As Stardew Valley approaches its milestone 10th anniversary, creator Eric Barone—better known as ConcernedApe—finds himself in a rare position in the gaming world. What started as a solo project intended to be a better version of Harvest Moon has evolved into a global phenomenon, selling nearly 50 million copies and fostering a community that spans from die-hard modders to casual mobile players. In a candid interview with IGN, Barone looks back on a decade that has consumed his entire adult life, reflecting on his growth from a "scrappy amateur" to the leader of a small, dedicated team.
The Evolution of the Developer
The most profound shift in the last ten years for Barone hasn’t been his bank account or his fame, but his transition from total isolation to collaboration. When Stardew Valley launched in 2016, Barone was a true solo developer, having built every asset, composed every song, and written every line of code alone. Today, he works with a team to handle the massive business side of the franchise, from multiplayer infrastructure to translations into 12 languages. Despite this success, he remarkably still describes himself as an "amateur," a mindset he maintains to ensure he never stops striving for improvement. He views this "indie soul"—with its occasional rough edges—as the key to the game’s authentic character.
A Living, Breathing World
Stardew Valley is no longer just a "baby" Barone is incubating; he describes it as a child that has grown up and left the house. The game has become an entity external to him, shaped as much by the fans and modders as by his own updates. He notes that the physical human connection at events like the "Symphony of the Night" concert tour—seeing 5,000 fans in a sold-out venue—was what finally made the game’s impact feel real. This sense of responsibility to his players is what keeps him coming back to the Valley, even when he feels the pull of new projects like his upcoming game, Haunted Chocolatier.
Looking Toward the Future: Update 1.7 and Beyond
While many expected Barone to walk away after the massive 1.6 update, he confirmed that work on version 1.7 is already underway. He teased that the update will include two new marriage candidates—set to be revealed on the official anniversary—and long-requested improvements to how children function in the game. He also dropped a bombshell for dataminers: there is still a secret message hidden in the game's artwork that has never been found, one that is so obscure it may never be discovered.
Barone admits he struggles with the balance of adding new content without making the game feel "bloated." He often contemplates his purpose, wondering if he will work on the Valley for the rest of his life. Yet, as long as people are still playing, he feels an inspiration to keep digging deeper into the existing characters, adding layers of dialogue and new festival variants. For Barone, Stardew Valley has become his primary way of connecting with humanity, a destiny he intends to maximize for as long as the community remains.
TOKYO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A plan to build a synthetic diamond plant in the United States is a prime prospect in Japan's $550-billion investment package, as the allies push to expand production of a material vital to chip and high-precision manufacturing, sources said.
It could be among the first batch of projects, details of which Reuters is reporting for the first time, set to be unveiled ahead of a U.S. visit by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi planned as early as March, the two sources said.
Both declined to be identified as the matter is private.
"The United States wants to accelerate domestic production of synthetic diamonds," one of the sources said. "By involving Japanese companies, Washington hopes to build a U.S.–Japan supply chain that does not rely on China."
China's recent moves to put export controls on some artificial diamonds has underscored the strategic importance of the material, most of which is now produced in China.
The synthetic diamond project involves Element Six, part of De Beers Group, the world's leading diamond company, the source added.
The news comes as Japan accelerates efforts to finalise projects under the initiative agreed as part of Tokyo's deal with Washington to lower tariffs on Japanese exports.
Its investment package would include equity, loans and loan guarantees from state-owned agencies Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI).
At the same time, President Donald Trump is raising tariffs on South Korea, which it accuses of dragging its feet on adopting a similar agreement reached last year.
Also likely to figure in the first batch of projects is a large-scale power-generation project, involving Japanese industrial conglomerate Hitachi Ltd (6501.T), opens new tab, the sources said.
The deal value of the projects was not immediately known.
Japan's trade ministry declined to comment on the projects under discussion, saying it was in talks with the United States to swiftly put together the project pipeline, but nothing had been decided.
Element Six said there were no formal agreements currently in place regarding any potential projects. Hitachi said it was engaged in discussions with the Japanese and U.S. governments, but declined further comment.
The U.S. commerce department and its Japan embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside business hours.
A major infrastructure project involving construction of a data centre linked to SoftBank Group (9984.T), opens new tab also remains a finalist, Reuters reported this month.
One of the hardest known materials, diamond is crucial to high-precision manufacturing.
It is used for ultra-fine polishing of semiconductors, machining hard metals and ceramics in quantum devices, and dissipating heat in advanced electronic systems.
Artificial diamonds also have dual-use military applications, in turning out munitions and radar components.
In the rapidly evolving world of digital media, few products have managed to achieve the longevity and cultural dominance of Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V). Initially released in 2013 by Rockstar Games, the title was heralded as a technical marvel of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. Yet, more than a decade later, it remains a juggernaut in the industry. Recent financial disclosures from parent company Take-Two Interactive reveal that the game has reached an staggering milestone of 225 million units sold, further cementing its place as the second best-selling video game of all time, trailing only the sandbox phenomenon Minecraft.
The scale of this achievement is difficult to overstate. To put it into perspective, the entire Grand Theft Auto franchise has now surpassed 465 million lifetime sales. This means that GTA V alone accounts for nearly half of the total sales for a series that spans seven main titles and numerous expansions over nearly thirty years. Its continued performance helped Take-Two Interactive beat its third-quarter financial forecasts, proving that even as the world waits for the next chapter in the saga, the "old guard" is still more than capable of carrying the weight of a multi-billion-dollar corporation.
A Decade of Dominance: The Three-Generation Strategy
The secret to the longevity of GTA V lies in its unprecedented cross-generational appeal. Rockstar Games executed a masterclass in product lifecycle management by releasing the game across three distinct console generations. It began as a swan song for the PS3 and Xbox 360, transitioned into a definitive experience for the PS4 and Xbox One, and was eventually "Expanded and Enhanced" for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Each iteration brought technical refinements—higher resolutions, faster frame rates, and denser traffic—but the core appeal remained the same. Players were drawn to the sun-soaked, satirical landscape of Los Santos and the interplay between its three protagonists: Michael, Franklin, and Trevor. However, while the single-player campaign was the initial draw, it was the persistent online component, Grand Theft Auto Online, that turned a successful game into an eternal service.
The Engine of Growth: GTA Online
The 225 million sales figure is not just a reflection of people wanting to play the story mode; it is a testament to the community built within GTA Online. By providing a constant stream of free content updates—ranging from elaborate multi-stage heists to underground racing circuits and nightclub management—Rockstar created a digital playground where players could live out their criminal fantasies.
This "live service" model transformed GTA V from a one-time purchase into a recurring revenue stream. Through the sale of Shark Cards (in-game currency) and the more recent GTA+ subscription service, Take-Two Interactive has been able to monetize the game's massive player base long after the initial retail transaction. This financial stability has allowed Rockstar the luxury of time—a luxury they have used to spend nearly a decade developing the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI.
Take-Two’s Financial Fortitude
In their most recent quarterly earnings report, Take-Two Interactive exceeded analyst expectations, largely on the back of the Grand Theft Auto and NBA 2K franchises. Despite a broader cooling in the gaming market and several high-profile delays in the industry, the "Grand Theft Auto" effect remains a reliable safety net.
The company reported that GTA V sold an additional five million units in the last quarter alone. For a ten-year-old game to move units at that pace is statistically anomalous; most "AAA" titles see the vast majority of their sales in the first twelve months before falling into the "bargain bin" phase. GTA V, by contrast, maintains a premium presence on digital storefronts and frequently tops the monthly charts in both the US and Europe.
