The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - PTFO - What Caitlin Clark Is Afraid Of

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

America generates an endless stream of opinions about Caitlin Clark, but there’s been almost no in-depth reporting about how her mind actually works. So before Clark’s Indiana Fever visit Angel Reese and the Chicago Sky tonight, Pablo sits down with Wright Thompson of ESPN: the only journalist who spent months getting to know Caitlin, her family, and her team at the University of Iowa, behind closed doors. And we find out what it’s like to live alongside a phenomenon who doesn’t process fear or emotion the way most human beings do… and how she’s been trying, privately, to change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're gonna find out what this sound is. She's so much more self-aware at 21 than Michael Jordan was at 50. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraffe King's Network. When your celebration of life is prepaid in advance, it becomes a gift from you to your family later, because no one should have to plan for a loss while they're experiencing one. Paying in advance protects your loved ones and gives you the peace of mind you deserve. Let us help you plan every detail with professionalism and compassion.

We are your local Dignity Memorial provider. Find us at DignityMemorial.ca. So, just the very first thing that I need you to know today is that I, like much of America, have been paying a lot of attention to Caitlin Clark, who is a bona fide cultural phenomenon at this point, at age 22, having spent the last 6 months being the most popular and most overhyped and most underrated women's basketball player in existence. And that is on top, by the way, of being grade A clickbait for all of this online culture war bullsh** which we'll get to later. But what is wild to me, of all is that while we love arguing about Caitlin Clark as a country, Caitlin Clark herself never engages even as she was left off the US Olympic team and

being debated all across the WNBA. What was your level of disappointment not hearing your name on the roster? Honestly no disappointment like I think it just gives you something something to work for um you know that's a dream you know hopefully one day I can be there and uh I think it's just a little more motivation uh you remember that and um you know hopefully in four years when four years comes back around you know I can be there. I cannot think of another athlete in America right now who is this scrutinized and yet this hidden, in plain sight, because we don't really know what Caitlin Clark is really feeling. We mostly just project ourselves and our guesses at what we think she might be like, and she is also largely unplugged from social media despite being 22, and so we have this surplus of opinions, but a truly embarrassing deficit of reporting, of actual knowledge.

In fact, I know exactly one journalist who has reported a genuinely psychologically-probing, in-depth profile of her, where they interviewed Kaitlyn as well as her coaches, like Lisa Bluter at Iowa, and her teammates like Kate Martin, while Kaitlyn was still just a college senior six months ago. All of which is why that same journalist, ESPN's Wright Thompson,

is the exact person I had many questions for today. No, man, it's absolutely my pleasure. So how do you just sort of introduce yourself as a chronicler of people who are both incredibly, incredibly accomplished athletes and also kind of extreme figures? What's your, what's your catalog got in it, right, for people who are not familiar with your work? Well, I mean, everybody from Michael Jordan twice to Tiger Woods to Pat Riley, sort of the white whale beat.

And so where is Caitlin Clark in this taxonomy of humans that have all done great things and are also all from the outside, kind of poorly understood. And she's the real thing. And like the real thing in a way that, honestly, I've been around a lot of college athletes, so have you.

And this isn't hyperbole, she's the most self-aware college athlete I've ever met. And I'm not even entirely sure who's second So self-aware to me was the big revelation as I'm reading you I'm hearing you talk about all the time you spent around her because Introspection right for any profile writer out there. That's that's the dream and you got it in ways that I would not have anticipated I walked in that first interview and she was incredible and like really thoughtful and really engaged

in understanding what was happening to her, understanding the stakes. As you said at the top, everybody has an opinion on her and almost none of those opinions are rooted in any sort of reality. And so she is having to live a real life and a fake life along parallel tracks. And she seemed to understand that understanding

and managing the fake one was absolutely essential for maximizing the real one. She was engaged in the process of understanding what it was that was happening to her. And she understood that this thing happening to her was completely out of her control. We started talking pretty regularly. And, you know, I think I talked to her dad every day for six months. I mean, that's an exaggeration.

