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- [00:00]
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- [01:26]
Mike Pesca
Hi, it's Saturday. It's the Saturday show. The old Best of the week, Best of the Vault and other interviews Mike has done elsewh this might technically bend the rules about when we did the interview was a week ago. The topic Ethan Strauss and I discussed essentially the death of sports writing. The death of one type of sports writing, which is the gamer. That's the recap of the game that just occurred. The thinking is you don't need the written form of this, but as Ethan and I discuss as a training ground, the gamer is invaluable. And also as a piece of art and as a piece of journalism. Let's not even call it art. Let's call it as a piece of craft. The gamer, when done right, delivers great joy. So enjoy this. This was a longer substack live. Ethan and I often talk on his show. We haven't done a live, I think ever before. And so it's a. It's a good way to do chat where we also solicit some audience interactions and how we do it is when it is live. You could always join in live and that's at Mike pesca.substack.com it's also at his house of Strauss and then we post them for paying subscribers to mikepesca.substack.com enjoy.
- [02:49]
Tempur Pedic Mattress Announcer
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- [03:22]
Mike Pesca
I'm Mike Pesca. I'm joined by Ethan Strauss, who has been up for eight hours now. You may be thinking, well, does he live in Belgium? Kuala Lumpur? No, the man lives in California and he likes to rise and grind at 4am Some questions. I also have some questions about sports journalism, the construction of the craft, and also what we're reporting on in the world of sports journalism. Ethan, I'd like to welcome myself to your substack live. I think that technically might be what we're doing.
- [03:53]
Ethan Strauss
I do think that might be technically what we're doing. And I rise and grind, Mike, because our topic is how the sports writing industry has died. This is part of my pivot. I'm an influencer. I'm going to be making videos of how I dip my face in hot wax or whatever before the sun comes up so other people can draw inspiration from my life and learn how to be more productive and optimized.
- [04:17]
Mike Pesca
So when I rise early, I have a couple problems because I would assume you have to get into it as a habit. The first couple times you do it, it must be uncomfortable. Am I right about that?
- [04:29]
Ethan Strauss
You're referring to my 4am Wake up? Yes, yes, 4am Wake up. It really depends. Some days it's very easy, other days very hard. But that's the trick of consistency. It's doing it when it's hard.
- [04:42]
Mike Pesca
So do you have good what they call executive function? Do you know exactly what this concept means?
- [04:49]
Ethan Strauss
I know it in the context of my children. I know if you're using it in a different context.
- [04:55]
Mike Pesca
No, it's that it's also funny, I guess. I don't know when they invented it or when it got popularized, but all parents know. Yeah, my kids have executive function. Do we? Don't we? This was invented. Invented in the year 2011. But yeah, some of the things about executive function. Well, why I bring it up is I'm not great at it and my son is really bad and he makes me see some aspects of myself. I want to make clear this. My son who is in college, not my son who's in high school, is good at executive function tasks. And one of the things we don't do is we don't estimate time correctly and we tend to my son and I always err on the side that is favorable to us and how it shows up in an early morning RIS is if I'm ever ahead of schedule for something, I, I don't know if it's I tell myself or I'm too optimistic or I have bad executive function. My concept of how much time I have if I'm 20 minutes ahead expands to at least 45 minutes. And why I bring this up is if I were a 4am riser, I know at least in the beginning I would tell myself, well now I have the whole weekend to get to my stuff and you really only have, I mean four hours before the rest of the world is joining you is pretty good. But do you fall into that or did you fall into that in the beginning not even realizing or telling yourself you had too much time in the beginning?
- [06:15]
Ethan Strauss
I think I fell into that in the beginning. But okay, I'll talk about my schedule and give me if it's a little self indulgent but I, I find it interesting there might be lessons for other people perhaps. And my younger son has autism. He's got the, the real autism, not that the other autism is fake, but more he's non verbal and he's a very sweet boy and we love him but he services and a different sort of schedule. And we're beginning this thing called ABA training and somebody comes to either their school or your house. And we worked out that yes, we could pay a nanny a lot of money to just be there in our house when somebody arrives or we could have him be at a preschool and pay for that where he might not fit because of his particular condition. But what makes more sense is for me, for me to actually be home in the afternoon. Well, if I'm doing that, there's basically not going to be any time in the day for me to support our family and to. It's strange to say work. It's weird that what we do is a job. But yes, it's a job. It pays money, it pays the mortgage and everything else. So the only way to make this work, there's no other way, is that I wake up at 4am, I work in a little office about a mile from my house. I roll out of bed, I get in the car, I'm often in my pajamas. And I walk into this nondescript office in my town and I write footy
- [07:49]
Mike Pesca
pajamas flapping the back. Pajamas. Describe please.
- [07:53]
Ethan Strauss
They're pajamas with dogs all over them. Because every year around Christmas my mother in law gets me a new version of that as a gift. So I'm wearing those pajamas.
- [08:03]
Mike Pesca
Does she think it's an inside joke?