The Road to GTA VI: A Legacy in the Making
As impressive as the 225 million milestone is, it serves as a daunting benchmark for the future. The announcement of Grand Theft Auto VI, set for a 2025 release, sent shockwaves through the internet, with its debut trailer breaking YouTube records within hours. The industry is now watching to see if the sequel can possibly live up to the commercial shadow cast by its predecessor.
The success of GTA V has fundamentally changed how games are made and sold. It proved that a high-quality open-world experience could be maintained indefinitely if the foundation was strong enough. It also highlighted the shift toward digital ecosystems; many of those 225 million sales were digital downloads, a medium that barely existed in its current form when the franchise first moved into 3D with GTA III in 2001.
A Cultural Icon
Beyond the spreadsheets and sales data, Grand Theft Auto V has become a permanent fixture of pop culture. It has been the subject of academic studies, political debates, and thousands of hours of streaming content on platforms like Twitch. Its satirical take on American life—targeting everything from celebrity obsession to government surveillance—remains as relevant (and biting) today as it was in 2013.
As the franchise total hits 465 million, the "GTA" brand is no longer just a series of games; it is an entertainment sovereign state. With 225 million copies in the wild, it is likely that someone, somewhere on Earth, is currently pulling off a heist in Los Santos at this very moment. Whether it can reach the 250 million mark before the sequel arrives is no longer a question of "if," but "when."
In 2022, the physics Nobel prize was awarded for experimental work showing that the quantum world must break some of our fundamental intuitions about how the universe works.
Many look at those experiments and conclude that they challenge “locality” — the intuition that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact. And indeed, a mysterious connection between distant particles would be one way to explain these experimental results.
Others instead think the experiments challenge “realism” — the intuition that there’s an objective state of affairs underlying our experience. After all, the experiments are only difficult to explain if our measurements are thought to correspond to something real. Either way, many physicists agree about what’s been called “the death by experiment” of local realism.
But what if both of these intuitions can be saved, at the expense of a third? A growing group of experts think that we should abandon instead the assumption that present actions can’t affect past events. Called “retrocausality”, this option claims to rescue both locality and realism.
What is causation anyway? Let’s start with the line everyone knows: correlation is not causation. Some correlations are causation, but not all. What’s the difference?
Consider two examples. (1) There’s a correlation between a barometer needle and the weather – that’s why we learn about the weather by looking at the barometer. But no one thinks that the barometer needle is causing the weather. (2) Drinking strong coffee is correlated with a raised heart rate. Here it seems right to say that the first is causing the second.
The difference is that if we “wiggle” the barometer needle, we won’t change the weather. The weather and the barometer needle are both controlled by a third thing, the atmospheric pressure – that’s why they are correlated. When we control the needle ourselves, we break the link to the air pressure, and the correlation goes away.
But if we intervene to change someone’s coffee consumption, we’ll usually change their heart rate, too. Causal correlations are those that still hold when we wiggle one of the variables.
These days, the science of looking for these robust correlations is called “causal discovery”. It’s a big name for a simple idea: finding out what else changes when we wiggle things around us.
In ordinary life, we usually take for granted that the effects of a wiggle are going to show up later than the wiggle itself. This is such a natural assumption that we don’t notice that we’re making it.
But nothing in the scientific method requires this to happen, and it is easily abandoned in fantasy fiction. Similarly in some religions, we pray that our loved ones are among the survivors of yesterday’s shipwreck, say. We’re imagining that something we do now can affect something in the past. That’s retrocausality.
The quantum threat to locality (that distant objects need a physical mediator to interact) stems from an argument by the Northern Ireland physicist John Bell in the 1960s. Bell considered experiments in which two hypothetical physicists, Alice and Bob, each receive particles from a common source. Each chooses one of several measurement settings, and then records a measurement outcome. Repeated many times, the experiment generates a list of results.
Bell realised that quantum mechanics predicts that there will be strange correlations (now confirmed) in this data. They seemed to imply that Alice’s choice of setting has a subtle “nonlocal” influence on Bob’s outcome, and vice versa – even though Alice and Bob might be light years apart. Bell’s argument is said to pose a threat to Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which is an essential part of modern physics.
But that’s because Bell assumed that quantum particles don’t know what measurements they are going to encounter in the future. Retrocausal models propose that Alice’s and Bob’s measurement choices affect the particles back at the source. This can explain the strange correlations, without breaking special relativity.
In recent work, we’ve proposed a simple mechanism for the strange correlation – it involves a familiar statistical phenomenon called Berkson’s bias (see our popular summary here).
There’s now a thriving group of scholars who work on quantum retrocausality. But it’s still invisible to some experts in the wider field. It gets confused for a different view called “superdeterminism”.
Superdeterminism agrees with retrocausality that measurement choices and the underlying properties of the particles are somehow correlated.
But superdeterminism treats it like the correlation between the weather and the barometer needle. It assumes there’s some mysterious third thing – a “superdeterminer” – that controls and correlates both our choices and the particles, the way atmospheric pressure controls both the weather and the barometer.
So superdeterminism denies that measurement choices are things we are free to wiggle at will, they are predetermined. Free wiggles would break the correlation, just as in the barometer case. Critics object that superdeterminism thus undercuts core assumptions necessary to undertake scientific experiments. They also say that it means denying free will, because something is controlling both the measurement choices and particles.
These objections don’t apply to retrocausality. Retrocausalists do scientific causal discovery in the usual free, wiggly way. We say it is folk who dismiss retrocausality who are forgetting the scientific method, if they refuse to follow the evidence where it leads.
What is the evidence for retrocausality? Critics ask for experimental evidence, but that’s the easy bit: the relevant experiments just won a Nobel Prize. The tricky part is showing that retrocausality gives the best explanation of these results.
We’ve mentioned the potential to remove the threat to Einstein’s special relativity. That’s a pretty big hint, in our view, and it’s surprising it has taken so long to explore it. The confusion with superdeterminism seems mainly to blame.
In addition, we and others have argued that retrocausality makes better sense of the fact that the microworld of particles doesn’t care about the difference between past and future.
We don’t mean that it is all plain sailing. The biggest worry about retrocausation is the possibility of sending signals to the past, opening the door to the paradoxes of time travel. But to make a paradox, the effect in the past has to be measured. If our young grandmother can’t read our advice to avoid marrying grandpa, meaning we wouldn’t come to exist, there’s no paradox. And in the quantum case, it’s well known that we can never measure everything at once.
Still, there’s work to do in devising concrete retrocausal models that enforce this restriction that you can’t measure everything at once. So we’ll close with a cautious conclusion. At this stage, it’s retrocausality that has the wind in its sails, so hull down towards the biggest prize of all: saving locality and realism from “death by experiment”.
Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has warned that AI risks becoming a speculative bubble unless its use spreads beyond big tech companies and wealthy economies.
Nadella on Tuesday said that the long-term success of the fast-developing technology would depend on it being used by a broad range of industries as well as on uptake outside of the developed world.
“For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread,” said Nadella. He noted that a “tell-tale sign of if it’s a bubble” would be if only tech groups were benefiting from the rise of AI, rather than companies in other sectors.
However, Nadella said he was confident that AI would prove to be transformative across industries, such as helping to develop new drugs.
“I’m much more confident that this is a technology that will, in fact, build on the rails of cloud and mobile, diffuse faster, and bend the productivity curve, and bring local surplus and economic growth all around the world,” he said.
Nadella’s comments came as part of a talk with BlackRock chief Larry Fink on the first day of the World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos, kicking off the first of several speeches by tech executives, including Google DeepMind chief Sir Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.
A growing body of data from tech companies, including Microsoft, has shown a global divide in AI adoption rates, pointing to productivity benefits and work applications being concentrated in richer developed countries.