Every other day for six months. That is that that's stalkerish, right? At a certain point. Hey, hey, you say potato, I say potato. Empathy, as a term in your story. Sort of hit me. So tell the empathy story, please. So her high school basketball coach, who's a delight, said that she knew Caitlin was

different and I think it was 10th or 11th grade. They had an assignment and Caitlin didn't know the meaning of the word empathy and struggled a little bit to have it explained. You get the sense that until she found, especially Kate Martin, but until she found this Iowa team, that she had never had a tribe of people before and that she had always been isolated.

These great stars, you and I've talked about this, you know, these elite athletes are... Lonely? I don't know the right way to say this. Lonely, that's it. They're from a nation of their own talent. So the quote from Kristin Meyer, who was her basketball coach

when she was in the 10th grade, Caitlin was, upon getting this sort of this introduction to a person who, quote, found it hard to understand what other people would feel, end quote. That coach, she turns out to be just one in a lineage, right, of people who are trying to make this person who can't naturally intuit empathy in Kaitlin Clark, realize what it's like to be on a team. And that is this through line in your reporting that just is undeniable. What's incredible is that whatever Phil Jackson sold to Michael Jordan,

Lisa Bluder and Jan Jensen sold to Caitlin Clark that this is a team. Basketball players need other basketball players to be great because basketball is just how you occupy and then don't occupy space. It's interesting that Caitlin understood I have to be able to be an essential part of a team, not to be praised, not because it was the right thing to do or she felt guilty for not doing it, but because if she's going to be Caitlin Clark,

she has to do that. I want to establish the degree of difficulty though for Caitlin Clark when it came to having to learn how to deal with people, because this is something that comes up again and again in ways that we did not know with this level of detail, but certainly got to glimpse it at times as you watch her play these games in college.

Which is to say, Caitlin Clark, behind the scenes in her private life, had at times the appearance of a total nightmare asshole to play with. She has no poker face and her teammates saw the pressure she was under, specifically Kate Martin. I mean Kate Martin is the unsung hero in all of this and she recognized early and said in the team meeting, I think Caitlin's freshman or sophomore year, like everybody thinks they want to be Caitlin but I don't think you really do. And one of the things

that Kate Martin said was heavy sits the crown. So her teammates were oddly protective of her. You know, there are a couple of her teammates she just rode mercilessly. You know, there was eye rolling. There was frustration from the coaches. They would make Caitlin watch video, not of games, but of practice and game cutups of her reactions after plays and tried to ask her, okay, pretend this is a stranger. Tell me, like, what do you think about this person? And so Caitlin was watching body language highlights, which is next level coach. I mean, that's Phil Jackson stuff.

Oh, it's incredible. And this, this is incredible. It, it, this is one of the greatest coaching jobs that's ever been done by, you know, Julie Fitz and, uh, Lisa Bluter and Jan Jensen on those cutups. Uh, describe what they saw, what you saw watching them watch it. She was throwing her hands up in the air. She ran off the court once,

so she wouldn't just start mother-fucking people on the court. And then she was like, well, I thought that was a good reaction. I didn't scream at anybody. Right, the spinning, she would spin around, right? Oh, she would spin around and she would, you know, f*** you. You know what?

This is going to sound like a weird question. Have you ever driven a Ferrari? I asked because I did. We had different expense reports, right? We had different expense reports. No, but I did once. It is so hard to learn how to start that car in first gear because of the torque. And so the thing I kept thinking about was Caitlin Clark has this unbelievably powerful vehicle

that is her own talent and she's having to figure out how to drive it without spinning it into walls. And her teammates, by the way, understood in real time that this was never going to happen again. And that as opposed to complaining about it, whether it's the attention or her temper tantrums or her taking over a ball game that, you know, especially I would say Kate Martin understood. Like this is once in a lifetime stuff. You know, you know that terrible baseball movie that Kevin Costner won for the love of the game.

