where you have these like really powerful people Who are getting the experience of seeing an even more powerful person which is extraordinarily rare extraordinarily rare Who doesn't want to follow the rules who hasn't had to follow the rules in the past? And now is in the position of potentially Very publicly Being able to to skirt those rules, right? Whatever the NBA comes up with in their investigation And we eagerly await the results of that right, which is the whole thing like Yeah, as you know, there's nothing more credible than an organization Yeah, right, right. So I think you start by asking like what would it behoove them to find and then start from there But whatever they find I think there will be owners who will say I don't care what they find. I know what happened The rules don't apply in this way anymore If there's no punishment and that's like the beginning of the breakdown of rules that were made for collective good and I think public examples of that Are terrible like you see this in countries where again We were talking before this about Greece when they went bankrupt basically and you could see these surveys where people started deciding that the next guy Wasn't paying taxes so they were like, well, I'm not paying taxes And then nobody was paying taxes and the country goes bankrupt And so it might seem frivolous like I see people commenting on your stuff all the time of like who cares leave it alone, etc And I used to get that all the time With some investigative reporting, right? Because people tune into sports stuff because they like sports and I always have to remind those people that The show has my name in it and if I find it interesting, I'm gonna do it Yeah, and at its best we'll also make the case as I am attempting to do right now that this story is not merely a story that's specific to A rabbit hole inside of the mba, but it's also the story of our time That's what I'm saying and and like I'm fine if somebody doesn't if if they think it's a kill drive Just ignore it then they can ignore it. Yes, but to say Someone else shouldn't be concerned about this I think is weird because It's almost to me tan amount to saying we should kind of live in and ends justifies the means sort of world and not care when people Break these rules and I don't want to be like some earnest like but the case you're making continuously through this book you're making The selfish person's case for why rules matter. Yes. Why you want to restrict other people and like I said why the Harvard law commencement starts with that wise restraints make men free because we know this historically that agreed upon rules Free people within those bounds to do things that they would have no other way to do and you can look at societies that don't have that advantage Where everything is based on who you know? What you can leverage where where where it's not really clear what the rules are today or tomorrow And those societies do not thrive So I think this is a moment where we need some like public corruption heads on spikes I don't know if that's that nba or wherever it is. No, but but I feel this all of the time I mean we are living through this era in which Owners in sports again as both the actual class of people were talking about Society and also the metaphor for the class of people were talking about society like these are the same guys They're coming from silicon valley. They're coming from finance They're coming into the league at a rate and at a financial status Owning these heirlooms that we grew up caring about with resources that are unprecedented And the thing about someone like Steve Ballmer is always going to be Is it the case That we are merely enshrining once again money As the thing that matters most. Yeah, because I think one potentially nice thing about sports That's actually different from a lot of the rest of society Is it kind of does seem like a meritocracy? Relatively speaking, it's important I think that I keep on hammering that both of us have done investigative reporting And we know all of the ways in which cynicism may be justified human endeavors are always very flawed You've investigated performance enhancing drugs and we've both investigated various financial frauds and we know Even the criticisms of the salary cap as a concept. I hear all of it. Sure. And I understand all of it as best I can The point though is that on a relative basis. I don't know if there's another laboratory For rules mattering that's more accessible or potentially persuasive than what sports offers Yes, so I think it's a really important public story because there there are these other areas all over society, but they're not as Mass consumer. They're not as public, right? They're not as engaging in many ways also But if you're going to have the salary cap If you're going to make the law Then it's even more dangerous to have it clearly not mean anything That's how you get to the survey where most Americans say other people have bad morals because They're looking around and the norms and rules that they think are worthwhile Are getting flouted like in in their face and so I think this is like a Proxy for this larger discussion that's going on society. Well, we're like importing silicon valleys Values as well as the actual again the great men that founded and ran a bunch of these companies This brilliant economist who was the central baker of india one point named raga ram rajan wrote this book called saving capitalism from the Capitalists and it's basically about how the biggest capitalist hate competition. This is exactly it It's that sports again both literally and metaphorically Is a shrine to competition Yeah, and if there's any political party