Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

CK Chuck Klosterman On Plain English with Derek Thompson

“It almost seems like you'd be a more informed sports fan if you never watched a game, if you only read the results. … If you play fantasy football, you're way better off not watching any games. If you want to win at fantasy football, never watch games again. Only read what the results are. The game is only going to confuse you. But of course, that's not what you want, right? You want to be confused in this way.”

Plain English with Derek Thompson · September 2026

“It almost seems like you'd be a more informed sports fan if you never watched a game, if you only read the results. … If you play fantasy football, you're way better off not watching any games. If you want to win at fantasy football, never watch games again. Only read what the results are. The game is only going to confuse you. But of course, that's not what you want, right? You want to be confused in this way.” — Chuck Klosterman, Plain English with Derek Thompson

Thompson had asked what is lost when MVP voters all defer to a single analytics number they don't fully understand. Klosterman answers that sports have gone so far toward the stats that watching has become almost a disadvantage, even though watching is the reason anyone follows sports.

Plain English with Derek Thompson · 2026-09-29 Listen to the episode → More from Chuck Klosterman →

Transcript

Plain English with Derek Thompson Around 1:24:56 into the episode
Chuck Klosterman

…to throw all those things away it's like you know like the past performance is no indication of future returns at least for this at bat so i i don't know what i'm not again i'm not sure if i answered the question that you were just saying like what do i think about it that's what i think you know

Derek Thompson

…understand and isn't that like kind of weird and interesting and so i'm just interested in this larger question of like what happens as we turn more of human decision making over to mathematical systems that we trust to be correct even though we don't understand what they are in the first place

Chuck Klosterman

i mean i suppose there would be the counter to that somebody would be like well learn what these numbers mean and if you learn you will believe that you'll see what and maybe that is the case but i mean i generally agree like like the netfix is a netflix example that's very easy to understand why that is only good for like the shareholder of netflix i mean it's like this okay so i'm one thing that i always bothered me it's going to seem like a weird analogy but i think they're the same i would hear people who went to say like oh creative writing programs or writing workshops and they would workshop their writing work and there was this idea that when somebody read a story the other people would respond and everybody kind of had to respond with something and what seemed to always happen is people would respond either you know with like to whatever was the most outside of the expectation like they'd be like whatever was the thing about the writing That was sort of stood out to them, you know, the voice or maybe a detail or something that they would be like, kind of like they would kind of sand those off. It would be all these people sort of noticing the things that kind of go outside of coloring…

Derek Thompson

It's funny how in a way, without my planning for it in the slightest, we've somewhat returned to a distinction between the nonfiction and fiction books, that there's something about certain nonfiction books that exist to be summarizable. What happened in World War II? How do I lose weight? What is…

Speaker 3

This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Now, this is a player in the food space that has championed winning food standards and quality since 1980. That means no added growth hormones or antibiotics in their meat and no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in their deli meats, hot dogs, or…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from Plain English with Derek Thompson