The Pomp Podcast - #1161 Jon Finkel | The Author Documenting Your Sports Heroes

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Jon Finkel is the author of a number of books across the sports industry, everyone from Charlie Ward, Nate Robinson, and more. He also writes a newsletter every week 'Books & Biceps'. In this conversation, we talk about greatest athletes, best sports moments, writing process, the rise of social media in sports, and much more.     ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th in Miami Beach hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of bold discussions, covering topics from investing, emerging tech, longevity, space exploration, entertainment and more.The speaker lineup includes names such as investing legend Cathie Wood, NYT bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy, billionaire Christian Angermayer, master of Contrarian Thinking Codie Sanchez, Modern Wisdom host Chris Williamson plus many more. Listeners will receive an exclusive 40% discount on VIP and Insider Pass tickets with code POMP40.  General Admission tickets are free of charge. Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. John Finkel is the author of a number of books across the sports vertical.

Everyone from Charlie Ward, Nate Robinson, much more. He also writes a newsletter every single week, Books and Biceps, which I highly suggest that you go ahead and subscribe to. In this conversation, we talk about it all. Who are some of the greatest athletes? What are some of the best sports moments? What's his writing process? Where exactly was he when certain sports events occurred? And what does he think about today, given all of the rise of social media and the increased

access for different types of athletes? I really enjoyed this conversation with John, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, what you agree with, and what you disagree with. The feedback is always helpful. It helps us create better episodes. Okay, here's my conversation with John Finkel. This episode is brought to you by Accenture.

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Bang, bang. I'm here with Jon. You wrote a book that ranks presidents based on their athleticism, which just the premise of that alone is absolutely absurd and awesome. Where did that idea come from and who is the most athletic president in history and who is the least athletic president in history? Awesome. Yes. A great place to start. So I, that book came from an article I used to write for muscle and fitness magazine for a long time for seven or eight years. I did all their big cover stories, WWE guys, UFC guys, football players, anybody who was jacked enough to kind of

bit that mold and um i hijacked an issue during 2012 and you'll love this i wanted to do like a athletic political issue but not policy basically like politicians but no politicians like just sports and athletes so i none of it happened by the way but i mocked it up with a couple guys it was called the big cover line picture of big jack dude was red white and huge the uh the taglines were um like freedom of the bench press and like instead of metal avon or metal is m-e-t-t-l-e like tough guy metal avon all this whole thing i mocked it all up and the the centerpiece of the whole thing was this article that i did ranking the athletic presidents um we basically did the article me and a couple of my writers who were younger like

this is gonna be so awesome like everyone's gonna love it it's gonna be like a buzzy thing a little before twitter but like people are gonna talk about it gets to new york we were in la the the big publishers look at it and are like yeah no we're not putting red white and huge like we're not gonna talk about politics even even like tangentially about their muscular stuff like we're out so the only thing they kept was this top 10 piece and they cut it down like like hurt my soul as a writer anyway right like you just believe in this idea and there was no real automatic feedback so i was gonna get like emails later and they cut everything out the only thing i had left was the top 10 ranked and they gave me like 80 words to talk about like why abraham lincoln was

a street fighter and you know gerald ford actually played football all that so that comes out people love it they're writing handwritten emails like this was really funny it was great i start to pitch a book idea and nobody like i don't have any idea no one wants it i'm pitching it to new york i'm pitching it to la i'm pitching all the publishers i had a loose like agent this is 15 years ago no one wants it 2012 so 10 years ago and i decide do some research i'm gonna put this fucking book out my i but like people talk about this stuff i'm gonna put this i already did like other books but like the technology had gotten to the point where you could i first i'm at a magazine so i have people who can design the book i have people who can edit the book i have people

who can lay the book out i can write the thing like i just need a printer and ingram just came out with this thing called ingram spark at the time and kindle had a it was called like kindle direct publishing or create space i think then and i was like i'm gonna print like 50 and i'm like it's not gonna cost me much and if i sell 100 books like we'll see what happens so i get into it and it's like man there's a lot of presidents they've a lot of them have like done nothing but a lot have done a ton in the sports world so then i realize the only way this is legitimate is if i take myself out of it and i come up with like an objective ranking system like if i like mel kuyper the shit out of this i call it jocks and chief so i come up with like

five categories like what they did in athletics before they were president what they did in athletics during how strong were they overall as a person how tough were they um and then what wizard legacy athletically and i came up with a one through ten scale and i'm like interview like researching rutherford b hayes and calling like the calvage coolidge library like did he really have these dumbbells and all the stuff and so yeah so that was uh that was how that book came out it was nuts when people read it today what is their take is it like hey you should just keep updating it with each new president that's the beauty of it so from a business standpoint every four years i have a new book i added i added trump when he came in i have to wait so the judge he was like

in the 20s so people don't know as much as people can't stand him like he was actually a very good high school athlete he was looked at in baseball he threw in like the high 80s played on the football team and then he had a weird thing like after after all it was over he has this ridiculous notion of like conserving energy like he doesn't i found it's in there like he he doesn't exercise because he believes you only have so much energy in your life so he looks obviously not like someone who exercises so that is an insane theory it's a quote there's a quote in the book where he's like i you know i just all the people i know exercise are getting new hips and i don't want that you only have so many heartbeats and i don't want to waste it exercising you look like him and you walk

around like him and that's yeah that's what happens when you do that but for a brief time he's decent athlete no exercise in office no focus on activity so he was in the he's a big like overweight kind of guy not in the taft sense or even the clinton sense but he was up there um but the beauty of this story is so i write the book and i have enough people through the magazine world that i can get it out there it gets picked up in the new york post new york post friend of mine kirsten fleming i'll give her credit forever it was like this is a really cool idea i want to interview about how'd you come up with this i tell the same version of this story uh she reads it gets picked up a bunch of places because in the post i get a call like driving home

to like get my kid to soccer it's cbs this morning somehow got my number from her can you fly here tomorrow to do a live show on cbs this morning and i'm like yeah so i call my wife i'm like hey we got to figure this out like she's like what are you doing i'm like i'm flying to new york living in texas at the time i'm like they're gonna put me like live to talk about this goofy book that because it was in election season i timed it right i'm not an idiot like it's gonna come out during the primaries everything or during the election and so they fly me up and all of a sudden i'm sitting there new york city cbs you know anthony mason and like the book cover is up there the green room has a copy of it like people are asking me to sign it and i'm like four months ago

like not a single publisher on earth i got i got 40 rejection letters no one's gonna read this no one cares it's a listicle it's something in buzzfeed yep i sold like 900 books by the time i flew home and so that was where the idea came from and that was sort of the cool feel-good story of like bet on yourself and it still sells a couple hundred books a year i don't do much with it and every four years i put it out so i have to wait till biden's done because a portion of the rankings is on how they were fit in office like reagan was notorious like he did circuit training he did nautilus stuff he rode his horse like he was into it obama like always like exercise and playing hoops like he had a nice gym that is like probably the coolest white house gym

they had um all the way ranking down to other guys who didn't do anything but so once up once biden's out i can add another one but every four years i'll just keep updating it and it'll just keep selling with biden uh he rides his bicycle i know he does that uh is that considered like strenuous activity or not so i think on the lower i put in the front like this is a book for like actual athletes i'm not gonna be like oh you know harry truman walked you know two miles two point two miles a day at a certain pace every day like okay but who cares yeah like john quincy adams swam two miles in the potomac in the winter nude i give that a lot of credit like that was badass right like he was cold plunging before it was cool yeah and swimming like there's stories of

him going like two miles like going off course like his staff i can't find him like they're running along the edge with his clothes like you gotta come out you gotta come out can you imagine today the new york post being like the president is naked in the potomac swimming there's a great one of my favorite quotes from the whole book so taft big guy like he gets hit a lot always like knocked out the fattest president but you know what like he worked really hard he's a wrestler in high school he tried really hard to stay in shape he hired fitness people he just was a big dude as he got older was really hard to keep the weight off so he also was a big like swimmer type because it was easy on his joints so he goes to the ocean i think he was in like cape cod or

something on like a president's retreat and he starts you know waiting out the big guy who got stuck in the bathtub and then he's about to go in a bunch of his staff are going to go in they go wait president's using the ocean only one way there's no room for anybody else that is absurd like the best staff joke ever about the president all right so you wrote another book you've written a lot of books but there's a couple i want to specifically talk about uh 1996 is the best sports year of all time yes why all right so i wanted to write that book since i was a kid it's 96 year i graduated high school and my kids are now nine and eleven my son is really into sports my daughter not so much but like everything we talk about now uh if you think about it like the whole world

changed in 96 the whole sport world changed in 96 so i originally had the idea called like decade of icons i was going to focus it on all the 90s and then my agent and i were kicking it around now he was like you know these yearbooks of like the year and i was like yeah let's do i'm going to do a biography of a sports year not that it's like never been done but no one's really tackled it that way it's always like a look a year in review or a look back but i was like i'm gonna do a biography as if the year was a person so if you think about it just from a from a sports perspective actually i think i talked to your brother joe about it like on an email chain once like so before in 1995 i'm in high school nobody cares about tiger woods he's just an amateur

person the few people outside of golf ever heard of uh alan iverson is in high school i mean he's in college georgetown he has a narch madness but like that's the first time he shows up he's not a household name nothing kobe's nobody the high school kid that's supposed to be good at basketball outside of people who follow it no one cares right you circuit or whatever jack's on orlando So there was no Kobe and Shaq right there, okay? You've got no The Rock, no Stone Cold. Both of them were screwing around, just hadn't gone on to sports yet. No Major League Soccer, no WNBA.

