Jason Gay: Go Ahead and Laugh (Season 3 Episode 9)

Welcome to Take the Long View with Matt Hall. This award-winning podcast reframes the way you think about your money, emotion, and time. The goal? Helping you put the odds of long-term success on your side. Woo! Today I am so excited because Jason Gay from The Wall Street Journal is here with us. He is the journal's sports columnist and a humor writer for its review section, and he is the author of the 2015 bestseller, "Little Victories: Perfect Rules for Imperfect Living." Jason has written for Vogue, GQ, Rolling Stone, and Outside magazines. And in 2016, he was named Sports Columnist of the Year by the Society of Professional Journalists and was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his family and a passive-aggressive cat. Jason, welcome to Take the Long View.

Thank you very much. And I really appreciate that very generous introduction. I don't deserve it.

Well, I think you do deserve it because you are my favorite person to read in the Wall Street Journal. And you bring a smile to my face, which feels funny to say, given that I don't know the journal is known for humor, but you are funny. And my question is, when did you know that you're funny?

Oh gosh, you know, it's an hour-by-hour check I have to do on my sense of humor, to be honest with you, especially these days. Look, I don't have a tremendous amount of skills. I'm not terribly accomplished. I can't chop wood, I can't cook, I can't like play any sport at any kind of high level. Maybe I can make a joke, maybe I can tell a story in a relatable way. I have the benefit As you said, I'm working at a place that is this tremendous journalistic publication, but as you said, you know, might not be people's first read for humor. So I get to have this element of surprise, maybe, that they're not accustomed to maybe getting a laugh in the paper. So I really get an advantage there to be in that context and work with a lot of really incredible people.

But is it something that has always been natural for you, or have you had to sort of work at and study the craft of humor?

You know, I don't know. I mean, like, look, I know what I was surrounding myself with as a young person. I was somebody who was completely drawn to humorous and funny things, whether it was as a young person listening to Dr. Demento's radio show as a kid. I don't know if you did that, but it was like Dr. Demento's quirky radio show where you listen to fish heads and all kinds of goofy stuff and talking about that with my buddies in 6th and 7th grade. Then moving on to things like Monty Python and Saturday Night Live and David Letterman. And that always had an incredible appeal to me. He still does a lot of it. And I was just drawn to it. And when I would write, I was drawn to the idea of trying to make myself laugh. I'm not always the best judge of what's funny and what's not. And I'm certainly capable of writing things that I think are funny that prove not to be. But it just matches, I think, my personality, which is to be a little bit irreverent, to be a little irrelevant sometimes too. But my job, my— My first sort of intuitive assignment at the journal is to write about sports. And one of the things that exists around sports, especially at sort of the high level, the professional high level and the super high collegiate level, it takes itself really, really seriously. You know, you turn on the television to watch a football game and you're like, you think you're getting like election night results with the bombast and noise around the sports. And to me, that's always a great, great, like table setting to be fun. You know, to poke holes in a little bit of the pretentiousness and the seriousness and the stentorian-ness of that kind of culture. So sports, I feel, is just sort of ripe for, you know, taking a little air out of the ball or the balloon. Mm-hmm.

Okay, but you also, I think especially in the last couple years it seems, have been stretching into other categories. Like, for example, one of your recent columns is about a leaf blower.

Yeah.

And it's written from the perspective of the leaf blower.

Yeah.

How'd you get that idea? And then how does that get approved?

Well, it's a sentient leaf blower. Yes. My family and I moved at the beginning of the school year and we moved from the city to the suburbs. And I was fascinated to discover the culture of leaf blowing. You know, it was as simple as that. All of a sudden I was like, what is that noise? And discovered that there's a great deal of conversation on the internet, including also in the journal before I wrote about this, about just what's an acceptable level of decibel and leaf blowing and the environmental havoc they create. And I just felt it might be funny, like, you know, we're, we're so accustomed when things become sort of like cultural enemies, you know, eventually the person or company stands up and says like, okay, this is what I think, you know, please hear me out. And I just thought it'd be funny to hear from the leaf blower. But to the top of your question, yeah, in the last couple of years, I have been writing a column for the review section of the journal, which is the Saturday paper. And that sort like an idea section, and my job is to like, look, buddy, we got a lot of serious stuff in this section, write something funny. Basically, it's no more complicated than that. You know, there's some really brilliant thinkers and writers who are published routinely in that section. I am not one of them. I am there to be the light appetizer before you dive headlong into the piece about existentialism or, you know, modern politics.

