Podcasts posts

During a recent WTF podcast, actor Jeremy Allen White, who spent a decade on “Shameless,” became a kind of matinee idol as a depressive Chicago chef in “The Bear,” and is about to star as Bruce Springsteen in “X,” was talkng about anxiety issues surrounding the end of “Shameless,” which for 10 years had given him regular work, comfort, and a lotta money:

Jeremy: And I started having a panic attack and I had to pull over on the side of the road because my arms, yeah, my arms went all kind of numb and and tingly. My neck started feeling very tight and chest—
Marc: Yeah yeah yeah. That's every morning for me.
Jeremy: Right. So you're familiar.
Marc: I really am, dude.
Jeremy: And I had to pull over and ... Look, I'm not saying like—you know, my ex wife has a lot of space for that kind of thing—but I'm just saying I think I was very difficult to be around.
Marc: Because you get into your own loop and you know, “everything's fucked.”
Jeremy: Totally. Catastrophic thinking.
Marc: I have that too!
Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc [hopeful]: Did you fix it?
Jeremy: I mean, every day I have my tools and I've got the things that I try to do to help it. But no, I don't know if it's ever gonna be fixed.

Me [listening during one of my regular walks]: I have that, too! BTW: I love the way Marc says this, and how hopeful he is when he adds “Did you fix it?” 

I always called it worst-case-scenario thinking, but now I guess I have the clinical name—if that's the clinical name. I haven't been diagnosed with it our anything, and I don't get the arm-numbing side effects, but my mind tends to go there, to the bad thing that might happen. And sometimes I'm living it in my head, and getting angry (or sad, or anxious) about the thing in my head, even though it's just a thing in my head. (“Those ol' dreams are only in your head.” — Bob Dylan) Maybe that's why I like routine, and why I get so anxious getting out of routine. Every weeks-long trip feels like a death to me, like I can't imagine myself on the other side of it. 

I don't even mind that it's never going to be fixed—that wasn't even a thought for me. I just like finding kindred spirits. 

While I was in Minneapolis/Eden Prairie last month, on one of my regular walks, I was listening to Preet Bharara's podcast, Stay Tuned, the August 21st episode with Atlantic Magazine writer/editor Tom Nichols entitled “With Putin, Trump Bends the Knee.” It was good and smart but a little too jokey for me given the circumstances. I don't have much sense of humor for any of this anymore; and I have increasingly little patience for people standing to the side making knowing, sardonic comments. Particularly if they have megaphones. 

But there was a moment—oh my god, there was a moment—where I thought Nichols was going to go there:

“There's a problem in the media with that, of course, which is to say, 'Oh, I can't write the story that says the president of the United States just blathered for two hours about sharks and electrocution. I have to write something that sounds coherent.' So we kind of go through like a buffet and we pick out the last...”

But then he drops it, and Bharara doesn't pick it up and say “You dropped this, and it feels like it's important,” and instead the two continue with their smart conversation about everything that's going wrong, which will do nothing to stop it from going wrong. But if they'd delved into the above? About how the media sane-washes so much of what Trump says? To make him sound like a statesman rather than the idiot grifter he is? Well, that's a big part of the problem right there. And getting writers and editors and publishers to see that could actually go a long way toward rectifying it. At the least, it would make the rest of us, the ones paying attention and buying and reading your fucking newspapers, feel a little less gaslit by those who have promised to inform us.

In a recent Poscast episode, “It's a Shame No One Talks About the NFL,” Michael Schur brought a smorgasbord of topics to the table, including ESPN buying NFL Network and other properties, or something, and the NFL owning some part of ESPN, or something. This led to feints toward the jokey (“It's about time we'll get some NFL coverage on ESPN”) and the less jokey. This is the less jokey.

Schur worried that football broadcasters, already averse to mentioning anything that the NFL doesn't want mentioned, will become even more averse. And then he brought up a famous example of a sportcaster doing their job.

