​HPR exclusive: Chuck Klosterman interview

By Ben Rodgers

Chuck Klosterman poses the big questions that no one is asking in his latest book, “But What If We’re Wrong?” One of those questions regards the potential blight of football as it is known today, hundreds of years in the future.

His ninth book hit the shelves earlier this month. In it, Klosterman, the lauded pop-culture critic and North Dakota native, aims to look back at widely held beliefs in today’s society as if it were hundreds of years in the future to see how those ideas hold up to the test of time.

“The whole point of this book in a lot of ways is I’m trying to create a situation where I am anticipating the way the history of ideas will change, and the history of ideas is the history of being wrong,” he said. “It’s just the history of people looking back on a previous period are reinterpreting and re-deciding what happens. What I’m trying to do is jump, say 300 years into the future and do that with things that are still going on.”

The High Plains Reader caught up with Klosterman over the phone while he was in Minneapolis, stopping to promote his new book to talk about the future of North Dakota State University football, reality TV and more.

“In terms of the long-term portrait, NDSU will deal with the same problem that the entire football culture will. Which is right now there seems to be two perspectives on what will happen; One is that as CTE, and concussions, and the brutality of football become more ingrained with the zeitgeist that football will just be doomed. And that people will not let their kids play football, so it will evaporate at the high school level, then the college level and eventually the pro game will collapse,” Klosterman said.

“The other argument is that football is so central to America as an institution now and it’s so interlocked with the culture at large, that it’s almost too big to fail. And they will adjust the rules of football and they will adjust the equipment and the way the game is played in order to keep it in a similar position,” he said.

Klosterman sees two other possibilities for the future of football. First is that the sport becomes less popular but more important politically. Fandom would be a person who is displeased with the course our culture as a whole could be headed down. Being a fan of football in the future could be a way to voice opposition to an opinion -- the opinion that everyone is special, deserves a trophy, and violence in sports is bad. The second route would be built on the same belief as the first, except all team sports would eventually disappear.

“A supposedly enlightened culture might not be comfortable with a lot of the ideas that are inherent in team sports. The situation in North Dakota will be no different than anywhere else, although it is possible in one scenario I suggest, that football becomes less popular but more important, it’s possible North Dakota might be one of those pockets where it remains.”

And though it wasn’t written in “But What If We’re Wrong?” Klosterman remains optimistic for the short-term future of NDSU football, the next 25 years or so.

“I think the national profile of the program has been so radically altered that what I’m suggesting is not as old as it seems. I would argue that Carson Wentz, being the second pick overall will be more of a recruiting weapon than the five national championships. Because now NDSU can go to a kid in Texas, or Florida or California and they can say, ‘Look if you want to go to LSU or you want to go to Florida or you want to go to Oklahoma, that’s fine, that’s a great place to be, but you may never get off the bench, however if you come to NDSU and you play and you succeed you can be a first round draft pick,’” he said.

His new book however, is more than talk about football. Klosterman tackles other, bigger topics, like the next great American author, how rock and roll will be remembered, a potential change in the laws of physics, and of course what societies hundreds of years in the future will think of modern-day TV.

“My argument in the book is that, right now we view television as a living, dynamic medium. The criteria we use for what’s good or bad is more taste-based or entertainment value-based. Is it enjoyable or interesting to watch the show? But what I’m discussing is the idea of TV no longer existing, which seems like a very viable thing that could happen with the way technology moves. And in that case people will be looking back at a dead medium …So what people will be looking for in television if it no longer exists is a window into the past almost like they’re being archeologists,” he said.

Kloseterman does make a direct prediction about what shows will meet his criteria, and it’s safe to say they won’t be anything considered reality TV.

“The larger point is those shows don’t look real when you watch them. If you’re flipping around on your television, flipping through channels, and you see a situation comedy and then you flip to a reality show, the situation comedy looks more like reality than the reality programing does. Reality programing paradoxically has adopted a fake appearance, just the way it’s filmed and the way it’s shot on video. It doesn’t seem like authenticity, even though the whole idea is that’s what the goal is,” he said.

“But What If We’re Wrong?” is unlike anything Klosterman has done in the past. Here he talks to a trove of experts in their respective fields. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Talking Heads founder David Byrne, filmmaker Richard Linklater, and author and law professor Jay D. Wexler are a few of the people he interviews for this book.

“I’m fortunate in that this is my ninth book. I’ve written eight books and a few of them have been relatively successful and as a consequence people have seemed pretty interested to talk to me. If I had attempted this when I was 27 there’s no way I could have gotten responses from any of these people. When I was maybe 33 I could have convinced some of them probably not all of them. This time around there were only a few people that didn’t respond to me,” he said. “In a weird way the stakes are low, if you’re wrong about something -- we’re talking about things that will happen when everybody in the book will be dead, everybody quoted in that famous book will be dead before any of these ideas are proven true or false -- people just seem comfortable commenting on a situation where there is no personal downside to being wrong.”

Klosterman also explores deeper thoughts, which is also why his new book is unlike anything else. Simulation theory raises the possibility that we are living in a giant computer simulation. He felt it was time to approach this subject, even though it can be difficult to grasp.

“All I can ever do is write about what is interesting to me at the time of the writing. In my early books I was just sort of unpacking all the ideas that have unconsciously built up in my mind throughout the first 25 years of my life and then at some point I lost interest in doing that. So I shifted toward fiction and creating a reality that didn’t exist. At this point in my life, and I’m sure it will only be temporary, but at the moment what I am interested in is larger questions about reality.”