I love the Saturday Journal more than any other day, just so you know.

Yeah, a lot of people—

That's the best day.

A lot of people do. And, you know, candidly, I think that we both know that the way that people get and appreciate and consume their news has radically changed in the last generation. And more and more people read the Journal not just electronically, but read it on their telephone. But I think the Saturday— and with other newspapers, the Sunday paper still retains a little bit of moat around it as being the newspaper experience, right? More people will get a weekend paper than will get a weekday paper now.

Yep.

Uh, and just because you have a little bit more time, you might have, you know, half an hour to put your feet up and read a newspaper. And I think that a print newspaper, though I've made my peace with the fact that, you know, the vast, vast majority of reads are going to be happening electronically, I do believe in the kind of like different experience of print reading, the kind of— there's a word I'm looking for that's escaping me, but just kind of the the way in which your eye will track from whatever you're interested in immediately to reading things that you wouldn't naturally be drawn to electronically. And I just think of how I began as a person who read the newspaper. I was a paperboy, delivered the newspaper. Just like a great deal of my newspaper reading was stuff that I didn't set out to read in the first place. And of course, the newspaper in those days wasn't curated for my tastes. It was a bunch of people's tastes. And I benefited enormously from that sort of happenstance of that experience of reading print paper. So this is a long-winded way of saying, like, I'm right there with you, and I know a great many journal readers are there too, simply because that Saturday remains sort of an experience product.

Yeah, you just nailed exactly what I do. I don't get the physical paper or read the physical paper as much during the week, but on Saturday I really look forward to walking down the driveway and grabbing my newspaper and praying that it didn't get wet by a sprinkler system or rain.

Right.

Let's talk about a quote that really caught my attention and the people at my firm's attention. You were talking about Aaron Rodgers.

Okay.

And you said, "Nobody gets clicks and famous for taking a long view. Hell has to be served in a handbasket, preferably with a clever baiting headline. If you haven't freaked out about at least 3 things you've read by 9:00 AM, you're not doing it correctly." Yeah, okay.

So, I mean, where that's coming from is really personal, like that the idea of a nuanced conversation conversation happening in a public way now is increasingly endangered. I feel that, like, we all know that the world is complex. We all know that people's individual responses to things that are happening in their world are sometimes complicated and shaded in many layers of gray. However, in the social media environment, gray doesn't register. You know, it's almost invisible. You know, the idea that conversations are nuanced and complicated and people's responses, you know, might have different motivations and layers is not something that the algorithms are set up to explore or certainly not promote. And so what it creates, I think, and I don't think this is any sort of original, you know, discovery on my part, but just that what it gets incentivized is conflict, is black and white, is the notion of like, you know, there's a right and there's a wrong political spectrum. You know, we see that incredibly supercharged where everything is, you know, set up as extremely divisive or binary, but also it applies to sports now too, the way that sports gets covered and the way that things get so— especially like on television where, you know, they don't get up there and say like, well, maybe the Packers are good or maybe they're not so good. No one gets on television to say that. They say like, they stink or they're great, you know, they're gonna do it all or they're terrible. Aaron Rodgers is a hero, Aaron Rodgers is a dummy, you know, like all this kind of incredibly binary thinking, which I find really boring and tedious, but which, candidly, is kind of the way the world is rotating right now. I thankfully work with people who don't require that kind of thinking, and I'm grateful to have an audience of readers who are willing to go along with my sometimes wandering brain. But I think there's real value still in having those kinds of wandering brains and conversations.

Yeah, and with respect to that, the piece on Aaron Rodgers, I think the story was they had had a not-so-great start. And he was saying, "Hey, slow down." This short-term outcome may not be the longer-term story.

Right. How funny is it that this was like several Aaron Rodgers controversies ago now at this point? Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, and that's a sort of thing that exists in sports that is awfully fun to make fun of too, is the fan base that flies completely off the handle after a single result, pro or con. You know, you can see, for instance, franchises and fan bases that go crazy when their team gets out of the gate 1-0, and they think that the Super Bowl is coming, and obviously doesn't always happen. So, you know, again, putting a pin in that kind of agitation is really fun.

Yeah. Can you think of an example where you, in your own life, have taken a longer view and it's really paid off? Where your patience and discipline has really been rewarded?