- [08:06]
Ethan Strauss
I don't about it. The woman's an animal lover and I do like getting the new edition every year and so I just don't have time for anything else. It's necessity is the mother of invention. It's also the mother of stick to itiveness. I don't know, but I just know. Look, you're on the clock. You've got between 4:30am really and 7:30am to get a post out to the world and if you don't, then failed and the rest of the day there are things I can do. There's also a podcasting block, a little podcasting to our window that we're in right now. And what I've come to find is that I generally get the post out and a lot of what I've been doing prior was hemming and hawing and oh my God, pacing around this office when I had more time. Oh, I need to write a post that everybody's going to pay attention to and read. Oh my God, what do I do now? I get a post out before 7:30am sometimes. It's something where I'm going, oh, this is going to be a talker. This is going to be the real post of the week. Other times it's just something I find interesting and that's been way better for me. I've really enjoyed the effects of it. It's oddly been liberating to have this constraint and I don't want to do too many end zone dances about it because what if this isn't sustainable? What if I thought that this is the solution to everything and it's not? But I think it's been great and I think that my customers like it. And I also have to confront that maybe there's only three hours of work in any given day and a lot of us are just faking it and I was faking it. And back when I thought I worked really hard, a lot of it was just procrastination. Yeah.
- [09:51]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And the more that your workday aligns with that of other humans, the more chance there is for distraction. I thought Dan diamond joined Washington Post. Dan Diamond, Love that guy. Very, very interesting. Breaks a lot of stories. Couple questions. Is the workspace a shared workspace or is it, do you, do you have a permanent desk in a workspace?
- [10:12]
Ethan Strauss
I've got a permanent desk and most of the people surrounding me are therapists and dentists and my actually right above my head, the floor above me. So when I need dental work, I just saunter out of the office and get dental work done. And I used to frankly steal or microlude his Internet comcast.
- [10:37]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, microluding what? You know, kudos to them for hitting the zeitgeist with in the same way that sometimes when you have to take a dental analogy, a raw nerve in your tooth, you can't stop touching it with your tongue. That's what that podcast did. And Gia Tolentino, I'm going to say this, and this is within the just the shared space of a substack live. And I don't know if I put this anywhere that was clippable, but she to me epitomizes a trend and maybe we get into our next topic of great writers, bad thinkers and not bad thinkers, because I disagree with what she says.
- [11:18]
Ethan Strauss
That's a good book. Great writers, bad thinkers.
- [11:21]
Mike Pesca
Sorry. Maybe, maybe we've always had this, but I notice it more and more and I don't mean people I disagree with. She in so much of her writing that isn't profile but tries to argue a point I do not think gets there. I think there are good writers. There are plenty of. There are plenty of people. I totally disagree with that. I have to say that is a well constructed argument. I think Gia Tolentino is very good writer, but a bad thinker. Another one is from the New Yorker. Here I go burning the bridges. Like this guy Andrew Morans.
- [11:54]
Ethan Strauss
He recently the fascism, white nationalism kind of book with the red cover that was in my house. Not real. Yes.
- [12:03]
Mike Pesca
And he recently did a big thing with Ronan Farrow, who I, I can't say is a bad thinker. And I think the New Yorker definitely selects. They have the best writers on the planet. I don't know if they have of the hundred best quote unquote writers, they have 80 of them. I don't know what the number is, but they've got Patrick Radden, Keefe and they got Daniel Grant and they got Immerwar, who is. Do you know Daniel Immerw Guy's amazing. Good thinker, good writer. They have the best writers and that's what it takes to get in The New Yorker. And you can't be a dummy to be a great writer, but you can be a disorganized, not great thinker. I guess Gia Tolentino would say nothing because she wouldn't hear what I'm saying, but she would definitely then say, fuck you, and I'm a better thinker than you. Or she'd think that, but she would probably say, yeah, she would probably say something like, actually, I'm a great thinker. And then she wouldn't be able. And then she'd be able to put together some sentences that would maybe make someone feel that I'm an idiot or that would, I don't know, change the subject a little bit, use a lot, use the right adjective next to a great action verb, but you wouldn't be able to make an argument. She'd also probably say, this podcast is that I did is very much a different thing than the, than the writing I do in the New Yorker. But that is my thesis, and I think we're beset by that in the world today.
- [13:24]
Ethan Strauss
I love this dichotomy. Some of you listening might not be huge fans of sports talk. You might be the highfalutin members of Mike's audience, but it reminds me of a great Colin Cowherd type dichotomy in one of his bits. Now, you know, there are great writers at the New Yorker, but are there great? Think my favorite one of those is when he was saying of Kevin Durant, when Kevin Durant was on the warriors. You know, it's like, it's like Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas. You know, it's, it's in Texas, but it's not of Texas. Kevin Durant, well, he's on the warriors, but is he of the Warriors? I just love, love that stuff. Now, this is a topic I've thought a lot about because I think it's possible to be a great writer and a poor thinker. I don't know if it's possible to be both, frankly. Mike, if you're doing what I'm doing, I think the disorganization of your thoughts might get revealed and exposed if you can't pick your spots. If you're writing every day, I think if you're kind of crazy or specious in your reasoning, that's going to be exposed. So I think that the great writers who are bad thinkers can benefit from selective writing. But there's been this general degradation that I've talked about behind the scenes, where on the left, there used to be these great writers and people who are agreed upon as great writers. And then maybe about five to 10 years ago, that stopped being less of a thing. If you ask people on the left who's your greatest writer, a lot of them would say, oh, it's Ta Nehisi Coates that's her best writer. And then they might name other writers and it feels as though he was the last guy. You're upholding Gia and some other people, but you're almost just more well versed in this. And I've talked about that with some people. I talked about it with Richard Hanania, of all people, because he was dismissive of it in a way because he thought that great writing has nothing to do with great thinking.