Was that it? For the love of the game, was that it? For the love of the game, yeah. Where the John C. Reilly character says, We're the best team in baseball right now, right this minute, because of you. There was that sense that they understood. Like it was beautiful actually to be around. Well, it reminds me of the other sort of like quote from that movie, which we're both gonna make fun of while also committing it to memory,

which is, you know, the pitching now to Yankee Stadium is the loneliest place in the world. And there is Billy Chappell trying to push the sun back into the sky to give us one more day of summer. Give us one more day of summer. That with Caitlin, it's like that's her spotlight. That's the person at the center, the gravitational center of all of this. Well, you know, after they lost the national championship game her junior year, they all went to this terrible suburban Dallas bar. She got back to the hotel and was still wearing her uniform, saw her father,

and that's when she lost it. Like, that's when all the adrenaline came running out. And, you know, they went out and it was just this beautiful thing of the Iowa Hawkeyes. You know, some booster was like, can I buy you ladies a drink? And Cable was like, we'll take 22 shots. And so, you know, it was hilarious. They kept buying rounds of 22. And, you know, I went out to dinner with her for her birthday with her best, with a bunch of teammates and her parents just before she graduated. And they were all sort of telling the funny college stories that you didn't think you'd

ever tell your parents, you know, because the whole power dynamic has changed by the time you're a senior. And it was just this beautiful nostalgic moment. There was that sense at the end of it that they all knew that something was ending and that it had been magic and that in some ways they would chase this for the rest of their lives. And that was really beautiful and it was really palpable up close. In the NFL, there is no margin for error. One mistake can change the outcome of a game. Science proves quality sleep can help boost reaction time, recovery time, and overall athletic performance.

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practitioner of the three-point shot, the rookie record for which Kaitlyn just broke, by the way, in a win over the Connecticut Sun on Wednesday night. But since the WNBA's Olympic break ended, the three-pointer isn't even the thing that has most distinguished Kaitlyn Clark's game. The news here is that she leads the league in assists per game now, with more than 8 per, and she had 19 of them against the Dallas Wings back in July, which broke the all-time single game record. And Kaitlyn also just broke the rookie record for assists in a season

just last week. It has been one long highlight reel of creative deliveries to her teammates. So when Wright Thompson is talking about how Caitlyn is this Ferrari with an engine that could power a team to the postseason, or possibly spin out into a wall, it is worth remembering that her teammates' assignment here, given that torque, can be absolutely terrifying. Because their job is to keep up. Oh, I mean, the number of balls that bounce off people's hands and bounce off their heads. I'm imagining what it's like to have been the others, the background singers,

and I imagine it's like coming into work and there's this weather system. Have you seen the movie Free Solo? Yes. Okay, so I had the pleasure of, at one of these sorts of boondoggles, I was in France interviewing Alex Honnold. Part of his legend in the documentary that I wanted to also invade his privacy about was just the way his brain works.

And his amygdala, as per the documentary, does not fire in the same ways that normal amygdalas do. Do you have no activation in your amygdala? There's just not much going on in my brain, it seems. Things that are typically stimulating for most of the rest of us are not really doing it for you. And he has some pushback on this and he does not like the simplification of it. But the whole notion is, oh, that guy's brain works differently. And I wonder when you got to the part where you're learning about how Kaitlyn feels about anxiety,

I wonder if any of this began to look a little bit like each other. Her brain definitely works different. I don't know if it works different in the way that Alex's works different, but she is definitely, there is a complexity to her understanding of herself, but also a deep, contagious simplicity.