You've got Mike Tyson still in jail, hasn't come back yet. So, like, when you look back at now, everybody, you can't talk about sports. Every athlete now, and I've interviewed, done it, done books with them, they look back, who are your icons? Kobe, Iverson, Tiger, Shaq, the Kobe Lakers, like, MLS now, Soccer Matters. You know, WNBA is now huge, people actually follow it. before in 1995 none of these conversations happened yeah they didn't even matter so if you look at like it's like a line of demarcation like before 96 none of that happened and then after and

then the second part of it is if you look at the people who were huge in 96 right so you've got the cowboys win their third super bowl like look at that team right like michael irvin still on tv deon as big popular wise probably as ever acheman the number one announcer these guys have been on tv on sundays for like 25 26 years right commercials now now he's doing geico with nick saban he was doing like dominoes with uh david robinson like yep these guys have not left they haven't left the scene tiger is as influential as ever and so if you look back like there's this line everything i talked about in high school was cool but from then on it's all these new people who came into existence in the sports kind of universe in 1996 i remember alan iverson he was

like literally my one of my childhood like uh heroes in sports right and um i remember as he was becoming more popular in the nba uh i was in middle school around like the late 90s and uh we convinced our coach who had zero power i'm pretty sure he was a volunteer to mandate which really meant we were mandating that all of the team got the uh first alan iverson shoes i think they were the uh the answers that um uh they had a little zip up that i think those came out before the questions the questions came out later if i remember correctly and so remember there's like 12 to 15 white kids in a random you know middle school in the middle of north carolina which is a huge basketball like all stuff yeah and we all get these alan iverson shoes and i remember

uh parents being like who's alan iverson right because i mean he was like really just starting to become popular and then they go and they look and they're like i don't know if we're into like the whole team wearing the alan iverson right and he had the uh armband like he was starting to put it all together and uh then i remember as our parents fought it yeah we became more obsessed he got on the cover of slam magazine and like as soon as all that hit it was like alan iverson cannot be fucked with yeah and then of course practice and then it like exploded and our parents were like what is going on who is this guy why are our kids always trying to watch sports every single night to see who we crossed up yeah like it just snowballed into this huge thing

and it's like yeah you don't remember like i definitely don't remember really before that like that is like a seminal moment for me of his like big explosion onto the scene and he changed how basketball really got played yeah because we were so i'm a little older than you and it was like bird magic like you know all those guys michael like when you're watching the 92 olympic dream team was like the biggest thing ever and like you're moving on those guys are all retiring they're not you know obviously jordan 197 98 like still big but from an influential standpoint like those guys were clearly at some point moving on yep and then you have like iverson and the beauty of iverson is like he came almost out of nowhere he was your size i mean i

covered him a bunch when i went you know for hoops heist some other places like he was six foot he was 160 pounds and he was in this land of giants and had just this fight in him and you didn't have to be from anywhere to just watch him and be like this guy is different and he's awesome and then some of the stories like that i that i had uncovered for 96 are incredible because so he was a nike guy nike high school john thompson's georgetown's nike thompson is on the board of nike everybody is like he's going nike reebok is like you go to nike jordan signs iverson you go to nike it's like oh you know maybe the penny will maybe penny will give a little push to iverson and a little penny commercials iverson's like no fucking way i want my shoe he goes there and

they come up with this huge campaign i can't remember the name of the two guys but they were watching mark madness and they're like we need him we're basically going to say to our guys uh we're going to put our entire marketing budget on this guy basically what nike did with jordan way back when and and we're going to get we want him to be him we don't want to polish him into nike or into rebar we want to make rebar what he wants and i was it was like that that's who i get behind that i can get behind that he comes out he's got he's in you know inputting designing the shoes they let him be who he wanted to be and it was like the most brilliant sneaker decision you could ever make from a company perspective i um i always say that the questions still to this day i

think are the best shoes ever made yeah 96 was cool because you still had jordan's yeah his shoe comes out shack had the hypnosis like which which it looked like you know it was weird and then the pennies were cool and pippin had his own shoe and like some of these shoes that came out then were great but but there was no there was no answer to the jordan it was like the jordans in general there was nothing as cool there were shoes that were like definitely like penny shack whatever but there was no athlete who you were like i'm gonna rep these shoes because i think he can stand up and be as cool as jordan and that's what that's what iverson meant so from 96 it's like how do you even talk about basketball in 2023 without kobe and iverson because every athlete you talk about

lebron pickham kevin durant their favorite athlete was either kobe yeah the other uh big moment i remember uh where an athlete kind of broke through uh with a bunch of my friends was uh carmelo anthony in uh march madness when he and syracuse went on the huge run yeah everyone was just like dude who is this guy and it was the same type of ingredients though right it was like it was a kid who just like obviously size-wise he was different but it's just like this kid is not gonna uh quit and he's just tough as yeah and i think that there was something about that entire like kind kind of mid nineties to like early two thousands where kids who that were like maybe college down to like middle school. And if you were into basketball, you were just like, things are

changing. And these guys are like the leaders of this new wave. Yeah. You had, you know, there was, it was almost like they had that passing the torch. It skipped over because it's really not Jordan to Kobe and all these guys. Like there was an era in the middle of like Marbury, Garnett, Chris Weber, and some of these guys that were, they were awesome, but they didn't, you know, mcgrady like they didn't capture your imagination vince did vince did because of the dunks and that was sick but like he never had the you know the playoff stuff he never made a finals he kind of never pushed over there over that hump of being like the cultural icon yeah uh but it was iverson and it was kobe and it's an unbelievable thing to think about like in your city in high school

it's like that conversation of who's who's alan who like he plays for where georgetown he played football somewhere in high school like kobe like who the you know the hornets want him or the lakers are going to get him like okay what a bust another high school guy nobody cares about and now it's changed completely forever all right so lebron played football in high school i think he broke his finger or something so he stopped playing but his team either won the state championship like they're like good yeah and obviously if you got a 6-8 dude run down the sideline it's pretty hard not to be good uh alan iverson was a quarterback in virginia uh he claims he was better at football than he was at basketball i have a great story okay so he gets to george

he gets in a lot of i'm sure people listen he got in some trouble got in a fight at a bowling alley and there was like legit violence not shooting real like real fight real fight they were throwing chairs unfortunately like you know back then the south like only the white kids got in trouble all the black kids got arrested especially iverson like ruining his future um at the time and it's cool how some of my books intersect like i did a biography on charlie ward they were looking at him as the next charlie ward because he was an incredible quarterback great arm elusive all the same stuff charlie could do it was a couple years after charlie had just won the heisman and also taking his basketball team to the elite eight so they're like you can build a college

offense around him florida state looked at him a bunch of schools looked at him gets in trouble no one's looking at him in like the greatest mom move of all time irison's mom drives up to georgetown talks to john thompson and is like help my son like i he has he cannot this can't ruin his life thompson takes him brings him up like you will listen to every goddamn word i say and i will i will bet on you and you will just listen to me iverson says great the first year unbelievable second year iverson's like he's becoming who he is a little bit of a star decides to roll into big john's office and test his weight and says i want to play football he says get your ass out of here i brought you here to play basketball and it's a great story and it's true

and so iverson was that good he was being looked at for for both sports when i think of uh his story and then you compare them to charlie ward uh i don't actually think most people would think of those two as uh the comparison because then it was the comparison now i think it's dion and charlie ward who's more athletic so this is i get when the book came out this was like the number of question like it's like all right bo jackson dion sanders and charlie are the only ones to have so this is what this is my this is my answer and i think this is the way i've lost and i've thought about it i promise you like way more than anybody else all right so bo jackson i've read jeff perlman's books it's incredible just came out like he was born a physical freak and he used that to

be like a mythological character in football and baseball and track actually also he was unstoppable he could jump over five foot fences five hundred foot home runs like there's stories in there and the research he did is incredible like he was an unstoppable force he could get outrun anybody he was a singular talent he handed in the ball he ran put him at bat he hit dion same thing like fastest could be returning punts the team didn't rely on him the quarterback got him the ball you know in football in baseball pitcher pitching the ball charlie charlie was the quarterback and point guard he wasn't just some guy who was getting by on speed although he had world-class speed and he wasn't just some guy getting out by on like athletic ability although you know his father

was an exceptional high school athlete he clearly had the genes for it but he was a brilliant athletic mind and he had to run the offense every play went through him shift gears after football and then go play basketball and take that team in the Elite Eight, and he plays a starting finals NBA point guard. So to me, the best team athlete, the best leader is Charlie Ward. Obviously, Bo is probably in a decathlon. Deion and Bo might be better. But if you're asking me, I think Charlie is the most impressive.

What about somebody like a Myron Roll? So Myron Roll, for those that don't know, I think he played at Florida State. I don't think they won bowl games. I don't think they won a national championship, right? and then he got a road scholarship yeah and if i remember correctly there's like some controversy because it was like is he going to go take the scholarship and go uh and do that or is he going to go to the nfl and he chose to go do the scholarship uh and he wanted to become a doctor and i think that he's actually neurosurgeon now yeah i think he's become a neurosurgeon and so

like when you look at somebody like that that's not two sports but like that may be harder than playing football and basketball is being on florida state's football team winning bowl games and also like becoming a neurosurgeon yeah the classwork is crazy and one of the themes of all these guys that i end up talking to is like at some point the the work needs to be done the film room has to get done like especially if you're a quarterback especially your point guard even in high school uh some of these guys who are playing all these sports are shifting back and forth constantly and school right and so the mental agility i think and that's again why i put charlie a little a little head in terms just an overall picture of like running an offense on both of

those yeah like he jumps into college basketball at like january and like he's playing against guys who all they do are you know five star recruits on mcdonald's all americans from north carolina you know nc state like the best schools in the country duke and he just came off winning the heisman national championship and within a month they are a well-oiled machine okay he had a sam cassell on his team edwards he had some players so it wasn't like he had no one there but uh but he's a point guard immediately comes in and like picks up the stride elite eight so it's like when i think about being able to do that and then the same thing the flip side he well everybody's doing spring football and spring practices he's in the march madness and then he's like shifting gears

back into like running the offense for bobby bowden so to me i i put that just as like a little bit of i don't know how you want to measure it but i put that as just a little notch above so in high school i played football basketball and baseball and i had obviously friends who just played football friends who just played basketball yeah uh in college i played football uh and we at one point played unofficially some of the basketball players in basketball. It didn't go so hot for them. There's a physicality that they just weren't used to. Especially in the middle of football season. Yes. But one of the debates all throughout high school and into college that we'd have over and over again, is it easier for a football player to go play in the NBA

or is it easier for an NBA player to go play in the NFL? Which one do you think? So I would say that from a sheer like physical standpoint, the NBA, the guys don't stop moving. Like if you watch, I've done the articles on like training for the combine, all this stuff. The physicality NFL is unmatched, but like you do your 20 second, 10 second route or you're running back a new thing.

