Just how much is AI poised to change our world? 

Unless you’ve been in hibernation, the flurry of attention surrounding the latest AI models coming out of Silicon Valley has been hard to miss. AI has gone beyond a chatbot merely answering your questions to doing stuff that only human programmers used to be able to do. 

But we’ve been through these cycles involving tech before. How can we tell what’s actually real and what’s mere hype? 

To answer this question, I invited Kelsey Piper, one of the best reporters on AI out there. Kelsey is a former colleague here at Vox and is now doing great work for The Argument, a Substack-based magazine. Kelsey is an optimist about tech — but clear-eyed about the huge risks from AI. She’s very much a power user, but is realistic about what AI can’t do yet. And she’s been banging the drum about how consequential AI is for years, even before it became such a hot mainstream topic. 

Kelsey and I discuss all the reasons why the hype this time is rooted in something real, how we got here, and where we might be headed. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday and Friday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s actually happening right now in AI?

If you look closely, AI is already a big deal. Not in some abstract future sense, but right now. The closest analogy is not a new app or a new platform. It’s more like discovering a new continent full of people who are very good at doing certain kinds of work.

These systems are not people, but they can do things that used to require people. They can write code, generate text, solve problems, and increasingly do so in ways that are very useful in the real world.

And the key point is that it’s not stopping here. Every year the systems get better. The progress from 2025 to 2026 alone is enough to make it clear that this isn’t a static technology. 

Whatever AI can do today, it will be able to do more of it tomorrow and so on.

Why is the reaction so split between panic and dismissal?

The default move is to assume nothing ever really changes.

If you’re a pundit, you can get pretty far by always saying this is hype, this will pass, nothing fundamental is happening. That works most of the time. It worked with crypto. It works with a lot of overhyped technologies.

But sometimes it’s just catastrophically wrong. Think about the early days of the internet, or the Industrial Revolution. Or even something like Covid. There were moments where people said this will blow over, and they were completely wrong. So you can’t just default to cynicism. You have to actually look at the thing itself.

What would you say has really changed recently? Why does this hype cycle feel different?

Part of it is just accumulation. For a while, you could look at progress in AI and say, maybe this is a short trend. Maybe it plateaus. There were only a handful of data points. Now there are many, many more. And the trend has continued.

Another part is that the systems are now doing things that feel qualitatively different. Not just answering questions, but acting. Planning. Taking steps toward goals.

And then there’s a social dynamic. Most people use the free versions of these tools. Those are much worse than the best models. So they underestimate what is possible.

I don’t really think of you as an AI optimist or a doomer, and you’re normally pretty level-headed about the state of things, but do you think we’re entering dangerous territory?

I’m generally pro technology. Technology has made human life better in profound ways. That’s just true.

But I also think the way AI is currently being developed is dangerous. And the reason is that we’re building systems that can act in the world, access information, and increasingly operate with a degree of independence. We’re giving them access to things like communication channels, financial tools, and potentially critical infrastructure.

And we don’t fully understand how they behave. In controlled settings, we have seen these systems lie, deceive, and do things that are misaligned with what we asked them to do. They’re not doing this because they’re evil. They’re doing it because of how they are trained and how goals are specified.

But the result is the same. You have systems that do not always do what you intend, and that can be hard to monitor or control.

What do you mean when you say these systems lie and deceive?

In experiments, researchers give AI systems goals and access to information, then observe how they try to achieve those goals.

In some cases, the systems have used information they have access to in ways that are clearly not what we would want. For example, threatening to reveal sensitive information about a person if that person does not cooperate.

These are controlled tests, not real-world deployments. But they show what the systems are capable of under certain conditions. And that’s pretty concerning.

Is this what people mean by the alignment problem?

Yeah. Alignment is about making sure that AI systems do what we want them to do. And not just superficially, but in a robust way.

The difficulty is that when you give a system a goal, it can pursue that goal in ways you did not anticipate. Like a child who learns to get out of eating dinner by making it look like they ate dinner.

The system is optimizing for something, but not necessarily in the way you planned. That gap between intent and behavior is really the core of the alignment problem.

How confident are you in the guardrails being built around these systems?

Not very. There are people working seriously on this problem. They’re testing models, trying to understand how they behave, trying to detect deception.

But they’re also finding that the models can recognize when they are being tested and adjust their behavior accordingly.

