Rob Henderson

You know what I'm doing? This is something that we do nowadays where I'm looking into whether a public figure is a real person or not. That's what I'm doing currently. I'm looking into whether Ashley Parker at, I believe, The Atlantic now is a real person, because some of the tweets about what has happened to The Washington Post appear beyond parody to me, and I'm just trying to make sure I'm not getting roped into a— what, like a deepfake to Tanya McGrath?

Oh yeah. Oh, I see.

Yeah, I mean, look, maybe I should be aware of this person. I'm just looking at her outraged that Will Lewis, CEO of the Washington Post, is at the Super Bowl, at the NFL Honors, whatever it is, shindig in San Francisco. And I'm just looking at this tweet for the murder of the Washington Post in the Atlantic yesterday. I was wet-eyed. 'Obvi' in parentheses, 'on the metro wearing my Post beanie, obvi.' And a woman, a stranger, leaned over and hugged me, which is to say the entire city understands the scope of this devastating tragedy.

Powerful.

Maybe you just got a hug because you were sad. I don't, I don't know. I haven't read the article though. There might be that bit of context where the woman knew.

Whenever I see that kind of Gen Z slang like 'obvi,' it actually diminishes my sympathy. It makes it seem less serious. Yeah, if she said obviously instead of obvi, I would have a bit more compassion, I think. But obvi just makes it seem so unserious. It feels like fodder for social media than something that's actually occurring in the real world.

Yes. Okay, so this woman appears to be a millennial. All the more shameful. And I've seen similar statements. There's one I was talking about with my friends from a few weeks ago where somebody in NBA media was sharing a rant about how we live in this fascist dystopia, and everything was lowercase with QT grammatical errors. They're just going, I believe the situation you're describing requires a bit more formality, but they see it differently. It does undercut it. Why are you saying obvi? Obvi like that song?

No, no, if the Federalist Papers were written all lowercase, or the Warren Commission report court, or the 9/11 Commission. Yeah, if you saw all of this written in lowercase with Gen Z slang, I feel like it wouldn't be a part of the historical record, or people just wouldn't take it as seriously.

Welcome to the house of Strauss. Yeah, go for it. Stars hang with stars, winners hang with winners. We're joined by Rob Henderson. We've got a little bit of a gimmick. I love a good gimmick. A good gimmick for this podcast right here, because for those of you who do not know, Rob, serious thinker, human psychology. Yeah, no, don't, don't play humble with me, sir. I call you a serious thinker. You're a serious thinker. That's how I presented you to Chuck Klosterman. Human psychology, young men, their trials, their tribulations. Not a sports guy, not a ball knower, and yet such a Klosterman fan that he has read football. And the gimmick of this podcast— enough of a gimmick that Chuck, I believe, was— he was interested in whatever our conversation might be about it. I want to know what you think about our bizarre sport and Chuck's exploration of it, because you love his insights about humanity and pop culture and time and everything else. But this is a topic unlike the 1990s, where I think you have no grounding. So that's my gimmick for this podcast. If that gimmick exhausts itself, there, there are a myriad of subjects we can get to. We can even return to the wapo devastation, whatever we want to call is happening there. I don't want to be glib about it.

I've lost my job before.

I'd lost my job before, and I feel for anybody who gets laid off. I'm not one of these people on Twitter going, ah, journalists, ah, you're getting fired. But it's also so that they, they can't help but be fired in the most self-regarding way possible. So that's part of the whole conversation.

Yeah, it felt tawdry. And I saw the tweets about, um, you know, this is all Jeff Bezos's fault. Elizabeth Warren tweeting about it, he's worth X amount of billions of dollars, so, you know, it's ultimately his responsibility to bankroll these journalists even if their organization isn't turning a profit. So, um, but to your question, Ethan, uh, you know, yes, I enjoyed, uh, Klosterman's book on the '90s. When did that book come out? About— is it 4 or 5 years ago now?

Wow. Where does the time go?

I know. And read some of his other books. I liked his book on villainy, I Wear the Black Hat. That was an entertaining read. So I'm generally a fan of his essays on pop culture. And you're right, I'm not a sports fan, sports aficionado. I guess I admire, you know, like some of these, these non-religious people say, I'm not a believer, but I believe in belief. You know, I respect religion, even if I'm not a believer. Well, it's me now. And I'm that way too about religion. But I guess I'm also reading this book. I also realize I'm a bit this way about sports where I am intrigued by the fandom and I admire the athletes and I'll go to the occasional live ball game. And, you know, I watched The Last Dance, the documentary about Michael Jordan. So I admire the kind of prowess and determination and all of that stuff that goes along with athletics. But, you know, I found the idea of this book interesting of, okay, he's going to try to see what does football say about the culture at large and using football as a lens. And, you know, it was entertaining and interesting and amusing, funny, all the kind of usual Klostermann characteristics in his other work. And, you know, I I thought, you know, in a way this book, like he was trying to— what, like in a way it felt like he was lamenting because the conceit of the book, which I listened to your conversation with him, the conceit of the book, okay, so in the future football is going to go away or it's going to drastically diminish in popularity. You know, he's compared it, I think, to like, like, what is it, like horse racing or professional boxing where they kind of exist but no one really cares anymore. And it felt like the book was lamenting the loss of this sport at the very moment that it's as popular as ever. And it felt like more broadly lamenting kind of a loss of this, I guess, like old traditional, you know, idea of, of courage, of strength, of discipline, of duty. And those are not— I mean, increasingly those are out of fashion. Those types of values. That's not the kind of world we want to live in anymore. And it kind of exists in, in football, but not so much anywhere else. So, you know, I— and, and then he also had, you know, various kinds of interesting observations, you know, around, you know, aging, old people versus young people, you know, ideas around fiction versus nonfiction. And so, I mean, and those honestly were like kind of the passages that caught my interest more. And then his asides on politics as well. Harris choosing Tim Walls, an assistant football coach, as her running mate, and talking about the sort of archetype of the football coach in pop culture, and then what a football coach, the character, means to people. But then Tim Walls himself being almost like this neutered, sort of, stripped of all toxic masculinity version of a football coach, which actually ended up backfiring because I guess the idea would be something like, like in the future, most people will be like Kamala Harris, where they kind of know, okay, well, football coach means something to most people. And so I'll pick a football coach, not understanding that that football coach means something different to football fans versus, you know, non-sports fans who are members of the educated political elite. And, and this is a sort of a cheap way to pander. Anyway, yeah, just an array of thoughts there. But and then of course, maybe we'll get into this later, but the very interesting chapter titled— what was it— Drinking Hot Coffee Through a Straw, the chapter in which he discusses the history of football and race. Hmm.

Yeah. And it's almost like you conclude from it that race means a lot, but maybe it shouldn't. There's a lot of paradoxical thinking when it comes to race and football. And as a tangent, there's some aspects that I would have wanted to get into. I could have talked to Chuck for 5 hours if we had the time on this particular topic. In a way, as much as it's presented as though race is this huge division point in football and reason for controversy and angst, and only 3 Black head coaches, and Quarterbacks, there's an inherent bias against them. And Black quarterbacks, they're told you should play wide receiver instead of sticking with the position that you're best at. And all of that— I actually, in this corny old-school lib way, enjoy the integration aspect of football, how you have these men from different backgrounds engage in a violent game where they have to have each other's back and they respect one another. They do this thing every year called Top 100 where the NFL players vote on who the best 100 football players are, and then as they reveal the list on YouTube, they'll show all these different players talking about this opponent they've played and their respect for him. And I like it in this corny way. It's actually rare— maybe not rare in athletics, but you just see people of totally different backgrounds showing such respect for somebody who might not be a lot like themselves. And it just cuts through because all that matters is performance. It's just mostly about the merit. And so when I see that, when I see Top 100, I go, well, this space, even though it has its divisions and there are position groups that tend to be white, as you read about, and position groups that tend to be Black, as you read about, it also works in a way that is a little bit more interwoven than society writ large. So I look at football more as a positive racial story than much of corporate media, where whenever race is discussed vis-à-vis football, it's a very negative story.