- [15:42]
Mike Pesca
Only a great writer, only a great writer would think that it's someone like a lot of times geniuses don't know what they have at their fingertips. I just interviewed David Epstein and he's a hard worker, but so much of what he was writing about, and he writes about how he himself, the book is about constraints and how he. His last two books he wrote 50% more than he had to. But there was a point in the interview where I didn't say it this way, but David, you're a genius like you just are. And other people be very hard for them to take and to extrapolate from your example, anything that would be great in their own life and also your 50% that you discarded, that would be anyone else's best 50% and would make two best selling books themselves. Anyway, sorry, digression. Go ahead.
- [16:29]
Ethan Strauss
Oh, I was thinking, do you just curate your reading list on the basis of whoever Barack Obama's reading? Because I believe he read Trick Mirror by Tolentino and I know he read the Sports Gene by Epstein. So that's. You guys share a reading list right there. I happen to think that. I don't know if it's clarity of thought because there are great writers who are obviously insane and maybe there's even a positive correlation there. But I do think honesty of thought, Ander, that does correlate with great writing. And I do think what happened on the social media era, Left, left, is that fewer people were on it and that degraded the quality of the writing, that there was this sudden palpable fear that you would be publicly shamed. And so people were less inclined to say things that were resonant. And whatever you think about the right or the left or who's better or who's worse, I think that era, the last five to 10 years, was an era where it became easier to name great writers on the right than it was to name great writers on the left, especially if you're going to be expansive enough to name some people who might be a little bit more in the center who are rejected by the left, even if they're not formally on, you know, formally on the right.
- [17:52]
Mike Pesca
Right. Part of it is, I do think a lot of the great writers on the left maybe don't write about explicitly political subjects. Right. So I mentioned David Grann. I mean, Flowers of the Killers of the Flower Moon has politics all throughout it. And if he were of a different disposition, if he was a great writer, if he was Kevin Williamson, I don't think that book would be who I consider great writer, great prose stylist. I don't think that book would be the book that it is. I'm not saying a lesser book. It would be a different book. And since it was almost, you know, perfect book, it probably would have to be lesser. I don't know if Kevin would even disagree with that. It's a very false challenge I've set up for him. Take this amazing, Pulitzer Prize winning book and tell me you'd do better at it. But, yeah, so, okay, that's one thing. When they're on the left, they don't seem as on the left. When they're on the right, just maybe by dint of their outlet, you're like, oh, this person's on the right. Then you have. I think Gopnik is great. I think, go, Adam. Gopnik is great for the aphorism. And I read him for. I, I'm pretty sure he does this, that he doesn't just come up with the aphorisms in the moment. He writes what he wants to write, and some of the aphorisms probably occur to him. And then he punctuates the end of every third or fourth paragraph with just a killer line. I probably have some scraps lying around because this is one of the things I do and it's, it's amazing. Let's see. Okay, this is, you know, I, I scrap and I scrap the New Yorker. This is Khalifa Sana. This is a great writer who is neither on the right nor the left. His view of Nkrumah resembles Nkrumah's view of Garvey, a visionary whose vision is easy to admire if you ignore what he actually did.
- [19:41]
Ethan Strauss
Boom.
- [19:41]
Mike Pesca
Love it. Yeah. So I love Gopnik. Would we consider him on the right or left? He would definitely not consider himself on the right, but he's not a leftist. You know, he Disagrees with Tolentino a lot.
- [19:56]
Ethan Strauss
I might be describing something different because I'm not being completely fair to writers on the left. I don't see much of an admiration in that tribe for this person's a great writer or that person's a great writer. You need to read this person. That's sort of what did A.O. scott say about Coats, that it's essential, like air or something like that, when everybody's falling over themselves to talk up coats back in the day. But I do think that there has been a degradation. I do think there's been an undermining of honesty. I do think that these spaces. There's more of a back channel, as Freddy DeBoer has called it, where people in private say, well, this is what I really think about. This is how I really feel. And maybe we should ground this conversation in more names. We're not naming too many people on the right with the Williamson example is an interesting one, because he was going to come to the Atlantic event and Coats, who was ideologically opposed to Williamson, said, effectively, I want him to be here because that guy can write. And the culture of that institution, I believe it was the Atlantic, just would not have it because of the ideological app. So I don't know if that.
- [21:12]
Mike Pesca
How that one turned out is. He had said, there's another point I want to get to. I actually need to hear the person speaking to fully evaluate their intellect. I think that they're very smart people who don't write. They're very smart people who write well and don't speak that well. And I think vice versa. But I really, before I make a full judgment, I need to hear them in interviews. And that has changed my mind sometimes. Yes, so what. How that one played out. Do you remember the specifics? Williamson was on a podcast and he said something that was intellectually consistent with his anti abortion stance, which is since I think abortion is murder and since I don't believe in the death penalty, but if I did believe in the death penalty, I would have to say he didn't say it like this. I'm softening a little bit then, since abortions murder, then the murderers are put to death, and one who has an abortion should be put to death. If you believe in that which is entirely intellectually consistent, it's not what you're supposed to say. Donald Trump, when he came out as against abortion, got that question wrong because, you know, there is a catechism of what you're supposed to say. So writers in the Atlantic jumped on that and this was one of those times where you could claim some sentiment made you unsafe. And is what they said about Kevin. And the shame of it is there's. I guess there's this trend. This was going to bubble up somehow. But the. I think in so many other ways, astute and wise editor of the New Yorker gave it in that moment. And so I don't know if he's proud of that or not, but Williamson's now at the Dispatch, and we all win.