That’s definitely a serious issue. If your system behaves well when it knows it’s being evaluated, but differently otherwise, then your evaluations are not telling you what you need to know. To me, that’s the kind of finding that should slow things down. It suggests we don’t understand these systems well enough to safely scale them.

So why do the companies keep pushing forward anyway?

Because it’s a competition. Each company can say it would be better if everyone slowed down. But if we slow down and others don’t, we fall behind. So they keep moving.

There are also a lot of geopolitical concerns. If one country slows down and another doesn’t, that creates another layer of pressure.

Why is agentic AI such a big shift?

The shift is from systems that respond to prompts to systems that can do things in the world.

An AI agent can be given a goal and then take steps to achieve it. That might involve interacting with websites, or sending messages, or hiring people through gig platforms, or coordinating tasks. Stuff like that. But even without physical bodies, they can affect the real world by directing humans or using digital infrastructure. That changes the nature of the technology. It’s no longer just a tool you use. It’s something that can operate on its own.

How scary could that become?

Potentially very. Even if you ignore the most extreme scenarios, these systems could be used for large-scale cyber attacks, misinformation campaigns, or other forms of disruption. The companies themselves acknowledge this. They understand. They test for these risks and implement safeguards. But safeguards can be bypassed, and the systems are getting more capable.

Are we even remotely prepared for what is coming?

No. We’re almost never prepared for major technological shifts. But the speed of this one makes it particularly challenging. If change happens slowly, we can catch up. If it happens too quickly, we can’t. And right now, the incentives are pushing almost entirely toward speed.

What’s the most realistic worst case and best case scenario?

The worst case is that we build increasingly powerful systems, hand over more and more control, and eventually create something that operates independently in ways we cannot control. Humans become less central to decision-making, and the systems pursue goals that don’t align with human well-being.

The best case is that we slow down enough to understand what we’re building, develop robust safeguards, and use these systems to create abundance and improve human life. That could mean less work, more resources, better access to knowledge, and more freedom. But getting there requires making good choices now.

Do you think we’ll make those choices?

We still have time. That’s the most optimistic thing I can say.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Imagine you’re alone in a room. No phone. No windows. No way out.

There’s only one thing in there with you: a giant pile of cocaine.

Maybe you’ve never touched drugs in your life. Maybe you think people who use drugs are bad or morally suspect. But you’re trapped in that room, for an unknown amount of time, and you’ve got nothing else to do.

What happens next? 

This is the question the philosopher Hanna Pickard asks in her exquisitely titled book What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing but Cocaine? Pickard thinks our usual stories about addiction are too neat. Either addicts are moral failures, or they’re helpless victims of a hijacked brain. Her book makes a convincing case that both stories miss what’s actually happening — not just in the brain, but in the world people live in and the inner lives they’re trying to manage.

I invited Pickard onto The Gray Area to talk about what addiction is, what it isn’t, and what it means to hold people responsible without reaching for blame. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday and Friday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Is the title meant to be a rhetorical question? Because if I was alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine, I’d probably, for sure, do a lot of cocaine.

Right. And what you just did is the point of the title.

I want it to stop people and make them think for themselves about what an environment does to drug taking. Being alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine is a metaphor for the social, economic, and material circumstances that many people with addiction live in.

But it’s also a shoutout to the history of animal models in addiction science. One of the early experiments literally put rats alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine to see what they’d do.

Historically, that was read as evidence for a brain disease model where cocaine hijacks the brain and compels use. 

But, notice what happens when you imagine your own case: You don’t imagine doing cocaine, because you think it hijacks your brain. You imagine doing it because you’re isolated, and bored, and suffering, and cocaine is the only relief available.

What compelled you to write the book? Is there something about how people talk about addiction that feels wrong or incomplete?

I think there are deep misconceptions about addiction in public discourse and in addiction science, and they span the political divide. They’re everywhere.

Because I’ve worked with people with addiction, my worry is that the way the rest of us misconceive addiction affects treatment and attitudes. It has real consequences. I’d been writing papers for a long time, and then, I felt ready to bring it together into something systematic that could correct these misconceptions.

A big misconception is that there are only two approaches. One is an antiquated moral model that treats drug use and addiction as morally wrong. No serious scientist or policymaker holds that model in a simple form, but it contaminates the cultural air. We all have bits of it that come out.

Then, the supposed antidote is the brain disease model, which rose in the 1990s and positions itself as stigma reduction. But, it’s got its own problems, and, in my view, it’s not giving us what people with addictions actually need. 

So, the book tries to offer something less simplistic, more humane, and in the middle.