Nadella also reiterated his view that the future of AI adoption would not rely on one dominant model provider, which has driven the tech giant’s decision to work with several AI groups, such as Anthropic and xAI, as well as OpenAI.
Microsoft gained an early advantage in AI through its $14bn bet on OpenAI, which gave the software group unique access to the ChatGPT maker’s technology and first claim on its data centre contracts.
But after restructuring its partnership with Sam Altman’s start-up in October, Microsoft has dropped exclusivity over its data centre needs and will lose exclusive access to its research and models in the early 2030s.
Nadella said companies would be able to take advantage of multiple models, including open-source ones or even building their own models using a technique called “distillation” to produce smaller, cheaper versions of powerful models.
“So the [intellectual property] of any application or any firm is, how do you use all these models with context engineering or your data?” Nadella said. “As long as firms can answer that question, they’re gonna be getting ahead.”
OXFORD, Miss. -- They came in droves, speeding into the parking lot of the tiny University-Oxford one-terminal airport, to say a final goodbye to Lane Kiffin.
They offered hundreds of one-finger salutes, almost in unison, and shouted expletives at Kiffin, who announced Sunday he was officially leaving Ole Miss for LSU.
From offensive coordinator Charlie Weis Jr. to Lane's ex-wife Layla, anyone who dared step foot on the two private planes sent from Baton Rouge received nothing but vitriol from spurned Ole Miss fans who so desperately wanted to believe Kiffin when he said he had changed and found happiness in their small Mississippi college town. It was mostly college-aged young men decked out in New Balances, but there were also multiple children, including one infant wrapped in a blanket and sucking on a pacifier. It's never too early, after all, to teach your children it just means more.
Never has there been anything like it, fans letting loose all their anger and disappointment at a man who had won 11 of his 12 regular-season games this year and had the Rebels all but guaranteed to make the College Football Playoff. Of course, never had a coach left a team with a real chance to win a national championship, still, either.
How could Kiffin leave now? How could he destroy so much hard-earned goodwill, from the rock bottom of being fired at the tarmac in 2013 to a man the Ole Miss fanbase and Oxford community loved and embraced as their hero?
To understand how we got to Sunday's wild scene in Oxford, CBS Sports spoke with numerous sources with knowledge of the behind-the-scenes decision-making process that ultimately led to Kiffin becoming the next LSU football coach.
The drama, coincidentally enough, cranked up into overdrive on a previous Oxford airport experience.
That was when a private plane carrying multiple members of the Kiffin family, including Layla Kiffin, was spotted arriving in Baton Rouge on Nov. 17th. It became a major national storyline, left Ole Miss administrators deeply uncomfortable about their head coach's future intentions, and exposed what had been in the works for weeks.
Kiffin and his representation had privately been engaging with three potential suitors for weeks at this point. By the weekend of Ole Miss-Florida (Nov. 15), Kiffin knew he could stay at Ole Miss or leave for either Florida or LSU. Both the rival SEC suitors had made clear by that point that Kiffin was their No. 1 target and they were willing to make him one of the highest-paid coaches in college football.
It was then that Lane told his family members, including his son Knox, that it was time to take trips to Gainesville and Baton Rouge. In the lead-up to those visits, various factions and voices pulled Lane in different directions. There were some in his ear, including CAA super agent Jimmy Sexton, telling him that LSU offered the best professional opportunities. Others believed Florida gave him the best mix of professional and personal happiness.
There was, frankly, a lot to like about Florida for Kiffin. He was a huge Steve Spurrier fan and wore a visor in honor of the Head Ball Coach. His ex-wife Layla's father, John Reaves, was a legendary former Florida quarterback. If the Kiffins all moved to Gainesville, Knox, a rising star quarterback at Oxford High School, could even play high school football at the same high school, Buchholz, his mother attended.
Kiffin had long been interested in the Florida job, even trying and failing to get in the mix back in 2021 when Florida instead hired Louisiana coach Billy Napier. After Florida fired Napier on Oct. 19 after a 22-23 record, it finally set up a potential marriage between Kiffin and the Gators.
There was only one problem: the first conversation between Kiffin and Florida AD Scott Stricklin did not go well, according to multiple sources with knowledge of how Kiffin perceived the call. At the time, Florida was the biggest job available and had the leverage to dictate some of its terms. That included wanting a general manager with an NFL background who wouldn't report directly to Kiffin. This was a non-starter for Kiffin, who strongly believes in the abilities of Ole Miss general manager Billy Glasscock, and had concerns about that setup. It got the weeks-long pursuit off to an awkward start from Kiffin's perspective, though Florida continued to aggressively pursue the Ole Miss coach.
(Florida announced Sunday it had hired former Jacksonville Jaguars general manager Dave Caldwell in conjunction with its hiring of Tulane head coach Jon Sumrall.)
There was something just beneath the surface, too. Multiple sources had long cast doubt on Stricklin's desire to ever hire Kiffin, a brilliant offensive mind with a penchant for stirring up drama. There was a reason, after all, that his mother used to call him "Helicopter" growing up.
"He thrives on fucking with people," one long-time friend said. "You cannot begin to understand how much he enjoys that part of it."
Stricklin, a more buttoned-up personality, had preferred Napier's no-nonsense approach over Kiffin's antics the last time around.
With the Florida booster base rallying around pursuing Kiffin, Stricklin did his due diligence and started vetting the Ole Miss coach before firing Napier. The biggest question he posed to those who knew Kiffin well was whether Lane had really changed and grown up. The answers Stricklin got made him comfortable enough to heavily pursue him as the next Florida head coach.
Still, Kiffin was well aware that he wasn't Stricklin's cup of tea, and the feeling was mutual. It was the kind of thing that could have possibly been overcome if there were no other options, but Ole Miss all but allowed him to do whatever he wanted in Oxford and kept giving him more and more resources to push the program forward. "He was never told no," one source said. Kiffin was concerned about Stricklin meddling and how they would mesh, later telling confidants he had a "weird vibe" about the situation.
And then came LSU.
Kiffin delighted in beating Brian Kelly and LSU earlier this season, but even he may not have known what it would lead to.
When LSU fired Kelly on Oct. 26th and later AD Scott Woodward, it became the story of college football. With Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry's involvement in both Kelly's and Woodward's dismissals, it signaled to some that LSU lacked much-needed alignment and could be subject to the governor's future whims, potentially hurting its ability to attract a top candidate.
Kiffin wasn't one of those people, however. In fact, he knew that if Woodward had remained the athletic director, he was very unlikely to get the LSU job, according to multiple sources. Woodward had told different people he wasn't the biggest Kiffin fan.
New athletic director Verge Ausberry, long a Woodward deputy, didn't share those feelings. The initial conversation with LSU, especially in contrast to the one he had with Stricklin and Florida, couldn't have gone better for Kiffin.
As one source familiar with the conversation described, LSU's pitch was: "Coach, we love you, we love what you've done. Whatever it is you do, however it is you do it, we just want you to pick that up, bring it here, we'll fund it and let's go."
"Music to his ears," is how Kiffin received the pitch.
Some in Kiffin's camp believe that had Florida made that same pitch right out of the gate, he could have ended up in Gainesville instead. And had Stricklin moved on from Napier a year earlier, as he considered before bringing him back for the 2025 season, multiple people believe Lane would have jumped at it following a 10-3 season that just missed the playoff cut.