You may be off the field, maybe not. You may be back on, you're maybe not. You don't have that in the NBA. And a lot of the guys pick probably which one they're going to be absolutely best at. But from a conditioning standpoint in game, I think it might be harder for some of the, especially like tight end, maybe by position, it's probably a better way to do it. But I think

this is the, this is part of the debate, right? It's okay. The NBA player, like what are they going to do? They can't be the quarterback. Most of them are like, I'll be a receiver or tight end. And that's pretty much the only two options on offense. Uh, and then on defense, they're like, Oh, you know, maybe, uh, I'd be like, uh, uh, D end or something. All right. I covered the summer league in 2001 or two when there was a, um, they were doing like a, there was an NFL strike. okay tony gonzalez who played basketball at cal with jason kidd right yeah with jason kidd and then he and then he goes into the you know obviously nfl he's really good um i watched him in the summer he played for the heat if he was he was saying if the nfl wasn't gonna come

back he's gonna play for the heat if you look at him on a football field he's like this unstoppable dominant jacked force he's just a dude on the basketball court he's five inches shorter than amari stoudemire who's there the other power forwards karam butler looks like he looks like he's his big bro hey how you doing like tony like that's a big deal these nfl guys especially running back they can't play they're too small yeah some of them uh but i would say like from a direct comp having watched him again he was only he was coming off the nfl the nba if he's a lead athlete i mean he was a bench player like trying to make it uh and so i'm not knocking him like obviously hall of famer football and amazing that he could do all that but if we're looking for

maybe an apples to apples comp like size wise and speed wise he wasn't with those guys and that might be might be the difference you wrote a book about nate robinson speaking of size uh and i think it's called uh heart over height yes if i remember correctly um is his legacy ruined after jake paul knocked him out it sucks because he's one of my favorite athletes ever he's the man in terms of the basketball if you leave if you leave i blame i've texted him about like i blame his trainers nate at that point still is one of the fastest he should have not got hit for five rounds and that's all i don't know what their plan was but if i were buying i've covered a ton of boxing i interview boxers i like boxing you like mma boxing like nobody can touch him speed

wise he should have just spun around and worn him out maybe you know just lasted the last thing i think he probably would have wanted to do is what happened and just get stone cold knocked out in front of millions and millions of people but it hurts uh as someone who's a friend of his now because this kind of happens when you do these books with these guys you just get invested in their lives you start to know them and their wives and their kids and like you root for them um again when i do when you do like a co-author thing you're kind of putting your journalism hat away so if i did like a biography on it'd be a little different because you're really coming at it from all angles but um nate was the first guy to give me like a shot to like co-write a

book with him so i'll always be grateful to him for that and he's awesome we've had fun but for for anyone listening who doesn't kind of know in a 30 second story like nate robinson um seattle rainier beach comes up he's five seven five eight even as like a sophomore he's a phenom in football and basketball and then at five eight he is the mr basketball and mr football in the state of washington now just he's five eight and if high school is probably five seven ish and a legit i mean i've stood next to him tower over the guy he could have played track like ran track he got recruited for steve carroll's usc team reggie bush lendale white like did his visit he could have gone to arizona could have gone to michigan got looked at everywhere for football got looked

at a ton of places for basketball what positions did he play he played point guard and he was a corner okay he was a ridiculous punt like if you have time youtube like nate robinson high school highlights like just every punt was like touchdown touchdown touchdown kick touchdown like picked everybody off and he decided he wanted to stay home washington he's like a big like loves his hometown like so he goes stays home at washington freshman year plays both sports has like a huge interception in the washington washington state game everybody's like you you're going pro like you're going to go to the NFL. And he's like, I just, I want to play basketball. And they're like, you're nuts. Like you're, you're five, eight. And he's like, this is what I want to do. So after

his sophomore year, he quits focusing on basketball, first round draft pick, you know, averages 16, 17, 18 points for the Knicks, three dunk contests, only got to win three dunk contests. So like, to me, that is his legacy, like an unbelievable, phenomenal, one of the best athletes we've had. And it sucks that like a generation of people are like, Nate, the guy who got punched in the face and by the YouTuber. So, uh, I have a controversy about the dunk contest yeah i don't think that they should have uh various heights participate because it doesn't look the same when a guy who's 6 10 does a windmill and then nate robinson does a windmill you're like dude that guy jumped higher you're like no he just had to go higher to get to the

same cooler i know yes i mean that's like they have an advantage if they can dunk if you're shorter it just looks way cooler than a guy who kind of doesn't even look like he's trying to get up white tried the 12 foot one and it just still didn't look cool it was like you're so big and and there's not moving and yeah it is it is interesting because like you know spud web won against dominique and like if you watch those old 85 86 dunk contest dominique was like an artist i mean the moves he did the movement of the ball if you slow it down like a full 360 like eight foot radius dunk but then spud would do like a 360 and you're like whoa like that dude's like four feet off the ground like what the hell he's like hanging up there yeah yeah so nate was a

power dunker too which was cool like in-game in traffic dunker which was great um but i hear your point like it always looks more pleasing uh you know he he dunked over dwight howard which is really cool and he was like really creative he had the the green crypto nate shoes to go over dwight howard in his superman costume and dwight was a pretty good sport i don't know if the 90s athletes would have been like yeah yeah we're competing sure dunk over me that'll be great i do think that there's a little bit of uh of change there yeah i don't think the guys had much camaraderie there camaraderie there but you know why is lebron never done a dunk contest he's scared he's a punk i don't know oh you don't like lebron i think he should have done

i think it's like if you look at the legacy of the guys he is who he who he's in line with you know jordan did it one amazing kobe did it once even though he wore his little warm-up in one like you do it once i think lebron's in you know there's undisputed whatever third fourth he's not i don't think he's better than jordan whatever who cares about that argument but he's in the top whatever two three of all time but he should have done it once the fact that he had done it as a rookie yeah i think no one would have beat him no no he would have won they make you they make sure they would have made sure he won and he had the ability i mean the dude could jump he could touch the top of the backboard like he should have just done it that's all i'm not i'm saying

punk only because like i don't know who got in his ear of like you're too cool for this especially at like 19 yeah but he should have done it once and won it and then is it a too cool thing or was he scared of like if you go up there and you embarrass yourself because you're trying too hard i can't imagine him being scared he's the ultimate like physical specimen like his first game when he did that dunk i think it was against sacramento or whatever like he had been owning dudes his age since he was like 12 like i can't imagine fear would have come into i think somebody was like hey you know you don't win he would have won and i think he had all the dunks to win i don't know it's one of those when he was in high school yeah it like i don't remember i was probably

too young when kobe was in his senior year like some of the i watched the videos now but lebron in high school was just like not fair no like just literally watching him and they and they'd be like on national television you'd be like oh there's like a game right and you can watch and you're like they got a 5a white kid guarding lebron and lebron literally is toying with this catholic prep school literally just rotate it in yeah and this guy is like trying right because he's like hey i'm on i'm on tv i can't let lebron dunk on me and then there you go just literally dunks on the whole team at once and they were cool because like i mean no one's gonna build like a uniform and a look for a team around me or you but it was like do you like these

green jerseys oh we can get different oh you like them big and baggy now with no sleeves we'll do that like he had the cool shoes the chosen one cover like if you think the most amazing thing to me about lebron is all the hype everything now me or you i would have been the biggest asshole i probably would have done 50 things in my 20s that i'd be embarrassed about now or like been written off we probably did do those yeah the fact that like he has all of that and like good dad good you know what i mean like good husband like smart and business gives back the community no real like trouble no fights like it's pretty incredible like that from from a character perspective uh that he never went off the rails i was like i'm a 25 year old millionaire

everybody loves me like it never happened the two biggest i've always said this right it's like he's the he's probably the one person with the most hype that lived up to it and i would argue he probably surpassed it even though he had the chosen one and all the stuff but uh if you think of other people who were like similar vein uh sebastian telfair remember when he was coming out and like and everyone was like this is the next point i'm a celgis fan like we had him i was like we're gonna get the coolest like he and it just doesn't happen didn't happen yeah and then uh in football there was a kid um tayvon austin you ever hear this kid yeah so uh him and there was a kid in florida i forget his name um but uh noel divine i think was his name uh and so both

of these guys had highlight tapes that went like these like the first viral like high school football highlight tapes and uh if the kid's name is noel divine that i'm thinking of it's like the state of florida didn't know how to tackle like literally he would like run into a pile it'd be like 15 defenders right you're like there's only 11 on the field like no i think there's 15 and he comes and he just pops out the other end and so just i remember being in like high school and college being like what the fuck is this kid doing and then uh austin uh his highlight tape the first five minutes is him literally dancing on the field of music it's awesome like you're just like you have to be good right like if you put on your highlight tape just you warming up dancing to

music you have to go to a top d1 school because if any coach watched all of that like they're like okay i gotta have the kid right and they all fizzle out they don't make it it's hard i mean it's really hard especially when i mean now it's even harder but i mean you're putting lebron on the cover of sports illustrator you've got like you've got cautionary tales of guys who you know that happens to and you never hear from again i mean kwame brown you never hear from again like even if they're not that level of hype um and just it's what it's his 20 20th year like it's insane that he's still where he is and he's gonna end up being the greatest i mean the guys he's compared to didn't come out like that they were high draft picks or whatever but they weren't the anointed as

like the greatest basketball player of all time or whatever it was in their sport and then like when you watch them dominate other sports the greatest what if i ever see is um so in uh in a high school west virginia randy moss was like a basketball player like a point for point guard i mean sorry power forward and jay will was his point guard and then in football jason williams was the quarterback and he was the wide receiver like if you could have somehow let both of them do both like obviously better basketball football whichever one like pays different sports but like can you imagine if they like somehow like you two are like you have five years to both go play football on the same team in the nfl or college like or college and then you can both actually

go play basketball together randy moss was an unbelievable basketball player greatest receiver of all time arguably but like i would love i love those stories of like the the what ifs of who could have been and what could have happened if they just stuck with a different sport randy moss literally was so good that most became like like literally became a verb like you are very good and then also i remember uh there was a a song that came out when i was in college uh some dj had like remixed it and uh they took remember his interview where he was getting in his uh car and he was like straight cash homie oh yeah right and they remixed the whole thing and they would just play it and he and he literally you're just like this guy is amazing

at uh at football um but it's it's cool to hear how good he was at basketball as well hey guys what's going on i hope that you're enjoying this conversation but i wanted to interrupt for a quick second and tell you about a brand new conference that i'm hosting on march 4th at the miami beach convention center the event is called lyceum miami and tickets are completely free for anyone who wants to come. I'm bringing together many of the most popular guests from the podcast over the last couple of years. Some of the guest speakers that we've already announced are people like Vivek Ramaswamy from Strive Asset Management, or Delian and Mike Solana from Founders Fund, Chris Williamson from the Modern Wisdom Podcast, Cody Sanchez from Contrarian Thinking,

and billionaire Christian Agermeyer, among many others. I've got a number of amazing surprise guests as well, some that you definitely will not expect, and others that come from walks of life that you will be scratching your head as to how I even got them to show up. But come check out Lyceum Miami on March 4th. The Lyceum was a public gym in Athens, Greece, where people used to come together, talk about ideas, and debate topics that were important to society. I want to meet people in person in real life once again after three years of a hiatus from real life events and so i'm hosting the event and as i mentioned anyone from anywhere can come to this event completely for free all you need to do is go to lyceummiami.com and you'll be able to pick up a free

general admission ticket make sure you claim your ticket in order to get in through the doors Lyceum Miami is going to be a great time. So come check it out. Come hang out with me, many of the popular guests from the podcast, and other like-minded individuals. Lyceum Miami, March 4th, Miami Beach Convention Center. I hope to see you there. All right, let's get back into this conversation.

Yeah, I love those stories. When I ever do books on a lot of these guys, I always look for that other thing. You know, Vince Carter. Vince Carter was an all-American. It could have been an all-American volleyball player. He was all state. I mean, if you think about it. A volleyball player?