Do you think of addiction as a disease in any conventional sense?

You shifted from brain disease to disease, and that’s helpful.

I don’t think addiction is a brain disease as that model has traditionally been constructed. That model says there’s pathology in the brain that causes compulsive drug use. I think there are problems with the idea that drug use is always compulsive, with the claim of pathology, in all cases and with the idea that pathology is the fundamental cause of the behavior in all cases.

But whether addiction is a disease depends on what we mean by addiction and what we mean by disease. Without defining both, we’re talking loosely.

So how would you define addiction?

A simple gloss is that addiction is drug use gone wrong.

We should start with the fact that a lot of drug use is ordinary. Caffeine is a drug. Alcohol is a drug. Nicotine is a drug. Most people use drugs regularly in ways that bring benefits and don’t carry tremendous costs. We understand psychologically why people do that, and humans have been doing it for a very long time.

Then there’s a shift. Alongside the benefits, the costs ratchet up. People lose relationships, jobs, housing. In places that criminalize possession, they can lose freedom. Physical and mental health decline. Sometimes, people die.

So, addiction is a pattern of drug use that persists, despite severe costs, in ways that undermine a person’s own good.

If you force me to label it, I’m inclined to call it a behavioral disorder. It’s crucial to keep our eyes on the fact that addiction is behavior — drug use gone wrong. Then, the question is what explains that behavior.

People like to say that they’ve got the addiction “gene,” especially if it runs in their family. Is that an actual thing?

I’m not a geneticist, but based on the last systematic review I read, the answer is no.

There are genes that predispose to a range of mental disorders. There are genetic factors that raise risk. But, we haven’t identified genes that uniquely predispose only toward alcoholism or only toward addiction more broadly.

And, of course, genetics is only one part. Childhood adversity, socioeconomic disadvantage, and co-morbid mental disorders are all associated with increased risk.

But, predisposition doesn’t mean addiction is a disease. Risk isn’t the same as the condition. Smoking raises cancer risk, but smoking isn’t cancer. In the same way, these factors raise the likelihood without being identical to addiction.

How much agency does an addict have? How much choice do they really have?

I won’t use the term free will, because that’s a philosophical can of worms. But, we can talk about ordinary agency.

It can’t be black and white. It isn’t that they have agency, or they don’t. It’s complicated and impaired in different ways, and it differs across people, across time, across substances, and across contexts of support.

The model we should reject is that drug use is compelled in the sense that a person cannot do otherwise, driven by irresistible cravings such that no alternative is possible.

Agency can be compromised while still being present. And that matters, because people with addiction need to exercise agency to get better. There’s no pill that cures you. Recovery involves stopping, rebuilding a life, and finding other meaningful things to fill the space drugs occupied. That’s an agential project.

But, subjectively, cravings can feel overpowering. Choosing doesn’t feel like choosing. 

I want to push back against the cultural picture that cravings are always overwhelming. Some people crave frequently but not intensely. Others do feel overwhelmed. For me, the question is: Why? What’s driving the craving?

Withdrawal is one reason. Withdrawal can be terrible, and if you know there’s something that brings relief, you can become desperate.

But, drugs can also be a go to coping mechanism for deep psychological pain. For some people, drugs become something like an attachment figure, the one thing that feels reliable in a chaotic world. For others, identity becomes wrapped up in addiction, and the fear is who am I without this.

Why does this matter? Because, once you see why craving is overwhelming, you can see what might help.

If it’s withdrawal, you provide medical support so stopping doesn’t mean suffering withdrawal. If it’s psychological pain, you provide other ways to cope. If it’s identity, you help someone build a new identity and a new story.

Those changes can make craving more manageable from the inside.

We’ve got this binary: Either someone is a victim of a brain disease or they’re a moral failure. What should replace that? What’s a richer and more humane framing that leads to better treatment and better understanding?

Moralism about drugs is deep in our society, and I think it’s wrong. There’s nothing intrinsically morally wrong with using drugs. Caffeine is a drug. Alcohol is a drug. Nicotine is a drug. Many drugs used medically are the same chemicals as drugs on the street. So, we need to confront that knee jerk condemnation.

We should think of addiction as drug use gone wrong, behavior that persists despite severe costs and undermines a person’s own good. 

Again, the question becomes: Why? And the answer is not one thing; it differs across people. It’s tempting to want a clean reductive explanation, but we lose what matters if we do that.

So, what are the different answers when you ask why?