that I feel like is being underrated as a concept it is the pro competition party, which can encompass both capitalism In its purest theoretical form as well as regulation Yeah, which is again like and she's been a guest on this show as well. I kind of feel like i'm a leana con democrat I saw on like bus stops. There'd be these signs for meta and they're like Please regulate us, you know to stop kids of a certain age going on and I assume that that's because Once you're established then you want the regulate you're like, yes, we let eight year olds get on our platform and do who knows what But now once we're a juggernaut and printing money Nobody should be allowed to have eight year olds on their platform just like more competition This is the thing that runs through the story of the mba and by the way from a pure product perspective, I think one Test that I thought about while I was reading your book and I was wondering like when it comes to the product that citizens customers are receiving One easy asset test for all of this is is it better? Yeah, is the lack of competition getting us better products? Or is it in fact in the case of the mba as all of these incredibly rich people come in Is it in fact worse? That's again where it's a proxy for these other discussions of like Are these rules leading to shared prosperity or better options for consumers or whatever it is? And I think we've deemed that's the case when we have competition, right? That's why we do it this way But people are getting around those rules or just ignoring them now our reporting on like the nfl pa the players union Right. It's like, why do I care about this this millionaires union? Well, it's because if you care about football, which statistically that's what we care about the most Is it a good thing when the nfl which runs professional football in america? Is it a good thing when they don't have a competitor? Yeah a check on them? And what happens if that check is the union and what if that union is also Connecting to all this stuff beset by its own corruption scandal. Yeah, what does the product become? Does it become something that has these countervailing competitive forces? sharpening it into something better for americans or is it a version that The very very top of the pyramid people are getting to dictate basically at their own personal wins Again, this isn't just going on in sports, right? It goes on in business in general Yes, this is just a public way to see it. It's so in your face that rules don't apply to certain people, you know the question of Why and how has corruption taken root? How and why did money become the only thing we can agree is important? Apparently it all brings us back to like again. Why are sports cool? I started reading this philosopher Name bernard suits. Yeah, who I use at the very end of this yes. Yes in suits Was responding to Ludwig Wittgenstein who was like one of the most influential thinkers of 20th century and Wittgenstein talked about The fuzziness of language and one of his main examples was that there is no Core essence of everything we call a game There's only a family resemblance like some games are played alone some in a group some are imaginary some are in the real world Etc some are luck some are just skill and suits said No, I think that's wrong. I think there is a commonality to all Games including sports and I think the commonality is an attitude and he called it the lucary attitude And he defined it as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles I love this part of bernard suits's Philosophy he wrote about it in this amazing book called the grasshopper where it's like Aesop's grasshopper fable where the grasshopper Plays all summer long and so he doesn't hoard enough food like the ants so he's going to die when the winter comes But in this case he justifies it. He's like because these games give meaning to life And so this was actually a justifiable thing for me to do Because I think it really is a metaphor for life. It's like take field add lines You know, it's like add meaning and so it's the voluntary attempt to overcome these unnecessary obstacles that adds meaning to the thing That actually makes achievement Even possible And so I think it's such a sports are such a pure way of seeing people attempt to overcome these voluntarily accepted obstacles And so then when they're trying to shortcut them, I think it dilutes the meaning of the endeavor in the first place It's a way of life. Yeah, it's a way of life. You described again the The heirlooms of social attitudes that are really hard to undo once you have A destruction of the institutions we've been talking about of the rules And what is better? What is more durable as an heirloom than sports in our country in which we are actually Agitated yeah by the idea that we are being cheated by another team because we're all opting into this way of life In which we all agree that this basketball court without Boundaries is just a piece of wood. Yeah. Yeah, we all need to embrace what is seemingly the Dismissable the otherwise easily dismissible fiction that any of this matters that the salary cap matters that putting a ball in a hoop matter But once you agree they matter. Yeah, suddenly You have the ability to engender something like A philosophy that can In your books telling actually benefit More people than otherwise Hello you it's glow time on magic radio Join me gokwan at breakfast with me harriott scott We're on magic radio with nicky Chapman gabby roslyn and me mel gedroich And what a team we are We're all on magic radio playing the best variety from the 80s to now It's glow time on magic radio Get that euro millions feeling this friday 10 uk winners