Well, that's a very good question. I'll try to answer it in the respect that, like, I certainly didn't set out with any sort of master discipline plan, anything like that. I was never somebody who was, well, you know, I got my 5-year plan or my 10-year plan. Never, never, ever. I think that newspapers are sort of metabolically right for me in that you're writing regularly, but you're not writing every 10 minutes. In my case, you're not writing every single day, but you're writing a few times a week. So you do get a chance to say something with some regularity. I don't know what I would do in a world where I was writing once a year. I marvel at people who do that, authors and book publishing people who are just tremendously disciplined to kind of go off the grid to come up with what they're doing next. I'm not built that way. But the long view part of it is that— let me answer this in a different way, which is that like the longer I do this, the longer I have had the privilege of having this column and an audience of people, the more I really develop a respect for people who can just kind of keep doing it. You know, we all kind of— we're younger, we have the very strong opinions, you know, this person's good, this person's not so good. And now I just kind of look at anybody in any walk of life, candidly, who's been doing it for a long time, you know, especially if they're doing it a long time at a pretty commendable level, and just give them my full admiration, you know, to maintain a career, to maintain the discipline, to not just stay in a career but want to self-improve. It's a really admirable thing, and I, and I hope I get to that point in my life. But, you know, my, my admiration is really for people who, who stick it out, who prove that they're not sort of like chasing whatever ribbon of the latest trend is and can kind of stay in whatever field it is that they are pursuing. For a long extended period of time.

You know, that connects to a story that I saw you highlighted from the Journal on Twitter about Steph Curry trying to use data to become a better shooter, even though he's one of the best shooters ever.

Yeah.

He wanted to make almost like a swish within a swish.

Yeah.

He wanted to get his shooting so precise, and his method was to shrink the basket by, I think, like 2 or 3 inches.

Yeah.

And so my question is, how do you do that in your own profession? What's your technique?

I will not stand for any comparisons to a virtuoso like Curry. I mean, there's just not— Like, I'm not anywhere near that kind of airspace. I admire greatly the tenacity someone who is so accomplished at something, and Steph, at this point, is pretty inarguably the greatest jump shooter we've ever had in the history of the sport. But the fact that there's no rest, that there's not like, you know, well, I've, I've, I've hit the level I want to hit. And there's always something, and that's a marvelous thing to witness. And I've seen it in a number of sports. My own instance, I think where experience has been helpful is just kind of not freaking out at the steering wheel a little bit. Having had the opportunity to do it for a long enough time that I know what happens when it all goes sideways. I appreciate when it's easy and it doesn't go sideways, but I'm not going to get overly flustered in the moment. I can't say that I was like that always when I was younger. I was definitely capable of freaking out and like, you know, being the person who thought everything was going to hell in a handbasket. But the more I've done it, the more I just kind of keep that calm. In fact, I kind of like it when things get a little wild, like I still believe strongly in writing on deadlines and writing for events on deadlines. So I like, you know, whether it's the Super Bowl or whatever event that we're covering, having that opportunity to like have to put it together in, you know, minutes, which is something that doesn't happen as much in newspapers anymore, or certainly in online publishing. But I like that. I like sort of making it hard, but I like sort of the calm of it that I feel now versus what I know I felt like when I was younger, which was Freaking out again.

Yeah. Okay, let's talk for a second about some things I really loved in your book, Little Victories.

Oh, thank you. Okay.

You have a section in there where you say, "Free yourself from trying to be cool." I especially love this little section here. You may be cool at the exact moment you do not think you are cool. You were cool when you stopped everything you were doing to help someone. When you listened instead of talking. When you met the person who would become your partner, and you were so nervous, you could barely string words together. You are cool when you talk to your mother on the phone. Please do not let your mother know this, because telling her is uncool, and she will never stop calling. That section, to me, is so Jason Gay, because it's funny, and truthful and poignant.