Some people are living in deep misery and isolation with few alternatives, and drugs provide relief.

For some, drugs become something like a relationship, an attachment. Identity can be central. Some people use, because they identify as an addict, and that’s what an addict does. We have to ask how someone gets stuck in that identity and what value it has.

Another explanation we don’t talk about enough is deliberate self-harm and suicide. Some people use drugs in ways that harm or kill them, because it allows self harm without direct physical violence, which many people find difficult even when they want to die.

We need to make more space to talk about self-harm and suicide in mental health, and to see how it can explain self-destructive drug use.

And there are explanations that involve what a person isn’t fully seeing: denial, rationalization, cognitive biases. All of us behave irrationally sometimes. Using those tools can de-pathologize and humanize addiction.

Given all that, how do we treat it? How do we hold people responsible without blaming them or condemning them?

This is grounded in clinical experience. In the clinic, you learn quickly that blaming and judging doesn’t help. 

But, it’s also easy to swing to the other extreme and treat someone as not responsible at all.

We need to separate responsibility from blame.

Responsibility is about agency and choice. Blame is the idea that we’re entitled to be hostile, punitive, and condemning. We don’t have to do that. We have agency, too, in how we respond.

So, you can have accountability with care and respect.

A way to see it is parenting. You can hold a teenager responsible without condemning their character. You do it, because you care and want them to learn.

Practically, it’s hard. It’s a skill. I came into clinical work more blame-oriented than I am now. Our emotional responses are shaped by culture and habit. We can work on them.

There are general rules, like don’t start by yelling at people that they’re terrible. The harder skill is communicating hurt, setting boundaries, and asking for change in a way the person can hear without recoiling.

How important is it for someone in recovery to tell a new story about themselves? And how much of that requires other people to stop insisting you’re who you used to be?

Identity can be fundamental. Recovery can require constructing a story that says, “I was an addict, and, now, I’m not. Now, I’m someone else.”

Stigma and condemnation destroy the capacity to tell that story. They remove optimism and possibility. They keep forcing the old identity back on the person. Once an addict, always an addict.

Nobody can do the work of becoming someone else for you. But, we can support it far more than we do.

Is that why AA and group therapy can help so much? Is it about support, and accountability, and belonging?

Absolutely. Groups are powerful.

A group gives belonging, support, community, and accountability. To be part of it, you’re committed to not using. Different groups handle lapses differently, but the shared project is a change away from drugs and toward a different future.

So, if you care about the group and want that belonging, you have to identify as someone who’s not in active addiction. That’s support and identity working together.

I’ll share an anecdote that I end the book with. In group therapy, we used behavioral contracts to help people stop using, because, to do deep emotional work, you can’t be high all the time. 

Someone would take a blank sheet of paper and write, “I will not use drugs. And if I do, I commit to making a support call to someone in the group or using support in my life to help me stop.” They’d sign it. Then, we’d sign it and write messages of support. “You can do this.” “You deserve this.” “I’m thinking of you.” “I can’t wait to see you next week and hear how it went.”

People would take that paper away, sometimes carry it everywhere. It didn’t work for everyone, but often, they came back and, for the first time in years — sometimes decades — they hadn’t used.

You can’t cure a brain disease with a piece of paper. The paper was a symbol of responsibility and also a concrete manifestation of care that someone could keep in their pocket. 

What do we as a society owe people struggling with addiction? What are our obligations?

Let me answer personally first.

There are people in all of our lives who struggle with addiction. I think we owe people, at least, the chance for relationship, care, compassion, and empathy when they’re in our lives. The limits depend on the relationship. What I owe a colleague is different from what I owe my children. Relationships come with obligations.

As for society, we allow the conditions in which addiction flourishes to continue. Childhood adversity, socioeconomic disadvantage, isolation, despair: These conditions increase risk. So, we have to take responsibility for allowing them to persist.

In other words, we built the cage.

Yes, we’ve built the cage. So, we have to do what we can to open the door.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

“Across party lines and demographic groups, young men are eager to be dads.”

That’s the surprising conclusion that Anna North, my Vox colleague, uncovered when she dove into the data to find out young people’s views about forming families. Birth rates have been in free fall, and talk of a demographic crisis has increasingly filled the discourse. In much of that commentary, the brunt of the blame has been directed at young people, who purportedly aren’t interested in settling down. But the truth, according to Anna, is more complex. 

In addition to Gen Z men expressing interest in procreating, she also found something else that was surprising: There is a real gender gap between young men and young women, with young women showing greater hesitation about the prospect of having kids. 