Interesting. So, so that, that I'm unaware of. I mean, he'd mentioned in that chapter the controversy around the history of race in football, but I didn't realize that even now, whenever race is discussed in the context of professional sports, it's always in a negative way.

I just, um, I, I think that they cut through the— it's just— I'll give you an example. I don't know if you know who Marshawn Lynch is. Uh, you know who Marshawn Lynch is?

Yes. Well, I mean, I don't know, but I'm familiar with, with who he is.

Yes, yes. Uh, so obviously Marshawn Lynch is Black, and I would say, I would say, because, uh, because we don't You know, we don't mind manners here. I would say Marshawn Lynch is quite Black. That's what I would say about Marshawn Lynch. And he was interviewed once about Christian McCaffrey, mentioned in Klosterman's book, who is a great running back and quite white. And Marshawn said something like, oh, Snow Bunny McQueen. Oh man, he's really— and he's just lavishing compliments, giving him this weird nickname that has to do with his whiteness. And it just, at least it just Again, there are divisions. It seems like a lot of white players tend to hang out with white players and a lot of Black players tend to hang out with Black players. But there's something to it that is absent a lot of the neurosis or the neuroses you see in other contexts, in professional class contexts where all these groups have their different little Slack channels for their ethnicity and there seems to be real acrimony there. Football, it just seems like more harmonious world, even though it's competition and the stakes are physical.

Yeah, there's this idea from political scientists of cross-cutting cleavages of if you have multiple valued identities, then this can diminish polarization. So you and I might be on the opposite side of a political party, but we share the same religion, or we might be different ethnicities, but we vote for the same person, or, and so on and so forth. And No, I think this, uh, that sports is another sort of unifier of, yeah, we may be different races or believe in different things, but we're both football players or we're both on the same team.

One of— this reminds me of one of my favorite little stand-up asides. I wouldn't even call it a stand-up bit. It's on YouTube. It's Dave Chappelle at the Laugh Factory from many, many years ago, and I can't really hope to recapitulate it in the way he did it, I'll do my best just to convey the gist of it. He talks about the Michael Richards infamous flameout where he just freaked out on stage and he was dropping n-bomb after n-bomb. And Chappelle says, I realized in that moment when I saw it that I might be more comedian than I am Black. I might be more stand-up comedian than I am Black, because even though the Black part of me was enraged, was angry at him, the comedian part of me was saying, "Ah, man, he's having a bad set. You'll get him in the next act, Kramer. You'll get him in the next act." And there was just something to that that I thought was profound, because when you do have one of these odd jobs that's differentiated from society, you feel this bond with people that can be deeper than a lot of the cultural bonds that undergird the divisions in our society. Can divisions be undergirded? I don't know how the physics of that works, but you know what I'm saying. Yeah. And I related to that. I related to that as a former sportswriter, beat writer, because I had this weird job where I was traveling around the country and I'm going into all these arenas and they're all these little castles, and I just know everybody and they know me, and we're off the clock of normal society. We show up to work at 5, we leave work after midnight, and we have to relate to each other in a way that feels special. And it— that's gonna cut through, that's gonna cut through a lot. So I found that inspiring in a way.

Well, with, uh, when I was reading that, that chapter, um, I thought about this, this, uh, results from these— there have been multiple studies on this now of this idea of whether human psychology is naturally organized to discern race. Because what, what studies consistently show is that when you interact with another person for the first time, you automatically register 3 things about this other person. So one is their sex or gender. Is this a man or a woman? The second is their age, how old this person might be. And those two make sense from a kind of evolutionary perspective for all kinds of reasons around reproduction and status and so on. But then the third thing that people consistently encode is race. And psychologists, academic psychologists, have been intrigued by this third one because in the human ancestral environment where we spent most of our evolutionary history, you would never actually meet someone of a different race than you. If you imagine before, um, the rise of geographic mobility, hunter-gatherer nomadic bands, traveling by foot, you would encounter outsiders, people who were not part of your coalition or your tribe. But in terms of race, they would look identical to you. You know, maybe they would configure their hairstyle differently or have tattoos, bodily adornments, piercings, things that would mark them as a member of their group versus your group or a different group. But you would never encounter, you know, someone who was a completely different racial or ethnic background than yourself. And so they hypothesize that the reason why we see race and why that is, you know, one of the three categories that we encode now is because we're actually using race as a kind of proxy for coalitional membership. It's not so much that we evolved to detect race. We evolved to determine, are you a member of my in-group or out-group? But race doesn't necessarily have to be about in-groups and out-groups. And so though there have been many different ways that they've tested this idea, can we set up a situation where we actually don't focus so much on race when we meet another person? And the way that they've done this is through what they call a memory confusion paradigm. And the very simple version of this is, you know, if you're a participant in this study, I would show you videos of a person wearing a different color jersey. So I might show you a white guy wearing a red jersey and he says a few words to you through the screen. And then I show you a few other videos of other people talking. And then I show you a white woman wearing a red jersey saying the exact same words that the white man earlier in the red jersey was saying. And I say, is that the same person as before? I would ask you this. Most of the time people know, no, the other, you know, that was a, that was a man. This time it's a woman. If I show you different age groups, I'll show you, you know, an old white guy in a red jersey and then later a young white guy in a red jersey. And I'll ask you, was that the same person? You would say, no, that guy was old. This guy's young. But when I— when you show people the same age person, same sex person, but a different race in the red jersey, people do often forget whether that was the person as before because they're focusing on the jersey and the age of the person and the gender. But race is not automatically encoded so much as the jersey. And so they've suggested that this is why sports teams work as efficiently as they do, why militaries work as they do. And I remember this, you know, I went through basic training many years ago and, you know, the first thing they do is they strip you of everything. They shave your head, put you all in the same uniform, address you by your last name, and nothing else matters except you're a member of this this branch of the military, and you're all kind of brainwashed into believing in the same things. But that's kind of what sports teams do as well. You're playing for this team and you all suffer together. And so, you know, like you, I agree that there's something kind of inspiring that we can rise above, you know, these preoccupations with race. And that was something interesting, too, that Klostermann had written about how even in kind of the peak of what, wokeness or whatever in the early 2020s where they had End Racism in the end zones and, you know, all this kind of stuff, people didn't really take it that seriously because football in itself is, you know, it's not so much focused on politics or racial politics, but about can you play this game or not?

Yeah, and the stakes are perhaps not mortal, though theoretically they could be mortal, but they're physical. And I don't know if he got into all of this— there's some other odd aspects. It's a bizarre game. That's why I love that he wrote the book. It is the weirdest— even if weird is subjective, football is weird. It's very weird. It's not similar to basketball where even if we have different roles, we're sort of all doing the same thing. It's more like the military. Where there are these little defined groups and they have different culture. I don't know if this was said at all in the book, and I thought about saying it to him, but I find this to be unlike anything in any sport I can think of, which is they used to have this thing called the Wunderlich test. Are you aware of the Wunderlich test?

It's a proxy for intelligence, right?

Yes, it's a proxy for intelligence that they would give draft picks entering the NFL. They, a few years ago, stopped doing it because of sensitivities that you would see that maybe a certain racial group would have a higher average than another. And it's— I, and frankly, I gotta say, there's just a privacy invasion aspect to it where should everybody know to a number how smart you are when you're out in the world? Seems a little unfair. I think maybe seems like it should maybe be a private matter. Perhaps it's relevant for your job, or if they test you, that's something that's good. But I don't know if it should be broadcast on the internet. I don't know how fair it is to Tom Brady that I know his IQ.