Her goals are not, I want this dollar shoe deal and I want to win this many rings and I want these stats. It's like, I want to be the best that there ever was. She loves that song, the Luke Cone song, where the wild things are, the line in their hearts on fire and crazy dreams. Like I think she likes those angry, alive arenas. I was worried that the moment was gonna get too big for her just as someone who knew her family

and like had become oddly invested, but it just never was. And like she's one of those people that the bigger the stage, the better. There's this story that you report about anxiety and whether she even feels it. And again, it's in the context of Iowa doing all of this stuff, which I did not realize until your story, where they are actively trying to make Kaitlyn Clark into a three-dimensional teammate and human that everybody can understand a bit better. And so a sports psychologist visits them. The sports psychologist asked him to go around the room, very simple, almost like name, rank, serial number,

basic baseline questioning and says, you know, what are you, when's the last time you were afraid? What are you afraid of? And it gets to Caitlin and now she's not flexing. She's embarrassed because she's trying to be honest, but she also knows how it's going to sound and she's like, I don't, I don't get nervous. And everybody sort of looked at each other like, Oh, holy s**t.

Well, well look, the teammates, you know, in this meeting with the sports psychologists, they're all saying the stuff that you'd expect for basketball players of a certain age to describe, even veterans, even retired players, right? Like, oh, the free throw line. They struggle breathing. They have these sweaty palms. And Caitlin, just to give you the quote that you have in the piece, she just says, quote, I never am.

What was even more interesting to me than this, which was clearly non-performative and actually sincere, a vulnerable confession of invulnerability, right? What is even more interesting is the self-awareness that she goes on to explain to you, which is, she says this, quote, at times, speaking of her teammates, they were definitely like, why is this girl a psycho? And so there is just like the, I am this way,

and I know that, and I can't always do what you want me to do about it, even if I know that you're trying to get me to change. I hope this isn't speaking out of school, and if it is, I apologize, Kate Martin. But when we finished our, we were, we talked to the phone, uh, one time she said, are we done? I'm like, yeah, cause you can ask you a question.

So I guess she was, you've been around a lot of really great athletes. Right. And I was like, I mean, I've been around some. Yeah. And she said, what, what does Caitlin have that they have? Like she was trying to understand. And, you know, legitimately, and like, what was just sort of like, this is her best friend.

Right. Was just sort of like, like, what is- She has that effect on people, right? Yeah, like, what do you think is going on here? And I was just like, man, she's, I mean, I think exactly what I said was like, she's a real thing, man. Like I was blown away, not like she's funny and smart and nice and all of that.

But like, so are lots of people. And that's not that interesting. Just the degree to which she was doing really hard work with the stated goal of understanding herself in order to become the basketball player she wants to be was rare and ultimately, and I don't know if you agree or disagree with this, but like to me, that's the pulsing energy

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expire 168 hours after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see dkng.co.slash.ftball. I want to get to the ways in which all of this can read like, oh, she's a bad teammate. Because when you are trying to understand someone who is forced to watch highlight reels of her lowlights, which are just body language videos, it makes me want to understand why she is that way. I think two things. I think one, you know, the caveat to that is always she's the best

teammate there ever was if it's a four on two break, you know what I mean? Like you want an open look, she's the best teammate that ever was. You want to pass across the floor through three defenders that hits you in the hand, perfectly in stride. She's a great team. I think how people are the way they are is less interesting than watching them try to be able to answer that question for themselves

so that they can maximize whatever they want to maximize. Because, you know, I have all sorts of weird quirks and shit that the older I get, I'm just like, this is not normal. Yeah, I've noticed. And, oh, that's great, thanks. And, but I don't know why. Now it's important to understand what of that is cosmetic

and what of that is like real interior load bearing shit that I that I have to deal with like some of it's just funny You know, I like to order for other people at a restaurant. That's fine I want America to know that you are the Caitlin Clark full court perfectly dropped in pass of restaurant orders I Trust I'm pretty good. I trust you to deliver the ball where it needs to be. I'm not saying you can't order. I'm just saying. You have a vision.

I wanna play jazz. I wanna order what I wanna order and I want us all to share it. Now, if you wanna order something separate, I'm in no way offended or threatened by that, but I wanna do my thing and I want the wine list. I'm sorry.

But like, by the way, it like to bring it all the way back. I mean, first of all, Caitlin's brother, bourbon nerd. So that helped me on account of the pappy land. I kind of being one of America's foremost bourbon writers. Do you know what that helps you more in the world of sports than you might imagine. I am deeply unshocked to hear that. On the level of access, something that made me laugh reading your story about Caitlin's teammates asking her to be like, hey, could you DM this celebrity now that you're Caitlin Clark?