Adding to LSU's momentum came a pitch directly from Louisiana Governor Landry, according to multiple sources. It was a productive early November call for both sides. It made Landry an enthusiastic supporter of LSU's all-in pursuit of Kiffin, which included a seven-year deal with an average salary of more than $13 million and an escalator, should Kiffin win a national title, that would make him the highest-paid coach in the country. Landry had previously complained about Kelly's $54 million buyout and initially vowed that LSU wouldn't issue a contract like that again.
After the Kiffin family visit to Baton Rouge went well, there was considerable optimism on LSU's side that they would swipe Lane out of Oxford. One plugged-in source even told CBS Sports that week, while nothing was officially done, that the most significant questions were about public relations and an exit strategy out of Ole Miss, not whether he'd be LSU's next coach. It was "very delicate with the Ole Miss side," the source said, and Kiffin was "trying to thread the needle" to be able to take the LSU job and still coach Ole Miss in the playoff.
Kiffin never explicitly told Ole Miss he was leaving, though. In fact, multiple conversations between Ole Miss's football coach and athletic director Keith Carter led the athletics director to believe he'd stay.
It was what made trying to predict what Kiffin would do so difficult for even those who knew him best. He could tell one person one thing and another the complete opposite. In recent weeks, there were days his staff was all but sure he would leave for LSU and then the next day Lane would talk about how good they had it in Oxford. Even those confident Kiffin would leave Ole Miss would frequently offer the caveat of him all but accepting the Auburn job in 2022, only to back out at the last minute.
The Ole Miss administration, including chancellor Glenn Boyce, did everything in its power to keep Lane in Oxford. They were willing to match salary offers that he got elsewhere. They were committed to maintaining a competitive salary pool to attract and retain the best assistants. They believed a national championship was possible at Ole Miss and just wanted Lane to believe it, too.
He ultimately could never get there, unable to resist the siren call of a "blue blood." Kiffin didn't believe he'd get a premier job again, according to those who know him well, not after he crashed and burned at USC. He had tried and failed over the years to get numerous big jobs that opened up, including Florida, Miami, Texas A&M and Alabama, but could never get traction. He seemingly had too much baggage for elite jobs, which preferred safer hires over the unpredictable Lane.
When he suddenly had two of the best jobs in the country, Florida and LSU, fighting over him, he couldn't resist. It seemed to color the way he viewed his current job, too, even though he publicly said he loved Ole Miss. He'd privately complain about the fanbase and whether the program's recent success was sustainable, especially compared to more historically successful programs like Florida and LSU. He locked in on what he thought were disappointing home crowds, telling some around him that didn't happen in Baton Rouge and Gainesville.
He convinced himself that Ole Miss offered no more security than any other SEC job, including the two pursuing him, which had just fired their coaches after less than four seasons. He brought up the corollary to Kentucky coach Mark Stoops, who was beloved there for exceeding expectations at a typically extremely challenging job. Stoops had done so well at Kentucky that he even came close to getting the Texas A&M job in 2023 -- the same one Lane tried and failed to get in the mix for -- but trustees reportedly killed the deal.
Two years after almost getting the A&M job, Kentucky fired Stoops on Monday after a couple of disappointing seasons.
Kiffin believed the same could happen to him at Ole Miss if he went 7-5 or 6-6 in consecutive seasons. If he stayed and passed up the LSU job now, he said he'd risk becoming Mark Stoops and missing his chance at a big job.
Ole Miss did its best to dissuade Kiffin from this notion. For one, as they told him, he had never won fewer than eight games in a season when you excluded the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season. He averaged 10 wins a season, Ole Miss administrators explained to Kiffin, so why would he ever be worried about losing his job? The fanbase loved him, and he was the face of pins, t-shirts, and plenty of other memorabilia. Even his dog, Juice Kiffin, had become an unofficial mascot of the football program. He had more job security than any coach in the country, they reasoned with him.
But it never clicked for Kiffin the way Ole Miss hoped. All the talk about having a statue at Ole Miss one day never moved him. He was getting restless, even telling one confidant before the season he felt he was "ready for change." One Ole Miss booster, who liked Kiffin and got to know him well during his time in Oxford, said of Lane: "He needs something to chase. Once you have conquered all and there is nothing left to chase, it's time to go."
That time had come for Kiffin. He was ready to move on to greener pastures in Louisiana. He desperately wanted to win a national championship like his mentors Nick Saban and Pete Carroll, and believed LSU offered him a better chance to do so than Ole Miss. He had been enamored with LSU for years, believing it was an incredible job with a fertile recruiting base and a state that only had to support one Power Four team, unlike Mississippi or Florida.
There was only one issue: Kiffin still wanted to coach Ole Miss in the playoff.
Weeks before Kiffin officially left for LSU, sources told CBS Sports that if Ole Miss was convinced that its coach was leaving, the school wouldn't let him in the playoff. It wasn't a card it wanted to play, but with the early signing period starting Dec. 3 and the transfer portal window opening Jan. 2, the school could not afford to start a coaching search in January if Kiffin was leaving.
It created an increasingly tenuous situation between a man who wanted to have his cake and eat it, too, and a school that had no interest in letting him do so. For weeks, it bubbled beneath the surface with both parties hoping it wouldn't come to a head. If he had left a year earlier it wouldn't have been an issue, but wildly overachieving with Division-II quarterback transfer Trinidad Chambliss and a team picked to finish 7th in the SEC made an exit that much harder.
"His own success has made his own position so untenable," one source said leading into the Egg Bowl.
It finally happened on Saturday, during a meeting between Kiffin, Carter and Boyce at the chancellor's house. It was then that Ole Miss finally, definitively knew Kiffin was leaving, after weeks of wishy-washy statements and noncommittal answers about committing to the school long-term. With Kiffin's mind made up, Ole Miss was ready to move on.
The Ole Miss coach wasn't going to leave for Baton Rouge without a fight, though. In a conversation described as tense, Kiffin didn't want to back down from his desire to coach the team through the postseason. When Ole Miss showed no interest in allowing him to do so, Kiffin, according to sources, threatened to take the offensive staff with him immediately if Carter and Boyce didn't relent. They held firm; Kiffin would not be coaching the team in the playoff.
As word of Kiffin's tactics spread, multiple Ole Miss football players confronted him in his office Sunday about it. Kiffin refused to directly answer whether he had told his on-field offensive staffers that if they didn't get on the plane with him to Baton Rouge the next day, they wouldn't have a spot on his LSU staff.
"I'm not making them go," Kiffin told the players. "They can do whatever they want."
Even after the Saturday night meeting that made clear Kiffin was leaving for LSU and wouldn't be coaching the team moving forward, he was still pushing hard on Sunday to Carter and others to allow him to do so. He believed down to the very end he would eventually win out and get what he wanted. It wasn't until Ole Miss informed Kiffin that it was moving forward with defensive coordinator Pete Golding as its coach that he finally relented and accepted his fate.
He did not attend a team meeting, at the school's request, instead packing up his office as Carter introduced Golding as the program's next head coach. There were cheers and excitement for Golding, a well-regarded defensive mind and the best recruiter on Kiffin's staff.
As Golding feverishly worked to hold on to as many Ole Miss staffers as possible, Kiffin made his way to the airport. He was still upset he wouldn't coach the team, even calling out Carter in a prepared statement. While he claimed the team asked Carter to allow him to keep coaching -- and he did have supporters on the team in that regard -- Ole Miss sources strongly pushed back on the notion it was a widespread feeling. Multiple players had become frustrated with Kiffin's indecision overshadowing the team's accomplishments, according to sources, and were ready to move on. Some even told the Ole Miss administration they cared more about whether their position coaches were staying than Kiffin at that point.