Yeah, well, it's not a perfect, uh, it's not, it's not quite an IQ. Well, I don't, I don't, I don't know that much about it. My understanding is like it's, it's sort of an abbreviated, like a short—

you failed the first question, Rob. The first question is whether it's an effective proxy.

Is it unfair though? Because, you know, it's— I don't think you would say it's unfair to know a football player or an athlete's 40-yard dash or any other statistic about them. But I agree with you that it feels particularly invasive. We all get uncomfortable around intelligence. I've noticed this with intelligence and then with physical attractiveness. As well, that every other human attribute, people will kind of accept that they're valued and accept that there are differences and that we're not all the same. So things like hard work, work ethic, industriousness, sense of humor, obviously things like height or charisma. But when it comes to intelligence and beauty, there's a lot of kind of smokescreens and obfuscation.

And while we're all beautiful and we're all smarter in our own way, Looks privilege is obviously the greatest privilege because I remember thinking that during the heyday of white privilege, and I was thinking to myself, looks privilege is such a privilege that nobody even acknowledges having or not having it. Nobody acknowledges the lack of it. People would freely say, I don't have white privilege. Few people want to draw attention to how ugly or average they are by saying, I don't have I don't have attractive privilege. It's, it's such a thing that people want. People don't even want— yeah, yeah, uh, the, the Wonderlic. Because it's not just that they have the Wonderlic that's weird. Here's the weird aspect: the position with the highest Wonderlic average is the offensive line. Their job is to protect the quarterback and to block the position group with roughly the lowest Wunderlich average, the defensive line.

Okay, interesting.

Yeah, how bizarre is that? And the weirdest thing of all is that the body shapes are actually quite similar. I think offensive linemen tend to be a bit fatter and defensive linemen tend to be a bit faster and more violent with their movements, but generally we're talking about guys who are in the 250 to 330-pound range and they just face off against each other. That is crazy to me. That is a crazy setup. I don't know. I don't even know how you could concoct a sport from scratch and get a setup like that where the— for lack of a better way of putting it— the smarter guys on the field, their job is to face off against the not-so-smart guys on the field and they are in conflict.

The game still works, right?

Like, the game works. Yeah, it works beautifully. And something else I've noticed— Julian Edelman is a former Patriots wide receiver, friend with Tom— friends with Tom Brady, and he has a successful podcast. And his podcast is great because he just gives the people what they want. He just gives them New England Patriots stories, and you get a sense of the culture. It just flows out of him and the little resentments within the culture and the resentments the different positions have against one another. And one thing you get from it that the media has not told you is that the offensive players are generally smarter than the defensive players and regard themselves as such and view the defensive players through that lens. And they will joke about it all. That's the thing. There is some real tensions here, tensions that you can't have elsewhere in society, but the guys seem cool with it. And if Edelman has a defensive player on, he's going to be talking about it and saying that, well, Bill Belichick is up there saying, oh, E equals MC squared. And what the hell, asshole? How did you not know that? And then he'll talk to the defense and it's, yes, it's 1 plus 1 equals 2. Oh, you thought it was 3? It's okay. It's actually 2. And it's a different tone because the expectations cognitively are different. For the defense.

I'm, uh, I'm thinking about, uh, uh, something that I, I observed. It was the exact same phenomenon that you're describing. So I was a, an electronic warfare technician in the Air Force. So when you work on airplanes, somewhat simplified, but you have what they call specialists who work on things like missile warning systems, right? It's a very technical thing. Radar systems, um, uh, radio, uh, you're up in the, in the, the flight deck, the cockpit, sort of, you know, looking at the instruments the pilot uses and make sure that everything's up to date, everything's functional. And then you had— so those are the specialists who work on, on, on that kind of equipment. And then you had the crew chiefs, and these are the guys who marshal the planes in, check the oil, like very kind of, um, you know, rudimentary, kind of, uh, uh, not especially cognitively demanding tasks. And there was this similar kind of friendly rivalry here of the specialists. The crew chiefs would call the specialists the pointy heads And then, you know, we'd call the crew chiefs, you know, the knuckle draggers. And you had, you know, white crew chiefs, you had Black specialists, you had every race in between on either side of it. But there was never any animosity or resentment. This was just a kind of a stereotype about these jobs and who's drawn to them. And that just happened to kind of reflect reality because you did have to have a higher test score to have the specialist job versus the crew chief job., and no one seemed mad or upset about this. People would crack jokes about it. But, yeah, there's something about, I think, like the shared mission that, overall, we're sort of on the same team or we're playing the same game or we have the same purpose. Um, yeah, there is something about that, militaries and sports teams, where I don't think anywhere else you can identify sort of those playful jokes. Well, especially about intelligence, where NBA—

NBA is a weird one. Basketball is crazy because the biggest selection pressure is height. And so there's just this degree of randomness. And you can have Pau Gasol, who I think was going to be a doctor— that was a pathway that he could have gone with— but he's a 7-foot-tall Spaniard and he became a Hall of Fame-level basketball player for the Lakers and Grizzlies before that. And so you can have somebody who barely knows what they're doing. I could name a couple on the Warriors who played valuable roles. Mo Spates, love Mo. But yeah, you might not— let's say I remember one of the assistant coaches said, Mo, not the most linear thinker. That's how it was couched. That's how it was said. Or you could have a guy who's doctor level Moe was 7 feet tall, nearly. Powell is 7 feet tall. And it's just incredible that they have to have the same mission, the shared mission, that the guy who's smarter actually might be less valuable than the guy who's not sharp, and they've got to make it work. Football has more of that sorting mechanism where you're sorted according to your role. That is a very different game.

Yeah, I do wonder, you know, sort of broadly whether professional sports does serve as a kind of release valve or something for the racial tensions in the country, that without sports, you know, would race relations be worse?

Because we ran an experiment, Rob. Funny you say that. I don't know if you remember, in the year 2020, sports were canceled.

Well, okay, but there was a passage in the book somewhere, and I actually wanted to ask you about this. That apparently— because again, you know, we mentioned, uh, I'm not a huge sports guy, but there was something in there about, um, how the NFL, the MLB, and the NBA, they had to keep playing games even during the lockdown, even when the stadiums were empty and the outcomes were compromised. So I, I do know that they canceled the games temporarily, at least in the kind of the early days of COVID but eventually they brought them back despite not having, um, any spectators. And I'm curious, like, you know, what, like, what was the— is that for advertising? Like, why play the games, um, when no one is in attendance?

Oh, you've, you've come to the right place, Rob Henderson. So when they sign these massive television contracts worth billions of dollars, if let's say the NBA doesn't complete their season, they are in breach of the contract. And the broadcasters have every right to go, we're not going to give you the money anymore, or we don't, we don't have to, you're, you're in breach of this contract. Which has a lot to do with why they did this crazy setup of going to Florida, the NBA did, playing at Walt Disney World in front of no fans, a bunch of TV screens meant to represent fans. And the effects were fairly profound. Offensively, the players were incredible. There were guys who really blew up in the bubble that didn't sustain it afterwards. Anthony Davis, excellent player before all his injuries, but he was shooting out of his mind in a way that just doesn't happen. And I suppose when you're surrounded by people, even if it's all going on television, being broadcast to people, there's something to just people being around you, the energy, a little bit of the stage fright. That just changes the energy and adds a little friction to the experience. That was one thing. And then I think a lot of the story was football dragging, dragging the rest of the sports back. My timeline might not be perfect, but here, here's something that was funny that happened back then. It was a media story that I don't think I covered enough. There was all this coverage that college football is just not coming back. It's not happening. It's not going to be happening given the COVID and everything else. It's just not going to be happening. And that's what you got from all these sports reporters at The Athletic, where I used to work, at ESPN. But at Outkick, the coverage, which was Trump-aligned and from the right, they were reporting that actually it's coming back. It is coming back. And so there is this fissure. And we ended up learning that the prestigious, the mainstream, the corporate reporters had no idea that college football was actually returning. And it was as though they just couldn't see it because they couldn't conceive of it. I don't believe they're better sourced than Outkick the Coverage. I don't think that's the case, and I don't think it was the case back then. I just think that was this instance where they had an ideological block and the people who wanted to bring college football back went, "Man, I can't talk to these crazy libs over there. I can't tell them about this. We'll tell OutKick that football's coming back." Because we forget that there's not just this ideological division on taking the vaccine, there was just this ideological division on how dangerous this was and what you should be willing to risk for it. And it was obviously more conservative-coded to say, 'Look, playing football is worth it, baby. We need that football back.' That was way more red-coated. And so it revealed, for those who didn't find it obvious perhaps, that the media was just culturally not only different, but also just— they needed sports less. They were nerdy non-sports people in the media. There's a lot there, but you probably didn't know about that. So that's what happened.