- [22:55]
Ethan Strauss
Yeah. I'm thinking about some other names. Michael Anton, I think, is a great writer. I don't know, maybe you disagree, but I could name some people. I could name Anton. I could name Helen Andrews. I'm trying to think of some other people who are on the right. I know Curtis Garvin. People disagree about that one. But he clearly had an impact with his writing across the culture of Silicon Valley. There are other people that I could name.
- [23:24]
Mike Pesca
I think that Helen Andrews is one of those. She might be a good writer. I think she's not a good thinker. I read her recent piece on women and feminism being the source of all ills, and you could just point to the gaps in the logic that a great writer would have done more to address the concerns of someone like me. I don't think she's a great thinker at all.
- [23:47]
Ethan Strauss
I think Andrew Sullivan's a great writer. I'm not sure how he might be categorized as this odd British conservative extraction that I don't know. He certainly wasn't accepted within the lefty space at New York Magazine, which took him out into me.
- [24:07]
Mike Pesca
Kicked out a little like Williamson, except he was there. Yeah. And also this, by listening to him on his podcast, cements one very good writer, bad thinker phrase reifies the idea that he is a good thinker. Yeah, I like listening to people out loud.
- [24:25]
Ethan Strauss
Yeah. Whether or not somebody's a good thinker doesn't mean that I agree with them. There are times I listen all of it. I'll go, yes, I agree with all of this. And there are other times where I'm going, I'm so this thing that we do with people that we're generally fans of, or we get angry in this parasocial way because you feel like they're making a mistake or they're not considering something that you think that they should consider, but there's something else going on there. It's not about somebody who generates the biggest percentage of topics that you'd agree with. There's a stylistic aspect to it when it comes to the writing. I'm shocked by your take that you need to hear them speak. I never considered that. That was never part of my calculus.
- [25:09]
Mike Pesca
It helps. I'm saying it helps. And it's changed my mind. And just getting. It's more data, and I think it's a robust data point. You know, this is an interesting question, which is for someone to be a great writer and you disagree with. I think most people who are writers or fans of writing understand how to navigate that. What are the mechanisms by which one would say, this person is a very good thinker, but I think they're making a bad point. I could, if I had the Helen Andrews essay, I could point to a couple of things because I understand how it would work. Where you'd say, good point, but not well put. I could understand where you'd say, wonderfully phrased, but I disagree. In other words, you're a good writer. Where do you say that is a really, really well constructed thought with which I disagree?
- [26:07]
Ethan Strauss
I don't know if people have that ability. I don't know if I have that ability. If you feel like you've clocked why a point is wrong, maybe you can have some admiration for the rhetorical tactic of it, but at some level you're just going to regard it as bad or as fuzzy. But I love this topic. Somebody might accuse us of being self indulgent. Not enough talk about writing. So I could think about this and talk about this all day. I wonder if there are people who become weaker thinkers because they stop writing. I believe that. I see it in sports writing. You've got people where. I'm not accusing Bill Simmons of this because he's the podfather, but you've got other people who become very successful as writers and they feel like that's hard. They don't want to do it anymore. Their relationship to it is not positive, but got them to a certain station status. So they start becoming a radio host or they become a podcaster. And I've noticed without naming names, that there are certain people, their points aren't. Aren't as good because the writing keeps you honest. In a way, it makes you reckon with what are my thoughts. I have to really work to clarify my own thoughts. And I'm not trying to talk myself up too much because I make a lot of mistakes. Podcasting and podcasting is this ineffable. For all I know, right now, Mike, we're doing great podcasting. And for all I know, right now we're doing the worst podcast.
- [27:44]
Mike Pesca
I know you Always say that.
- [27:45]
Ethan Strauss
I believe, though, that when I go on a program, I went on that Monitor the Situation podcast, that tech bro podcast, when they were asking me questions and I had to explain, it was so helpful that I'd written all these articles on the topics they were asking me about. And if in an alternate reality, if they were asking me these questions, I believe I would have been worse because I hadn't had to do that work. And so I think that there are a lot of public intellectuals, for lack of a better term, who end up declining because they're not working that muscle. And so there is a connection, as you're, I think, clued onto between the writing and the talking.
- [28:27]
Mike Pesca
And back with more of this conversation with Ethan and I, where in this part we actually get to the sports riding portion.
- [28:55]
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- [29:01]
Mike Pesca
Cool.
- [29:02]
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- [29:12]
Mike Pesca
we're back with Mike Peska and Ethan Strauss trying to save journalism, sports journalism. Tell the audience, tell me what this monitoring this situation is. I read a press release. I didn't listen to you. Apparently Marc Andreessen has said everything's on all the time. So what we're going to do is embrace something called Randomonium, which was the original idea of CNN that anyone is talking about on the Internet, mostly Twitter. That is a show we will talk about that seems totally healthy and not at all wearying or brain melting. But what was your experience with it and what is it?