Yeah. And reminds me that I'm doing a lousy job of calling my mother on the phone, which she helps remind me of. I mean, cool is a fun, fertile topic, right? Because it's probably the human quality that is most sought after through advertising, through imagery, through the things that we are constantly bombarded with, whether it's in advertising environments, social media environments, just our walkabout, the way we interact with people, what we look at people, what we desire, love it, how we interrelate with other people, how we fall in love. You know, cool is just this very sort of indescribable quality and yet so incredibly present in the way that we are told to behave. And I think the thing that is very hard to put your finger on is that what we find most cool, or the people or the individuals or the actions that we find most cool, are things that are unconsciously cool. You know, we're all kind of very aware of the person, and maybe we've been that person at times of our lives— I certainly have— where we think we're cool, like we've got the right jacket on and our hair is looking pretty good and we're going to the party and, you know, our friends are going to be there and, you know, that person isn't cool. They're probably a little bit of a cartoon of it. The people that we hold up as like sort of iconically cool, whether it's a Paul Newman or an Aretha Franklin or Aaron Rodgers in the pocket of third down or whomever it is in our lives that we look up as cool, they're not actively seeking out to be cool in the moment, they just are. And so it's this kind of like interesting quality, right? In that we're all kind of chasing it. We're all kind of being sold products and qualities and life enhancements that are going to give us cool. But in the end, eventually it's just this intangible quality that, you know, certainly can't be bought.

In the book, you talk about something that I can relate to. You have a cancer story, and I like one of the things you share where you say, you know, You know you're on the other side of cancer when you start sweating the small stuff again.

Yeah.

And my question to you is, while true, do you fight that or have you given in to that?

Oh God, I long since gave in to that. It's sad to say, but like, yes, of course. I mean, I'm like 20 years out from my episode now, and I was very fortunate in the moment, and I remain very fortunate now. But that was wisdom that was given to me by somebody who was going through cancer at the same time and was saying that you're going to realize that you're on on the other side of it when you start like blowing up at mundane things, whether it's a long line somewhere or somebody putting you on hold on the phone, you know, the standard BS stuff that we get agitated about, you know, because there is this instinct that happens when people are diagnosed. And certainly the way that people start talking to you that, you know, like, are you going to somehow become this like font of wisdom? You know, the long view, because now you have the benefit of staring at mortality. In my case, I should be very clear that I was not staring at mortality. I had a very beatable diagnosis. Diagnosis, but it's still the C word. And so people treat you a little differently. And like, there's this thing like, oh, well, we're going to start like climbing mountains when you get done with this. You're going to climb Everest. You're going to like sell your possessions and travel the world. Are you going to like be a different person? And, you know, I'm sure there are people who have endured things like this who have made significant life changes. However, I think for a great many people, life just kind of progresses in a way that, you know, if things go hopefully positively, you know, you do return to the now stuff. And I do think that appreciating that, in my case, like, yeah, like looking around and realizing that I was getting annoyed at something that used to annoy me before my diagnosis was a real moment for me of realizing, yeah, this is what recovery actually looks like.

You've interviewed a lot of famous people or been around a lot of famous or important people, and I really enjoyed a section of your book where you talk about riding a bike.

Yeah.

And you mentioned your interview of Robin Williams.

Yeah.

Do you remember what he said?

Sure. He said to me that, you know, Rob Williams is, you know, a public record, but he was somebody who struggled with, you know, psychological issues. He had addiction issues in his life that he overcame, but he really threw himself into cycling to the point that I would hear from people that I knew in the Bay Area where he lived that if you ever wanted to sell a bicycle, just put a bicycle in the window and Rob Williams will walk by and buy it at some point. So I knew his reputation as a collector and as a super fan. Fan, but in the conversation, you know, he knew everything about everything in terms of the technology and the sport and all the individual characters in it. But he was most interested in the experiential quality of it. He truly loved it for what it gave back to him. And what he said in the quote that I'll never forget, which is that it's the closest you can come to flying. And, you know, if you ride a bike, that's the kind of thing you hear and the little hairs on your arms stand up on end because you know that to be true. Now, there are other worlds and sports and things like that where that kind of same adrenaline rush can be achieved. I interviewed an 89-year-old skydiver the other day who said the exact same thing. It is the closest you can come to flying. And he might have a better point. He is literally in the air, you know, 5,000 feet above the earth. However, it speaks to just what is a universal feeling of people who are interested in adrenaline sports and in things that might be risky, actually find kind of a meditative quality to it. I'm really interested in people who compete compete in, for lack of a better word, dangerous sports or sports that carry a good deal of risk because they actually feel driven to finding this kind of meditative equilibrium in that sort of chaotic environment. You know, you look at a bike race and you think, well, that looks beautiful. You know, they're winding their way through French countrysides and castles and chalets and stuff like that and going down the face of and so on, and you're like, that's really beautiful. But the reality is, if you're in it, it's like having your face in a furnace because it's, you know, it's risky and you have to be smart, you have to keep your wits about you, and you're exerting yourself at 103%. I just find those personalities and those individuals who are in those worlds really interesting. And Robin was like— so one thing that happened after his terribly unfortunate death was I got reached out by people in his world who said, listen, we're going to We're gonna auction off his bike collection and we'd like you to write about it. Like, you know, we're gonna do this for charity. I can't remember exactly what charities they were, but he had this incredible collection. I remember going to this garage in San Francisco and it was just as far as you could see, bikes and bikes and bikes. And it was like looking at a bike museum 'cause he had everything. I mean, he had the, you know, most beautiful expensive Tour de France chariots. And he had the little red bike that like a grizzly bear rides in a Russian circus or something like that. He had choppers, he had, you know, everything imaginable. And that felt like a real honor because, you know, there was this world in which people really reacted to the way that he talked about cycling. Mm.