Oh, dude. Yeah, Yeah, they wanted to know Caitlin could get Drake to Iowa City and Kate was like guys. I don't know Drake Caitlin did get him arrows to her tickets, which is like that's it. That's tough I mean, I just had to get tickets for a three and a six year old to go to the Superdome and I'm gonna be paying off favors for the rest of my life. All of which is to say though, that she was in Chrysalis, in public, trying to understand what she was gonna turn into in real time and do it fast enough to not self-destruct.

There's a difference, as you put it, between being a watcher, which we are, we're in that category forever, and the watched. An inner circle human being who is watched. One of the ways that I thought about the story was Caitlin Clark, who her whole life had been a watcher. I mean, she's an obsessive sports fan. And so, you know, she gossiped about people on the internet.

She loves Patrick Mahomes. She loves Travis Kelsey before the Taylor Swift stuff. She's a huge Chiefs fan. She was transforming from being one of the watchers to one of the watched and was figuring out how that reorders everything about how you consume media, how you live your life, how you move through the real world and the virtual world, how you, how you work on your craft, how you have to behave in public, whether or not you can go to Target.

She loves Target and can't go to the Target in downtown Iowa City anymore, which is a heartbreaker for her. And so she's learning all this in real time while she's doing these interviews. And playing these basketball games and is the absolute center of the world. It's the depth that is unseen when you just view someone as a culture war. Object. You realize, oh, wait a minute, hold on. unseen when you just view someone as a culture war object, you realize, oh, wait a minute, hold on. She not only talked to the sports psychologist, not only was consensually watching cutups of how she was an asshole,

she has this performance consultant, Brett Ledbetter, who comes into the story, the degree to which she tried to be a better teammate because she wants to be better at basketball, even better than she was, I do want to establish that this was done not from like a fuzzy woo-woo. Like this was like, hey, we need to win games together.

And there's this thing about taking off the cape that you quote here. What does that mean? How does this all sort of like meld together And there's this thing about taking off the cape that you quote here. What does that mean? How does this all sort of like meld together under the like old school desire to actually win in sports? All of the work they were doing was not in some altruistic desire to create holistic young women to go out and better the world.

You know, these are basketball coaches, very good ones, very competitive ones who want to win basketball games. She has to trust her teammates. She also has to know that she can just be a person around them, that she can be vulnerable, that she can talk about her hopes and dreams and her heartbreaks and the things going on in her life. I mean, one of the reasons I think the team works so well is that they saw her like do

superhuman things while dealing with things in her private life that never became public. And so, you know, they were watching in awe, you know, because I don't know how I'd have handled that, but like, you know, the coaches and Caitlin were actively working against a loudly ticking clock to make this group of people be able to go out and win games. One of the things, one of the tips that, that she was given by this coach was a thing that, I think typically we're very wary of advising women to do,

but Caitlin seemed to get the premise, which was you gotta smile more. You gotta smile at people. Well, one of the things she says is, I want you to smile at every person you encounter, and then I want you to come back and tell me how they responded to you and how that was different than usual.

Just, but this is part of the, you know, with Steve Jobs, it was the reality distortion field they used to talk about. Like when you were in his presence, you were again, orbiting him, and things seemed both possible and also at times awful. With Caitlin Clark, the power of a smile because everybody is attending and watching her, it actually makes a difference on this very real human level, it sounds like. And she's very good with like, you know, remembering reporters names, little stuff

that matters to people. Super polite. I mean like dude like I sat next to the grizzled old Iowa beat writers at a game and they talked about her like she was Kirk Farrance or Dan Gable. Like nothing but respect, no caveats, no she's great for a just unequivocal total respect. The degree to which she is doing the stuff that for a just unequivocal total respect. The degree to which she is doing the stuff that for a sports writer, of course, is catnip, like meditating upon what praise does to her.