Can you imagine that guy? You're just some dude who only plays volleyball with your nice little 24-inch vertical and your 6'2 jumping up. And Vince Carter, Vince Sanity, future ridiculous dunker over everybody, jumps like 42 inches and puts the ball in your face, right? And they're like, he's going to go to the Olympics. He could be the future of American volleyball. And he's like, yeah, I'm not doing that. He's like, I'm going to go and play basketball. But I'll play volleyball in the spring because we have a volleyball team.

And, like, who knows? He's never going to do it. He goes on the beach. Like, Chase Budinger, who was in the dunk contest, went and played. I used to see him when I lived in L.A. Like, he played on the AVP tour. Like, it translated over for him. He was really good.

But, like, those little glimpses of, like, what if Vince was like, I just want to be the greatest volleyball player that has ever played volleyball. I want to be known as the baby with the volleyball, the Michael Jordan volleyball. That is going to be what I'm going to do. It would be crazy. But, like, would anyone know who he is? Nah. That's why I didn't do it. like i mean unc or volleyball like yeah i i don't uh i'm not even gonna apologize for this but i

don't think i could actually name a single volleyball player like i lived out there so i was into it you know cars cries like the guy um dollhouser and rogers and then honestly the most famous is misty may and carrie you know carrie walsh there that probably if you asked anybody just volleyball but do they still play no right or yeah maybe carrie walsh might i don't know she's retired yet but they played i mean for yeah funny one of the coolest uh in-person events i've ever seen it's very small packed house on the beach in hermosa beach the cb the uh the the volleyball avp would allow anybody to go they couldn't california you're not allowed to at least if you couldn't charge tickets on sand because it was public property so they would

build the stadium and you'd have to just anybody could show up walk on and carrie wallace and misty may were about to beat the the record i don't remember who it was for the most wins by a doubles team and it was a place like this these are die hard like 1200 that's it like die hard in the wool volleyball fan beach volleyball fans who grew up watching these guys and it was nuts and i remember thinking like man if you just get to the thing that you are supposed to be doing yeah the fans didn't get acknowledged like obviously they got the olympics and all that but it was one of like the coolest just moments to see for them it was like you know like cal ripken breaking lou garrig's record it was huge and for that crowd it was amazing did uh uh ripken

they pulled the lights what's that do they pull the lights you ever heard this story no so i i'm pretty sure uh no i'm sorry is it cal ripken or lou garrick and maybe there's a story about both of them but uh one of them i thought it was cal ripken uh he was uh on his way to the stadium or something something happened and he was gonna miss a game and supposedly uh the lights on stadium didn't work same day oh interesting yeah i heard there was a few of those with him a couple one at bat type deals and uh and things like that to me that record i was in like you know that was probably when i still really followed baseball yeah you know it's awesome but the last few years he wasn't doing it it was really just like and he was still he's an amazing athlete he also could

play basketball and other sports but like kind of just let me get my at bats like i'm not not bad in 340 anymore let me just get let me just get through this record everybody can you know clap and be excited about it who's the athlete that you are like man this person was just absolutely dominant at their sport and like if you're into the sport or not you can just sit back and be like that is amazing so i grew up my best sport was always swimming and i have an appreciation for michael phelps that i can't have in other sports i'm below average at basketball i play one-on-one i play all the time but like i was not i didn't make my high school team i was all county all-state swimmer so it's the only sport i was really good at i played football

punted you know fullback like bullshit whatever but i was good at swimming i understood what it would take to be like a good swimmer every fullback is like fuck this guy yeah yeah it's like mike all scott is like dude get out of here yeah every single one they're like this guy like why why you know i my thing was you're talking about funny jokes for for being like an athlete of like playing two sports i was a really good swimmer and i got on like our high school story and this is a funny thing is like so it's all these like nerdy swimmers are nerds like they're all they can't talk and i'm coming from football i have to lose 20 pounds like i'm on this thing high school sports talk with this guy jimmy cavallo and he's like john uh i'm 19 or 18 like

this cocky just douchebag and he's like john you came from football it looks like you want to you know is there anyone else that you know of on your team or in the county who who goes from football into swimming and it has a success and i was like no i don't think anybody can do that and and i like dead dead stare like two shot into the camera i get home and my message machine is you know we're gonna have cell phones like just hey asshole oh you're the like my friends just we are gonna use this for the rest of your life like who the hell like staring into the camera like like i'm a wwe like throwing down the gauntlet like yeah you try to punt and do butterfly like yeah nobody can do that so so that is uh my little swimming moment but phelps when phelps won the

uh i believe it was the hundred fly goggles full of water i understand it's not swimming it's swimming he's blind he dives in i mean it's the most frustrating thing when you have a little water in your goggles but for him to have the muscle memory count the laps know the strokes hit a wall ideally hit the wall perfectly he's behind you can't see anyone in either lane his muscle memory and his actual like stroke count where he is what he has to be he's swimming completely blind and he out touches so it's not even like he just hits the wall like he actually does a perfect touch gets up and anybody you watch the video he pulls his goggles off water pours out he turns to bob and his coach and goes i couldn't see dude i don't care what sport you're in what

you do if you just try to swim one lap with goggles full and just i just say touch the wall you couldn't do it let alone be the rest of the best in the world at that event so for me it's michael phelps so when he did that specific race he went down touched the wall and came back and touched and it was over yeah so down and back basically and touched the wall so it's really a turn and touch the wall and he did all with water insane butterfly not like even we can kind of maybe like he couldn't catch you have no see listen i i jump in the pool i don't get water in my goggles what's going on with this guy how'd he get water dude i know fucking olympics right you think you have goggles it works it never happens i mean everybody who swims at some point

you just the angle hits wrong or you think they're sealed and they're not especially then like the olympics you've got your cap goggles and the cap over the goggles like to triple check like you're double triple sealed i don't know how it happened but the panic mode of the olympics like Oh shit. I just, I can't see. And then like, focus, calm down and just swim your race that you've sworn 4 billion times in practice by math in your head. It's the most insane. I think it's the most insane. Is it better to swim with the, with the water in there or just take them off? I think you take them off if you could, because at least when you're up, you can kind of gauge where you are. I mean, I mean, I have contacts, so I'm screwed either way. If that happens,

but like, assuming he can see, I can't even swim down, down and back. Yeah. Just assuming he can see but like any swimmer listening now is like yeah that you know you look at all the other feats and there's a million things i mean the flu game and all the stuff that people did and you can come up with oh come on the game he was hungover yeah yeah you can see whatever you want to point to as like the thing to me the level of difficulty on that is higher than almost anything else what what is the greatest sports moment in history for you and and not in terms of like everyone has to agree but for you like personally what is the So the greatest moment for me is going to be the Sox winning in 0-4,

Red Sox winning in 0-4. So I grew up wrestling. Right. I know. I know. Yankees and all that. But I'm going to see the greatest moment in person. And it's mainly because, and I wrote a piece about this,

because of who's involved. So in order to have a great moment, like if you're sitting at home on your couch, you weren't there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like high-fiving your friends or your brother or whatever. But it has to be in person first, I think. And it has to matter a little bit more to you guys because of who's there, where you're at, and what you're with.

So the 99-9 All-Star game, my dad somehow through work gets tickets for me, him, my brother. Die-hard Red Sox fans. We grew up in Boston. We're all going there. My grandfather's a die-hard fan. My dad is. I am.

Pedro has, like, rejuvenated the franchise. Like, the most fun, like, incredible charismatic pitcher I've ever seen. Favorite player on the team. And we go to the game. We're in the locker room. Ken Griffey Jr. is there. Like, we did. This was, like, the only time ever we just had, like, full, you know,

Willy Wonka passes. Like, my dad just made it happen. And I'm with my dad and my brother. We go to the game. We go to the all-star game. It starts. And magic. Pedro's starting, of course, at Fenway Park.

And he strikes out the first five guys in the National League. Now, it wasn't a championship. And it wasn't all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like hugging your brother like, oh, my God. We're watching this happen live. It always is the first one that comes to my mind. That's a pretty good one.

You'll appreciate this because you have a brother. When I was in like maybe late elementary, early middle school, for some reason like there was no decision making in our family it was like you are going to be a giants and a yankees fan and i decided that like i'm not going to do that for like a two-year period and i was like i'm gonna be a jets and a mets fan just to piss off my dad and uh subway series happens 2001 and i'm the oldest of five boys and pretty much the only one who like should probably go to the game in terms of like i'm like 11 or you know whatever it is uh and he doesn't take me he takes my brother and i asked him years later i said why did you do that and he goes i

wasn't gonna sit there and listen you talk shit to me the entire time and i'm like you know what that's probably the like best argument you could have made like you definitely should not have taken me to that game i did the same thing i would sit there chirping the whole time you vibrate you like you you kind of like move around the other teams that your dad would hate yes remember like my brother became a bills fan for no reason like i was an a's fan in the 90s because of ricky henderson and all those guys and like eventually you kind of migrate back to like it would be cool to root for the same team and if they suck they suck but like they were right around the time of like like i said it was right around when they got players and it was like oh

we maybe we had no more we'd always guys it was fun so uh so for me i think the olympic uh there's an olympic moment that like i wasn't there or anything but it it uh resonates so much is um what's the guy uh johnson i think is his last name who he's running he pulls his hamstring and uh he's hot he's like hopping around and his dad comes out and those types of moments i always think like nobody's running on the track in 2023 right or 2024 like there is way more security now and so like we're kind of robbed of a lot of those types of moments when you look back on sports there's a bunch of different things that happened where um i think there is uh uh some guys ran on like the golf course or whatever there's like a famous video right they're like celebrating

smoking cigarettes the guy's running around with him shaking his hand he's like what that would have been like bulldozed and probably tased at this point literally right and so uh i do think that there's like this element of sports that like for security reasons they can't do it anymore but uh that's pretty cool to see right it was also i mean i didn't live it like in a city close enough but like when i interview a lot of like the older older generation there was a lot of sneaking in the games like the love of the game was like sneaking in moving up in your seats going up and scalping instead of having to worry about if it's on ticketmaster did you stub hub or whatever like it was a bit more of like it was kind of like free-flowing like you could go and move

seats and do things and and i think yeah it's now it's super corporate and also this is to me the biggest part of that is like if i want to know what any of the assets we've just talked about are doing or any of the athletes are doing i can just get their instagram posting you didn't see them if you were at the game you saw them and maybe sports center but that was it if i wanted to see larry bird we had to go to boston garden and watch him play if if i wanted to you know in the 2000s if i wanted to see griffey i had to wait till the mariners came to boston to go watch him play like the access now is in a certain way has ruined the like the exclusivity that kids have like if my son wants to see luka donchik highlights he's just instantly on luka's feed