You tell another story in Little Victories that has stuck with me, and that's of a man named Marty from Minnesota who turns out to be a Nigerian prince.

Yeah, well, I mean, this is a story that I think about probably once a week, I think, because it was really a life-changing event for him, but also a life-changing event for me to be able to witness something that's happening to somebody that's going to forever change the way that he views the world. I mean, I'm gonna try to do my best to recollect it, but he was an African American guy who grew up in an adopted family and at a certain point grew interested in who his birth parents were. And discovered that his mother was a student at a college in Iowa and that his father was a visiting student from Nigeria who had returned to Nigeria, which at the time was in the throes of a very painful civil war, and never came home, never came back to the United States. So he was given up to adoption and raised by, you know, he had a very happy and loving childhood, but, you know, like a lot of people at a certain age, became very curious about where they came from and did did the research. And this was not like 10 minutes of Googling. This was years of him seeking records being opened to him and so on, and eventually was able to locate his mother, and then was able to locate via email his father, who was still alive and living in Southeast Nigeria. And I read a little story in a paper in Minnesota saying, like, local man discovers he has princely roots, that the father was, in fact, this tribal leader in Nigeria. And I was like, this is interesting. And I wrote to him and I said, "If you ever go to see him, will you let me come with you?" You know, just kind of like throwing that off like a lottery ticket, you know, never imagining he'd respond, much less invite you. And that's what happened. He did invite me and I went with him and a photographer and a couple other people. And, you know, I mean, again, think of like what it is like to be able to bear witness to somebody seeing their father for the first time at age, I think he was 40, 41 years old at the time. Imagine what it's like for a father who is in his 70s at the time, to see his son for the first time. Just incredibly raw emotions that, you know, are almost indescribable. It's really hard to tell a story like that because the people that are experiencing can't even articulate what it means to them. Certainly not in the moment. It takes a long time to do that. But yeah, that was, you know, a story I'll never forget because the graciousness of the family to let us into that very intimate, and I should add, like, complicated family event. You know, it's not like you're just like, oh, thanks, Dad. 'Great to see you for the first time.' I mean, you're unpacking a lot. And so I think about that story all the time.

And that story is in a section on travel and the importance of travel. And you end that section with saying, 'At its best, travel is going somewhere else to find home.' And I thought that was just such a great statement and a fabulous story. People should buy the book for many reasons, but that story alone is really worth having having it. I also need to talk about someone I have an unnatural level of love for. I'm a Federer fanatic.

You're a Fed-head?

Yeah. I don't know if I'm in any clubs where I have gear or whatever, but one of my lifelong dreams was to see him play at Wimbledon on center court. And through a couple buddies, I was able to do that. And it's one of the great moments of my life. You wrote about Federer and said— I like this note you have— "On occasion, I've seen Federer at a press conference after a loss." A question will come that suggests he should be morose, as if a train has just hit his dog, and Federer will grow a little snippy and fix the interrogator with a glare that says, 'Do you realize what amazing good luck it is to be me?' And it is. I like to imagine Federer saying everything while wearing a gold cape and petting an albino tiger. I love it.

