A few weeks ago, I had some sort of customer service problem with a company. I don’t even remember what it was. I was annoyed and amped up at the perceived error on the part of the company. I went to their website to lodge my complaint, and ended up in a chat with a person who eventually resolved the issue. I was curt. The person on the other end was kind. When I finished the conversation, I was taken aback by the customer service agent’s response. I don’t remember the quote, but it was something like:

“Thank you so much for your kindness. This was truly the most pleasant interaction I’ve had all day. I hope you have a great rest of your day.”

It could have been sarcasm. But I don’t think so. Number one, I suspect companies frown upon their customer service agents being blatantly sarcastic with clients. Number two, though, even though I was frustrated, I was trying to hold myself in check. Brusque? Yes. Outright rude? I don’t think so.

If I am correct that the customer service agent was sincere, think about what that means: People who work in customer service spend their days dealing mostly with people who behave like jerks, such that even basic decency feels like a notable anomaly.

This morning I found myself with some extra time on my hands, and so I decided to entertain myself by picking a fight with Google Gemini. I asked it to appraise one of college sports’ villians du jour, and Gemini predictably responded with an amoral, both-sidesy jumble of nonsense. Paragraph after paragraph of meaningless verbiage. Again, though: I was bored. So I proceeded to argue with the chatbot until it accepted my point of view.

Even though I knew this conversation was stupid, I could feel my adrenaline rushing as I typed. I felt the same pace-around-the-room anxiety I would have felt were I engaged with a non-artifically intelligent person.

A short time later, I found myself unwillingly chatting with yet another bot. I had accidentally signed up for the wrong subscription for an app, and so I wanted to switch plans. There was no option to chat with a customer service agent, and so I had to send an email.

In response, I soon received a very detailed, mildly condescending, and completely unhelpful email listing off a bunch of things that ranged from pitifully obvious at worst to “things a typical user would already know” at best. You’re not going to believe this, but the response had been generated by AI.

Because, I guess, I had too much time on my hands. I responded to the email a couple of times, trying to guide the AI model to actually addressing my particular issue.

I failed.

It was annoying.

The AI chatbot indicated that, at some point, I would be graced with a response from an actual human being, but in the meantime I found myself left with the choice of continuing an increasingly frustrating back-and-forth with a poorly trained chatbot, or cutting my losses and waiting patiently for said human. I chose the latter.

What occurred to me as I was emailing back and forth with the shoddy chatbot is that, if a human were to suddenly enter the chat, my adrenaline and my level of annoyance would already be sky high. Thus, the chances of me being curt, or rude, or even mean to the human customer service agent would start out at a high level. Imagine working in customer service, and every single person you talk to has already spent 20 minutes being pushed around by ineffective chatbots. The person on the other end of the exchange would almost certainly start the conversation in an aggressive posture. The rates of abuse, I suspect, would be quite high.

We live in a world where the effects of de-humanizing language are impossible to ignore. Those of us in the United States live in a country in which people on the other side of the political spectrum are often treated as inherently evil, and inherently worthy of whatever harm comes their way.

Now consider what it means when people who are already awash in dehumanizing language begin to replace many of their human-to-human interactions with human-to-chatbot interactions. When we chat with chatbots, common courtesy seems unnecessary. Rank rudeness is also unnecessary, and yet human nature dictates that many of us (probably most of us) will resort to such language when interacting with ineffective or unhelpful AI. And if this becomes the norm—if screaming into the void of a mindless AI customer service text exchange becomes an everyday occurrence for us, how will we stop ourselves from letting that rudeness seep into our other interactions? More to the point, if we spend much of our time talking with non-humans, won’t this prime us to treat the actual human beings around us as if they, too, are less than human?

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Here’s where things get even weirder, though. One might choose to respond to this conundrum by simply adopting a rule that people should be polite even if they are chatting with a chatbot. I have some philosophical misgivings about applying a term like “polite” to interactions with a computer, but on the other hand, I think such a rule could have positive implications for society.