there's four zillion twitter accounts youtube accounts showing all this stuff so when i finally do take him to the first time he's going to see that athlete he's literally watching highlights in the car on the way there whereas it used to be you were going to see larry burt i was going to see michael jordan for the very first time the um the other thing uh that feels a little weird is a lot of these guys uh when you get the i don't know uh the special like feeling or whatever taken away yeah is that they act differently as well like we're recording this and uh there's a story out that uh john morant was potentially in a truck like in a car with other players and they were like there's a red laser that people think might have been a gun or like like like all this

stuff that now is coming out and you're just like would people be doing some of this stuff if instagram didn't exist yeah right like yes we get more access but also it feels like some of the athletes do shit and you're just like why like what what are you doing you you have like i think it was a shannon sharp was like you have a 200 million dollar contract like chill out you're not hard and you know what else happens like you lose perspective so one of the good things that a lot of the best sports writers can do the you know the bob ryan's the howard bryant's the guys who write these big books and have followed over for years is like you put the athlete in their perspective how good they are historically what they might mean to its city and that's why i really

like uh ricky henderson's biography that he used it because it really places where ricky came from in oakland why he was how he was with his cockiness and confidence but also like what molded him to be who he was and now there's no context it's just crazy play or athlete does this and there's no one unless you know athletic i know there's places that have it but you're so exposed you're going to see them the next day they're going to go on twitter and talk about it or go on instagram gonna talk about it there was a little bit again i am all for athletes do whatever they want but we've lost a little bit of context of like there was somebody like this his name was babe ruth by the way like you know it's like when you talk about oh the the first guy you know what lebron

does in branding it's amazing babe ruth did all of it the guy had his name on like 150 things he had ghost written books he had plays he was in the movies he had movies that he was producing he had tobacco coke gum like horses like he hit it did everything it was 120 years ago right 110 years ago so it isn't that crazy what these guys are doing it's just you see it all the time and you know all the behind the scenes stuff what's the flex factory yeah man it's my pride and joy this is how i found you i have i have my son and my daughter and my flex factory it is the garage gym it is like a thing that i always wanted to have um so i spent a lot of time writing for muscle and fitness immense fitness that's my my writing back when i came up writing

for those two magazines and GQ. Well, GQ is a bit of an outlier, but whatever. Anything that had men's or muscle or fitness or like dudes I could write for in my 20s. And all these athletes, whenever I'd go travel to interview them, they just had these badass home gyms. Like full home gyms.

I know like The Rock now with the Iron Paradise is probably the most famous version. But like I did a story with like Batista and John Cena and he's got like a barn on the side of his house that's like a full gold gym that's his gym. And like Brock Lesnar, I went and did a piece on it. he's got like this huge hanger that is a full gym. You walked in, you'd be like, Oh, does nobody go to this gold gym? It's like, no, it's just Brock Lesnar's. That's why no one's here. Right. So I

always wanted, like, I'm not going to have that, but I always wanted my version of it. And then you have kids and like working out is just hard. It's important to me. I'm a meatheaded heart. Like I'm not going to not lift, but like you try to put it at lunch at work. And then, you know, I was just telling her earlier, like, you know, you're trying to time it right. And then you, you take your pre-workout at like 1115 and they get called to a meeting and you're like, Oh, you guys don't want me in this meeting right now i'm about to do it you don't want me here and like it times off wrong and then you're just like your heart rate's jacked but you're just sitting there like yeah no that's good power play that's awesome you're like under the table

like your legs moving so like i wanted to make it how often does that happen not now i work from home but it used to happen a bunch i used to work for uh the college football hall of fame and like i loved it it was great it was all football stuff but like we had a gym right across the street and i brought my kids to school early and all the stuff's when i live in texas and i used to go to was in la fitness it was great and i would try every day it was a joke in the office like i tried to time and they're like have you taken it yet because we might have a meeting and i'm like fine i won't i'd you know put it back down yeah and then but some days just wouldn't work i'd be like halfway out the door like hey can you come in we're gonna go over this thing with this thing

and i'd be like sweating already like gosh you know that like faces yeah yeah like hey red red i always used to uh so obviously college football like everyone's trying every concoction they can possibly come up with um and uh uh the pre-workouts like dominate right um and there was guys who'd be like hey try this one because uh you get all the energy like all the stuff but like it doesn't give you the jittery feeling yeah and i used to be like nah man i don't know if that shit's working like you need your face needs to be on fire like you need to literally feel like your skin is melting and then you're like i don't know what's going on with my body but like let's go to the I remember I would take it anymore it's funny because now that I have my own gym like

all the science behind like you know when you get up I work out really early in the morning like 5 5 30 and like you don't want to be jamming caffeine and creatine in your body right then so I actually don't really I don't take any pre-workout any at all ever um but when I did like you just you feel like the hulk man like the good ones where your heart rate would jack up and like I remember one time I was like racing down the banister and like I did a swing around the banister old house like rip the banister off and i was like first of all like that was awesome second of all like i should probably not be in trouble i was like what was that i'm like nothing i'm like i just bore our house apart with my bare hands so in college uh you know there's always

like these memories that you have where you're like oh this is like a different level and uh there's two specifically but one that that uh just cracks me up to this day is uh the strength and conditioning coach there's this other guy uh who was actually our running back slash fullback whatever uh his name is paul forselini if he hears this he's gonna fucking die so uh i'm moving in to college i got my dad with me we're moving like whatever bullshit in and paul and his dad they're moving in and i swear to you this dude literally walks up to the elevator he's got like a fucking refrigerator and like and i'm like okay different world right like uh i probably should go lift a little bit more before uh we get on the field and so he gets hurt and at one point uh um he says to

me he's like hey you should come down to the weight room uh we're gonna try to bench press i think it was 135 like a hundred times in an hour or something like like some you know like ridiculous thing it's got strength codes you got this guy and so they get started they're going they're going and they keep going around like the corner and i'm sitting there like a young kid whatever and all of a sudden i'm like what the fuck is around this corner and i go and they're literally going into the cleaning supply closet and the strength coach is like sniffing the fucking like chlorine or whatever smelling salt and i literally remember saying to myself like oh i thought it was a joke like i didn't think people really did that and he's like no it's

better than pre-workout and i literally were like i don't care that much right like that was the moment where i remember thinking to myself like i care but i don't care enough to smell chemicals to lift and so i was like there's a trajectory change here that is gonna end up with me doing something else with my life than trying to like go do this it's hard man especially when you cover these guys the levels are are insane the nutrient timing they call it of like i already did a feature uh with the strength and conditioning coach for the university of florida when tim tebow was there his senior year and this was like one of the most athletic teams you'll ever find they had emmanuel moody transfer from usc they had tebow um they had aaron hernandez at the time

but they had a bunch of dudes who were and this is when he like it's just like fuck like fucking up by the way like in that interview all of them to a man like he's the most impressive athlete we have like strongest dude as a quarterback like a couple linemen but like stronger than all linebackers for sure hardest worker like out there and he was talking about like the you know they would do the uh they go to the swamp at five in the morning and do their sprints and gassers and then go and do their gym it was interesting because um ryan lochte went there he was like working out for the olympics in in the gym there so it's kind of cool and he would talk about like here's when we take the creatine so it kicks in here and here's the glucose and here's this and

we're watching heart rate for this and that was when i was kind of realizing like and i think they started having trackers for heart rate monitors it wasn't like the you know the apple watch or whoop yet or anything but like it was like okay so so they know like 15 minutes from now this is when's the best time to do strength or stretch or whatever and like you learn all these things from interviewing these like elite elite trainers and so that's when like you understand that there's there's actually a whole entire philosophy and science people dedicate their lives optimizing their strength and conditioning and it's like yeah so if you're just the guy benching your pre-worker in your garage like it's great but like if i really

wanted to do it i could have a team of guys like yeah yeah the uh the two stories with tebow that i uh always remember is um i think it's in his book he says that he's at like a high school uh summer camp and one night in the dorm they're like uh getting competitive with each other and they're like hey let's see who can uh curl this bicep bar uh the most and so there's like a line of all the campers and he keeps trying to move to the back to the back to the back to the back and he says he eventually gets a second to last but for the last guy won't let him get behind him so he's like i stepped up and i was like i have to do this so many times that he doesn't pick it up and so the most anyone had done is like 30 or 40 times and he claims he did it like 250 times like some stupid

right and so the guy literally doesn't pick it up whatever he he wins but he's like but i was the quarterback at camp and i couldn't throw the next day yeah you gotta step up man yeah and then the other story is uh uh they were doing like a tug of tug of war type you know like workout where it's you versus one other guy and for those who don't know like usually they kind of uh literally do tug of war but like you pull somebody but it's not just like pull the flag across the line it's like you pull it until the coach literally hits uh the whistle yeah and so you like play to the whistle was like the whole thing and um so when they were doing it at florida supposedly he was up against a lineman or linebacker whoever he was going against and he starts pulling them and he

literally is like just yanking this kid and he pulls him down the hallway into the bathroom supposedly and he pulled and he like gets into the bathroom he's like i literally couldn't go any further back like i just like ran out of space and then the coach like blows the whistle and they're just like yeah the quarterback is bodying right now like not just doing it but like embarrassing them and so when you look at that you're like yeah that takes a special type of person to not just have the physical ability to do it but to almost be like mentally in a state where like that's the level that you want to go to in order to uh assert your dominance and like leadership in a team right yeah he he really impressed me i was so this is what maybe 10

years ago whenever it was um and i flew out there um you know it's the guy and he was the most like sought after name in maybe not all the sports but definitely college football and like he was his curating was through the roof like he was about to win the heisman like he was the guy and he's a young kid again like we talked about lebron like i would if i was that guy like there's a real good chance i would be an asshole all the time and everybody like this punk like he just was born with this amazing ability but he they all talked about how great he was and you know the first and last to leave all that cliche stuff but when i finally got a chance to interview him it was like at the end of the day he'd been working all day i'm sure he had stuff to do and

you know they're media guys like hey you got you know you had 15 minutes solo because i interviewed a bunch the whole point was like it was about the team but i did get interviewed with him he said hey you know how you doing and he was like off like it was so polite and like endearing it was like i was like what he's like where did you fly in from and the first 10 minutes i'm like i don't want to waste all of it but i found myself being interviewed like but in a very polite really caring way of like how long was the drive because i lived in florida i was like here i was like getting traffic yeah it's tough around there um what are you what do you live with your girlfriend like just the whole conversation and i was like yeah and i'm like all of a sudden like hey man

let me uh let me ask a couple questions yeah like you're awesome and you're nice but like if i don't get these quotes this whole story sucks but you're really great and i'm gonna say that you're great but like he left and the guy was like you know how often that happens like one of the media people they're like he just whatever it is you can't bullshit that there's no way i don't care you don't care you're not going to just talk to some random guy who you said you have 15 and i've and the reason i know this is because i've had so many athletes over the years who are just assholes like who you who give you that 15 minutes and aren't even remotely putting their thought or focus who's the biggest asshole um biggest asshole there's a guy i'm gonna say it because uh there