No, no, no, that's, that's helpful to understand. And yeah, he— Klosterman mentioned the, the incentives to playing football, kind of. There was a chapter in there about CTE and how reasonable is it to expect a 20-year-old who's offered the possibility of fame and fortune while also a substantial risk of head injury? You know, can we really expect them to reasonably make that decision. And at the moment, society, we, we say yes, but I think Klostermann and many others are predicting that in the future we're going to say no. But then there are other areas of society where I think we're, we're actually— like, to me it's interesting, sort of, because you mentioned this is conservative-coded, that yeah, there are, there are risks, um, but you should be able to do it anyway. Um, that's conservative-coded. But then, um, something that, that that seems similar but is much more sort of lib-coded is like an 18-year-old starting an OnlyFans, right? And so you have the possibility of fame and fortune, make a lot of money, and you do something that could be damaging, you know, not physically damaging, but reputationally or psychologically damaging to yourself. But then in this case, the conservatives would say because of these risks, you maybe shouldn't be able to do this, whereas the libs would say, hey, like, it's your freedom. You should be able to do whatever you want and, you know, exploit your own sexuality however you see fit. So I'm interested in that asymmetry.

Yeah, I think conservatives generally care more about sexual morality. Yeah, and the libs have a little bit of a patronizing attitude towards minorities and that they're going to get themselves hurt if we don't look out for them, perhaps.

But then, but then women are— I mean, they're not whatever, like, like, like, uh, numerically minorities, but they're in his— they're historically mistreated group. Right? And they have been sexually exploited in the past, um, yeah, you know, in various ways. But in this case, um, is it because— I guess the idea is because they're opting in, you know, they're the ones who are making this content themselves, the state or, you know, the morality police or whoever should not interfere with this decision. Um, but then why would they not apply that same logic to, um, you know, uh, I guess, yeah, like ethnic minorities or, or anyone who wants to play football.

Sometimes I feel like we're making a mistake almost by trying to find the thread in it because it can be just self-perpetuating. Yeah, it's like, why are there a lot of Somalis in Minnesota? Is it that Somalis love the ice and the snow, or is it just that it started and then other people went, oh, this is the place to go to, and then it just gathers steam? Maybe with that one there's welfare benefits or whatever, but this happens with immigrant groups where A group will wind up in a random place in America, and then suddenly there are a bunch of people from that place, and it's because the first people went there and it just perpetuates. Where was I on this? There's so many places to go with all of this. I've completely lost my train of thought.

Well, I wanted to ask you too about this, um, I mean, since we're, you know, we're sort of talking about, uh, you know, the controversial parts of the book. Caitlin Clark. So as a non-sports fan, um, I've heard that name many times. She has sort of broken through, crossed over into mainstream fame, and I see her in Nike commercials or whatever. And, you know, I live in New York, I walk through Times Square and I'll see Caitlin Clark's face on the big screen.

Pin on that. Pin on that. Yeah, I want— we will talk about the Caitlin Clark thing, but I need to bring— I, I— because it got knocked out of my head as I was doing my stupid immigrant analogy. I, I just want to throw this one at you because it's so perfect for Per the last topic, The Washington Post, I believe, before it was genocided by Jeff Bezos, did a big study on people who played football. What they found was this: over 90% of the people who played football had injuries that they suffered from their career that they felt every day. They felt the pain from playing football every day. And over 90% of the people in this big survey reported that they had zero regrets playing football.

I would imagine that, um, the critics of football would say, well, you can't trust their judgment because their brains have been compromised by the sport. And so, you know, there's no way for them— for you to divine, you know, a perfectly uncontaminated, uh, retrospective view, like, do you regret it or not, because, you know, their brains have been rocked or suffering from head injury. So, but I mean, I still think that's interesting. Personally, I buy it that, you know, that if enough people have gone through this experience and despite all of the downsides, they still would do it all over again. That seems to me evidence enough that people should be allowed to. But I would imagine the critics would say, well, you know, how much can you trust that?

Well, I just look at it as they can— they experience the highest of highs. And those memories last forever. I mean, how many— what percentage of American men would sacrifice two fingers to have sex with Sidney Sweeney once and not live with regret over having made that decision? In this wild hypothetical, I believe that they look back at it, and I would even recommend that you watch The Boys of Fall. Kenny Chesney. Kenny Chesney, ode to American football. Where you see these speeches given by NFL coaches to a high school team, last game of the senior season, of how much they've got to soak it all up and relish it. And you keep hearing this from NFL players, that nothing compares to those days, nothing compares to those highs, that when it's gone, it's gone. I can't access it. I didn't play football like that. But even if it's grievously, grievously injurious it appears to also be a portal to something that can never be replicated or experienced in any other way. And as horrible as the cost is, and as much as people who bore the cost would tell us, you do not even know how horrible this cost is, apparently the reward is such that we don't know how amazing the reward is either. And the reward is in excess of the cost.

Yes. Now that, that makes sense. I mean, I think, I mean, the two fingers, uh, trade-off. I mean, I think how many men would, would accept CTE, uh, to sleep with Sydney Sweeney? Uh, how many, uh, retired NFL players would give up two fingers to have, you know, had that experience, uh, of, of being a star player? But what I was thinking about, so I'm, you know, back to, back to the, the Washington Post, uh, uh, finding, I think either way the critics would, would find a flaw with it. So on the one hand, if you could prove that these players are actually uninjured, that their brains are perfectly intact and they tell you, I would do it again, the critics would say, well, but they're not injured. So of course they would play again. You need to ask some injured players whether they would play. All right. I'm going to go ask some injured players, do you regret playing? And they say, no, I don't regret playing. The critics would say, well, that's because their brains are injured. And so you can't trust what they say to you.

I want a brain injury that makes me live absent regret. Where's that, LeBotte? To me. That sounds wonderful. That sounds like— I don't think it's the CTE making them say that. I don't. Caitlin Clark, what was intriguing to you about what Chuck said about Caitlin Clark?