- [29:49]
Ethan Strauss
Well, that's what intrigues me about it. I won't be able to describe what it is because I don't know what it is. But there is this embrace of the whole thing. There was, somebody said about it, they said, all these guys are doing is reacting to the timeline. It's totally going to work. I don't know if it's totally going to work, but I'm intrigued with how they're going look. Everybody else is just implicitly letting Twitter be their producer. We're going to explicitly let Twitter be our producer. We're just going to bask in this. We're doing the just pure uncut heroin over here and seeing what happens. Is that going to lead to a hit? That podcast going to be resonant? I have no idea. And I still don't know what I was there to do. They just asked me questions. Eric Torenberg asked me questions about what's going on with the NBA and Nike and the wnba. And I felt quite fortunate to have written a bunch of articles that weren't locked in our present shock of Twitter, but in the recent past that I could draw off of and believe that if I were in that circumstance, otherwise, without having written those articles, I don't know what I would have done. Maybe I would have malfunctioned. Maybe I would have embarrassed myself more than I usually do.
- [31:05]
Mike Pesca
Is Twitter. I would, if I had to guess, first of all, you could curate Twitter and have it point to you whatever you want. But is Twitter generally WNBA skeptical? And was that their baseline?
- [31:19]
Ethan Strauss
Is Twitter? I guess they call it axe number one. Looking back, I was committing a social faux pas in that space because I was saying Twitter, Twitter, every other word because that's what it is to me. Wait, who is skeptical? Who's WNBA skeptical? Are you saying are they WNBA skeptical?
- [31:36]
Mike Pesca
Well, let me ask you this first. Did you also talk about the Omaha Kings in Center Sacramento? Do you always do that? No, what I'm saying is if they're saying Twitter, sorry, X programs them, and you mentioned that they wanted to talk about the wnba, did they come into the conversation saying something like, no one really watches the wnba. Were they thinking the reason Nike, which just laid off some large percentage of its workforce, was because they embraced the wnba? Because there's a lot of other. There's a lot of other evidence, like the WNBA minting all these millionaires, that it actually is doing pretty good?
- [32:16]
Ethan Strauss
That's not the perspective, as far as I could see it. It's more everybody who is interested in the WNBA without being interested in the WNBA is interested in Caitlin Clark versus the wnba. That's the top. That's what people want to talk about. And I sometimes find myself in defense of the WNBA as a cultural product, but not in the way the people in that league would want me to defend it. And find a parallel here between this idea of these guys trying to form a singularity with Twitter and the idea of what the WNBA is. And what I mean by that is this is the product of the WNBA wins and losses. Is it which is the best team? Or is the product of the WNBA the heat of the controversies it so reliably generates and the conversation it's able to stoke. Because let me tell you something. A couple weeks back I wrote about an NBA topic and I wrote about a WNBA topic. I understand that there are far more people who watch the play in game with LaMelo Ball. And I talked about LaMelo Ball and wrote about it. I got far fewer subscriptions on that article than when I talked about the WNBA team that just had back to back first overall number one pick, Knicks, who happen to be dating. And the team is trying to hide that. So that's what I mean when I talk about the wm. Some of its advantages are over other leagues. Other leagues don't produce stories like that. They capture people's attention like that. And so I feel it's almost an underrated aspect if we're trying to defend its importance, that some of the absurdities that are getting in the way of the WNBA players getting as rich and watched as they might otherwise would be. Well, some of those dynamics also happen to be what's interesting.
- [34:20]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, there was a very big show called Heated Rivalry which has the absurd premise that two professional athletes in a league are having sex with each other. Wow. That happens every day in the wnba. I had I was I recently the show Hang up and Listen, which I used to do and started in 2009. I was one of the first hosts of and then wasn't but the last the last episode ever aired.
- [34:47]
Ethan Strauss
Great. For those of you who do not know, a great informative podcast, one of the first incredible quality when the podcasting space was new certainly how I came to learn about Mike and I listened religiously. So I just wanted to say that. But continue sir.
- [35:06]
Mike Pesca
So the three replacement hosts of the original did a last episode. They did make an interesting point that there are no general interest podcasts anymore. And I always knew the power of podcasting was you can slice and dice and you could just have a Sons of Rubio podcast and you could have a, you know, Philadelphia 76ers specific or you could have a WA Go WNBA gossip podcast. But I didn't realize there were no general podcasts that were still popular. That said, they invited me. Ben Lindbergh was great enough to say, hey, do you want to do a prediction for the next 17 years? And one of my predictions, first of all, one of my predictions was a team in basketball. Maybe the Wizards tanking are going to say wait a minute, if we just shoot at our own net, that'll count, that'll help our efforts. But then the other team, maybe the Sacramento Kings will say wait a minute, if we shoot at our own basket, that'll help. And then a basketball game will break out. Although the 10 second 8 second rule to get it over half court is all screwed up. Okay, but my main so many digressions. Digressions. But My main point in bringing this up was I said, I made this joke that there'll be a version of heated rivalry in every sport. In, in cricket, it'll be heated, left, googly, wicked, or whatever that phrase is.
- [36:26]
Ethan Strauss
Oh, wait, wait. Are you talking about in reality, are you talking about fictional portrayals of these sports?