Kiffin took many of those coaches with him on the plane including his brother Chris, Weis Jr., co-offensive coordinator Joe Cox and receivers coach George McDonald. Days ahead of the early signing period, Kiffin took general manager Billy Glasscock and senior director of player personnel Mike Williams to LSU, too. Kiffin on Monday sent out one of his famously cryptic tweets that included an easter egg: The flag of Trinidad, which of course could be interpreted to mean something regarding Ole Miss QB Trinidad Chambliss, who has filed a waiver for eligibility in 2026.
Quarterback portal dominoes aside, Kiffin alone was a massive coup for LSU, which beat out two rivals for him. The Tigers' brass believed they had a coach worthy of following in the footsteps of Nick Saban, Les Miles and Ed Orgeron in bringing more national championships to Baton Rouge. With multiple police motorcycles guiding him through the city, Kiffin arrived in Baton Rouge like a conquering hero to a throng of celebrating fans.
But after weeks of drama enveloped the Ole Miss program over Kiffin's antics, overshadowing the best season in program history, even one LSU source expressed a tinge of concern. Kiffin had already infamously been the first coach fired in between a semifinal and national championship as Nick Saban did back in 2017, and now he became the first head coach to be pushed out before coaching his team in the playoff.
"I don't know that his drama is going to go well here at LSU," the source said. "They want it now, but I don't think they'll like the drama."
More than 300 miles away in Oxford, a wild scene showcased what happens when the drama that felt so fun for so long finally turned ugly. A man once held up as a demigod was now a fanbase's biggest villain.
Kathryn Nicolai has gotten really, really good at putting people to sleep. Getting a good night’s sleep has always been something of a superpower for her, so it’s only natural that she built a business around helping other people do it too.
“I always say, I sleep like it’s my job,” she says, laughing.
Nicolai describes herself as an architect of coziness. Her office, with its enormous lounge chair and dangling mobiles and strings of fairy lights, is practically a temple to the feeling.
“If I can make any part of my life feel softer or cuter, I’m going to do it,” she says.
Once a yoga teacher, Nicolai is now the founder of the Nothing Much Happens empire, a podcast, book, and general storytelling machine that helps put millions of Americans to sleep as quickly as possible.
But how did a business based on telling bedtime stories to adults take off?
Nicolai, who will launch an app and release a second book next year, never imagined she’d be a professional writer. It wasn’t until her early 30s, when a close friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer, that she began to think seriously about it.
“Right before she died, she said, ‘You’ve got to make your dreams come true. I won’t be able to do mine,” Nicolai recalls. “And I said, ‘I know.’ And she went, ‘Don’t blow me off. I am telling you something very important right now.’”
Nicolai didn’t even know what her dreams were. “I was just getting to the next day,” she says. “I think that if Renee hadn’t interrupted me, I would have kept doing that for a long time.”
When she actually sat down to think about it, she realized something. What she really wanted, she thought, was to tell bedtime stories to adults.
Empire of rest
Like many kids, Nicolai grew up on stories. Her dad got her into audiobooks as a child, and she played a record that told the story of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase over and over for an entire summer.
As she got older, she turned to meditation and yoga, eventually becoming a full-time yoga teacher. She created and ran her own studio, met her wife and got married, and settled down with their dogs in Michigan.
When she had that pivotal conversation with her friend Renee, she was already spending a considerable amount of time using her voice and presence to help calm people down. But she’d long harbored a secret dream of becoming a writer. Maybe, she wondered, there was a way to combine both passions.
“Your life doesn’t have to make sense to anybody else. If you have a passion, it doesn’t matter if it works. It matters that you pursue it,” she says.
At first, she wanted to tell a story in book form, but the barrier to entering the publishing industry felt high. A podcast seemed more accessible. Anyone with a microphone could have one. Why not her?
At the time, she knew of just one other sleep podcast, which recapped TV episodes. “I really thought, this is quite niche,” she says.
It took her two years to actually sit down to record the first story — a rambling tale about all the smells and sensations you encounter as you make your way home from work in the rain, one that would help take her listeners from the day’s onslaught of information to a quieter place.
She knew it would put people to sleep, because she’d been falling asleep to some version of it herself for years. She released the first episode in April 2018.
At first, the reception started out, well, sleepily. She was checking the download metrics every day: 24, 48, 100. A month in, the numbers ticked modestly upward, to ~1.5k.
Back then, she was still running her yoga studio, teaching five or six times a week, writing stories, and recording the podcast. By the time she’d been putting out episodes for a year, she’d reached 10m downloads, earning money from ads and premium content subscriptions.
“And then I got a literary agent, and then I sold my book in about 35 countries,” she says. “And I was like, okay, apparently this is going to be a thing.”
Americans clearly needed help getting a good night’s rest. And Nicolai wasn’t the only person thinking about how to help people sleep better.
In 2014, the CDC declared insufficient sleep a public health problem. For the one-third of Americans who aren’t getting the recommended seven or more hours a night, that means higher rates of anxiety, depression, heart disease, and obesity, and other conditions.
By 2017, McKinsey & Company released a report suggesting private equity firms look into investing in sleep optimization. There’s a business case to be made for the industry: Studies have estimated the US loses ~$400B a year in productivity due to sleep deprivation.
Over the last 10 years, the sleep industry has exploded. Mattress companies are multiplying, as are wearable tech options like Oura rings that monitor your activity so you can achieve optimal results even when sleeping.
In 2015, Americans spent an estimated $41B on sleep aids. By 2024, that number sat at $67B. Consumers can now buy a whole host of CBD-infused gummies and oils. A few companies even make CBD-infused bedsheets and pillowcases.
Sleep tourism is also now a thing: Hotels are offering pillow menus and retreat weekends. Luxury resorts are offering trip itineraries focused on getting a better night’s rest. Last year, trend forecast agency WGSN labeled “therapeutic laziness,” AKA bed rotting, as one of the year’s top trends.
The bedtime story market is also getting more crowded. When Nicolai started out, there was just one other sleep podcast. Now, there are hundreds, and apps like Calm are getting in on the boom, offering their own stories narrated by celebrities like Harry Styles and Matthew McConaughey.
Nicolai has come a long way from her first episode. Her stories, which are set in a village called Nothing Much, are effective because:
They’re heavy on nostalgia and familiarity.
The overarching activity is soothing and/or enjoyable.
They’re steeped in sensory detail.
As the title suggests, nothing much happens.
She still writes every story herself, all 495 of them now. But it wasn’t until four years into the project that she sold her beloved yoga studio, going all-in on the village of Nothing Much.
“This whole enterprise I was building was about rest. I could not burn my candle at both ends and then try to pretend to know how to help people rest,” she says.
She picked a lane, switched to a weekly episode release cadence, and watched her numbers soar. “Now, 200k [people] might listen to me on a day,” she says. She’s at 200m downloads overall. She employs two of her friends, one of whom does “community care,” AKA customer service, for the villagers (listeners) who span the globe.
Her stories focus on feelings: a morning with the windows open and fresh fall air blowing through, an evening when two friends meet for the first time, a walk through the backcountry after the rain. She’s introduced listeners to librarians, bakers, innkeepers, and a whole host of animals that call Nothing Much their home.
“So many people tell me they wish they could live in the village of Nothing Much,” she says.
In January, Nicolai is launching an app that will help them do that — at least for an hour or two every day.
The great thing about being famous for your voice is that although she has some high-profile fans — literary giant Meg Wolitzer, for one — Nicolai enjoys moving mostly anonymously through a life she calls ridiculously charmed.
She still lives in Michigan and spends her days dreaming up how to expand the village. She has kids' books in mind, and wants to write a book starring two beloved villagers, Marmalade (a cat) and Crumb (a dog). She’d also love to create feel-good sleep content for TV.
