And it's almost all just because of our phones.

Well, yeah, that's the thing.

The phone thing is huge because, okay, let's face it.

It used to be, and I don't want to fetishize the past, but it used to be not that long ago, 15 years ago, even if you had a smartphone, it was like outrageous to be like using it.

at dinner or in the middle of a conversation, et cetera.

And so like, and this is, I don't think this is, and this is why this issue gets tricky.

I don't think it's totally an instance of personal morality that all of us have sort of, or most of us have overridden that taboo.

yeah that's it yeah well i mean those people that

I got it.

I came to Simon and Garfunkel, it, it seems to me, too late.

I was, I was already a teenager, but it was still too late.

Um, they're one of my favorite outfits.

I, I used to...

So I, in college, I always took the bus to school from New York, and on the bus, 'cause I was just getting introduced to this, you know, when you think of what does America sound like, Simon and Garfunkel and the larger category of singer-songwriter, largely guitar-based, finger-picking, and harmony singing is one of the, you know? And, and this was my introduction to that.

Um, and now it's so funny.

What's your pick for the playlist?

And I, I, I wonder if you think that the good vibes here right now are just temporary, or if there's a way in which a championship like this actually does have some kind of long-term effect on the city, whether it be political or just, like, in terms of building community.

Yeah.

Well, famously in the 1970s, uh, New York's municipal government had to be, you know, uh, the dra- the language gets more and more dramatic as we go on in time, but basically saved by a coalition, mostly from the, the banking world.

New York's former lieutenant governor, Dick Ravitch, was a big part of this.

Um, and yeah, so that was the moment in New York's history where sort of the idea that the city was ungovernable, sure, but that the sort of horizons of possibility for it, especially on the level of budgets, was kind of, like, constrained, right? And then you have now Zohran Mamdani, who puts forward a new vision, a vision of, um, abundance and not sort of just, like, strict taming, that we need an iron fist to govern the city, et cetera.

And so that motion, I think, to your point, is very operative here, that New York's politics are partially a result of the migration that you mentioned.

Lots of people have talked about the sort of gentrification of, for instance, Black politics in New York, the Democratic Socialists of America.

Check out Odoo at O-D-O-O.com. That's O-D-O-O.com.

But I want to ask, how do you think about the aesthetics of a show that is really about dialogue and criticism?

First of all, thank you for the great sort of guiding sort of approach to the conversation.

And thank you for everybody who made today possible.

It's interesting because I do think, and here I do want to stand up for chat and dialogue, discussion, conversation as ways to not only transmit knowledge, but to in some ways create it.

As we all know, really good conversations refresh something in us and not just by sort of recycling ideas, but by making new ones kind of come to the fore.

Maybe one way to think about the aesthetics of conversation, recorded or not, is to think about what kinds of responses it engenders.

Often, when somebody listens very often to a chat podcast, they develop what we all have known to sort of dread, the parasocial relationship.

I mean, what aesthetic elements and layers stand out to you

But I'm wondering if you can explain why Trump's attendance was so controversial, given that there's a long history of presidents, including Trump himself, going to big sporting events, like the Super Bowl, for instance.

Well, a couple of reasons.

One is Trump's, I think, pretty consistent history of, you could say, sometimes benignly neglecting, but often expressing real animus toward the NBA specifically.

Um, many of the NBA stars have been very vocal about not wanting to visit the White House after they win, um, the NBA championship.

I think it was, uh, Stephen Curry who was like, "Ain't going." Uh, Trump has had his public scuffles, um, at least sort of verbally with LeBron James.

It's, you know, unmistakably true that the NBA, not only demographically, but sort of culturally, puts kind of Blackness forward in a way that the other sports, major American sports leagues do not.

Obviously, that is not always Trump's vibe.

And I, I, I wonder if you think that the good vibes here right now are just temporary or if there's a way in which a championship like this actually does have some kind of long-term effect on the city, whether it be political or just, like, in terms of building community.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A- and also, like, I think part of that ethos, um, the sort of race conscious left of the time, was precisely to, um, engage with race and try to, um, excavate it for, for trope, for stereotype, to sort of look all of the, um...

in, in certain, certain admirable, but also, yeah, sure, certain, like, m- maybe kind of also cringe ways, um, fisk cultural stereotypes for kind of, I don't know, clarity or moments of grace between disparate kinds of people.

I'm thinking about two years, two years later, um, Spike Lee makes Bamboozled, which is still my favorite Spike Lee film.

And, and, and it's, like, set in a sort of minstrel environment and, and, you know, a, a, a TV producer using minstrelsy as a way to sort of, like, reinvigorate, like, the popularity of the show, and it's a similar thing of, like, um, this, like, uh, Bamboozled, is, among other things, Jon was talking about the way people read headlines before.

Among other things, this is a work of media criticism.

Yeah.