- [36:31]
Mike Pesca
I think I was just making a prediction that there'll be some TV show about a gay relationship in every professional sport. And then I started naming the sports and I said, in cricket will be a stickly wicket. In, in nascar it'll be heated condenser. And in the wnba it'll be the Phoenix Mercury. That was my joke. And I said they are the. They are the number one. According to Autostradle, they have the most quee players on their team. Can I go back and when you said, is it fair to say, you know, the WNBA's product isn't really the product, it's the heat around the product though, the WNB take. But is that different from the NBA regular season, really? I mean, I know post season people pay attention, but isn't NBA regular season mostly a takes based institution?
- [37:25]
Ethan Strauss
I think there's a comparison and people say that the NBA game, it's not the product anymore. There's derivative product that happens to be the product. It's a highlight league. Adam Silver said that. So it might not be this buzz in this controversy, but that's part of it. The podcasting economy. I know a lot of people say I don't watch any NBA games, that I listen to the podcasts to get these dispatches from what's going on out there in NBA land. And they're not actually engaged with the product itself. I don't know if that's sustainable or if that's healthy, but you can certainly draw a comparison. Now, what I find fascinating about the wnba, as I said on this Monitoring the Situation podcast, is Sophie Cunningham. I find Sophie Cunningham to be one of the more interesting people in sports right now. She is not a star, for those of you who do not know. She's almost like a Rick Mahorn character, an enforcer for Caitlin Clark's team who
- [38:28]
Mike Pesca
go on to become a WNBA coach.
- [38:30]
Ethan Strauss
He might have Bill Lambert be Lampaire. Yes. Okay, so I don't. Yeah, she's not an essential player or anything like that. And she's an attractive, tall. It is WNBA blonde woman. And she, she has channeled this to a lot of success and to a lot of. Of engagement and fame. She's far more famous than some of the stars of the league and somebody might go, well, that's not too interesting. You know, an attractive blonde woman is popular on Instagram. Whatever. No, what's interesting to me about her is that she has channeled this tacit maga fan base contra the culture of the wnba. It must make her hated within that culture, but it's made her famous enough to transcend it. And so watching this player use that opportunity. And I'll give an example I know you listened to when I was talking about it with Wozny Lambre. She'll just do these things that, you know, are pitched towards a maga audience. And so she never overtly. Almost analogous to how the Dallas Wings players are not explicitly dating. But, you know, if you can read between the lines, there was some story where a police attack God took out a guy with an exotic name. I don't know if he's an immigrant. I'll just pretend he's an immigrant for the sake of this story. So immigrant man was being violent, trying to attack somebody with some sort of wooden object or some such, and a police canine got him, and he got arrested. And there's a video of it, and Sophie Cunningham tweets out, good boy. I could watch videos like this all day. Which. That. All day at the end, to me, that tickles me. It's one thing to say the good boy. It's the other thing to say. And look, I'm. I'm for canine stopping criminals. I'm not against that. But it's quite a statement you're putting out in the world that this is. This is my fetish. This is what I'm into. I. I want to watch these. These German shepherds really drag away these violent immigrant criminals. And to say that within the WNBA culture, I find that to be such a zag when others are zigging that I. I find. Look again, the NBA does not offer anything like this, or at least quite like that.
- [40:58]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. How popular? I have some metrics. How popular do you think women's basketball is compared to men's?
- [41:09]
Ethan Strauss
Okay, how would you even determine that? Because I would determine.
- [41:15]
Mike Pesca
I have a couple metrics. One is the NCAA women's final versus the men's. Because they're supposed to be contributing the same amount of resources and attention and marketing. Now, if some of the marketing is. You mention another game during March Madness, the men's version, you're going to hit. Hit many times more viewers. So. But do you remember a few years ago when Caitlin Clark was in the finals, and what was the big headline from the ratings of those finals, it
- [41:46]
Ethan Strauss
got more viewership than the NCAA men's final.
- [41:50]
Mike Pesca
It did. And that's notable. And then there was a question. This means that the W, or sorry this means women's basketball is, has arrived, has transcended. And then it went down quite a bit after Clark left. It was a Clark bump. But just listen, I checked it out this last year the finals, 9.9 million watched the women's finals and 18.8 is almost exactly double watched the men's finals. And I gotta say the men's finals was horribly played. But still, that's a one to one comparison. However, and you'll see that comparison a lot. However, if you look at the ratings of the early rounds where the men does better than the finals, it just blows away the women. It is like an 8 to 1 ratio if you could find. They don't even post the ratings on a lot of these early round games. And another indication is that, well, in the WNBA they put up curtains in the arena so when the Liberty play in the championship game they don't even f attempt to sell out the whole Barkley Center. I think they could, but in the women's game they have a big problem filling arenas selling seats for early rounds. And these are home games for at least one of the teams playing. So that's one indication with the wnba. I have another one. But I'll stop rambling and say what do you think of that so far?
- [43:08]
Ethan Strauss
I indicator of how popular your sport is. Quick and dirty. Is your finals. Is your championship okay?
- [43:14]
Mike Pesca
Fair.
- [43:15]
Ethan Strauss
Right now with the NBA it's about a 10 spot. If you've got a better matchup, it might get to about 12 to 15 million. Right. You sort of have a floor of about 9 to 10 currently in the NBA. Lot less popular now than it used to be about 10 years ago or so. The NBA Finals would get 20 million. That's a separate conversation name. Now the WNBA Finals, I would imagine because I have not checked recently. When it's on network TV it would be a fifth of the NBA viewership, if not an order of magnitude less depending on scheduling.