Well, thank you. I mean, I had a similar reaction the first time I got to see him, and so I actually saw him in Wimbledon for the the first time play when it was the Olympics, uh, in London 2020. So it wasn't actually literally Wimbledon, it was at the All England Club where Wimbledon happens, but they were playing on center court. And I had the same kind of goosebump feeling because he is somebody who exists sort of at this higher orbit in the world of sports, not just because he's this incredible champion, but he's just— gives people this aesthetic joy, right? Like, talking about this with a colleague of mine last night about Steph Curry. Curry has reached this point now in his career where he's getting cheered on the road, where the road— the fans who are supposed to be booing him are cheering for him to succeed. In Brooklyn last night, they were cheering MVP when he was at the foul line. That's just unimaginable for most athletes. But I feel like he sort of reaches this Federer zone because you're not just seeing someone performing at a high level. We both know that there are two other tennis players in the men's field who are remarkably iconic, Djokovic and Nadal. Federer is sort of this complete package of both champion and an aesthetic. Like he plays in a way that is almost balletic. It's like watching Nureyev play a sport. And it just is different. And I think also the other part that happened in his career was that there was this pretty bleak lull in his mid-30s where he did not win a major title for about 5 years until he won in Australia. And I think in a weird way that that humanized him and made him more relatable and more popular than ever. Because if you remember at the early stages of Federer's career, the grumbling was like, oh, he wins all the time. Boring. Can't tennis get other people to do do this? Well, nothing makes you more empathetic and more interesting as an athlete than to have some real setback in your career. And he had many of them, many, many, many heartbreakers along the way, 5 setters lost. And I just feel like it built almost this cult around him. And cult is too strong a word because he's actually just enormously popular. And you're not alone, you know. And I think that, you know, to bring it to the present day, right now he's in a situation where he had another knee surgery at the end of this year. There's real question marks as to whether or not he's going to be able to come back. He is 40. But a very hard thing to do, to come back and play at a high level after having multiple surgeries in your 40s. We've not seen it in tennis. I don't like the idea of him sputtering to the finish. You know, you kind of want him to walk off triumphantly on the second Sunday at Wimbledon or some other major event. That's one of the things about, you know, sports, is you don't get to book those kinds of things.

Yeah. Well, I remember I was sitting close enough that I could see the smirk on his face when he would hit a ball to one of the ball to the ballkids, and they wouldn't have to move. It would almost go in their pocket without them touching it. And he looked as proud of that as he did a winner down the line. And it just showed— It's like the Steph Curry swish within a swish sort of thing. It's like he's on a level. I mean, he was playing a world-class opponent who he dismantled with ease. But his game within the game, like the way he would hit the ball back to the ballkids, kids was really incredible because it looked like he was getting as much joy out of that game that was happening on the side. And the way he answers press conferences in 4 or 5 different languages.

I mean, it's— Yeah. No, he's otherworldly in those respects. And you're smart to, like, watch tennis that way because I think that, like, if you go to a match, obviously there's the match, there's the scoring, and the way that they are performing actually on the scoreboard. But there's also these other things that you can pay attention to, whether it's their demeanor in between games when at breaks or the way that they interact with whether it's ball boys or lines judges back in the time that we had lines judges or the crowd or just how they handle setbacks. Tennis is a very unique sport in that you're out there on your own for a very long time. You have to comport yourself somewhat reasonably. Obviously not everybody does it every time. And Federer has occasionally had an outburst of his own. But for the most part, his ability to sort of move on to the next is unrivaled. All the great champions, whether Roger Federer a great champion in any other sport, one of the things that does just make them distinct is not the way that they win, you know, because they're going to win, but the way that they lose and their ability to sort of turn the page and continue to get at it and move on to the next. Not everybody is built that way, and history has seen many, many champions who have sort of come along to the scene maybe at an early age, and you think, oh wow, this person is going to pile up the championships But the first little setback that comes along kind of undoes them. And the greats are the ones who can kind of go on to the next thing. Hmm.

I could talk about tennis and Roger Federer and just the game in general for a long time. I like the Tom Ford story and dressing up in your day-of-the-week socks. And I also wanted to talk maybe about parenting and that awesome bit you had at the end of your book where you talked about your friend who was an old biking pal holding Jesse. And then your line about saying, "I was hoping that Jesse would poop so we could find out how much Kenny missed that." Ford was just, you know, this—