are guaranteed to be millionaires That's 10 more reasons to dance 10 more robots 10 more limbo's 10 more salsas 10 uk winners are guaranteed to be millionaires this friday Euro millions from the national lottery. It could be you Rules apply 18 plus what if you could feel more confident? Finally go after that promotion and feel great about inspiring other women It all starts by recognizing your worth and talking about your wins with confidence That's why galaxy chocolate has created the unhumble project in partnership with the charity young women's trust To bring you free confidence training get the pleasure you deserve from the incredible things you do Take the training today search galaxy chocolate the unhumble project I've vacillated in various points especially at some points when I was doing certain type of investigative reporting in sports And I really soured and was just like Screw this, you know, it would take me a while to kind of recover sometimes But when you think about the amount of meaning That we've imbued sports with you know Put this peach basket up here in this line here And all of a sudden you have this incredibly meaningful activity. I mean you you you did this Guys who are on death row like uh, the death row inmates who spend their last seconds on earth Expending breath to make The noise of let's go cowboys Yes, because they feel like this thing has added meaning to their life and they feel like they're part of something And I think that's just an interesting sign Of how much meaning can be added to this otherwise ridiculous endeavor Just like you have to find ways to add meaning to the ridiculous endeavor of your life And so when people say None of this stuff matters. I'm like, then you're just saying then you don't care about adding meaning to life basically and by the way suits Makes a sort of unexpected argument late in the grasshopper where he says by the way if we end up in utopia where tech is handling most of our work Then games are going to matter even more Because that's going to be where if work is no longer the main part of our identity Then really this participation in games and these voluntarily accepted Obstacles are going to really be the core activity that adds meaning to our life at every turn I'm always like tempted to remind people like we're not saying that all rules must be enforced Because all rules are automatically good. I'm glad that some americans like defied uh their colonial rules and we dare say Entrepreneurially started a country. Oh my god. I mean like we're living through again Depending on whether we survive nuclear winter. We are going to have the conversation around what's it like to disobey orders? Yeah at the highest levels of government and we are at the same time having a conversation in the nc double a around How are we supposed to pay these athletes and isn't it strange that we needed to break the rules around non paying athletes to get them some sort of financial justice before we had These regulations being reformed to enable something like a market all of that Yes, all of that is being considered But I think the principles the core principles around are you encouraging competition? Are you deterring corruption and are you creating a society that actually gives a f***? Yeah about holding the most powerful people to some sort of account You are led to this attitude that I'm always confronting these days, which is Yeah on its face. It's not cool to be the guy with the book that says rules matter and yet Like to be The guy quoting jack Nicholson while holding a bobble head We need you on that wall. This is where we are. We f***ing need someone to say this Yeah, you have to care you have to care. I think like the pendulum and all of this is seemingly always Unfortunately a pendulum it swung so far away Yeah to the point where it has to be this like re assertion like we forgot why other things besides money Yeah, we're virtues in the first place. Yeah, and there's so many things. I mean You know like living through this kind of healthy on 90s. There were so many of these things That I feel like I just got to take for granted. Yeah that now Are more in my face, you know, whether that's because of being investigative reporter Also, just like things that are happening in the world How nice it was to have a feeling of sort of trust to some degree people are always getting away with stuff There's no question about that but that things kind of functioned in some impartial way and that there were at least regularly consequences for high profile Malfeasants that ended up in the news And that's a good thing you want people to be able to take that for granted So that they can go about their business and just rely on that and have this like background of trust and belief And I think that's That's really undermined and obviously there's a lot of people I call conflict entrepreneurs. I stole that word from uh, this journalist Amanda Ripley who Really profit from making a lot of our institutions Look even worse than they are, right like Elon Musk, I think it's amazing some of the innovative stuff he's done at the same time He spends a bunch of time on the internet sharing memes that just kind of make people look stupid for Caring about regulations or anything like that which makes sense for him because He's like wants the government money and then wants to block the government money for other people But that that kind of making people feel stupid for earnestness the mob is good at Shitting on stuff but not so good at having ideas And I think it's it's concerning because there are people who profit from from Breeding this mistrust of everything in others And I think the fact that we're in this