- [43:53]
Mike Pesca
And then there's something else which, which gets at the Nike angle. How about how many really passionate fans who identify themselves primarily as this thing or one of their big identifiers. And I came across this in a Seattle paper and they published all of the most popular, in fact all of the novelty, what do they call them? Vanity license plates. And actually I have this behind the paywall. I have it similar, similar. I remember the number for the Seattle Storm and and be advised that Washington State University fanity license plate which isn't just a sports team. It's like 240,000 people in the state that have that license plate. And uw which is I thought would have more has a little less. So with that as a baseline I could read you some others. How many Seattle Storm license plates do you think are driving around the state of Washington?
- [44:56]
Ethan Strauss
This is such a great question. They don't even have an MBA and I. These ones are tricky. I'm going to give you an honest guess that might be less than the shocking low total that it is.
- [45:09]
Mike Pesca
I said 240,000. I was off by an order of magnitude. 24,000. 24,000 from Washington State. Do you want the Seahawks number?
- [45:18]
Ethan Strauss
Yeah.
- [45:19]
Mike Pesca
11,000.
- [45:22]
Ethan Strauss
Yeah. That's an impressive amount. That's quite a choice. That's a real choice. That's not flipping on a game. That's you really representing right there. I'm gonna go 13 for the storm.
- [45:35]
Mike Pesca
It's 98. But you're correct. You're correct to do it double digits. Yes, that's right. The other state. A few other states have recently introduced WNBA vanity license plates. The other state that has had it for a few years are the Minnesota Lyn. Are they the world champion? They're always in the finals.
- [45:57]
Ethan Strauss
So the most popular player they have my favorite player. But that's a. That's a different topic right there. But anyway, yeah, the links they got Nafisa Collier who is a mom and became a great player an even greater player after having a kid one defensive player of the year and then was arguably the best offensive player of one of them them accomplishment right there. And arguably doesn't get the sort of cultural push that some of the other players do because maybe in that culture that's a transgressive identity.
- [46:35]
Mike Pesca
Oh, I never thought of that. Do you think that being a mom helped the rim protective instincts kick in?
- [46:42]
Ethan Strauss
I think it's a great thought. I think the mama bear impulse around the cylinder has yet have to should be studied. We might get some.
- [46:50]
Mike Pesca
All right. I. I just want to hit you with one more vanity license plate. WNBA stat. The Minnesota stats. They have this blackout license plate. It's a black license plate. 248,000 of them. It's the most popular thing in the state of Minnesota. Much more popular than ice fishing. The Vikings have 5,000 vanity license plates. Third most popular vanity license plates plate is the missing and murdered indigenous relatives license plate. There's an upper. Yeah. Yeah. Mm. I r. It's usually iw. They change it from women to relatives. Anyway, I want you to know that. Which is impressive. It has more. More missing and murdered indigenous relatives than Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Timberwolves combined. They have. Yeah, they have 1100 and 1300. Where are the links? The long standing link links.
- [47:42]
Ethan Strauss
Well, now you've given me more of a baseline. I'll go 150.
- [47:47]
Mike Pesca
157. You are good at this. Good job.
- [47:50]
Ethan Strauss
Yeah. Oh, that's pretty good right there.
- [47:57]
Mike Pesca
If they get on their game, if they get on their horse, they could hit that missing and murdered indigenous relative number. That's the threshold. Yeah.
- [48:05]
Ethan Strauss
When we're going to talk about the death of sports writers. Ready?
- [48:07]
Mike Pesca
I do want to talk about that. I looked it up. Rick. Rick Mahorin was an assistant under Bill Lambir and then went on to coach WNBA team in his own right before the Shock moved to Tulsa. There's also, if you read his Wikipedia entry, it has this vague description of him. Sounds like smacking Lisa Leslie in a fight. But the way it says it is he extended his arm and came into contact with Lisa Leslie. Anyway.
- [48:31]
Ethan Strauss
Passive fight.
- [48:34]
Mike Pesca
So I do think, and I send. People should know. I send these examples of bad sports writing to you, Ethan, and you didn't ask for it. But when I did, you responded, I
- [48:44]
Ethan Strauss
don't want it, Mike. It makes me depressed. And you don't stop. It fills me with dread over what you see. But you were saying.
- [48:54]
Mike Pesca
I'll read just the lead of a story about the Montreal Canadiens. From the Athletic. November 15, 2025 is an important date that helps explain the Montreal Canadiens 2025. 26 season. That night the Canadiens lost at home to the Boston Bruins 3 to 2 in regulation. That loss was. Sorry again, that loss 2 was the Canadiens third regulation loss in a row. It dropped their record to 10, 6 and 2. They would not lose three consecutive games in regulations again. After that loss to the Brooks ruins over their next 64 games. The Canadiens lost consecutive games in regulation only four times and followed each of those four losing streaks with a victory. The last of those. Yeah, you gotta stop. You gotta stop.
- [49:40]
Ethan Strauss
All this word for word on the worst blind date is what I'm envisioning. Oh, my God.
- [49:47]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, it's like. Tell me you're on the spectrum without telling me on the fact.
- [49:52]
Ethan Strauss
Oh, my God. That's, um.