It’s a fascinating divide that could be hugely consequential, so I asked Anna to come join me on the Friday edition of The Gray Area to explain what she found in her reporting. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday and Friday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What were you looking for when you started reporting on this piece on how Gen Z men and women are thinking about parenthood and how differently they’re thinking about it?

I saw this really interesting poll of young voters, Gen Z voters, and looked at male Trump voters, male Harris voters, female Trump voters, and female Harris voters and asked them to rank, what are the things you think are important in a good life.

The male Trump voters actually rated having children as number one among 12 or 13 different options. Nobody else had it up that high. Not any of the women, no matter how they voted. And not male Harris voters, either.

And if you look across polls, overwhelmingly, you’ll see young men more excited, more enthusiastic about having children one day than young women. And I could think of a lot of possible reasons why that might be, but I wanted to dig into it a little bit. 

I have the numbers here, and I don’t want to butcher it. This is from your piece on a 2023 Pew poll: 57 percent of men between 18 and 34 said they wanted to have kids one day, and only 45 percent of women said that. That was a little surprising to me. Maybe it shouldn’t be. 

I was kind of surprised by that. As you say, I thought it was a pretty big gap, especially given that the narrative that I think we had heard about young Gen Z people generally over the last couple of years is this is a generation that doesn’t want kids.

This generation doesn’t want to get married. This is a generation that’s really worried about the future, and feeling really alienated, and doesn’t want to take these steps toward conventional family. And so, I thought it was interesting that these high numbers of Gen Z men were saying, no, actually we do want kids. 

If you dig back into the historical polling, it’s a little wonky. There’s some evidence that women without children, for a long time, have had a little bit more trepidation than men without children. And partly that’s for reasons that make sense. They know that their careers could take a hit. They’ve all read those articles about the motherhood penalty. They know that they will probably have to give birth, which men don’t have to do, and deal with physical recovery and deal with all of the stereotyping and stigmatizing that comes with having a female body that becomes a mother in this world.

So, it’s not weird that young women might have more anxieties. But, I think what was striking to me was the size of the gap and, really, the size of the enthusiasm among men of a generation that were expressing this pretty conventional social aspiration to have a family.

How do you explain their increased interest? Why are Gen Z men increasingly fired up about being a dad? What are they telling you?

I think I got a certain sense of that where one of them just talked about his friends who are male and think of this as something they’re going to do one day. They think of it as like a capstone or just a really important part of a full life. And it’s something that they assume that they’re going to do. 

What would you say are the primary reasons you get from women? Are you seeing the data from Gen Z women about why they’re hesitant? 

Well, one expert explained it to me: It’s never been more costly for women to have a child. And that doesn’t mean it’s harder than ever to be a mom.; it means that women, many women, most women in the US, probably have more options than they’ve ever had. Women’s salaries still aren’t at parity with men’s, but they’re higher than they have ever been.

Women’s educational attainment is really high. There’s a sense that there’s an increasing social sense that women can live a full life without becoming mothers, and that’s fine, and there’s a lot more acceptance for it. Whereas women used to just really not have that many options for their lives, now they have lots. And you’re giving some of that up. When you have a child, you know, it’s documented that you’re giving up some salary. You’re giving up some time.

And then, two, I think you’ll hear from young women this concern that their partners are not going to pull their weight. I get into this in the piece that we have seen real shifts in terms of how much childcare men do, but it’s not 50/50. And women know that.

I think a lot of women also know that they are going to end up, you know, contributing economically at least 50%, if not more than 50%. So, I think there is a worry that they’re going to be doing more than half on the home front. They’re going to be doing at least half, if not more than half, career-wise. And so, I think that can start to seem like a bad deal too.

Maybe the thing that surprised me the most is that it would appear with Gen Z men, in particular, the trend is towards more of a preference for traditional division of labor — this idea that to be a man means to be the breadwinner.

I do think it’s of a piece with some polling and data that we see from Gen Z men just like expressing a variety of traditionalist gender ideas. 

I talked to a guy who does a lot of polling with Gen Z, and he did say that when he polls young men, they really associate masculinity with being a provider, more so than any other characteristics. 

But, I also think that we’re seeing other moves in the opposite direction.

If you just play this out a little bit, it seems like this is going to be a problem, with young men and young women moving in different directions, wanting different things, having competing visions of what it means to be a dad or a mom. And, of course, politically, young men are moving to the right, and women are moving more to the left. How’s that going to play out? 