“People like me sometimes get called Pollyanna-ish, or told we’re walking around with rose-colored glasses,” she says.
But, she points out, our brains are primed through negativity bias to focus on scary or upsetting things.
“So when you deliberately go out of your way to look for good things, that’s not rose-colored glasses. That’s taking off the gray ones. You’re actually more of a realist than you were before.”
Sounds like a dream to me.
I like to tell people that the night before I stopped sleeping, I slept. Not only that: I slept well. Years ago, a boyfriend of mine, even-keeled during the day but restless at night, told me how hard it was to toss and turn while I instantly sank into the crude, Neanderthal slumber of the dead. When I found a magazine job that allowed me to keep night-owl hours, my rhythms had the precision of an atomic clock. I fell asleep at 1 a.m. I woke up at 9 a.m. One to nine, one to nine, one to nine, night after night, day after day. As most researchers can tell you, this click track is essential to health outcomes: One needs consistent bedtimes and wake-up times. And I had them, naturally; when I lost my alarm clock, I didn’t bother getting another until I had an early-morning flight to catch.
Then, one night maybe two months before I turned 29, that vaguening sense that normal sleepers have when they’re lying in bed—their thoughts pixelating into surreal images, their mind listing toward unconsciousness—completely deserted me. How bizarre, I thought. I fell asleep at 5 a.m.
This started to happen pretty frequently. I had no clue why. The circumstances of my life, both personally and professionally, were no different from the week, month, or two months before—and my life was good. Yet I’d somehow transformed into an appliance without an off switch.
I saw an acupuncturist. I took Tylenol PM. I sampled a variety of supplements, including melatonin (not really appropriate, I’d later learn, especially in the megawatt doses Americans take—its real value is in resetting your circadian clock, not as a sedative). I ran four miles every day, did breathing exercises, listened to a meditation tape a friend gave me. Useless.
I finally caved and saw my general practitioner, who prescribed Ambien, telling me to feel no shame if I needed it every now and then. But I did feel shame, lots of shame, and I’d always been phobic about drugs, including recreational ones. And now … a sedative? (Two words for you: Judy Garland.) It was only when I started enduring semiregular involuntary all-nighters—which I knew were all-nighters, because I got out of bed and sat upright through them, trying to read or watch TV—that I capitulated. I couldn’t continue to stumble brokenly through the world after nights of virtually no sleep.
I hated Ambien. One of the dangers with this strange drug is that you may do freaky things at 4 a.m. without remembering, like making a stack of peanut-butter sandwiches and eating them. That didn’t happen to me (I don’t think?), but the drug made me squirrelly and tearful. I stopped taking it. My sleep went back to its usual syncopated disaster.
In Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia, Marie Darrieussecq lists the thinkers and artists who have pondered the brutality of sleeplessness, and they’re distinguished company: Duras, Gide, Pavese, Sontag, Plath, Dostoyevsky, Murakami, Borges, Kafka. (Especially Kafka, whom she calls literature’s “patron saint” of insomniacs. “Dread of night,” he wrote. “Dread of not-night.”) Not to mention F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose sleeplessness was triggered by a single night of warfare with a mosquito.
But there was sadly no way to interpret my sleeplessness as a nocturnal manifestation of tortured genius or artistic brilliance. It felt as though I’d been poisoned. It was that arbitrary, that abrupt. When my insomnia started, the experience wasn’t just context-free; it was content-free. People would ask what I was thinking while lying wide awake at 4 a.m., and my answer was: nothing. My mind whistled like a conch shell.
But over time I did start thinking—or worrying, I should say, and then perseverating, and then outright panicking. At first, songs would whip through my head, and I couldn’t get the orchestra to pack up and go home. Then I started to fear the evening, going to bed too early in order to give myself extra runway to zonk out. (This, I now know, is a typical amateur’s move and a horrible idea, because the bed transforms from a zone of security into a zone of torment, and anyway, that’s not how the circadian clock works.) Now I would have conscious thoughts when I couldn’t fall asleep, which can basically be summarized as insomnia math: Why am I not falling asleep Dear God let me fall asleep Oh my God I only have four hours left to fall asleep oh my God now I only have three oh my God now two oh my God now just one.
“The insomniac is not so much in dialogue with sleep,” Darrieussecq writes, “as with the apocalypse.”
I would shortly discover that this cycle was textbook insomnia perdition: a fear of sleep loss that itself causes sleep loss that in turn generates an even greater fear of sleep loss that in turn generates even more sleep loss … until the next thing you know, you’re in an insomnia galaxy spiral, with a dark behavioral and psychological (and sometimes neurobiological) life of its own.
I couldn’t recapture my nights. Something that once came so naturally now seemed as impossible as flying. How on earth could this have happened? To this day, whenever I think about it, I still can’t believe it did.
In light of my tortured history with the subject, you can perhaps see why I generally loathe stories about sleep. What they’re usually about is the dangers of sleep loss, not sleep itself, and as a now-inveterate insomniac, I’ve already got a multivolume fright compendium in my head of all the terrible things that can happen when sleep eludes you or you elude it. You will die of a heart attack or a stroke. You will become cognitively compromised and possibly dement. Your weight will climb, your mood will collapse, the ramparts of your immune system will crumble. If you rely on medication for relief, you’re doing your disorder all wrong—you’re getting the wrong kind of sleep, an unnatural sleep, and addiction surely awaits; heaven help you and that horse of Xanax you rode in on.
It should go without saying that for some of us, knowledge is not power. It’s just more kindling.
The cultural discussions around sleep would be a lot easier if the tone weren’t quite so hectoring—or so smug. A case in point: In 2019, the neuroscientist Matthew Walker, the author of Why We Sleep, gave a TED Talk that began with a cheerful disquisition about testicles. They are, apparently, “significantly smaller” in men who sleep five hours a night rather than seven or more, and that two-hour difference means lower testosterone levels too, equivalent to those of someone 10 years their senior. The consequences of short sleep for women’s reproductive systems are similarly dire.
“This,” Walker says just 54 seconds in, “is the best news that I have for you today.”
He makes good on his promise. What follows is the old medley of familiars, with added verses about inflammation, suicide, cancer. Walker’s sole recommendation at the end of his sermon is the catechism that so many insomniacs—or casual media consumers, for that matter—can recite: Sleep in a cool room, keep your bedtimes and wake-up times regular, avoid alcohol and caffeine. Also, don’t nap.
I will now say about Walker:
1. His book is in many ways quite wonderful—erudite and wide-ranging and written with a flaring energy when it isn’t excessively pleased with itself.
2. Both Why We Sleep and Walker’s TED Talk focus on sleep deprivation, not insomnia, with the implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that too many people choose to blow off sleep in favor of work or life’s various seductions.
If public awareness is Walker’s goal (certainly a virtuous one), he and his fellow researchers have done a very good job in recent years, with the enthusiastic assistance of my media colleagues, who clearly find stories about the hazards of sleep deprivation irresistible. (In the wine-dark sea of internet content, they’re click sirens.) Walker’s TED Talk has been viewed nearly 24 million times. “For years, we were fighting against ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead,’ ” Aric Prather, the director of the behavioral-sleep-medicine research program at UC San Francisco, told me. “Now the messaging that sleep is a fundamental pillar of human health has really sunk in.”
Yet greater awareness of sleep deprivation’s consequences hasn’t translated into a better-rested populace. Data from the CDC show that the proportion of Americans reporting insufficient sleep held constant from 2013 through 2022, at roughly 35 percent. (From 2020 to 2022, as anxiety about the pandemic eased, the percentage actually climbed.)