was a guy who i did a cover story with and it was supposed to be for muscle fitness and i don't even know if he's in sports now i have no idea and i think he would own up to it because he was a jerk we flew there to do an actual cover story shoot with him we had a photography crew and it was a guy he played for the race for a while evan longoria and whether he whether he was having a bad day some of these guys have them some of these guys don't he'd been in the league for a while so it wasn't like a rookie type of thing and he was just like he wasn't into it and we're like we need just we're gonna put you on the cover and he wouldn't you know look i always he wouldn't answer questions or he was just not really posing for the stuff he was like all these guys are here

they'll be gone soon and like you know what do you work out he's like i don't really work out like it was muscle fitness i'm like well what do you do the weight training he's like i hate weights that kind of stuff and i'm like you realize like you could have just said no to this whole piece like he wasn't really in great shape at the time and i always always being honest i always always always put out like they are allowed to have bad days yeah we're there for a job maybe something happened it's like i always say that i don't in life he may be great but for that four hours and my my photographer i did a ton of shoots with all the wwe guys we left and he was like dude something's up like that was rough like we're not going to use there's nothing to use we called

our own home and they're like what i was like we don't have we didn't do the cover so like maybe a great guy but in terms of like and i don't want to even call him an asshole in terms of a rough rough experience yeah that was the toughest thing and he'll listen you have a huge file like i'm I'm sorry. But like that day was brutal. Like we flew all the way out there from LA to Tampa and we didn't get the cover story. And, uh, who knows, maybe he's Jack now we'll do it again. I love it. Uh, you also wrote a book about dads, uh, and their ability to continue to work out. You have kids. What is, you said you wake up early and you work out five, five 30. Like what's your daily schedule? Yeah. So the reason I came up with the, or the reason I had the garage gym,

I always wanted a name of the flex factory. Like it just always had the name before the gym. Yeah. i'll tell you that so i interviewed triple h this is true story i interviewed triple h for a cover story from legend legend right yeah the whole thing and i was talking he had kids and you know i almost got suspended from middle school for doing it yeah that was a big thing like i was out of school but like i remember here i was literally in middle school and like for those that don't know wwf at the time uh there was a group and they were basically going around and they were taking their they're taking a cross across their crotch area saying suck it and if you're a young impressionable boy you see that you're like that's awesome and you would do it

to like each other like as a joke it was like an like kind of like an endearing you know you only did it like you wouldn't actually do it to start a fight yeah no no definitely not but of course teachers see it then it becomes like a thing the parents like what's going on like all the like any high school college where you went to kids scored a touchdown they're all doing it yeah of course it became part of culture to some degree and i was in uh i'm pretty sure it was like late middle school and kids were like doing it all the time and uh i think i like did it like at a friend down the hall but of course it's like classic like out of a movie right the no like the teacher is like coming around the corner and like sees it right and you're just like now you're like whatever

like obviously it wasn't directed towards you yeah but there can't be any disrespect in a middle school and so i remember i had to like have a meeting and like do all this stuff and i was like triple h no and i literally was like oh my god i'm gonna like get in trouble for this and so i always remember thinking back like dude schools are so stupid but also like they have to keep some element of control yeah so that i'm kids running up and down doing suck it yeah well true story so i but my son is into wrestling now and we watch all friday night smackdown and my raw and they did a 30th anniversary of raw two weeks ago and they brought those guys back and for the first time ever my son sees the suck it and i can't get him to stop walking around how old is he he's nine

he's perfect literally like 9 to 13 is like you got him he has a whole like you know kids have like you know ring entry he has like a ring exit to go to school every day he came up with it's awesome and like now he does this added to it it's amazing and so uh it reminds me of the uh mark cuban you've seen the video cuban at a uh he's on the sidelines like he walks off the bench or something uh to a kid and a kid is trying to like uh shake his hand and so cuban walks over he like begrudgingly like walks over and he's like all right i'm gonna give this kid and then the kid dabs on him and mark just looks at him he's got this look of like are you fucking kidding me and the kid's like 10 yeah right and it's an amazing video because you're just like

in that moment he's just like i can't be mad because like this is probably the highlight of this kid's life right now that he just dabbed on mark cuban but also like kid yeah my son will like get filled like fight with my daughter and end it with this and you're like good job like you use it correctly and i'm kind of proud of you but you really can't do it now it's old first of all people are like what the hell where'd you come up with that but it's it's awesome to watch them take uh take all this stuff in so um so triple h i was interviewing him for a cover story and um he switched the time a bunch which happens all the time and he finally calls he's like yeah i'm just uh i had to move things around and i just made a joke like oh you know trying to get the gym in

because a lot of these guys um they travel 300 days a year whatever like the the move to get over jet lag for almost all to a man is hit the gym immediately. Like get off the plane, hit the gym, like get your sweat in, get your stuff in, you get it done. And then you can kind of figure it out. So I just threw that out. He's like, no, I'm actually, cause he was already kind of an executive already. I'm home. He's like, actually work out at like midnight too. And I was like, what? And he's like, I, you know, I have kids now and I want to be home for them in the morning at breakfast. And like, there's no way he's talking like, or in triple H he's like, there's no way I can do this. And I can't leave the house in the morning during the day. I can't

this so i just he has i think it's james frank i want he has he's a big like uh big power lifter helps train him i'm probably bossing him but whatever it is anyway he so he works out so i was like man that's what happens to me all the time on a much smaller scale i'm not running the wwf but like i run out of time so i had started like bringing exercise stuff home for random stuff so i had some dumbbells some cables you know some bands a couple uh you know a couple like ropes to do stuff jump ropes and then i was like i'm gonna do like i want to be able to just work get it done before the kids are asleep but this is my kids were like one and three two and four like they're finally sleeping through the night which is as anyone knows like amazing you can't

complain you can't do anything or plan an early morning workout if you're up three different times because of night terrors or potty training or whatever so when they finally i could count on that um i just like slowly added shit like i got like a squat rack and then i got like an inclined bench there an inclined decline bench and then i got like heavier weights and then i got a set of plates and then all of a sudden i was like this is the greatest thing ever like i started going all in i got a hex bar and like slam balls and the on it kettlebells with the gorilla on them and like i was like i gotta you know i have all these posters from growing up like my reggie lewis poster and mike greenwell and the salt and the slam i'm like i'm gonna i'm gonna like make this

i don't need a man cave i don't want some room to watch tv i don't care like i can watch it wherever this is gonna be like my spot yeah and i had this stuff i have larry bird posters from when i was like 10 like so the whole wall now is basically like frozen in time like 1991 and uh and i get up every day about 5 15 sometimes 5 30 and i till 6 30 full hour um i do like power lifting and on stuff one day and body weight stuff and dumbbells switch i have you know from all my time muscle fitness and men's fitness i have a zillion workouts to pull from so i just kind of rotate through um and then i finished 6 30 ish 6 40 i wake up my kids my daughter's already up now my son it takes like 15 minutes to get him out of bed and do all that shit um then we have breakfast and

i'm making my smoothie driving to school walk the dog and you know start the day at like eight o'clock it's not bad it's pretty good the dog walk's my favorite part because like workout done kids are like off to school you know never know what's going to happen but then they eat breakfast don't eat breakfast forgot their homework need five bucks for a field trip like it's chaos even on the ride like oh you know i always tell my kid like telling me you had a homework to do today in the car on the ride to school is not telling me you had homework to do it's telling me you forgot to do your goddamn homework and there's nothing we could do about it because i'm pulling into the parking lot five minutes so like it's always that kind of stuff so i get home the 20 minute dog

walk we have a lab she's great like on one wind ready to go get home you know shower real quick by 8 15 8 30 like it's time to write time to get to work yeah the um uh my daughter is not old enough yet for homework but uh when i think about anything to do with homework i'm just like dude i put out a tweet a while ago it's one of my best ones i wrote finkel hating homework since third grade hating homework since college hating homework helping a third grader hating homework since the beginning of homework stop it and like every parent was like yes yes yes yes i mean like literally right so much work it's so stupid when we used to get home from school my uh mom used to make us sit at the table and like do our homework before we go outside or like do whatever and uh

i mean we like would cheat on the homework in front of our mom not like cheat like in like cheating school like we would be like we're done so he was in there for three minutes like no no i'm done i finished it all and we'd like uh they'd send you home with like the assignment you know thing whatever we were like trying to like erase shit like whatever we could possibly do to make convince her that we were done we would try and i think back i'm like we probably should have just done the homework and we've been done faster how to do it forget knowing how to do it we've just been done quicker than if we had spent all that time trying to trick our mom into thinking our homework was done see well now the whole new thing is now is like i'll be in my office writing or

working like you guys are doing your homework same thing at the kitchen table all of a sudden here like alexa what's 43 divided by 17 i'll be like you can't you that's not well you're i don't want to bother you it's like okay wait so you're just gonna completely cheat ask alexa all the answers because you don't want to walk 15 feet i appreciate it but like you know so i'll go in and you know help but like there's so many you know tricks and stuff now who knows what was gonna happen when they're older but like they ask alexa everything like so what's the capital of senegal and it's like you can't you have to this is what the book's for this is why you're supposed to be so like i go back and forth on this as of like yes i've seen the like you know whatever the the

second grader or whatever being like two plus two alexa like whatever it's like four you're like ah you probably should know that one but uh 43 divided by 17 like yeah i might ask alexa i might double check if it was if it was recorded like no public math my son my son got ahead of it he goes alexa am i ever gonna need to know what an isosceles triangle is i was like now this is a kid he's got he's gone past what it is he's gone right to do i need to know this shit alexa because you know everything alexa's like uh get do your homework he's like uh your parents in the room okay if your dad's not there then now this shit's your dad's there then we have to have that conversation uh and also i think that like most people's jobs they just google anyways

right like i spent i don't know a more time than i admit looking shit up all day yeah so like actually if you know how to do that maybe asking alexis cheating but like you know if you could use google then maybe you're actually prepared they cut you down because like my my boy will come home and be like dad i had to write a paper today like really wasn't hard is that's just what you do right stuff yeah i do you little shit that is what i do it wasn't hard it wasn't hard i mean i just had to like think of things i'm like yeah that's it he's like so that's that's what that's kind of it now he's you know now i'm like you see this 300 page books like you know pulling out the look at the references like trying to find a way to impress him and he's like yeah no i can do that

i would just have to sit down a couple times yeah just think about it yeah just think about it and put it down i'm like let me see what you wrote you know it's like daniel boone war i'm like okay you know what that's good yeah you spelled it right uh when you think about uh the intersection of your life you got this newsletter uh biceps and books books and biceps books and biceps all Right. I mean, perfect name, right? What is the, like the, the goal of this? Is it to find books for meatheads or is it actually to expand past that on? Hey guys, I hope that you're enjoying this conversation. As you probably realize, we don't run any ads on this show. That's right. All the other podcasts, all the other YouTube

shows that you watch, they have advertisers. We don't have any direct relationships with advertisers and we simply create this because we enjoy doing it. Now that we do that though, we have a team. And if you'd like to support us, one way you can do that is to go subscribe to the Pomp Letter. It's a daily letter that I write to about 235,000 people about my personal opinion on financial markets, business, technology, and Bitcoin. Just go to pompletter.com and you can sign up there. I'd love to have you join us. And it's a great, easy way to support the work that the team and I are doing on a daily basis. All right, let's get back into this conversation. yeah it's like so i always like newsletters that share people's processes so anybody can do like

the wrap-up stuff i love your book reviews like what did you get from this stuff well i come across when i'm researching a book i might find 50 books for that book just touching upon it or articles and things like that or i may find a concept in the book that i want to explore more and then also i happen to have written for all these fitness magazines and i work out a lot so it's like just sharing a little bit of what goes on behind the scenes and putting a book together and sort of the lifestyle that puts the book together. So I always say it's like imagine your like educated meathead friend was like recommending workouts and books to you every week.