Well, so we're, you know, we're kind of 40 minutes into this discussion roughly, right? So, um, you know, I, I guess my— what came to mind for me is, because I've heard about this as well, I think it might have been on your, uh, Substack, you've written about some of the on-court, um, collisions and abuse and some of the mistreatment she's experienced from, uh, her fellow, uh, players. And I had no idea until I read Klosterman's book that when Clark started playing for Iowa, uh, the audience for female college basketball actually increased, uh, so much that it surpassed the viewership for men's college basketball, which blew my mind. Because even I understand that there's way more people watch men's sports than women's sports. But she had that kind of star power or ability or something that drew people in. And yet, you know, I had some ambient awareness that people didn't like her, even though she was successful and was drawing attention to this sport that has historically been beleaguered. And people have said, well, why aren't more people watching women's sports? And so on. It must be sexism. And, and so Klostermann points out, like, you know, this put a lot of people in this tenuous position of, well, suddenly this sport is popular. How do we explain this? And the very person who's making this sport popular is somehow become the target of a lot of resentment and pettiness and anger and bitterness and so on. And then I thought, —because Klostermann uses this, I think it's early in the race chapter as a way to sort of— he uses that initially and then sort of slides into the discussion about race. But what I was thinking is I can't imagine, I don't know, if a similarly historically mistreated group had been kind of in the margins of sports, no one really cared, or regularly mocked, and they always wondered, why aren't we as popular as whatever the dominant, more popular group is? And then suddenly someone emerges who's talented and interesting and charismatic. I don't think that the response would be the same. Like, if I'm thinking about something like, like a disabled group, like, I don't know if there's like a professional league of disabled basketball players and they've never really had much interest. And then suddenly one of them turns out to be very interesting and talented and so forth, and they get a lot of eyeballs. I can't imagine other disabled people saying like, this is unfair or intentionally trying to foul this person or badmouthing this person in any way. I can't really imagine this even for, I don't know, if in an alternate universe— I mean, I guess this did happen at one point, right? Like, like leagues were segregated by race. But if there was a very talented Black player on a Black league and then a lot of white people started watching or something, I don't think the other Black players would be like this, you know, starting to foul this person or mistreat them on purpose. But something about women and women's psychology is unique in this regard. Well, where— and you, you see this pattern because there are studies on, on sort of group dynamics of men versus women. And it does seem that it's much harder to keep a coalition of women together than a coalition of men, despite the fact that men generally tend to be more confrontational and hostile and aggressive and prone to violence than women. Um, when you look at group dynamics with a shared purpose and a shared mission, men do find— seem to find it easier to put aside differences relative to women. And this was a very interesting sort of real-world demonstration of this because up until this point I'd only seen these kind of artificial lab-constructed scenarios in psychology studies.

So there's so much going on with it, so much going on there. And part of the— part of the— it's a unique situation because the WNBA had been the subsidiary of the NBA that had been floated by the largesse of the NBA for a quarter century. So it wasn't making money. It was like one of these NGOs or working at NPR. So Washington Post. Yeah, the Washington Post. The status wasn't about the money. If you're being logical, you would go, oh my God, the moneymaker has arrived. She's going to spread it around. We're going to get more money. We're going to get a better TV deal. This is our golden goose. This is incredible. But because it was never about the money, it was about your status within this culture that most people don't care about. There was more of an iron law of institutions dynamic, the idea that your power or your status within a group is more important than how the group is doing overall in aggregate. And so beyond the gender dynamics, there was that dynamic and I believe they really liked their culture. They didn't want anybody messing with it. And there was a tone and a tenor that she was bringing the wrong kind of person along. These people who might vote for Trump were now interested in the WNBA. These people are Republicans and probably hold racist opinions, and when they boo, they do it racistly. There was a lot of commentary about that, and also Okay, so you've done the hard part of identifying certain negative pathologies that might be more female-coded, because as we know, men and women are different, but only men have negative pathologies that could be discussed writ large. Uh, yes, but it— but I, I think that sometimes, hypothetically, is it possible And I say this knowing that men have obviously many flaws. We dominate when it comes to crime, for instance, and murder and all these other things. Are we a little bit better than the ladies at the is versus ought distinction? Mm-hmm. Say more. What do you mean by that? Because I saw that repeated when it came to the Caitlin Clark situation, when male commentators, many of them retired athletes, said Look, this is how it is. She's the golden goose. And the response from women who were in the league or covering the league was, yeah, but it should be A'ja Wilson. A'ja Wilson has 2 MVPs. And it's okay, I understand, I understand that. I understand that she has 2 MVP awards. I get that. But over 10 million people are watching this woman. Well, it should be A'ja Wilson, and it's racist that they really like Caitlin Clark. And you go, okay, I get— maybe it is, maybe it is, but here's the situation. And it was this endless loop, endless loop that, uh, had the potential to foment a new negative gender stereotype that I would only share in a group chat, never ever ever say on a podcast. This is merely a character I'm playing, people.

Yeah, we're just dealing in hypotheticals here. Yeah, but that's okay. So that's interesting. That maybe men would be more likely to say, well, even if they disliked this player, well, the market has spoken and this is what people want. Give the people what they want and then we all get richer and whatever, we move on.

But yeah, I, I could put it this way. I could envision in the NBA there's a popular white player, there might be some resentment. Steve Nash was— he won 2 MVPs. People thought maybe Shaq should have won the MVP instead. But there's still a sense, let's say, if Steve Nash was a bigger deal a lot of them would be saying, look, though, I mean, a rising tide lifts all boats. You know, we can all eat. More people are watching me steal the ball from Steve Nash now when they're watching his games. Yeah.

I mean, generally, men seem to be more comfortable with status hierarchies. I mean, this is like classic finding. Joyce Bennison, who's an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, has done a lot of great work on this. You know, men are— as long as it's sort of based on skill and competence and not sort of bullying and domineering, men can respect that some men are just sort of higher and more respected than others, whereas women, you know, have much more difficulty with this, that they like sort of flattened structures in terms of social dynamics. But there's this other interesting idea of the male warrior hypothesis. And this is evolutionary psychology idea that essentially within a same-sex peer group, so a group of women or a group of men, And on average, the kind of conflict within these groups are about the same. So men, the conflict is more sort of overt and physical, more kind of bullying and mocking and teasing and so on. Whereas with a group of all women, much of the kind of social conflict is indirect gossip and innuendo and badmouthing and so on. But when these groups are pitted against another group, of outsiders, men seem to be better on average at subduing the within-group conflict. And suddenly they have this outside group that they're up against, and that is— the whole purpose is to defeat them. So we're going to squash our differences within our group, at least temporarily, while we deal with this other group. Whereas women have more difficulty with that. And there have been like very interesting studies. So I know I mentioned before, I'd only been familiar with, with lab studies, but there have been some of these observational studies, I think of either high school or college basketball games of like willingness to shake your opponent's hand after the game. And you see that, that men are more likely after a game to shake the opponent's hand after a game versus women who are more likely to snub the opponent. But then also when you look at the dynamics within a team, Often the girls' teams find it difficult to get along with one another. If there's a history of conflict within a group, the men are better at ignoring that temporarily during a game, whereas women, if there is kind of a conflict among the players, that still seems to express itself even when they go up against a different team. So, you know, this is, this is kind of, you know, I'm explaining it in a way that's more I guess, uh, explicit in the way the researchers describe it. But this is kind of an interesting pattern.

You know what's interesting about NBA culture too? At least I think you would find it interesting. So I think something that surprises a lot of fans of the NBA, or did when I was covering the Warriors, they think the players are friends with each other. They think the teammates are friends with each other. When they watch them on TV, they're all wearing the same jersey and they're high-fiving when the ball goes in. They look like the best of friends. And why wouldn't they be friends? They travel the country together. We were just talking about if you have this rare, weird job that's different from the rest of society, you're going to have a natural bond. They have that. It would make a lot of sense. They're practically celebrities. Other people aren't. They should be able to share something. And actually, what you find is that there aren't really many close friendships on a team. Some teams, yeah, it does happen, but a lot of the times, not really. Guys aren't hanging out with one another. And I asked some people in the league about this, this very strange pattern, and they said, look, have you watched the show Entourage? Have you watched the show Entourage? Yes. They all want to be Vince. They all want to be Vince, and it works better that way. It's more frictionless that way. Where do we— where are we gonna go eat? Oh, it's wherever Vince wants to eat. Oh, we're at the nightclub. Who's gonna get the hottest girl? Who's gonna get— oh, Vince, he's gonna get the hottest girl. If these NBA players start hanging out with one another and the order is a bit fuzzy, it creates problems potentially. It creates issues. So they want to be in a comfortable dynamic with their friends back home or their friends outside of the team where they all get to be a big fish in a smaller pond than having this other uncomfortable situation where it's not clear who should be on top.