The Malcolm Butler pickoff of Russell Wilson, right? There was a beat of silence after it happened and then [sportcaster Cris] Collinsworth said, 'I'm sorry, I don't understand the call! You've got Marshawn Lynch. I don't understand why you're throwing the ball there!' And I'm sure that it was like, 'Oh, I shouldn't say this. They're going to be angry at me.“ But that's what you needed to say in that moment. That's what everyone in the world was thinking—and, by the way, has thought every day they thought about it since it happened. And so, when you completely shirk your responsibility to call it like you see it, you're also losing the fandom. Because if all that had happened was that they had said, 'Incredible play by Butler,' which obviously it was, and no one had said, 'Why are you throwing the ball from the two yard line when you have Marshawn Lynch?' you're basically ceding your authority as the person whose job it is to comment on the game.

All of which is good and true. What made it click for me was Joe Posnanski's follow-up:

And you're not serving the listener. Because they're like, 'Am I losing my mind?'

And that's when I thought of The New York Times, NPR and Trump.

For 10 years now, the Times, NPR and much of legacy media have smoothed out Trump's rough edges, and completely ignored the bat-shit crazy shit he says/does every day. I have no idea why they do this, but they do. They have ceded their authority as the people whose job it is to comment on the action. They've made millions of listeners/readers across the country say ”Am I losing my mind?" I'm one of them. Every morning.

This is truly one of the awful things about the era. It's not just that their reporting, or lack of it, helped elect a dipshit wannabe Mussolini; it's that when you listen to them/read them, they make you feel like you're losing your mind. You're crazy for seeing what they're not reporting. Because to them? It's just another day.

“There is an overwhelming amount of bad faith surrounding [the Jeffrey Epstein case] on the part of lots of different people. I saw on Jake Tapper's show on CNN on Sunday, a sitting United States senator, Senator Mullen [Markwayne Mullen, R-OK], say and insist on two completely disprovable falsehoods. One, he kept insisting that the initial plea of Jeffrey Epstein, the sweetheart deal, happened under Obama in 2009.

”That's just a fucking lie.

“It's just a lie. And he's sitting there. I mean, it's unbelievable. He's sitting there arguing with Jake Tapper. He's like, 'It's 2009.' Jake goes, 'No, it's 2008. It was under the Bush administration.' That's one. 

”And then second ... There are two categories of documents that relate to the Epstein investigation. One category is grand jury material, which the law recognizes as the most sacrosanct kind of sensitive law enforcement material. And there's a bunch of other stuff, which generally speaking is accorded great confidentiality and sensitivity for all the reasons that we've been discussing. ... They're two different things. And the grand jury material can't be released without an ordering by a judge. ... And when Jake Tapper appropriately and legitimately makes the point, 'What about the non-Grand Jury stuff?' a sitting senator, a lawmaker of the United States of America, says, 'No, every single bit of information and investigative material in some way has been before the Grand Jury or touched the Grand Jury, so none of it can be released without a judge.' That is total nonsense.“

-- Preet Bharara, from ”The Insider Podcast: The Epstein Files (with Ben Wittes),“ Jul 28, 2025.

This quote stands out less becaus a Republican politician lies—that's an every second occurence—but because I've never heard Preet Bharara swear so much. It feels like he swears more in this one episode than in all the previous episodes combined. Maybe he's more gentlemanly when he's co-hosting with Joyce Vance and lets loose with Ben Wittes, but either way he seems as fed up as the rest of us—as we watch dipshits and grifters, clowns and cowards and opportunists, destroy out country. For nothing. For the worst kind of nothing. For a foul-smelling bag of wind.

Bharara and Wittes also talk up the overwhelming hypocrisy of it all. How these people (the Bonginos and Bondis of the world) made hay, money, and names for themselves by pushing for the release of the Epstein files; and then they get into office and do a 180. And they do a 180 without acknowledging the 180. That's pure ”1984.“ ”Eurasia? No, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. What are you thinking?"

While I was in France, the Boston Red Sox traded its star player and face, Rafael Devers—whose first MLB hit, a homerun, I saw at Safeco Field in 2017—to the San Francisco Giants in what was widely regarded as a salary dump. It led to a good discussion on the Poscast between Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur. The latter, a big BoSox fan, talked about the idiot techbro mentality in the Red Sox organization, then used what's wrong with the BoSox to talk about what's wrong with the culture. 

It is this virus, this absolute plague that is destroying the country in which we live, which is these consulting groups come in.