For people who aren't terribly up on fashion, you know, he's arguably one of the leading menswear designers and womenswear designers of the last generation, right? He was the lead designer for Gucci for a long time, started his own label. You can buy some very, very expensive but beautiful Tom Ford suits and things like that. But he's also kind of positioned himself in the market the past number of years as kind of like a vanguard of wisdom, of fashion wisdom. He's the kind of person who says, "Men should never wear shorts. Shorts are for, you know, playing sports and jumping into a pool. If you're not doing either one of those things, you should never wear shorts." And in a good-natured, funny way, he's not this like punitive scold or anything like that, but he is the kind of person who says exactly what's on his mind at all times. And I did have that moment of going to visit him at his studio And as you would, you'd be kind of like, I was nervous about what I'm wearing. I can't afford a Tom Ford suit. No way. I'm not going to wear that. So I'm going to wear my nicest suit that I have. I got my tie on. I got my shirt. And I got everything pressed. I feel I look pretty good. And then I have these janky little Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday socks that I got as a Christmas present that I'm like, what are the chances he's going to see the socks that say Wednesdays all over them? What are the chances? Not going to happen. And literally within like 90 seconds of the interview starting, he's like, you know, it's Wednesday, right? I know that because I'm looking down. Oh no, I think the sock was the wrong date. I think there was— I had the— couldn't even get that right. Anyway, but you know, that's an example of like when that happened in the moment, it's mortifying, but I'm also like, oh, that's great material. I'm so happy that did happen because that kind of humanizes the person, right? It's a lot easier to tell that story than it is for me you can tell like how a Tom Ford cut of a suit makes it a Tom Ford suit. With my kids and like parenting and the Kenny thing was simply just an early part of my son's life. First child and everything about him is— feels like it's like this long slog parenting, right? You know, you're like, oh my God, when are these kids going to grow up? They're so like stinky and noisy and wonderful but punishing. And having him around a friend whose kids were all grown up and out of the house and off to college and professional lives and so on, and he grabbed Jesse and he just held him, you know, for just a little bit longer of a time than people would normally hold a child. And he's just like, you're never going to know how much you're going to miss this until you're here where I am. Like, you just— there's this feeling that I've missed this so much. Like, I've missed this ability to hold this little person loyal to me in my arms in this way. It didn't even take 21 years. I'm there already. My children are older They're terribly uninterested in me gripping them up, picking— I can't even pick them up if I wanted to because they weigh too much. But it did sort of underline for me in an early moment of parenthood how quickly it all can go. And I know that sounds like somewhat of a trite observation, but it really is true. And it really— parenthood accelerates a life in a way like nothing else has accelerated my life ever before. It's made it wonderful in every respect. I have no regrets, but it does speed that clock up. You feel like you're actually, like, you know how people have podcasts and you feel like you're going at 1.5 or 2 speed once the kids show up. I really feel that way.

Yeah. Well, that's a good note for us to end on. And I would tell you, I hope you keep writing for decades to come, 'cause I would miss your voice if you were not there. There. You are unlike anyone else in your ability to be humorous and also really truthful and candid at the same time. Your voice is original. If you weren't there in the paper or on the web, I don't know where I would go to get my fill. So I hope you keep writing for a very long time.

Well, I will do it as long as they let me. And I really am grateful for those kind words, and I don't deserve half of it. I'm really appreciative of you taking the time to read all this stuff and ask me about it. And yeah, I would— Listen, I will do this as long as they let me, 'cause I feel extremely fortunate to have this job. You can find me at Wall Street Journal, wsj.com/sports. You can find our whole crew there, and I'm part of that.

All right, Jason, well, thanks so much. I really appreciate your time. Very generous of you. Thank you. And I'll keep reading and watching and paying attention to all you put out there.

Thank you. Grateful to you. Have a great week. Bye-bye.

All right, see you, man. Are you a funny writer? Please note, the information shared in this podcast is not intended as advice. The intent is to share meaningful experiences. I am likely not your advisor, nor wealth manager, nor financial planner, and my opinions are my own and not necessarily shared by his Hill Investment Group. Investing involves risk. Consult a professional before implementing an investment strategy. Thank you.

Hi, Longview listeners. I'm Buddy Reisinger, a longtime member of the Hill Investment Group team that helps translate Matt's thinking into action for our clients. If you like what you've heard and want to learn more, I encourage you to go to our website, hillinvestmentgroup.com, and sign up for a complimentary call or meeting. Matt doesn't dispense cookie-cutter advice on the podcast because each of you is unique. So go to hillinvestmentgroup.com, schedule a meeting, and let's start talking. We can't wait to hear your story.