That's it. It's like the smart guy, like the idiot guy who you think is in the gym who also reads, he's got some things that you might want to check out. That's kind of the ethos of it. And so every week I share a book, like why I liked it. A lot of times I do get to do author interviews, which is cool over all the years I know. So a lot of people have books coming out that I'm going to read.

They'll do three or four questions for me. And I try not to ask like lame-ass questions. It's more like, do you write in a coffee shop? Do you write here? Like, what do you listen to when you're like real author-y type stuff? And then the biases part is I'm a meathead, man. I just post pictures of my garage gym. I do put a lot of stuff in there that helps me, especially as I've gotten older, like, you know, posture stuff, hip flexor stuff.

Like things will help you as you, you know, like to recover if you're trying to get strength, if you're trying to do these things. So it's really what I'm doing now or what I've read now. But what I found is there's a huge contingent of guys like us who grew up working out, exercising, who now have kids. kids are getting older they don't have time to read they don't want to look for stuff is this a good book that's coming out oh cool i have a filter for it and you know what i do want to start benching again like a lot of the things that i write on the fitness side i'm just responding to questions like uh i want to start like benching again like what's a good program or what's a basic like power lifting program to do and i'm like oh the five by five and here's why and actually

here's an article i wrote eight years ago that will help you or you know i want to start swimming which i swim a big one like i've done a bunch of like starter swimming workouts so it's really just to help out. And then also, you know, you build over book over book, you build readership and they don't really always cross over. Maybe somebody who read 1996, isn't going to read a fatherhood book who might not be into the macho man, Randy Savage, but like they've all bought a book for me. And it kind of gets a little through line. I think it's smart to have that, have a little bit of knowledge about who you are, how you put books together and how you live. It's interesting because James clear, uh, I was listening to an interview he did with,

maybe it was Tim Ferriss or somebody. And he talks about, uh, they pick three segments of people when they launched atomic habits and one of them was crossfit and so he sent free books to a bunch of crossfit influencers and his point was like if you're in crossfit there was like a four-week period where everybody in the crossfit world was posting this book and he was trying to unpack in hindsight why they all accepted the book and posted whatever he's like because everyone always has sense of them workout shit yeah right he's like i was the only one who sent him a book and they all wanted to have their audience think they were not just a meathead yeah so like hey here's this book that I'm reading about habits and like everyone in the class. And like, it like

makes sense in hindsight, but it was like fascinating that he was like, that led to kind of the initial spark that eventually led to, you know, one of the bestselling books in, uh, in the last couple of years. Yeah. I think that's a huge thing. And he's, he's brilliant with those insights. And it's right when you see it in practice, because you get how many people start living that lifestyle a little bit with you, right? Like I did a giveaway of stickers. It's just a nothing thing, but like gone 50 of them gone in like 10 minutes within the second the newsletter gets out and you realize that yeah people who work out a lot um and are into it they're not morons most of them there's the bros always juicing whatever but

like a lot of them are just dads and dudes trying to stay safe moms too and you know and women trying to get in shape and what are books that might interest them a lot of people don't read a lot um and i think what you do is great you pick a lot of cross sections or maybe people who aren't into investing or into bitcoin but like this is a great philosophy this is a great lifestyle thing to think about this is just a great way to look at life new a new new direction and so i'll put like it's got definitely sports and maybe history ish heavy but a lot of it is like really good writing really good writers that i like um have you read this new book that just came out here's why i bought it here's the author here's why i admire this author um and the the emails that i

get back people respond pretty regularly are you know that's great i love that i think i'm going to buy this book or whatever it is but also it's the same on the fitness side so to the same thing is CrossFit. Anyone who's like grew up loving these sports is going to like the books. And if they're that, that niche of like that Venn diagram of like, you know, I have like books, you know, biceps, like meatheads, like if you're in there, it may, maybe it's not 50 million people, but it might be two. I'll take it. Those are my, that's my group. That's my crew. I love it. Uh, you said that you start working eight, eight, 15. So after you've kind of done all the morning routine, what do you do during the day? Yeah. So I have a bunch of like creative consulting where I do a

of copywriting so i used to do like a ton of stuff for fitness brands muscle milk cyto sport gatorade all those kind of things so i do a lot of work for brands around you know around local and national just on helping them with their products uh helping them like just you know go through and you know put like the copy for how are we going to market this protein shake to this or this cryo center that we're putting together for this so i do a lot of those sort of client work and then the bulk of what i do is books so i have um right now i'm like deep in the weeds on a macho man randy savage biography so that's like the bulk of my time i actually ghost write too so i usually have one or two ghost writing books with pretty usually professional athletes like

kind of elite entrepreneur ceo type so um i usually have a couple those take longer because you're only talking at their schedule maybe once every week or two um 45 minutes so walk me through if you're writing a book like the uh macho man uh book what does that process look like how long will it take you so the you know that one's gonna end up being over a year so it's like if you're talking from idea, like I've always wanted, I want to write a macho man books as I was like 12, but like you put a proposal together. Um, it's really in depth. It's like everything you would do for the book, uh, who the audience is, why they would want it, you know, who are comp titles, um, what you're, how you're going to present it. What are the platforms you, you know,

promote it on, not just your social, but like, who are all the places that would like it? Who's going to review it? You know, a whole thing. Um, sometimes a sample chapter, sometimes not, I've done enough books now that I can just be like, here's Charlie Ward, like, here's how I write or whatever but sometimes a sample chapter a chapter of what you're going to do with it and you pitch it and then you know hopefully a traditional publisher wants it or like i do with jocks and teeth i'll just put it out macho i wanted to go with a legit big publisher because i want it out in stores i wanted to work with a publisher uh who has done wrestling books before particularly so they can reach that really rabid crazy wrestling audience and so uh once you get

past all that the publisher says yes and you have an advance and you're starting the beginning is just absolute research like finding and interviewing every possible person who ever had anything to do with this person um and then going through and archiving the interview so you know what specifically to ask these people about so the beginning it's almost just like firehose of like i'm just googling and i know the things but like you know you go and there's a couple resources one of the best is a place called newspapers.com and like somehow they've archived every newspaper maybe 80 of them all the way back to like the 1800s so you'll just do like 1952 angelo papa right marching man's dad what comes up and just go i will seriously go year by year with certain

keywords wrestling this that just to get a feel of that then look out like i know the list of people i want to talk to hacksaw jim duggan and grippy the dragon steamboat a million dollar man and like you know i know that major list that everybody else can name but this books and anybody who writes biographies will tell you like it's the other people it's the guy who sat next him on the bench in his high school baseball team some minor league baseball player he lifted with that you know in the morning before games those are like those put the stories together so i'll spend you find those people in questions really it's like pulling a thread you get one facebook groups are actually like really good so like the class reunion group for the macho man macho man

with the downers group high school in illinois there's they just had their 25th reunion or whatever 35th anniversary we'll do public math as you say whatever it is they just had an anniversary they just had a reunion and i found the facebook page for it and i was you know just messaging here's what i'm doing and one or two people got back to me and luckily one of them was like one of the social leaders now they're all in their 70s and you had a great conversation he actually uh he played baseball or basketball with him his freshman year knew lanny a little bit lanny's his brother leap and lanny poffo um you know here's who else you should talk to who that's the the key for anyone i mean the question you have to ask yourself is when you're done with

the interview you say who else should i talk to about this what else is there something i'm missing what else should i know like those two questions will get you like 50 of the better stories in your book i'm sure you do it even with this like what what is the other thing who else was on that team that you might know that might still be around and you just pull that thread and all of a sudden that one phone call will lead to two will lead to three will lead to five you know some of them are just work like macho man was in spider-man as bonesaw mcgraw remembers you know like it's awesome and uh you know i found a couple interviews he did while on set but i like went through instagram and scoured i found the he was bonesaw mcgraw in the movie there are some like

sort of extras but they kind of have bit parts called the bonettes these these four girls who accompany him to the ring well i found some bonettes no way what was it like being on set with him what was it like walking and what was it off behind the scenes when you weren't filming what was the director sam ramey was the director like how did he interact with macho like that kind of stuff and you just dig and dig and dig and it's these little moments that make it all worth it when you sounds goofy but like when the bonette dm me back and was like i'd love to talk about randy he was great and it's like i have i have eyes onto a major movie that he was on awesome and then she had someone else to talk to and so you do that with every little scene in

their lives and eventually you talk to hundreds of people and then you start pulling the articles about those things and that's that's how you go when you finally have enough per each section that you're comfortable with and there's no limit you just eventually get to a point where you're like i think i've exhausted his high school baseball career you just start writing and when you start writing how much of it is like uh i already have all the information now i just got to kind of play editor versus like you sit down you have it in your head and you just start writing so i like to start every chapter as if no one's read any other part of the book i mean for the most part like it could stand alone so that they'll come in different spots a lot of writers

that i've always like do that um and so like for for instance randy savage like people people may or may not know he was a really he's a minor league baseball prospect like he played for the reds uh he played for the tampa tarpons he was good he made a single a all-star team twice like so you want to talk to people all through that at a certain point you're hearing the same stories over you're like there's probably not much more here in this case um his brother lanny papa who you know unfortunately passed away last week i was talking to him a lot and i had banked a bunch of interviews with him about randy's life and so um once i have a third during those conversations with these people is when i'll start pinning like this is a great place to start i try to start on

action sometimes you can't always start in like the middle of a you know flying elbow drop off the top rope or like when he's getting in a baseball brawl it can't always be like jumping in the middle of an action movie you sometimes need context but i always try to start in that like what is the inciting incident of this chapter what is the thing that if i'm reading at night because i always put myself like very few people at two in the afternoon like i'm gonna have an energy drink and sit and read all fired up it's like they're whining out at the end of the day maybe they're lying in bed maybe they're you know sitting way outside of their cars thing like what's going to get them like this chapter is exciting they're in it all of a sudden they're