Yeah, this is— I mean, so this is an interesting real-world example of, uh, how status equivalency actually increases conflict. I think that a lot of people have this lay intuition, this belief that, well, a lot of conflicts stems from inequality and that once people are equal with one another, that conflict will dissipate. I guess for reasons of respect or esteem or something. But actually what you find is that when people are closer in status with one another, conflict is actually more likely to occur because then you don't have these very easy sort of social heuristics of, yeah, who's— where are we gonna go eat tonight? Well, if you have two alphas, right, like, that might turn into a very uncomfortable discussion. But if you have one, then everything is frictionless and easy. Um, you know, who gets the girl? Oh, you know, the, the leader gets her, versus if you have two would-be leaders, things get much more uncomfortable and difficult. Um, and so, yeah, that's, that's okay. So that's why these people have entourages. But then you've also heard— I mean, I'm not, um, I'm only basing this off of some, some interviews that I've read of a lot of like A-list celebrities prefer to hang out with one another because the idea being they only, um, only someone who's in the same position as themselves could understand the problems that they have, that kind of thing.

Um, I don't want to derail the conversation here, but no, I think, I think, yeah, I think this is a good distinction. I think the difference is that they're not in direct competition, and their salaries are not public. When you look up the roster of an NBA team down to a dollar, you see what everybody is making, and that can result in a lot of tensions. I think in Hollywood there are reports that he got this for a movie or that for a movie, but, you know, and they might be competing for scripts, but it's all a bit more vague. It's a more vague world than we are on the same team. And yeah, they hang out with each other, but I don't know if everybody who's on a movie set is friends with one another. And you've seen similar dynamics, Rob, where you hear people talking about some popular sitcom and they go, man, I hated the boy in Boy Meets World. He was horrible. Hated that guy. I think they hang out with each other, and I didn't give that distinction. They're often friends with guys on other teams or a guy they played with in college. I think it's being around somebody repeatedly and being in the same, the same situation. That's where the status game becomes more of an issue.

Interesting. Yeah, so if I guess in— that's— yeah, if salaries are publicly known and it feels like a more zero-sum situation. Um, okay, now there's something— NBA is incredibly zero-sum.

Incredibly. And I've said this on the podcast, but it's why the culture of the NBA is less complementary than the culture of baseball. When I watch the MLB Network, I'm often astounded by how the retired, retired players are just lavishing compliments on the players of today. Because when I watch retired NBA players, they're grousing, they're griping, they're sliding. And I've decided that's because in the NBA it is zero-sum. If I'm scoring more points, it's good for the team, but you're getting fewer touches. And you getting fewer touches is just the precursor to you not being in the situation anymore or being traded. In baseball, if I'm hitting more home runs, I'm not detracting from anything that you're doing. Indeed, if I'm batting behind you, the pitcher is scared of me and they're throwing you more hittable pitches. Because they don't want a situation where there's somebody on base. So in baseball, it's a very individual sport and thus ironically allows for more— what am I looking for? Not symbiosis, but just copacetic people getting along. It's so individualized that people can get along more easily. Than basketball, where people actually have to make status sacrifices for the greater good.

And that would look like— if, um, yeah, either, either sort of, uh, empirical evidence or just anecdotes or something about whether, um, sort of off-the-court, off-the-field camaraderie is higher amongst baseball versus the NFL versus, um, you know, any other sports. Or can you rank these? How, how close are these guys when they're not on playing the game based on sort of the zero-sum nature of, uh, of what they're playing.

That would be interesting to see. Well, the 49ers in football, it leads to some resentments. They've got something called the Cabo Crew, a group of them who like to vacation in Cabo, including the coach. And then the perception is, well, those are the players who are in good with the coach and they have a thing and you're either on the outside or you're on the inside. So all these sports have their little, little dynamics when it comes to that. And I've gotten so far from Chuck's football book that maybe we return it to football. I'm not sure.

But well, can we, can we— since we're on the top— I mean, we were, uh, on the topic of Caitlin Clark and sex differences. There was a very interesting aside Klosterman shared here about Canadian women versus Canadian men. Oh yes, yes. So he, he suggests, and this is just his impression, that Canadian women, um, often unfavorably compare the U.S. to Canada, um, you know, I guess with regard to culture and healthcare and so forth, whereas Canadian— and those Canadian women tend to remain in the U.S. US. So they come here from Canada and then they kind of don't like many things about the US, but they stay regardless. Canadian men, the reverse, that Canadian men, you know, sing the praises and, and say very nice complimentary things about the US, but then eventually many of them move back to Canada. Um, I'm curious what you made of this. I don't know that many Canadians. Um, I have seen this pattern with non-Canadian, uh, immigrants. Immigrants and visitors that, um, you know, the, the women seem to be less satisfied with the state of the U.S. versus where they came from versus the men who seem to like it more. Um, and yet the men do seem more likely to travel back.

Yeah, and I have to take Chuck's word for it because this is a man from North Dakota and he has more experience with Canadians than I have. The Canadian is just a funny creature in general. I knew nothing of their thoughts of the world when I was young, and now I'm on the internet and I see it, and I see all their— at least the journalists' resentments towards my country and how my country dominates their outlook. But they also at the same time have their own nationhood identity and, uh, filter a lot of what's going on here through that. So it's been a long, strange journey. Getting more of a sense of Canadian culture from the outside. Now, is that related to— what do they call it— the heat map? They did some psychological study where, where conservatives had more of the internal locus or focus of warmth and the liberals had more of the exterior.

Maybe it's— yeah, so you were, you were given a set of, uh, like, like a number of points So you say, I give you 20 points and you can allocate them across like different entities. And so the, you know, the center of this kind of moral circle would be your friends, your family, the people you love, your peers. And then from there, maybe something like your neighbors, your people in your town, your country, and so on and so all the way. And then extended all the way out to things like inert entities like trees and rocks and non-living things. Points, and they've— and you can only— you have a limited number of points, you know, how are you going to distribute them as far as where your moral circle is or your moral concern is concentrated? And the conservatives, it was overwhelmingly concentrated among their family and their friends, and then to a lesser extent, kind of their town, their state, their country, whatever. And then for liberals, um, they were much more likely to allocate these points outside of— you're kind of, kind of further out— trees and rocks, um, um, non-citizens of the country they reside in.

Yeah, that's a fascinating study. There might not be a connection here. I'm— I mean, it's such a curveball from Chuck because the first thing we could easily go, okay, the Canadian women are more anti-US than the Canadian men. Uh, women skew more to the left. Media coverage of the United States can be critical. And there's something about the United States that is déclassé to elites. And so that would be a more charismatic message with women. We could also say that women have more of a concern for everybody having healthcare, and the way that Canadian healthcare is presented might be more charismatic to them potentially. But the weird curveball he throws is that the Canadian man who comes to the US is favorable to the US and then returns to Canada. I don't know what the hell to do with that part. That part, I don't know what to make of it. That the Canadian woman who complains about the US stays in the US, the Canadian man who is favorable to the US leaves the US. No clue. And it's anecdotal, so I'm not sure, but I can't— I don't have the experience to say.

Chuck, I can give you my, my like very speculative like word cell take here, which is that if you're a non-American man who likes the US, probably one of the things you like about the US is the patriotism. And if you admire patriotism, I mean, you know, in the abstract, then you also admire it for yourself in your own country. And so the Canadian man who admires America and American culture probably admires the patriotism because they themselves feel that for their own country, and that's why they go back. Back. Um, but, uh, I don't know if that fully holds because the women, um, who move to the US say nice things about Canada, but then they don't go back. So, you know, it's complicated.

I don't— yeah, I don't know what to make. Actually, no, it's not that.

Oh, hold on, hold on. So if the Canadian women come to the US, they don't like the US. One of the things they don't like about the US is patriotism because they themselves don't experience patriotism, and that's why they don't go back to their home country.

Okay, now I've solved it. Oh my God.