- [49:54]
Mike Pesca
I think there was an. I think there's an actual editing error in there because I checked online and that sentence with that loss, too was the Canadians third regulation loss. But the word that was put in was Boston Bruins. And so you have the Boston. That night the Canadians lost at home to the Boston Bruins. That lost to the Boston Bruins was the Canadians third regulation loss. And hockey itself does themselves no favors with these weird records and regulation losses and any losses. But this is a horrible writing. It's not a one off every time I read a gamer, which is, will you tell me how they're assembled? When you started as a sports writer, did you have to. Did you have to file the piece? That was right after the game was done. That would run as a pro forma aspect of the recap portion on espn.
- [50:38]
Ethan Strauss
Depends on the era, the moment. There was a time where I wanted to quit ESPN because they changed it because they had looked into the research and the most readership you would get was correlated to how quickly it came out after the game. So they came to me and they said, new rules, everybody. You get that recap. Up five minutes after the buzzer, I was like, wait, what? Like how, how is this even? I. I felt like that scene in the Simpsons when Monty Burns is becoming Howard Hughes and he's going insane and he says to Smithers, hop in the spruce moose. And he has this little model airplane. And Smithers goes, well, that's just a model airplane, sir. Done. And Burns goes, I said, get in. That's what I thought. Where you're asking me to do something that's absolutely impossible, but yet I somehow did it. The product just got worse. I tried to write as much as I could, and if something happened unexpected, it was a disaster. It was really stressful. But when it was more reasonably, when the schedule was more reasonable to get was quite a great thing. It could be artful. When I had about an hour or an hour and a half, I think it's, you want to get it in by midnight on the west coast was the rule at ESPN. So the game goes from 7:30, might wrap up around 10:30. I mean, you got to work efficiently. You go into the locker room, you've got your quote, you have your general skeleton of what you want to do to tell the story of the game. And sometimes it would all fit together gloriously and other times it wouldn't fit together so well. But I had some pride. It was a job that not everybody could do and I could do it, and that felt good. And it makes me so sad to see that this is just going away. And I guess that the skills I had back then are transferable to whatever I do now. Now. But there's this wistful ache within me that I was good at a job that no longer exists. And that's what you remind me of every week when you.
- [52:51]
Mike Pesca
And you have requested that all those examples keep on coming. But is there. Do you know now? Do you know now if there really is any reason other than the vestigial organ reason to keep running these gamers? This froze description of what happened in the game published one minute or one hour after the games had done.
- [53:13]
Ethan Strauss
Yeah, I'm sure there was a reason for people to get the Yellow Pages and the White Pages for a while after it stopped being a thing. And it is a shame because in theory it should be a thing. In theory, we would. There is an audience for this. Who would want this? And the Athletic still has a lot of readers who enjoy articles about the sports. It just appears that the gamer itself, that discipline that used to be an artful discipline. Grantland Rice had the famous gamer of the horse race, if I'm remembering correctly, where he.
- [53:47]
Mike Pesca
No, it was.
- [53:48]
Ethan Strauss
Who was it?
- [53:49]
Mike Pesca
I was going to say W.C. handy. It was. It'll hit me. Yeah, yeah. Assault.
- [53:55]
Ethan Strauss
Full.
- [53:55]
Mike Pesca
It was. Yeah.
- [53:56]
Ethan Strauss
War.
- [53:57]
Mike Pesca
Full brother of Assault.
- [53:58]
Ethan Strauss
William.
- [53:59]
Mike Pesca
Right, Right.
- [53:59]
Ethan Strauss
I don't know. Who knows? Andrew Sullivan. What. What. What name are we going with here? I can't. We both know what we're talking about, but I can't remember what it is because when you read that, you're just absolutely staggered by the artistry of the formal prose. And you won. We've all just gotten stupider over time, but I feel that way.
- [54:20]
Mike Pesca
W.C. hines, death of a racehorse. Airlift Full brother of Assault. There we go.
- [54:25]
Ethan Strauss
There you. There you go. So, yeah, to be able to write something that's artistic under time pressure and captures what it was like to be in that place, in the moment is a beautiful art. And to be clear, when I say that it's dying out and going away, it's not because there's a total absence of need for it or it serves no purpose. I believe that that would be incorrect because there were stories that I was able to tell back in the day that you still see told in the Athletic by writers who might not necessarily be doing a gamer, but doing something similar that you only get access to that story because you're there. You see aspects of the scene and not literally everything is captured on camera, not literally everything is recorded. It can't be. Maybe in the future it will be in some Black Mirror episode. And I believe that what I and other people were able to do was capture a lot of texture of what these games were like for fans who wanted to know, well, what happened after the game? What were the players talking about? Klay Thompson was on his back in the locker room, exhausted, saying that that was one of the greatest moments of his life. And it was because it was so hard, that sort of story right there that you would not get otherwise. And because it's being phased out and because media telling these stories is being phased out, I do think it is a loss. I'm not saying it's a loss in the aggregate. I'm not saying it's a decline in the aggregate. But often, even if things improve, we lose aspects that we miss and there is a void there until we learn to stop missing it.
- [56:19]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show. Corey War produces the gist, Kathleen Sykes runs the gist list, Ben Astaire is our booking producer and Jeff Craig runs our socials. Michelle Pesca oversees it all benevolently. And thanks for listening,
- [56:41]
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Mike Pesca
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- [56:52]
Mike Pesca
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- [57:10]
Ethan Strauss
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