Yet, there is evidence that the large language models (LLMs) underlying chatbots actually reward rude behavior. A team of investigators from Penn State University constructed a set of 50 multiple-choice questions spanning a range of disciplines, and posed those questions to ChatGPT 4o using a variety of tones. The tones ranged from “very polite” to “very rude” with three gradients of politeness in between. The researchers found the accuracy of ChatGPT’s responses to generally be in the low-80% range. However, they found that the highest accuracy—84.8%—came when the user’s tone was “very rude.” By contrast, “very polite” users were rewarded with responses that were accurate 80.8% of the time. In short: being rude led to moderate increases in accuracy.

Be careful not to anthropromoprhize AI. The better responses are not because the chatbots felt bullied into trying harder. Chatbots, after all, cannot feel. The authors of the paper, Om Dobariya and Akhil Kumar, note that the reasons behind the differences in accuracy likely come down to things like the language the LLM was trained on or the length or complexity of the various prompts.

“After all, the politeness phrase is just a string of words to the LLM, and we don’t know if the emotional payload of the phrase matters to the LLM,” Dobriya and Kumar cautioned.

Indeed. However, perhaps we should be less worried with how the LLM was trained, and more worried about how it is training us. That emotional payload we are deploying may not have an impact on the chatbots with which we interact, but if such conversations train us to be jerks to the actual humans with whom we interact, the impacts can still be harmful and indeed, dangerous.

In Netflix’s 2018 documentary series “Wild, Wild Country,” viewers get a history lesson that is unlikely to be found in any traditional school textbook. The series centers on a controversial Indian guru who, along with his flamboyantly abrasive enforcer, builds a compound in rural Oregon and soon tries to take over the local government. At the time this was happening in the 1980s, the culture clash between the religious group and its flabbergasted neighbors became national news (thanks in part to a poisoning conspiracy). Today, though, the controversy is largely lost to history.

And that’s why the series is so fun to watch. It gives viewers an otherwise impossible look into a wildly absurd—and wildly specific—place and time in history.

Many great documentaries perform a similar feat. Think Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man” or Errol Morris’ “Gates of Heaven.” Even documentaries like Laura Poitras’ “Citizen Four” are premised on the idea of taking the viewer—an outsider—into a place they could not otherwise go.

The new Oscar-nominated documentary “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” takes a decidedly different approach. Yes, it transports the viewer into a place they could not otherwise visit—a Russian school at a time when government propaganda is beginning to intrude on the school’s curriculum. Yet, what makes the film so poignant is that it functions not so much as an inside look designed for outsiders, but rather as a meditation on its own co-director’s outward gaze.

Pavel Talankin was an event coordinator and videographer for a school in the Ural Mountain village of Karabash. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfolds in 2022, the school is increasingly asked to promote the war through scripted lessons and patriotic ceremonies. Not only that, but Talankin is required to film the lessons and upload them to a server so that the government can (theoretically) verify that the school is performing its patriotic duties.

Talankin is scandalized by the requests. He finds them both absurd and horrendous. It is not lost on him that the reason schools are being targeted for this type of messaging is because the young people who graduate will soon be asked to don Russian uniforms and fight.

Talankin begins searching for ways to undermine the government’s efforts. He reaches out to a Russian TV producer looking for stories about how the Ukraine war is affecting the work lives of Russian citizens. The producer reads Talankin’s pitch, but instantly realizes it would never be allowd to air on Russian TV. However, he is intrigued enough to forward it to the American documentarian David Borenstein, who contacts Talankin and suggests they collaborate on a documentary based on Talankin’s footage.

The result is a unique directorial collaboration. Talankin regularly communicated with Borenstein, sending footage and discussing strategy. Given the circumstances, their strategy talks centered both on the structure of the film, and on the safety of its protagonist. In the film’s final moments, we see Talankin saying goodbye, both explicitly and implicitly. He has a final conversation with his mother, who also works at the school and does not realize he is leaving. He coordinates the school’s graduation ceremony, where students give heartfelt goodbyes to their classmates teachers, including Talankin. He takes down posters from his office walls and recounts all of the things he loves about his town. He loves “almost everything” about the town, he says. And then, he flees his homeland to safety.