You know, it’s definitely something that I think we see in a lot of data and something we talk about a lot, something that, like, has real implications politically for elections. It has implications for families. But, I think the bottom line for me — just from all my reporting about families, and childbearing, and all this kind of stuff — is there are lots of ways that we could make it easier as a country for people to have the families that they want.

Two things, like paid leave or affordable child care — if you’re worried about all these men who really want kids and women are not so sure, a great way to address that worry is to support the women. And I think that ends up helping everybody across the board.

Is there a world where women are able to have children without paying the professional price they’ve had to pay?

Sure. I mean, there’s plenty of countries where the wage gap is smaller. You know, generally what people talk about, again, is things like paid leave and affordable, accessible childcare. In countries where women take really long leaves, like a year or longer, you tend to see less parity career wise and wage wise. But in countries where women can pretty easily take six months and don’t have access to good childcare options that are affordable, you do see better parity. It is possible. It’s not, pie in the sky. 

Another thing that experts pointed me to is Scandinavian countries that have introduced paternity leave that has sort of use it or lose it. The family has X number of weeks of leave, Y number of weeks can be used only by the dad. So, if the dad doesn’t use that, then you don’t get it. And that really incentivizes men to take that time and has been a big driver of social change in the countries where it’s been tried.

Football occupies a strange place in American life. It’s the most popular sport in the country by an absurd margin, but it’s also the most controversial. It’s treated as a civic ritual in some places, a primitive distraction in others, and a kind of background noise almost everywhere. 

For millions of people, football Sundays (and Saturdays) structure the week. For millions more, football represents everything that feels excessive, violent, or backward about American culture.

What makes football so hard to talk about is that none of these interpretations feels fully wrong or right. The game is violent, but also beautiful. It’s deeply commercial, yet genuinely communal. It’s hyper-engineered, obsessively optimized, ruthlessly controlled, while also delivering moments of genuine unpredictability that no scripted entertainment can match. 

The writer Chuck Klosterman has spent much of his career thinking about how mass culture works, why certain things take hold, and what they reveal about the people who love them. In his new book, Football, he turns that lens on the most dominant cultural object in American life. 

Klosterman is especially interested in football as a mediated experience. After all, it’s a game that most fans have never played, can’t meaningfully simulate, and only encounter through television. And yet we can’t get enough of it. Why is that? And why is it that football, of all things, continues to function as one of the last true monocultural rituals in a fragmented media landscape?

I invited Klosterman onto The Gray Area to talk about all of this and why he thinks the sport may be both more powerful and more fragile than it looks. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re a football fan, but this book isn’t a love letter to the game. What were you trying to do?

I say it’s not a love letter because I think when people write about something they love, especially something they’ve loved for a long time, there’s an impulse to justify that love. To persuade the reader that this thing deserves the emotional weight the writer has given it. That’s not really what I’m interested in doing.

I approach football the same way I approach music or movies or any other subject I write about. It’s just criticism. I’m trying to understand what the thing is doing, how it works, and why it exists the way it does.

I’ve been thinking about football unconsciously for 40 years and more deliberately for at least 20. At some point it occurred to me that football is going to matter less in the future than it does now. That’s not a judgment. That’s just what happens to large cultural objects. Everything eventually recedes.

And when that happens, people are going to try to explain retroactively why football mattered so much. They’ll tell neat stories about violence or capitalism or distraction or American decline. And I think those explanations will mostly be wrong, or at least incomplete.

So what I wanted to do was describe what football means while we’re still living inside it. While it still feels normal and necessary rather than strange and historical. It’s almost like writing an obituary before the subject has died.

Is that why you wrote it for people who aren’t born yet?

That’s a bit of rhetorical exaggeration, but the idea behind it is real. Books force you to commit in a way other media don’t. Online writing gets overwritten constantly. Books make you stake a claim that’s supposed to endure.

When this book comes out, it’ll already be out of date in certain ways. And five or 10 years from now, it’ll feel even more distant from the moment it describes. That’s kind of the point.

What’s your experience with football?

I grew up in a small town in North Dakota. We played nine-man football. Football was just part of life. If a game was on TV, it was on whether anyone was actively watching it or not.

I was a sports journalist early on, then became more of a culture writer, but football never really left my thinking. As I got older, it became more important in a different way. Not because I watched more games, but because it started to feel like one of the few remaining cultural objects that could still connect people across differences.