You know, like this is the s*** that you hope that, this is stuff that you got from Michael Jordan at the very, very end. She's doing this at age 21. She's so much more self-aware at 21 than Michael Jordan was at 50. The addiction to praise and that specifically. Her view on that is like, I want to be at that point where I am not getting high

off of tweets saying great podcast. And she like, and she says that because she was doing it, you know, I mean, she's Googled herself. And just that way lies madness. And her getting caught in the culture war was terrifying to her because she understood how you can blow yourself up in that space. ["Spring Day"]

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there's a saying in boxing that I think applies here to Kaitlyn and Angel and their now multi-year rivalry and that phrase is styles make fights. Kaitlyn is a finesse player. Angel leads the league in rebounding. Caitlyn is white. Angel is black. Angel is a member of the majority group inside the WNBA that is a minority outside of it, as we have previously discussed on this show.

And onto all of this is everything we want to project, up to and including the presidential election incidentally. Even though Kaitlyn has never self-identified as a Republican, and her idol growing up, just for the record, was Maya Moore. But one thing Kaitlyn and Angel pretty clearly share is a mutual appreciation for demonstrative gestures, which the nation saw when LSU beat Iowa to win the national title in April 2023, and Caitlyn got a taste of her own celebration, the whole John Cena hand in front of your face, you can't see me thing, which was followed by Angel highlighting one particular finger.

Kaitlyn proceeded to beat Angel in the Elite 8 in April of this year at a game that I was lucky enough to watch in person. But Kaitlyn, conspicuously unlike the alleged fans who are all commenting all the time in her name on the internet, she has refused any contribution to a verbal back and forth, which is an apparent anxiety that I did not realize Caitlin Clark could even feel until I got to one particular scene in Wright Thompson's story. The total lack of anxiety around on-court high-pressure moments in contrast with the scene you have

where she is being interviewed on television about Angel Reese. One of the things people talk about is race is a component of this. Your thoughts? Yeah, I don't think Angel should be criticized at all. You know, no matter which way it goes, you know, she should never be criticized for what she did. You know, I'm just one that competes and she competed. So I think everybody knew there was going to be a little trash talk in the entire tournament. It's not just me and Angel. So, you know, I don't think she should

be criticized. Like I said, LSU deserves it. They played so well and like I said I'm a big fan of hers. What happens when Jeremy Schaap stops asking the questions and the interview ends? She starts shaking. She has like she's her anxiety is so high she starts shaking. She starts calling her mom and Lisa Bluder and Jan Jensen be like was that okay? How did I do? And what she said to me was if you do do one wrong thing, your life can really end. Yeah. And like, so she was caught up in a culture war that, you know, I think she and Angel Reese understand each other perfectly, or at least, you know, in a commercial game

eventually oh yeah it's funny because Angel Reese's bird and Caitlin is magic they're incredible competitors and Caitlin and I don't I've never met Angel so I don't want to speak for Angel but I imagine watching how great she is dude that game she had where they lost, where LSU lost to Iowa, where it was so clear that Angel Reese was hurt. Watching that performance, I imagine that both of them think all of the sort of maelstrom around a big game, all the talking and all the booing and cheering. I bet they love it.

Like as opposed to being threatened by it. I bet they love it. I mean, when you know this move the shape of shaking the ring finger. I bet on a certain level, Caitlin loves that and is like, all right, you know, you got me this time. So the the culture war aspect of it was really interesting

because it was non-existent in her interior life and omnipresent in the life that people were projecting on her. And like, I mean, I thought there was really interesting story in the gap between those two things. Yeah. And look, I heard from people who played in the WNBA, who wanted to hear her say things to weigh in on the culture war because,

and this is the Taylor Swift parallel, like what do you do, we've done episodes about this, right? What do you do when your Stan army, when your fan base even, is doing things that you are not directing them to? Or even worse, what is it like when a bunch of people do stuff allegedly on your behalf and maybe they're not even fans maybe they're just