Ah, so you mentioned the Class A earlier. Um, one other, and then this was actually completely, a lot of this book, you know, I, I, I'd sort of seen bits and pieces of this and Klosterman's other essays and work. One thing that really stood out to me, and especially given my interest in, in things like, like social class, um, his riffs on soccer. So one of the interesting points he makes about soccer, which I, I should have known this, he says it and then immediately I understood it, but it was just, it never—

I saw you share this. I'm so glad you're bringing it up. Continue.

Which is that, um, and I noticed this, I mean, I lived in Germany for 3 years. I lived in the UK for 5 and a half years and I never got into soccer. You know, I'm not sort of temperamentally inclined to be a sports fan, but I knew soccer fans, you know, football fans, whatever. And, um, attended the occasional game. But Klostermann points out that in Europe, soccer is for the commoners. And you see this if you go to a football game in London, American football or American soccer or whatever. You see, you know, drunken hooligans and that kind of culture. You know, a lot of people are familiar with that. And the European-educated elites are not that interested. They're kind of indifferent to soccer. Maybe the political elites will pay lip service to it during the World Cup or something, you know, in part for their own, for their own benefit, for votes. But in America, it's the opposite, where the commoners, regular Americans, have little interest in soccer. I think it's growing, it's changing a little, but generally still not nearly as popular as the other professional sports. The higher up you go in education, the more likely the person is in America to like soccer because they associate it with with European sophistication, even though in Europe it's not the sophisticated people who like it.

It's not a particularly— it's not a particularly sophisticated game. No offense, soccer lovers. It's the beautiful game. Nobody ever called it the complicated game. And I noticed this, and not only did I notice it, I think I fell victim to it. I was one of these people— how people say, I used to be in this cult I used to, you know, be under this misapprehension. I couldn't see the error of my ways. I was playing— I, I knew nothing about following soccer, but my friends started playing FIFA, the video game, a little bit in high school, at the end of high school. And then I went to college, and my roommate, he was from Guatemala, he's a big soccer fan, and he was showing me these really cool clips. It was very exotic to me to see these clips from the English Premier League and World Cups I hadn't bothered to watch, and these highlights of the greatest goals. And back then you didn't have— YouTube was not in the circulation it is now. You, you just, you didn't have access to these things. You didn't— you'd have to really know about it to know when you could see anything from European soccer, to see these full stadiums, and it's clearly a big event. And it's a big deal, some other planet somewhere. Really cool. And so I got into it. And when he found out about some big Champions League game, I would go to whatever sports bar happened to have it. And it was all very exciting to me to see Ronaldinho back then. And eventually I came full circle and eventually I just went, okay, um, now that the novelty of this has worn off and I don't feel like I'm as much of a sophisticate, I— it's kind of boring, you know, if we're just going to be real about it. It's like, I, I'll watch a really big game, I'll enjoy a big soccer game, and I also can understand that there are finer points of the sport that I don't have any connection to. If my son had taken to soccer, I could see a different reality where I really get into it. But I went through that whole— I went through the whole thing, man. I went through the whole thing of I want to look into this soccer, this shows I know about things outside of America. Wait a second. It's kind of boring. You know what? I'm just a dumb American. Give me my NFL. I went through the whole, the whole loop of it, the whole journey of it. And it's true. And I've heard this. I've heard this from second gen immigrant kids of, "Dude, back home, this is what the rabble likes." And then you get to Portland, they're all wearing the little soccer scarves. Just, what is this? And I don't know how sustainable that is for a culture, for a culture of sport, for it to be this effete, nerdy pursuit for the world's game that doesn't happen to be that anywhere else. I guess it's working though. I guess it's working well enough currently for soccer.

There's something about football versus soccer, you know, American football versus soccer.

Football versus soccer. We're Americans.

Well, what I'm, what I'm interested here is that I like soccer is boring and it doesn't seem to actually require that much in the way of— I mean, I'm sure, you know, if you have listeners who love soccer, they're gonna, they're gonna excoriate me, but relative to football, it seems less mentally demanding. To strategize for a game of soccer versus football. There just seems to be way more moving parts and much more going on in a game of football versus soccer. And so it's not only more mentally demanding, but also far more physically demanding. So you sort of— a lot, a lot— it requires a lot in the way of sort of mental ability, but also physical ability.

And what I'm thinking about here is, you know, the way does Yeah, I want to interject because Dana White— you know who Dana White is?

You know that? Yeah, the UFC founder.

Yeah, right. Yeah, he, he, he courted controversy because a few weeks ago he called soccer the least talented sport on earth. Okay. Yeah. And said that I can't stand soccer. And his argument, one of the quotes is, when you're playing a game where the net is this big and the score is 3-1, are you shitting me? And he was saying that, look, this is a sport for 3-year-olds. If a bunch of 3-year-olds can play this, I look at it as a lot of whatever you like about a sport is just what you're used to. And sports have their different value proposition.

I kind of like that though. Like that age heuristic where like 3-year-olds can't play soccer, 3-year-olds can't play football even if they were sort of physically able to mentally, they couldn't play football. It would be impossible to organize a game of 3-year-olds to play football. You need, you know, there's a minimum sort of mental threshold to play football and 3-year-olds don't have it. But for soccer, it's a very simple game to understand. Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. So, so football is physically demanding and mentally demanding, soccer less so. And I remember sort of reading and I don't remember where I got this, but it rang true to me, which is essentially that America is the land of extremes and Europe is much more sort of moderate. Um, and the examples given were things like, um, drinks. If you order a cold beverage in Europe, it'll just be something maybe out of a refrigerator if you're lucky. If you're extremely lucky, you might get 2 or 3 ice cubes. If you order a cold beverage in the US, it would be filled to the brim with ice. Um, hot beverage, in the US, you know, you'll burn your tongue. In Europe, it's kind of, you know, a few degrees above room temperature. I'm into that. Things like, like fitness. We in America have the fattest, most horrifically obese people, but also gym bros who are shredded and incredibly fit. And in Europe, everyone's just kind of normal skinny fat and so on. There's all of these different things. We have the kind of the dumbest people in the world, but also the best universities. And so I think, yeah, football might also be like a kind of an example of this, of it's an extremely violent sport, but it's also extremely mentally demanding.

It, it's a paradox of the sport where it's dumb knuckle-draggers, theoretically low culture, and also if you hear any of them talk about it, they sound like physicists. It's absolutely inscrutable as to what they are describing. And yeah, sports are optimized for different things. Soccer spreads so easily. Look, there's no mystery of how soccer spread around the world. No mystery at all. You show somebody soccer once, they go, I get it. NFL, I mean, you just go, how was the sport— I mean, I could maybe see— I don't even know how it was invented. It's so complicated, let alone how it's spread as a meme. It seems like a miracle that that even happened. It's not optimized for it, but it's captivating enough in a way. And yeah, I, I think there's something to the Dana White argument as far as my own interest is concerned, but it all seems arbitrary. People will argue what sport is better as though there's an objective standard for it, when really a lot of it, as in food, is what were you brought up eating. If you were brought up eating this, it would be delicious. If you were brought up eating that, then it's gross. People who are raised in Canada love hockey. I hate hockey. I'd never want to watch it. I hate the sight of it. Get it out of my face. If I grew up in Toronto, though, I would be into it. And I like those sorts of questions because I'm always fascinated by how much of taste is subjective and how much of taste is objective. There's got to be a sport that is objectively great, but I don't know how we could even prove that.

Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel the complex nature of football probably prevents it from, from being successfully exported. Whereas, yeah, soccer is so simple to play that anyone can— I mean, you literally just need a ball. You don't even need goals or nets or whatever, whereas football is much more involved there. But yeah, I, um, I've got a question.