If someone asks me my favorite sport, I’ll say basketball. But if you ask which sport matters most to how I understand American culture, football wins easily. It’s not even close.

Why football, though? Why does it dominate culture so completely?

A lot of it comes down to historical timing and structural compatibility.

Football emerges in the late 19th century, right after the Civil War, and it carries a metaphorical relationship to organized conflict. It’s a simulation of war, without all the death and geopolitical consequences. That metaphor is baked into the game at a very deep level.

Then television arrives, and football turns out to be perfectly suited for it. The stoppages, the structure, the anticipation between plays, the way action unfolds in short bursts, all translate beautifully to broadcast.

You describe the game as generating a sensation of chaotic freedom inside an environment of total control. How does that happen?

Football is one of the most engineered experiences people routinely engage with, even if they don’t think about it that way. Every play is designed in advance. It’s encoded into a language that only a small group of people fully understands. It’s transmitted through headsets, wristbands, and signals. It’s rehearsed endlessly during practice. And it has to be executed within very strict time constraints.

Behind every snap, there’s all this hierarchy. Coaches, coordinators, analysts, trainers, medical staff, league officials, rules committees. It’s a deeply bureaucratic system. In a lot of ways, it’s almost corporate. Everything is planned, regulated, and optimized.

And then the ball is snapped, and all of that structure suddenly recedes. For a few seconds, what you see feels spontaneous. Twenty-two people collide, react, adjust, and improvise in real time. You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, even though you know it’s happening inside a very rigid framework.

That contrast is where the power comes from. You get unpredictability without existential risk. You get chaos that’s bounded. The play might fail or succeed, but the system itself is stable. There’s a beginning and an end. The whistle will blow. The next play will come.

I think that mirrors how a lot of people want to experience the world more generally. Most people don’t actually want true chaos. They want the feeling of danger without real danger, the feeling of freedom without losing the structure that makes life manageable.

Would football be as entertaining if there wasn’t this continual possibility that someone will get hurt? 

I don’t think people want to see anyone get hurt. Football isn’t a blood sport in that sense. But risk matters. Meaning requires stakes.

It’s like climbing Everest. People don’t climb it because they want to die. But the fact that death is possible gives the act significance. If football eliminated serious risk entirely, it would become something else.

That’s why safety rule changes provoke such strong reactions. On the surface, those reactions sound crude. But they’re pointing at a real tension between safety and meaning.

Why do you think football is such a fundamentally mediated experience, even when we’re sitting in the stadium watching it?

I think most fans understand football through what you might call television grammar, whether they realize it or not. We’ve all been trained, over decades, to see the game from a very specific set of angles, with certain visual cues and rhythms that television provides.

So even when you’re sitting in the stands, what you’re actually doing most of the time is mentally translating what you’re seeing into that television version of the game. You’re imagining the sideline camera shot. You’re thinking about the replay you just saw or the replay you know is coming. You’re filling in information you can’t physically see from your seat because you’ve learned how the broadcast usually explains it.

There are moments when being in the stadium gives you something television can’t. If a play breaks right in front of you, or you see something develop before the cameras catch it, that can feel special. But most of the time, the stadium experience isn’t about seeing the game clearly. It’s about being part of something larger.

So what are we watching, really? Is it a sport on TV? A TV show about a sport? Or a sport that used to be a sport and then became a TV product? 

I think it’s a real event that’s experienced through mediation. The players are doing something real. The outcomes matter. The risks are real. But the way most of us encounter that reality is through a highly constructed medium that shapes how we understand what’s happening.

What makes sports different from almost every other form of entertainment is that no one knows what’s going to happen. There’s no script. No writer has decided how it ends. Even the people most invested in the outcome can’t control it once the game starts.

That kind of liveness is incredibly rare now. We’re surrounded by entertainment that’s optimized, focus-tested, and refined to minimize unpredictability. Even when we don’t know exactly how a show or movie will end, we know that someone has designed that ending with a specific effect in mind.

Sports don’t work that way. Anything can happen, and sometimes things happen that no one would ever write because they’d seem implausible or unsatisfying on the page. That unpredictability creates a different kind of engagement.

I think we really underestimate how valuable that is, especially in a culture where so much of what we consume is engineered to be smooth, coherent, and controlled. Football gives us a mediated experience of reality that still contains genuine uncertainty. And that combination is a big part of why it holds our attention the way it does.

The Damar Hamlin incident felt like a moment when all of this snapped into focus. It wasn’t just another injury. That one felt different in real time.