“Mr. Nobody” is a moving portrait of a heroic dissenter, and an inside look at a country undergoing dramatic social and political change. Yet, the film works because it inverts the traditional outside-in dynamic. Yes, it takes the viewer inside a place the viewer could not otherwise go. But the poignancy of the film is that its insider—Talankin—is doing his work as a message to the outsider. It’s not about an outsider looking in; it’s about an insider looking out.

By connecting with Borenstein (and through Borenstein, the outside world), Talankin gains an audience who is in on the joke. When the school begins receiving lessons that not only script what the teacher teaches, but also the questions students ask, Talankin can look at the camera and know his audience thinks it’s as crazy as he does. When Talankin goes on the roof of the school and kicks over a stand holding the Russian flag, it’s not just a weird act of micro-protest; it’s a performance for a global audience.

It’s impossible to know whether Talankin would have carried out such antics had he not known the footage would eventually be seen by an international audience. However, without an audience of outsiders, the footage would certainly have lost its meaning. It would be lost to time or confiscated as evidence by Russian authorities. Maybe it would simply sit neglected on a Russian server for decades. Or perhaps it would have even found its way into Russian propaganda. In any of those cases, though, the footage would no longer be a protest; it would no longer serve as a wink to a knowing audience.

Moreover, whereas “Wild, Wild Country” is about people who chose to believe in a particular strain of religious ideas, “Mr. Nobody” is about a person who does not drink the proverbial Kool-Aid. He knows what is happening is absurd, and he knows his international audience realizes it’s absurd. Deep down, he hopes his friends and neighbors know this, too, but he also knows that the majority of the people in his hometown favor the war. They even hold a rally in support of it.

“Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” then, is ultimately a story about human connection. Yes, it’s a time capsule of a particular place and a particular time and a particular people and a particular political project. But mostly it’s about the idea that human connection can overcome isolation, even if that connection is only possible through the lens of a camera.

Recently, I got the chance to catch up on “Welcome to Wrexham,” the FX series that follows the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney as they try to revive a storied Welsh soccer club that had been locked in the basement of the English soccer pyramid for more than a decade.

Reynolds and McElhenney bought Wrexham AFC in 2021 and soon began documenting their ownership journey with a film crew. Each season of the resulting television series focuses on a single Wrexham soccer season. Early on, the team was so obscure that one could watch the docuseries season without having any idea how the team had performed during the preceding season. That was a good thing for fans of the show. After all, Reynolds and McElhenney’s stated goal was to elevate the team out of the depths of English soccer, and thus the team’s performance each season became the central tension of the show. However, the American ownership duo has been so successful at their goal—the team now plays in the second-tier Championship league—that fans of the show are facing a peculiar problem. Now that the team plays in a league regularly televised live in the United States, Yankees like me must decide whether to watch matches live, or whether to try to avoid “spoilers” until the next season of “Welcome to Wrexham” comes out. In short: Do we want to be fans of the soccer club? Or fans of the TV show?

All of this got me thinking about another sports-related documentary series I watched recently, Netflix’s “Mr. McMahon,” which tells the story of the pro-wrestling company WWE and its longtime chief executive, Vince McMahon.

Those subjects—the WWE and McMahon—are two separate, but highly intertwined, stories. The McMahon side of the docuseries deals with important issues around McMahon’s alleged behavior and management style. However, in this post I want to focus on the WWE side of the documentary.

What the WWE story makes clear is that fans, and the wrestlers themselves, care passionately about the shows WWE puts on. Each WWE event is driven by a carefully orchestrated story line, even if the exact details of what happens in the ring are sometimes unplanned or unexpected.

Central to those story lines is the concept of “heels.” These are the characters who are chosen to be the villains, the “bad guys.” They make it possible for the good guys to triumph over evil, even though sometimes the good guys later end up becoming heels themselves.

As “Mr. McMahon” shows, wrestling became a major phenomenon in the American entertainment scene, but it has also faced a series of ups and downs. At the moment, the WWE is at a high point. It brought in a record $391.5 million in revenue in the first quarter of last year, which coincided with the debut of its flagship program, “WWE Raw,” on Netflix. In the third quarter of 2025, the WWE’s revenues topped $400 million.