So here’s the first question I have: In 2025, exactly how much of our “sleep opportunity,” as the experts call it, is under our control?
According to the most recent government data, 16.4 percent of American employees work nonstandard hours. (Their health suffers in every category—the World Health Organization now describes night-shift work as “probably carcinogenic.”) Adolescents live in a perpetual smog of sleep deprivation because they’re forced to rise far too early for school (researchers call their plight “social jet lag”); young mothers and fathers live in a smog of sleep deprivation because they’re forced to rise far too early (or erratically) for their kids; adults caring for aging parents lose sleep too. The chronically ill frequently can’t sleep. Same with some who suffer from mental illness, and many veterans, and many active-duty military members, and menopausal women, and perimenopausal women, and the elderly, the precariat, the poor.
“Sleep opportunity is not evenly distributed across the population,” Prather noted, and he suspects that this contributes to health disparities by class. In 2020, the National Center for Health Statistics found that the poorer Americans were, the greater their likelihood of reporting difficulty falling asleep. If you look at the CDC map of the United States’ most sleep-deprived communities, you’ll see that they loop straight through the Southeast and Appalachia. Black and Hispanic Americans also consistently report sleeping less, especially Black women.
Even for people who aren’t contending with certain immutables, the cadences of modern life have proved inimical to sleep. Widespread electrification laid waste to our circadian rhythms 100 years ago, when they lost any basic correspondence with the sun; now, compounding matters, we’re contending with the currents of a wired world. For white-collar professionals, it’s hard to imagine a job without the woodpecker incursions of email or weekend and late-night work. It’s hard to imagine news consumption, or even ordinary communication, without the overstimulating use of phones and computers. It’s hard to imagine children eschewing social media when it’s how so many of them socialize, often into the night, which means blue-light exposure, which means the suppression of melatonin. (Melatonin suppression obviously applies to adults too—it’s hardly like we’re avatars of discipline when it comes to screen time in bed.)
Most of us can certainly do more to improve or reclaim our sleep. But behavioral change is difficult, as anyone who’s vowed to lose weight can attest. And when the conversation around sleep shifts the onus to the individual—which, let’s face it, is the American way (we shift the burden of child care to the individual, we shift the burden of health care to the individual)—we sidestep the fact that the public and private sectors alike are barely doing a thing to address what is essentially a national health emergency.
Given that we’ve decided that an adequate night’s rest is a matter of individual will, I now have a second question: How are we to discuss those who are suffering not just from inadequate sleep, but from something far more severe? Are we to lecture them in the same menacing, moralizing way? If the burden of getting enough sleep is on us, should we consider chronic insomniacs—for whom sleep is a nightly gladiatorial struggle—the biggest failures in the armies of the underslept?
DENVER — Riverside County Sheriff's Office issued a press release Monday afternoon that confirmed what 9NEWS reported Friday -- that the investigation into the fatal golf cart crash that claimed the life of John Elway's longtime friend Jeff Sperbeck had concluded with the finding no criminal charges would be filed.
"Following a thorough investigation into the death of Jeff Sperbeck, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office has determined that the incident was a tragic accident with no evidence of criminal activity or intent,'' Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco stated Monday in a press release. "Consequently, no criminal charges will be filed at this time, and the case will be documented as an accidental death."
Sperbeck's family and Elway can move forward with some closure as the law enforcement agency has closed its investigation into the fatal golf cart incident that occurred in late April in a gated Southern California community.
“It’s over,’’ Bianco told 9NEWS on Friday. “We’ve talked to everyone involved and we found nothing new. There was nothing criminal, it was what we’ve been saying all along that this was a tragic accident.”
The incident occurred April 26 as Elway, the Hall of Fame quarterback and three-time Super Bowl-champion as a Broncos player (1997-98) and general manager (2015), was driving a golf cart out of the Madison Club toward his home a quarter-mile away. Sperbeck fell off the back of the golf cart and suffered a fatal head injury.
"This has been a very difficult situation for everyone,'' Elway's attorney Harvey Steinberg told 9NEWS on Monday. "We always knew John had done nothing wrong, but that doesn't lessen the sadness associated with this situation.
The Riverside coroner’s bureau found Sperbeck’s cause of death to be “blunt force trauma,’’ the manner of the death was “an accident” and the cause of the accident was the “passenger fell from the golf cart.”
“I’ve looked at video 100 times and there’s no explanation as to why he fell off, he just fell off,’’ Bianco said.
Bianco initially was going to wrap up the investigation in late-May but decided to wait until it contacted 18 additional residents with video in the private golf course neighborhood before concluding that matter. That part of the investigation was concluded with nothing new revealed.
Sperbeck had been an NFL agent to more than 100 players, coaches and executives. He was the type of agent and marketing rep who stayed in touched with his clients long after the NFL careers ended.
When one of Sperbeck's clients, former Broncos and Peyton Manning quarterbacks coach Greg Knapp, was killed four years ago while riding his bicycle by a driver distracted by his cellphone, Sperbeck helped Knapp's wife Charlotte not only with service arrangements, but in helping to found the Coach Knapp Memorial Fund that promotes distracted driver awareness and reform. The cause includes an annual stadium stair climb by NFL coaches as running the stadium stairs was part of Knapp's pregame routines.
Elway and Sperbeck were partners in several businesses, most notably 7 Cellars wine. Sperbeck had been Elway’s marketing representative since the latter’s prime as the Broncos’ superstar quarterback in the early 1990s, a relationship that grew into a close friendship.
When Elway was the Broncos’ general manager from 2011-2020, and the team was playing a road game out West, Sperbeck, who had a home in Southern California, would almost always accompany him.
They were together over the final weekend in April. According to sources who spoke to 9NEWS, Elway, his girlfriend, his son Jack and his wife, the Sperbecks and their friends left a private function sponsored by Vuori clothing line at the Madison Club in La Quinta on Saturday, April 26. They did not attend the outdoor Stagecoach country music festival in nearby Indio, as had been reported initially.
They did go to Stagecoach the night before, but it was windy and uncomfortably cold. They decided at the function on April 26 not to go again because of the inclement weather. Instead, a caravan of three or four golf carts with a total of 10 to 15 people set out to make the quarter-mile trip to Elway’s house at the private golf resort’s community.
Elway’s son Jack and his group were in a cart ahead; Elway was driving his cart at the rear of the caravan. His girlfriend was seated next to him with Sperbeck’s wife, Cori, was seated on the outside. Sperbeck and Johnny Devenanzio, who is also known by his stage name Johnny Bananas, stood in the back of the cart. Elway was following the carts ahead when Sperbeck fell off, sources said.
There was no swerving or horseplay, according to sources. No one was drunk, according to multiple sources. The cart didn’t hit anything. It had been a smooth ride.
Indications were that Sperbeck fell straight back and hit his head immediately. He had no other injuries, according to a source.
After Sperbeck fell off the cart, Devenanzio yelled up to the front. Elway stopped the cart as Cori Sperbeck rushed to her husband. Sperbeck was breathing, but it was immediately apparent he had suffered a significant injury, a source said.
Elway called 9-1-1, according to a source, and paramedics arrived quickly, but little could be done. Sheriff Bianco said he could tell by the 9-1-1 call that Elway was in no way impaired.
“I listened to the entire 9-1-1 call,’’ Bianco said told 9NEWS in May. “He was very articulate. He was very responsive. He was not slurring his words. He was not hesitating in his response with the dispatcher. It was a normal urgent conversation.”
Sperbeck was rushed to a local hospital with a brain injury. He died four days later. His organs were donated.