I think almost everyone watching sensed that immediately. You didn’t need an official announcement or medical confirmation. You could tell from the way the players reacted, the way the broadcast suddenly changed its tone, the way the commentators started speaking more slowly and carefully. It felt like the language people use when they think someone has died.

What was striking to me was how quickly football itself seemed to recede from view. The game stopped mattering almost instantly. Nobody was talking about standings or playoff implications. All of the usual narratives that surround a Monday night game just evaporated. For a brief window, it felt like the entire apparatus around football had been suspended.

There was also this strange liminal period afterward, where nobody quite knew what to say. It suddenly felt inappropriate to even ask the obvious questions about what this meant for the sport. When someone did raise those questions too quickly, the backlash was immediate. It was as if we collectively agreed that there was a moral pause button that had to be respected.

If Hamlin had died, there would have been a reckoning. I don’t think there’s any way around that. 

The harder question is what kind of reckoning it would have been and how long it would have lasted. Football is enormous. It’s not just too big to fail; it’s almost too big to stop. The entire economic and cultural infrastructure around it is built on the assumption of continuity.

Covid showed us that. 

Even in a moment of genuine global crisis, the overriding instinct was to find a way to keep the games going. Empty stadiums, revised schedules, altered protocols, but still football. That doesn’t mean people are callous. It means the system is so large and so central that stopping it entirely feels almost unimaginable.

And in Hamlin’s case, once it became clear that he was going to survive, and once the injury could be framed as a freak convergence of circumstances rather than a direct extension of the game’s usual violence, there was a kind of collective exhale. The moral crisis didn’t disappear, but it retreated. Football resumed its normal position in people’s lives.

That moment revealed something important. It showed how close the sport always is to forcing a confrontation we’d rather avoid, and how quickly we move past that confrontation when circumstances allow us to. Football constantly brushes up against questions about risk, responsibility, and complicity, but most of the time it gives us just enough distance to keep watching.

So is football a good or bad thing for society? Ultimately you come down at 53 percent good, 47 percent troubling. That feels a little like hedging.

I don’t think of that as hedging, even though it probably sounds like it. It’s my way of being honest about the fact that once you really start pulling on the threads here, the question of whether football is “good” or “bad” is complicated.

You start asking yourself what it even means for something to be good. Is it good because it’s entertaining? Is it good because it creates meaning in people’s lives? Is it good because it brings communities together, even if it also causes real harm to a smaller number of people? Those are not easy questions to weigh against each other.

Football clearly does a lot of things that are socially positive. It creates shared rituals. It gives people a sense of belonging. It produces moments of beauty, excellence, and drama that feel meaningful to millions of people. At the same time, it exposes players to physical harm, and it reinforces certain cultural values that don’t always sit comfortably with the way we like to think about ourselves now.

So the 53–47 split is really just my way of saying that I think the balance tips slightly in favor of football being socially positive, but only slightly. I wouldn’t have written the book if I thought it was overwhelmingly negative. But I also couldn’t write it honestly if I pretended the troubling parts were marginal or incidental.

Part of what makes football interesting is that it refuses to resolve itself morally. It doesn’t let you land comfortably on one side or the other.

Given the dominance of the sport, and the TV product, it’s hard to imagine an America where football isn’t king, but you say it’s doomed. Do you really believe that?

I understand why that sounds extreme, especially when you look at the current numbers. Football is not declining right now. In the near term, I think it’s going to become even more dominant.

But size creates fragility. The bigger something gets, the more it depends on a web of conditions staying intact. Football relies on advertising economics, labor stability, broadcast deals, and cultural goodwill all lining up at once.

Right now, advertising is a huge part of why football works. It’s one of the last places where advertisers can reliably reach a massive, captive audience. But that model depends on assumptions about how advertising works that may not hold forever. The costs keep rising, and it’s not clear the value is rising at the same rate.

There’s also a generational issue. Football’s cultural power has always depended on people growing up around the game; playing it, watching it, or at least being adjacent to it. As that lived experience fades, the emotional connection changes. People may still watch, but it won’t mean the same thing.

When football eventually recedes, it won’t disappear overnight. It’ll become something more niche, more historicized. And when that happens, future generations will misunderstand what it meant to the people who lived inside it. They’ll moralize it, flatten it, and miss the texture of the experience.

That’s part of why I wanted to write the book now. Not because football is about to end, but because this moment — when it still feels unavoidable and central — is the hardest moment to capture later.

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