What struck me about “Mr. McMahon” is how little time the series spends on the question that is probably most commonly raised with regard to WWE: Is it real? The docuseries takes for granted that fans of WWE know it’s staged.* The only people fixated on the “Is it real?” question are those who are not fans of the show, and who don’t understand why people watch it.

I remember in high school going to a friend’s house and watching professional wrestling with him and his family. His family loved it; I didn’t get it. I was hung up on “proving” it was fake, and so I missed the point entirely.

The point—what Vince McMahon understood earlier than most others—is that while the matches and their outcomes are important raw materials in producing entertaining sports-related programming, those raw materials can be greatly enhanced by focusing on story lines. It might be exciting for Wrestler A to throw Wrestler B out of the ring and onto a chair, but it is far more exciting if Wrestler A is the hero everyone is rooting for, and Wrestler B is the villain who is finally getting his comeuppance.

While the WWE has never openly advertised that its matches are staged, the league also knows that the means by which the outcomes of its matches are determined are far less important than the way its matches are presented; the story lines matter, the veracity of the matches does not.

The booming sports-media world has learned this lesson, too. It’s not just “Welcome to Wrexham.” Scroll through ESPN’s streaming library and you’ll find a long list of sports docuseries, not to mention an almost endless stream of sports talk shows that spend far more time on the human drama of sports than on strategy or game recaps.

I’ll leave it to the sports writers and TV critics to decide whether all of this is good or bad for sports. Instead, I want to focus on what all this says about sports as a commodity.

McMahon was certainly not the first person to realize that sports is a commodity. It is unlikely that sports broadcasting would have ever become a multitrillion-dollar industry if sports broadcasts were simply fact-based descriptions of on-field action.

However, McMahon was among the first to appreciate—and to exploit—just how cheap a commodity athletic endeavor could be. In his version of commodity exploitation, he took very strong men and women and had them play-act outlandish feats of strength on camera. And that’s all he needed. He did not need to have true fighting; he didn’t need true winners and losers. He just needed a whiff of competition from people who looked strong. From there, he could craft highly compelling television.

“Welcome to Wrexham” and the parade of similar sports docuseries perform a parallel act of resource exploitation, albeit by drilling the well of legitimate athletic competition. These shows invert the traditional sports broadcast: instead of showing all of the plays in a game and then garnishing the broadcast with color commentary and insider insights, these series focus on insider drama and season it with only the most consequential highlights from games. Instead of needing 90 minutes of match play to produce a program, they manage to build an entire sports program with just 3 or 4 minutes of actual play—and sometimes even less than that.

Should we care? Should we be offended? I don’t know. Maybe?

However, I think this helps explain one final phenomenon we are seeing: the rise of the sports influencer. Athletes have long been given lucrative sponsorship deals, but as it becomes clearer and clearer that sports is a cheap commodity, athletes are increasingly beginning to assert their right to exploit the commodity themselves. The most obvious example is college athletes finally demanding payment for the use of their names, images, and likenesses, but this also extends to athletes like the Kelce Brothers and Sophie Cunningham, who have each launched podcasts. Many will see the latter as simply an extension of influencer culture; and it certainly is that. However, what makes athlete influencers unique is that the resource they use to get their ventures off the ground is their high-profile athletic abilities. Like any business, their side careers will succeed or fail based on a variety of factors, including talent, grit, and business savvy; but their seed capital is their athletic performance.

There’s a mid-sized coffee chain here in the upper midwest that makes a variety of coffee-themed drinks, almost none of which contain the discernable taste of coffee. It’s very popular, though. I joke that it’s a coffee shop for coffee lovers that don’t actually like the taste of coffee.

As with WWE, since “Welcome to Wrexham” debuted, there have been plenty of news articles making archaeological attempts to discern which facets of the show are “real,” and which are contrived. However, such questions imply that, if it turned out that the behind-the-scenes conflicts or dramas depicted on the show were embellished, viewers might tune out. I don’t think that’s true.