like golden era of conspiracy thinking is is a result of that Yeah, and it's it's interesting to be a show that has felt again the seo the search engine optimization incentives around being the person who's willing to Interrogate and occasionally even prove what feels like a conspiratorial theory Journalistically, yeah, it's interesting to be outside of a Of an instant of an organization. I was gonna say institution an organization a mainstream media organization and get credit for being Disruptive yeah, and yet at the same time Be always trying to follow again the Douglas north star Well played this value. Yeah of like man Here's an interesting thing that I have been hearing from front office executives around the NBA When it comes to gross violations of the NBA's cardinal rules such as the salary cap What one NBA executive told me was? Yeah, we don't want to have to learn How to do money laundering. Yeah, we don't want to have to be competing in a market where we can't trust our other competitors Because they're orchestrating insane schemes untrammeled by any regulation and now we are gonna have to pay a price In a way that I think only continues to erode the premise of a rules-based sport That's right. So they want to be protected from what they themselves would start doing exactly So what you call collective trap, right? It's like you want kids off social media But you got to get them off as a group because you don't want it's hard for one kid to get off of social media on their own So these kind of collective traps are what you save yourself from by having serious rules and again not to get too Like highfalutin or farfetched or whatever, but since I was doing all this research on the origins of our legal systems We talked about the british legal system that we live under now another half Basically after the or a lot of the world lives under the french legal system that was exported So in the english case the merchants were worried about the king having too much power in france It was the local magnets like these sort of like regional power guys Who were worried about one another much more than the king? And so that's why france ended up with a different legal system where the constraints were on one another and that's I think in some ways Also has something in common with what's going on here was they said look I don't want to have to bring my militia to this guy I don't want him to bring his militia to me and so they started making rules that constrained one another actually vesting more power in the executive so that Which maybe would be like the commissioner or something in this case to say Save us from ourselves like we don't want to have to do this stuff We just want to be guaranteed that the other people also aren't doing it. And so That's what'll happen right is if they if they decide that this rule doesn't actually have any legitimacy Then they're all going to start learning money laundering when the people who are meant to enforce fair competition themselves are suffering from a conflict of interest And the public interest is not The most heavily weighted interest in that conflict I think what you're seeing happen in sports is what you're seeing happen in America in general and I think that we are at the point where Yeah, I mean look I want you to get paid for all of your work but If you need to go to a russian Horn literary clearing house That's the only way you're gonna get working porn into this I'm just saying if you got a torrent inside the box by david ebstin to help save whatever is left of This american impulse towards can we please give a s***? Then yeah, maybe maybe I'd settle for that too. I feel like with this bobblehead. He's even Gone around the number of bobbling parts cap. I've never seen that many bobbling parts On a bobblehead like this guy just can't you know everything bobbles there There's there's steve. You couldn't just settle for bobblehead. It's called a bobblehead for a reason I've never contemplated how much bobbling is too much bobbling. Yeah, see I've had my eye on the steve ballmer ball here I don't know what you've been looking at I've been trying not to get sued I Publicory finds out is produced by walter avaroma max welcarny ryan cortez Juan galindo patrick kim nealy loman rob mccray matt selvin claire taylor and chris tuminello studio engineering by rg systems sound designed by andrew bursik digital strategy by bailey carlin and andrew northern beam song as always by john bravo And we'll talk to you next time I People are a funny bunch for every careful colon you've got your laid-back lisa So when it comes to cash ices at leads building society, it's not one size fits all You've got that person who's happy to lock their money away and that person who wants to keep their options open You've got that person who likes to chat it through and that person who already knows exactly what they want So whatever kind of saver you are as a witch recommended provider for savings We might just have the cash isa for you leads building society visitors online or in branch You know what you're getting with a wedding wedding hats A baby in a waistcoat crying throughout the vows themed tables Awkward best man speech The plus one People dancing in a circle ruined rental suit Sometimes in life you just know what you're getting like a luxury bed and a great night's sleep You know what you're getting with premier in get that euro millions feeling this friday 10 uk winners are guaranteed to be millionaires That's 10 more reasons to dance 10 more robots 10 more limos 10 more salsas 10 uk winners are guaranteed to be millionaires this friday euro millions from the national lottery It could be you rules apply 18 plus