Elway released a statement upon his friend’s death: “I am absolutely devastated and heartbroken by the passing of my close friend, business partner and agent Jeff Sperbeck. There are no words to truly express the profound sadness I feel with the sudden loss of someone who has meant so much to me. My heart and deepest sympathies go out to Jeff’s wife, Cori; his children Carly, Sam and Jackson; and everyone who knew and loved him. Jeff will be deeply missed for the loyalty, wisdom, friendship and love he brought into my life and the lives of so many others.”
Sperbeck’s Celebration of Life was held June 7 at the gymnasium of his high school alma mater, Jesuit High School in Sacramento. Elway was among the hundreds who attended.
Is every civilization destined to rise… only to eventually fall?
Is there such a thing as a perfect form of government that can stop that fall?
Why do some civilizations thrive for centuries, while others vanish without a trace?
These are the kinds of questions that have haunted humanity for thousands of years.
And more than two thousand years ago, they deeply fascinated a Greek historian named Polybius.
He wasn’t just some dusty scholar tucked away in a library. Polybius had a front-row seat to history. Exiled to Rome as a political hostage, he didn’t waste away in a prison cell. Instead, he found himself living among Rome’s elite — right in the heart of a rising empire. Rather than just observing history, he tried to make sense of it. And in doing so, he asked one of the most powerful questions in political thought:
Can there be anyone, so apathetic or lacking in curiosity to have no desire to understand , by what means & under what form of government the Romans conqured the entire inhabitat world & brought in under absolute control in a time span of barely 53 years?
Like many ancient thinkers, Polybius believed civilizations behaved like living organisms. They go through a natural life cycle: birth, growth, maturity, stagnation, decline, and death. Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had explored similar ideas, but Polybius took it a step further. He laid out a detailed theory — a cycle of seven political stages — called Anacyclosis.
Anacyclosis: The Political Life Cycle
Stage 1 → No Political Structure
In the beginning, early humans had no political system. No kings, no councils — just small groups struggling to survive in a lawless world. Decisions were made by necessity or mutual understanding, with no long-term leadership.
↓
Stage 2 → Kingship
Eventually, from this power vacuum, a strong and capable leader emerges — someone brave and wise enough to bring order. He earns the people’s trust, protects them, and builds structure. In gratitude, they grant him authority. Kingship is born.
But over time, the king’s descendants inherit power without earning it. Arrogance creeps in. Justice fades. Kingship begins to rot.
↓
Stage 3 → Tyranny
Kingship decays into tyranny. Rulers start to govern through fear and cruelty, not wisdom. They exploit the people for personal gain. Discontent simmers.
↓
Stage 4 → Aristocracy
Eventually, the noblest and wealthiest citizens overthrow the tyrant. They don’t install a new king. Instead, they share power among themselves. An aristocracy is formed.
In its early days, this elite class governs with the public’s interests in mind. But their children grow up pampered, entitled. The noble mission gives way to selfishness.
↓
Stage 5 → Oligarchy
Aristocracy slips into oligarchy — the selfish rule of a powerful few. Power is hoarded, and inequality deepens. The people suffer under neglect and oppression.
↓
Stage 6 → Revolution → Democracy
Eventually, the people have had enough. They rise up, overthrow the oligarchs, and swear never to give unchecked power to the few again. They decide that power must lie with the people. Thus, democracy is born — founded on freedom, equality, and collective voice.
For a time, things improve. Prosperity returns. But nothing lasts forever.
↓
Stage 7 → Democracy Corrupted → Mob Rule
Future generations, born into rights they never fought for, begin to take them for granted. Division spreads. Greed grows.
Charismatic leaders — demagogues — rise. They speak the people’s language but serve only themselves. They inflame anger, manipulate fear, and break down reason.
Democracy unravels. Chaos takes hold.
↓
Stage 8 → Anarchy → Rise of a New Strongman
Out of the chaos, either anarchy reigns — or a new strongman takes control. He promises order, restores discipline, and begins the cycle anew.
And so, the wheel turns once again.
This is Anacyclosis — Polybius’s theory of a repeating cycle in which each form of government inevitably decays into its corrupted version. Monarchies become tyrannies. Aristocracies turn into oligarchies. Democracies dissolve into mob rule.
It sounds dramatic, but when you look at history, the pattern… kind of checks out.
Take Athens, the crown jewel of ancient Greece. Legend says it began under wise kings like Theseus — the same guy who defeated the Minotaur. Over time, Athens grew wealthier and stronger but fell into the hands of tyrants. Eventually, the people rose up and handed power to aristocrats.
After more political evolution, Athens developed into a direct democracy by the late 5th century BCE — at the height of its cultural and military might.
But then came corruption. Demagogues, pretending to be men of the people, took power and made reckless decisions. The result? A crushing defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the slow death of the Athenian empire.
In the next century, all of Greece ended up ruled by kings again — Alexander the Great and his successors. Full circle. Back to monarchy.
So why did Rome break the cycle — at least temporarily?
That’s the puzzle Polybius tried to solve in his famous Histories. How had Rome conquered the Greek world so easily?
His answer? Rome didn’t get stuck on the Anacyclosis wheel like everyone else.
Rome began with kings, like most civilizations. But by the 6th century BCE, they overthrew their monarchy and built a Republic — run by aristocrats at first, but gradually expanded to include ordinary citizens. And by the 2nd century BCE, during Polybius’s lifetime, the Roman Republic had evolved into something entirely different: a mixed constitution.
Rome’s system blended elements of monarchy (executive magistrates), aristocracy (the Senate), and democracy (popular assemblies and elected officials). Each branch could check the power of the others.
As Polybius wrote:
“Rome’s constitution has three branches, each with its own political power. These powers are distributed and balanced so carefully that you can’t say for sure whether Rome is a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy.”
In modern terms, we’d call this a system of checks and balances. Each branch depended on the others, and none could dominate without being restrained.
He explained further:
If one branch tries to overstep its bounds, the others can block or restrain it. This balance keeps the whole system stable.”
To Polybius, this was Rome’s secret sauce. They hadn’t abolished the political cycle — they’d transcended it by blending the strengths of all forms of government.
But here’s the twist.
Polybius was writing at the height of the Roman Republic — when it still looked like it might last forever.
History, though, had other ideas.
Just about a hundred years later, in the 1st century BCE, Rome’s Republic imploded. And guess what? It collapsed almost exactly the way Polybius had warned.
Discontent was everywhere — among veterans, allies, poor citizens, and even parts of the elite. They all felt cheated out of the rewards of Rome’s success.
Into this chaos stepped power-hungry figures: Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and finally Julius Caesar. They manipulated the system, built personal armies, and turned political conflict into full-blown civil war.
And then came Octavian — Caesar’s adopted heir. He crushed his rivals, took total control, and rebranded himself as Augustus. With him, the Republic died — and the Empire began.
So did Polybius get it wrong?
Not really.
He had just underestimated one thing: nothing lasts forever.
Even Rome, with its clever mixed constitution, couldn’t escape the wheel forever. It just delayed the inevitable.
And that brings us to today.
Polybius’s theory doesn’t just feel ancient — it feels timeless.
Take Nepal, for example. In just a few decades, it transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, fell into civil war, flirted with dictatorship, and eventually became a democratic republic in 2008.
Yet, even now, the system faces instability, infighting, and disillusionment.
The wheel turns.
So maybe Polybius wasn’t just talking about Rome.
Maybe he was talking about us — about human nature, about power.
We like to think history moves in a straight line — always forward. But maybe it’s a circle.
Maybe it’s a story we keep rewriting. Different names, different systems, different flags…
But the same patterns.
Call it history.
Call it politics.
Call it what it really is:
The oldest game we still don’t know how to stop playing.