bots maybe they're just so the question of a responsibility in that sort of online culture way is different right from everybody else that we're talking about the older athletes have had to deal with. If she were my friend or my sister or my daughter I would say you don't ever engage good or bad with the mob. The act of becoming Caitlin Clark is revolutionary and way more revolutionary than what some dumb says on Twitter. She is actually changing the world for little girls and little boys and redefining what it means to be a sports hero

and a sports fan. I mean, she's doing this on both ends of the commodity chain. Right, and the thing that's most exciting to me, having read your story, is that her philosophy, as much as she still struggles with it, and we see, by the way, in the struggles with, and we see by the way in the WNBA, we see her throwing looks at times, we see her spinning, right? It's not like she has cured

herself of this thing, but her philosophy clearly is not might makes right. Her philosophy is not because I am so great, you must enable this this she has worked at trying to be better in ways that are so shocking given the history of how society has reverse engineered the way you should be based on how good you are at something it's just a remarkable bit of actual human maturity dude it is, I mean, Brent and Ann Clark did a great job because like, that's real. And you know, like her, like her brother, like her family is like really Catholic, but in sort of that solid Midwestern way, not in the scary way. Yeah, not in the scary, JD Vance-ian.

You guys took the wrong message in the Da Vinci Code sort of a way. And they're just really thoughtful, intellectual people engaged in the sort of big idea of being a human being on a spinning rock. They say rosaries at the games, they're really superstitious, they have to sit in the same seats. It's, you know, it was a hell of a thing that happened to all of them.

The fact that millions upon millions of people will follow her, will watch her, will make a point to pay attention to her at a time when attention is so scarcely paid to that magnitude is we just haven't seen it in that category from female athletes. We just have not seen that. Oh, dude, those their last three games, those TV ratings were, you know, blew the World Series out of the water, blew the Sunday of the Masters out of the water.

Every NBA game on ESPN was beaten by Iowa basketball game. And also the interesting thing is none of us know how this is going to end. She could be Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, whatever, you know, like, I don't want to get like, but it hasn't happened yet. What do you think to yourself when you see in the WNBA, the stuff that her coaches at Iowa put on those low light reels, when you see her get frustrated and begin to lapse, what goes through your mind? Look, man, people don't really change.

You know, like, like, like you can, you can control it to a degree, but you know, I, to a degree, but I think as long as she's engaged in the intellectual fight to be self-aware, to know when this helps fuel her and when it moves past the needle and starts becoming a hindrance, as long as she's aware of the mask eating the face Then I think it's all good. I mean, I don't you know, I Michael Jordan never turned it off. I

Would like to us to have this exact same conversation ten years from now Yeah, see what happened because I know what she wants, I know what we all would want for her and what seems possible, I mean, even on certain days in the right light, likely, but we have no idea. And so what you're watching is someone with an enormous amount of potential with a enormous capacity for work

a enormous capacity for work and for invention and reinvention and self-analysis and really critical data-driven looks in the mirror, you're watching that person try to put all of those things together to be the greatest whoever he was. And there's no way to know if that's gonna happen. I mean, that's the drama to me. Can she realize these things that must feel both close enough to touch, but so far away as to be deeply anxiety inducing?

I mean, that's interesting to me. Yes, no, it's an experiment. We're watching an experiment. It's an experiment. That's exactly right. On terms that until I read your story, I did not realize what was happening. So, Ray Thompson, at the end here, I look forward to you ordering dinner for me in exactly 10 years. And I will be in New York at the end of September.

Oh yeah. You will order dinner for me a lot sooner than that. And I will be in New York at the end of September and yeah, right Yeah, you will order dinner for me a lot sooner than that Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Michael Antonucci Walter Aververoma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Nealey Lohman, Rob McGray, Rachel Miller Howard, Ethan Schreier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tuminello, and Juliet Warren. C2 Engineering by RG Systems, Sound Design by NGW Post, our theme song by John Bravo. All of us will see you on Tuesday.