And the buzzwords are all the same. It's efficiency, streamlining, rightsizing, all of that crap. And what happens is they go, hey, you should fire these 38 people and do X, Y, and Z, and you will increase profit margin 12.648%. And in those 38 people are like a beloved 78-year-old woman who bakes cookies for everybody and brings them in on Fridays, and has the title of senior administrator in the office or whatever. And they're like, what are we paying her? $94,000 a year? Get out of here, lady! And then there's like a 85-year-old guy who's like the head of the scouting department, essentially emeritus. And he's making $168,000 a year. ... And you're like, nope, you're gone. Get out of here, buddy. ...

And so they're like, haha, look at this streamlined, efficient professional outfit we're running now. We've saved $3.1 million per year in administrative costs. And meanwhile, everyone in the building is miserable, just miserable. Everyone's daily work experience has gone down in happiness quotient like 68.45 percent. And they never think about it. They never care about it. They treat people like they're fungible tokens that they can just throw away or cash in.

Yesterday, walking around Capitol Hill, I listened to Michael Lewis on the Cautionary Tales podcast talking about Sam Bankman-Fried (per “Going Infinite”), as well as civil servants in government (“The Fifth Risk,” “Who is Government?”), and it's interesting, with the latter, how he keeps refining his argument. He was already super-articulate on the topic and now he's more super-articulate. Feels worthy of posting on the day after the State Dept., at the behest of Marco Rubio, acting at the behest of Donald Trump, began firing more than 1,000 civil servants—people we need more than ever. Alas.

Here's Lewis:

So I wrote a book about the first Trump administration called The Fifth Risk, where I wandered around the administration, the executive branch, and got essentially an education from the various departments that Trump himself refused to get: how the agriculture department worked, how the energy department worked, what went on inside these places.

The longer I spent there, the more taken I was with the actual characters in government. Whatever the stereotype of the bureaucrat is in the American mind, they violated it. There were these breathtakingly devoted public servants, who were experts in all kinds of arcane fields, who were doing the work that kept the society together... 

I'd find this person who'd done this unbelievable thing, and I'd say, “I want to talk to you about it.” They go, “Well, it wasn't really me. It was the team. You really have to talk to my bosses.” It was very little ego. I guess, what it is: these jobs self-select for people who like doing big important things but don't care much about credit or money. It's hard to believe that such people still exist in American life. Everybody else seems to be looking for fame and fortune. These are sort of like the opposite of reality TV stars. They got interested in a problem. They've worried the problem to death for 30 years. It's had enormous consequences and they don't expect anybody to pay attention.

It's a great podcast episode, worth listening to. The government is not the deep state, nor full of the lazy or corrupt. The opposite. It's the lazy and corrupt, elected by a propagandized mass, who are firing them. This is how countries die.

“That's right out of the Trump playbook: if you want to know what he's going to do, see what he's accusing other people of doing—usually falsely. He's a master of bearing false witness. He operates within the limits of his imagination, and his imagination is spurred by the awful things he can imagine other people doing. ... He's had the idea then that, 'Oh, you can do this. And oh, in my mind, they've already done it, so I can go do it.'”

-- Michael Lewis on The Bulwark Podcast, March 21, 2025, episode “Government Workers Aren't the Corrupt Ones.”

“One of the things about this strain of [Silicon Valley CEO], they don't shut up, right? They're issuing manifestos, they're giving speeches, they're tweeting all the time. I wonder how any of them do their job because they just talk all the time. ... I keep looking for them to say something interesting. Like, 'Oh, I hadn't had that thought,' or 'Oh, nobody ever said that before.'  ... I'm just shocked by how dull they are.

”And the antics! Like Elon Musk, the way he dresses, carrying his kid around on his shoulder like he's a Mini-Me, the chainsaw, all that stuff? It's all like putting a lampshade on your head at the party because you actually don't have anything witty to say. ... 

“It would be nice to have a serious conversation. I would love to sit down with a Peter Thiel, physically inside one of the departments of government, and go piece by piece through what that department is doing. Let's just have a conversation about why this is necessary, why it happened in the first place, why we're doing this. And I might start in the Department of Energy. Because without the Department of Energy, Tesla doesn't get off the ground. I can't remember the size of the loan, but I think hundreds of millions of dollars in loans or loan guarantees to Tesla, which at the time, Elon Musk said, got him off the ground. And Tesla employees have said the company would never exist if the government hadn't come in. So much of technological growth, economic growth, springs from public-private partnerships, springs from the government interceding in the economy. And that they have been direct beneficiaries of this, and are still, and that they don't acknowledge it and want to go gut the things that actually made them rich, that's where it gets really bewildering.” 