I've got a question. I've got a question for you, Rob Henderson. Why are we not pathetic to you, we sports fans? Chuck seems vaguely embarrassed by the level of his fandom, and something I didn't bring up to him is there's an element of it being D-class A that he's a Dallas Cowboys fan from not Texas. There's a big America, Star-Spangled bigger cachet to Cowboys fandom. But it's not just that. It's just being a thinky guy in the way he is and having his emotions swirled about by what these younger men do in this proxy war. It's all very silly. And yet I share the exact same thought process he has. I can't help it. I love it. It's where my fixation goes. Why are we sports ballers not pathetic to you? You said that you respect us like religion. While not being overtly religious. I don't know if I believe you. I don't know if I believe you. We think we're pathetic.

I don't want to make too much of that analogy that I drew to religion. It was, you know, I guess if I had to choose, you know, do I respect professional sports or religion more, you know, I'd have to say probably religion. But I— but there's something about sports that I still— and in the same way that religion as well, it speaks to something in human nature, that drive to something higher than yourself. And I know they're not perfectly the same thing, but something about sports, the admiration for excellence, of pushing yourself to your limits. I really liked— and I listened to your discussion with Chuck, and I know you'd mentioned that you wanted to leave this for the the listener to read the book, but I— this passage did really move me and I hope you don't mind me bringing it up, dude, where he's talking about his memory of his father. Yes. Yeah. And it was what was like Doug Flutie threw this Hail Mary pass or something. And until that point, you know, Chuck's a kid watching this game with his dad and his dad is like, oh, it's all over for him. He should just give up. I'm paraphrasing. And then Doug Flutie successfully passes the ball to his teammate who scores touchdown. And then Chuck's dad says, "Well, there you go. I gave up and he did not. And that's why he is who he is. And that's why I am who I am." Oh, God. And that was probably my favorite line in the book. Me too. And yeah, it was— And I think, like, that in itself captures something about Even if you're just a fan on your couch and you'll never play, you know, you're one of these, I guess, yeah, the sports ball, whatever, like the caricature mouth-breathing sports ball fan. I still respect someone who can respect that, who like, this person is like a superior form of human being. And I admire that so greatly. And I will, and I'm willing to admit to myself that I'm not that, but I, but I, they still hold that in such high regard. Um, there's just something about that, that willingness to, to admire excellence that I like.

That was my favorite part of the book. I did not discuss it with Chuck. I tried to say maybe it should be a teaser for other people, but you should just read the book. It's quite entertaining. That stuck with me, but almost— I, I, if I would have asked Chuck about it, it would have been why he put it in there. You gave me a plausible theory for why it's in I think it's one of those passages though, if I had to guess, I don't think that he would have assumed it was our favorite part of the book, but we both came to that conclusion independently. And for me, there's a painful wistfulness to it, and the scene is set up in such a way where you expect his father, who's rooting for Flutie, to be ecstatic. But I love that there's this painful in-the-moment reflection on, well, that's why that person did what they did, and that's, that's why I am who I am. And I don't know what to attribute that to, if that's Midwestern Nord melancholy. I don't know what that is, but I love that passage. I love it. It's just It's inspiring and painful simultaneously.

Yeah, I guess there's something— there's some, like, I'm not going to explain this perfectly, but it's something about, like, this interesting combination of humility, uh, combined with, um, respect for excellence, um, self-awareness, um, just— yeah, there's a lot going on there, um, and I really think that, yeah, that, that sort of encapsulated it for me. That when I do watch the occasional game, I am often, you know, in awe of what I'm witnessing. And I am aware of all the many thousands of hours these guys put into training and practice and sacrificing everything in pursuit of this one mission. And so, and I know sort of in the grand scheme of things, whatever, guys throwing a ball around, who cares? And I know like a lot of the, you know, a lot of guys online, you know, the dissident right type. So it's just sports ball. It's what bread and circus is, that kind of thing. But I think that's okay because I think in the sports, in the physical world, there is no debate about merit. You either caught the ball or you didn't. And it's nice. I think there are domains of human activity where there is no argument about whether something happened or not or who's better than someone else. I like that.

It's interesting to watch San Francisco enlivened by the presence of the Super Bowl. Obviously, the Super Bowl is played over an hour away, but everybody here is staying in San Francisco, or the main people of it. And it's, it's funny. It's funny to see the NFL. It's funny to read Chuck's book and just— the NFL is everywhere right now. I just, before this podcast, was at some sort of NFL media hotel, and this is a bit of a You know what? I've got to stop myself from doing this. Goddamn it. I'm getting feedback, Rob, from people. I apologize for my own digressions. I can't help it. Do you know why my brain does that? It does it because I'm trying to do an article, and in my head, when I'm trying to shape a paragraph, I'm going, wait, get back on track, get back on track, get back on track. I can't help it. I have a digressive mind.

—now that makes you a great writer, Ethan.

Oh, you're too kind, too kind. It's the scene of this culture war right now. There's a funny— here's a funny thing, Rob Henderson. I was maybe gonna write this, but I'll say it to you. I'm looking at a little— it's not revealed versus stated preference, but it's secret preference versus public preference— where I went to this party with all these NFL media people And I wanted to get their opinion on San Francisco because San Francisco, from my eyes, looks a lot better now than it did a few years ago under the Mayor Lurie. But it's also not all the way back. And I actually expected them to lavish praise upon San Francisco because the weather is just perfect for this Super Bowl week, just unseasonably wonderful. I didn't get that response. I got a lot of yuck. That's what I got. And then when I go on social media, I see NFL media personality after NFL media personality saying, you know what, this town is amazing. And I'm looking at it going, that's not what I was hearing when I was talking in private. And I just find that to be— I find that to be funny. That's understandable. But I think that's a funny dynamic. It's become part of this broader culture war. Whether San Francisco sucks is now a matter of political perspective. And the other thing I find to be amusing about it, Rob, is that it's such a small city that anybody telling me what they think of it, there's almost a Heisenberg's uncertainty principle aspect where your presence makes this not what this place actually is like. You have infused, you have taken this place over. It's like we are a bladder that has just been filled by you, and this is not whatever the standard experience is. It's all Super Bowl'd out. Everything is NFL. All you people are in the city. You're all looking at each other going, isn't San Francisco great? And you guys don't live here. So these are my scattered thoughts on the NFL invading my locality.

Yeah, well, I mean, I guess, I guess the bright side, you can enjoy the temporary reprieve from normal San Francisco. Another, another reason to love the NFL.

Yeah, I don't like that for this week they kicked out my fentanyl dealer and they've cleaned up the streets and broken my habit. I don't know if there's anything like— what happened there where they cleaned up everything for Xi visiting? What were the dynamics behind that? But anywho, anyway, uh, are there any other observations, anything else you would like to discuss before we wrap up? I mean, we could go anywhere. We could talk about Helen Andrews raising complaints about Asian immigrants and the whole fight over that. We could talk about men not approaching women. I wrote down a few topics.

I mean, well, I, I'm, I'm intrigued by both of those, Ethan. Um, probably a good place, uh, maybe to, to close, but, but we should— because both of those deserve a full, I think, a full episode maybe, uh, uh sooner rather than later because I'm seeing the ongoing drama and I see my friend, uh, I think our maybe mutual friend, uh, Richard Hanania, sort of going to war with Helen on this point. So I'd love to do a different discussion, separate discussion on, on the Asian immigrant question.

They should just do one of those old school Bloggingheads. Remember Bloggingheads?

They should just do that.

Yes, they should just, they should just argue over it. I I have not seen the Dick Hanania versus Helen Andrews fight over whether Asian immigrants are grade grubby to a fault. I have not seen that as of yet. But anyway, anywho, maybe that will be a different episode. I enjoyed this particular conversation. What would you like to promote on the outro? What should people be on the lookout for?

You know, Substack, I guess, is the main thing. So RobKHenderson.com, check out my Substack. My book Troubled is out in paperback and yeah, it's good enough. There you go, man. Thanks so much. Thank you, Ethan.