Rather, “Welcome to Wrexham” is a reflection of the reality that sports media does not need to have much to do with sports in order to be profitable. “Welcome to Wrexham” is simply an example of a sports-themed television show that can attract “sports lovers,” even if those “sports lovers” don’t actually like watching sports.

*That’s not to say the physicality of the show is entirely scripted; the series makes clear that accidents do happen, people don’t always follow the script, and performers suffer real and serious injuries on a relatively frequent occasion.

When OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded more than 3,000 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean back in 2023, the tragedy was almost impossible to wrap one’s mind around. Yet, as subsequent news stories and a new Netflix documentary make clear, the story of the Titan’s failure is not particularly unique. It’s actually an age-old story: a hubristic would-be titan of industry just cannot bring himself to accept his limits. Eventually, the limits catch up with him. And in this case, with four of his passengers.

That’s essentially the plot of “Titan: The OceanGate Submersible Disaster,” which debuted on Neflix in June. The film was directed by Mark Monroe, who is perhaps best known for his work as a producer on the 2017 sports-doping documentary “Icarus.”

The film is powerful because of the firsthand accounts of several former OceanGate employees. Over and over again, they tell the story of a chief executive, Stockton Rush, who refused to acknowledge critical safety concerns, even as a parade of engineers and executives quit or were fired after warning Rush that the submersible was likely to fail.

The documentary begins in the most ominous way possible. Rush, along with the veteran submarine pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and three paying “mission specialists” are bolted into the submarine, about to embark on their journey to explore the ruins of the Titanic. Before the hull is sealed, Rush warns his passengers that they might hear alarms as the ship descends. If they do, he says, they should not be, uh… alarmed.

“So, if you hear an alarm, just don’t worry about it,” he says. “The best thing you can do is don’t do anything.”

If Rush’s foolish disclaimer sets the tone for the documentary, the film’s heartbeat is the sound of carbon fibers popping on the ship’s hull, an ominous sign of the Titan’s looming destruction heard throughout the film. The ship’s hull was made of carbon fiber, a noel (and cheaper) material for such applications. Throughout the film, tests show that when the Titan (and models thereof) is lowered into the ocean, fibers start to snap, with a staccato mix of pops and blasts. The sound is audible because engineers installed an early warning system of sorts—a series of microphones around the hull that could sense breaks in the carbon fiber. The popping of one, two, or even 10 of the thin fibers was not necessarily a major concern. But the documentary shows how the popping got worse and worse as the submersible descended, foreshadowing its all-too-predictable demise.

I mentioned above that the paying passengers on the ship were referred to as “mission specialists,” a comically aggrandizing title for a passenger. The reason that term was used, a former staffer disclosed, is because marine regulations have strict rules for what passengers can and cannot be made to do; calling passengers “mission specialists” was Rush’s way around that regulation.

That’s not the only way Rush allegedly bypassed regulatory requirements. The submarine apparently was not flagged, theoretically putting it outside any country’s regulatory jurisdiction. It also was not “classed,” meaning it was not inspected by a third-party safety inspector. When a staff member quit and filed a whistleblower complaint, Rush allegedly told a colleague that it would be nothing for him to pay $50,000 to ruin the staffer’s life.

Rush, as we learn in the documentary, is born of generational wealth. It’s impossible to know how much Rush’s wealth influenced his’s leadership style, but the film makes a strong case that Rush loved the power associated with his wealth, and that he had insufficient faith in both safety regulations and in the laws of science itself. A Coast Guard report issued this summer after the film’s release lays the failure squarely at the feet of Rush, arguing that his management style and infidelity to safety protocols created a toxic—and ultimately deadly—workplace environment.

As easy as it is to fault Rush for his hubris, one must also acknolwedge that plenty of people with his same attitudes are, in fact, seen as successes in our society. The film suggests Rush wanted to be like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, and many of the criticisms leveled against Rush were similarly leveled against those two “titans.”

Yet, while Titan certainly takes Rush to task, it also highlights the dangers associated with a toxic work environment. Our society sometimes romanticizes the idea of the erratic, demanding boss; however, when an organization’s leadership is unwilling or unable to hear the concerns of its workers, its success will always be limited.