-- Michael Lewis with Tim Miller on The Bulwark Podcast, March 21, 2025, episode “Government Workers Aren't the Corrupt Ones.” Much recommended. So good. I'll be posting more from it. 

More from Michael Lewis' podcast, “Against the Rules,” whose fifth season is all about how sports betting became the multibillion-dollar business it is.

That began with New Jersey trying to overturn a federal law that one of its own senators, Bill Bradley, wrote and enacted in the early 1990s. Jersey harnessed the power of Ted Olson (RIP), and he and his Federal Society buddies, including those on the bench, overturned the law in 2018. And the floodgates opened.

They didn't open uniformly. It's state to state—legal in 38 of the 50. And they're not open uniformly to just anyone in those 38 states, either. These companies want to maximize profit, of course. And how do they do that? By minimizing the amount that smart gamblers can bet and maximizing the bets of the stupid. The stupid even get VIP treatment. They get a “host,” who invites them to events, concerts, what have you. 

Lewis talks to a sports gambler he names Rufus, who uses “mules” to place bets for him, since he's limited in how much he can bet. But he has to be careful with the mules, too. They can't keep making smart bets—bets that after they're placed, the odds move in their favor. Stuff algorithms would flag. He has to mix it up. He has to lose in order to win. 

“The gambling companies,” Lewis says, “treat Rufus as a kind of cheater, a card counter at the blackjack table. But I don't think of him that way. He's actually figured out stuff about sports—about why things happen in sports—that other people don't know. He's more like a smart stock market investor. He knows better than the market knows, the right price for some bet. And what kind of market refuses to let the smartest people in? This market, it turns out.”

But it's worse than that. “In theory,” Lewis says, “these new companies are required to flag people with gambling problems and limit them, guide them to shrinks who can help them, and end the cycle of misery caused by gambling addiction. In practice, it seems, not so much.”

He talks to another sports gambler, whom he dubs Beckett, who, rather than using mules, creates different personas for himself and gambles that way. Same deal, though. He has to lose in order to win. 

I was developing my character as a very frustrated, losing gambler, who'd keep throwing money in. One day, I sent this host a flurry of messages after some really heavy losses, you know, over the previous few days. I sent message after message and the host called me absolutely exasperated and said, "Hey man, look, look, look, I know you're really frustrated. I'm sorry you lost. Don't worry, I'm going to take care of you. But please, please do not put messages like that in writing. Compliance might see it. They might get worried. They might have to close your account and you know we don't want that to happen. So just call me next time. Don't put it in writing. And hey, I'll give you 40 percent on your next deposit.

Then we get this exchange:

Lewis: It's unbelievable.
Beckett: It's disgusting. It's absolutely disgusting.
Lewis: How important to those companies do you think the addict is?
Beckett: Incredibly important.

In a serious country, this might be dealt with seriously. But we haven't been a serious country for a while.

Anyway you should listen to Michael Lewis' podcast. Totally worth it. 

The other day I was telling my wife about the latest season of Michael Lewis' podcast “Against the Rules.” If you're wondering why there's so many ads and nonstop blather about sports betting as you're watching a sports event, well, this answers it. Blame New Jersey, Ted Olson (RIP), and the John Robert Supreme Court. In Murphy v. NCAA (2018), with Olson arguing for the bad guys in front of several of his Federalist Society club members, the court overturned an earlier Sen. Bill Bradley law that prevented most sports betting in the country, and the floodgates opened.

Here's the question I asked my wife. The year before that decision, in 2017, legal sports bookies generated $300 million in revenue in this country. What was that figure in 2023?

“I don't know,” she said. “A billion?”

“Wait, you think it tripled in five years?”

“Well, I don't --”

“It's $11 billion.”

And of the two big sports betting companies, DraftKings and FanDuel, that were already in place? Lewis says, “It's as if when Prohibition ended, there were these two massive liquor companies sitting there with databases on individual Americans and their taste for alcohol. And the government ordered them to go wave a glass of whiskey under the nose of every alcoholic to persuade as many as possible to start drinking again.”

All of this is from Episode 4: “A Hard Way to Make an Easy Living.” Not pretty, much recommended.