two pages in and we're going and so usually i have a little good radar now after 10 or 15 books of like i'll make a little highlight and even in the conversation like and i'll just do it in bold like bad i write badass badass like okay and then as i go through my notes i'll just search like find search badass and it's like okay this is a good story to open this chapter this is a good story to open this chapter what about uh when you're writing or you're doing it at home i do music coffee shop okay i do when i'm at a coffee shop uh there's a local one i have that i go to a lot which is i think i i go to the other day like in twitter like i reached the final boss level of coffee shop writing i walk in i get a head nod and they roll over and meet me at the

table with with i just get like a small coffee yeah um and they know and they know and i just pay for it when i'm my way out like that is you know used to be and the best part of this coffee shop is because i have my macho man shit spread everywhere and a couple of the guys don't speak english great they just call me macho so not only like have i reached like here's your coffee it's like hey macho and i'm like this is i'm never leaving here all right and do you listen to music or you just like the coffee shop i'll just the coffee shop sounds are good they actually have a pretty good like 90s station they put on or whatever um at home funny enough i used to listen to music like explosion in the sky or

jimmy hendrix i like a lot like three little three little birds some of these like over and over and bob marley i'm sorry um over and over again but uh i found this goofy youtube thing that is just coffee shop background noise dude it's the weirdest thing it's got like millions of movies so i'm not so i was just gonna say there's some of these there's like that there's one uh uh i've seen they have different locations like the sounds of a certain place there's fire i don't like a fireplace they do like warm rain mountain and that's one of the funny things about like becoming an author as i am like growing up in movies it's like okay when you write like you go to a house in the hamptons or like some beautiful cabin in the mountains it's secluded

just put on fucking youtube three weeks away no one's bothering you and now it's like yeah i wrote at the mechanic today i wrote outside of my kids taekwondo i wrote at the call like it's not like that uh but the coffee shop sounds it's weird i listen to the same one over i've tried a bunch like i know the cadence of this one hour i know where i am in writing like oh the hour is up i know the people in the background weirdly like oh that's the person's gonna come in in five minutes and talk about like their finals getting canceled or whatever it's really weird so weird so that i caught myself the other day listening to the coffee shop background noise at the coffee shop and then i knew i i'd like crossed over into some metaverse where like i need to pull back

yeah yeah yeah but i but i do think everyone has like uh music specifically or like sound i think yeah uh you always remember where you are and like what you're doing yep when i wrote the charlie ward book i spent a week in thomasville georgia his hometown and they had an amazing coffee shop i think it's called like the greenville coffee shop or something and uh they great coffee i don't even because i had one cup of coffee a day i just would have it while i'm while i'm drinking while i'm writing and uh they had they would always play this and i had to find it i'm blanking on it now but it was like uh it was like beethoven mozart one of those and it was always in the back and it was very relaxing and i would write after the end of day of doing interviews and stuff i'd go

there and have like they had these amazing like prelines and cream cookies or whatever and you know for a week they get to know you a little bit oh he's the guy doing the charlie ward book whatever and i listened to it when i finally got home and again i changed it up for every book just so because it does bring back stuff i want it sounds stupid like i want to get into like when i listen to this this is what i listen to yes while i'm writing this like life of dad book for some reason i was into like dave matthews from my college i listened over and over like the same three songs whenever i hear it i'm like i finished that book so in the charlie ward book for the rest of it when i got home uh i was listening to like beethoven's not like the big one but it was like

a background one and every time i hear it because it's in movies and all that it takes me immediately back to that cafe it's weird i um uh the only time in my life that i have uh this like specific recollection is uh i was a catcher in baseball for like uh years and years and years and one of the coaches was like hey man you should uh pitch and i was like uh why he's like well there's like a two-way relationship here and you already got one side down it's like so i remember being like all right fine and for whatever reason uh i had like remember the uh uh kids now would be like old school like boombox things or whatever and we had got like a super cheap one or whatever and we had you put the cd in there and you like put it kind of perfectly so that it doesn't fucking rock

or anything and the cd skips the whole thing and uh limb biscuit had uh had come out and uh whatever the song was and i just remember like whenever i would hear that i'd be like i remember being in the backyard fucking throwing a baseball being like well the coach is stupid enough to put me up there like i better just not hit the hit the batter like as long as i don't do that i'll be good and it is funny how like you do kind of through your life have these sounds that always resonate and you remember like what you were doing when you either first heard it or you heard it on on repeat or whatever uh and it's a cool way to bring those memories back yeah i just had that with so i drove up to um tampa for so macho man lived in tampa the end of his life and when he

when he died he had a heart attack while driving his car and he crashed into a tree and he'd already died but it was like a pretty crazy moment like his his wife was in the car like she had to pull the tree like they were going to oncoming traffic like she reached for the wheel because he's like a 220 pound dude who just like slumped over and she hit this tree and this tree has become kind of like a de facto memorial memorial for macho man like uh so i always had to go visit and see it i want his house was close to there i wanted to go get a feel for it so i drove out with my daughter and you know the deal was like i let her come on the road trip with me and she just like i just want to listen to my music like my brother you know worst thing ever is i let them rotate

songs in the car in the morning it's just a fight it's like metallica and taylor swift just back to back jarring each other so she just listened to taylor swift over and over and over again and uh shake it off like they take it off yeah and over on read i would zone out whatever talking and now it's all it's been like a couple weeks and as i'm writing like forever taylor swift shake it off well for me will be linked to the macho man randy said obviously what he would have listened he would have loved it yeah yeah um the the other piece uh that's like very fascinating to me about all of this is uh you write about sports or sports related topics but you also have written a bunch of blogs and kind of articles and things like that

uh, one of them I was reading and I literally was like, this is me and my brothers is two 50, which is a driveway game that you all, uh, created. Yeah. And I'll put some context around this. So my daughter just got, um, uh, like a child basketball, uh, hoop. And so of course, you know, first thing I literally got put together the second I was done putting it together, I got the ball and I said, Hey, come here. And she kind of waddled on over and I put it right underneath the basket and i dunked on her just to remember one yeah just don't stand under the rim like rule number one of life don't stand under the rim um but i was explaining to my wife i was like look if we had this in our house as a kid like we would have made up a game she's like what

do you mean i'm like well if you see here on the tile like you know the three tiles away would be certain points and like i started she was like are you just fucking psychos and i was like i'm pretty sure every boy everyone who has a brother something similar and i was reading your piece and so 250 is a game you guys created i'm so happy brothers this is the greatest thing i'll ever write no matter what i do ever this is it because it touches on i mean i've had guys write me like i'm crying as i'm writing this like this brings back my older guys maybe my son or whatever something happened so it's probably the piece that's resonated the most and it's the one that resonated the most with me so growing up as i have a younger brother and i best friends my dad and i

are close uh the three of us are very very close and one of the games we came up with you know Eventually, as you're doing on your daughter, like you just start working your dad, right? Like you're playing three, you know, two, two, we play, you know, hustle or 21, the three of us and friends would come over. But like, once you hit like 13, 14, 15, even if you're like, I think I'm in pretty good shape, but I'm pretty sure my son's 15. He's going to just be bodying me up and killing me. The first time you beat your dad, you're on.

Right. And we literally are the same. Nobody is ever allowed to like you win. You won by your own like grit and guts. Like nobody's ever like, oh, hey, let me like, and to this day, like my son doesn't win unless I, unless like he wins wins. and so it was as we got older like we'd start switching from like hustle and one-on-one or two-on-one where we play and my dad was never a great athlete um but an amazing eye hand

coordination i think you said specifically in the piece that uh with the foul line he couldn't jump over the foul line yeah yeah yeah you couldn't do the foul line darts pool like anything where you're standing i hate coordination was great um and so as we got older like it became we're gonna even play horse anymore because we would all be too competitive and go all the way around or my brother and i would decide to play so far away that my dad just couldn't get it up there he's like 45 or now that almost that like 50 55 years old he couldn't reach when you're a kid by the way you you definitely like do all the things that uh your dad can't do like three dribbles with your right hand crossover jump off your left foot and then like hook shot oh he's like i can't even

fucking remember all we would do is jump and touch the back of where their left hand and lay up with the right and he'd be like i can't do this shit why you know i can't do this shit you know every time my brother who could jump higher than me would then pull it on me and be like i'm gonna grab the rim and lay up and they'd be like i can't do this shit right so it's like just an everton game so we came up with this game is the perfect equalizer anyone who has a driveway hoop daughter son i play we play with both of them now it's to 50 very simple rules all you do is the first person to 50 wins it's like baseball rules you get up first shoot till you miss next person goes first person to get the 50 wins and you get your last steps it's all like uh free throws free

throws at the free throw line that's all you do um it's perfect because you can do it after dinner like everyone's just relaxed you don't have to get sweaty just had a couple cheeseburgers you're hanging out no big deal and so we started playing this game my last year being home in high school and my brother's three years younger so he's a sophomore and then forever home every call we played thousands and thousands of this game and um my dad as he got older the thing that used to kill us about this was he would always be like in his recliner inside watching like a red sauce game or seinfeld or whatever and we'd like knock on the window like eight o'clock in the summer as the sun was going down after we played like real games we had a 50 and he'd come out and it used

to be so frustrating because he would come out in like dock siders and my father he's like six one a husky guy again not a great athlete but i had for some reason he was gifted with an unbelievable ability to hit free throws this guy who who couldn't like do a jump shot like could not like come around a screen would stand up having not shot he used to do this thing every time i could do it now rub his hands and hit 25 in a row 30 in a row cold and he used to be like i don't need any warm-ups and my brother who was an excellent high school basketball player captain of high school team captain of his high school team and then me just okay um would just just be like so frustrated and uh him and my brother would win all the time i to this day have never won

you've never won with my dad involved okay on christmas day i beat my brother and both our sons in a legit to 50 game for like the first time i've ever beat my brother i'm not a good but my dad would probably win like 70 percent of the time how pissed was your brother this christmas furious because it was the first time our sons are both nine they're two months apart and it was the first time we all played me he me and him built his hoop at his house like the end of the summer kids weren't really old enough to play with a real ball from real foul line they just got strong enough it was the first time for the record we ever the four of us played to 50 uh and i and i won and he was like my brother's like an awesome athlete it was very very pissed

off so craig it's on it's on posterity now it's on the pop pod like everybody knows literally i'm imagining my brother and i playing something where like if i knew i was better than at it they know too yeah right and vice versa and like they won't admit it but like whatever and then if in front of our kids they beat me and now our kids think that like they're better yeah well what's funny is we play that we play i would sit there and make you play over and over and over again until they know yeah literally i am better than him we play one-on-one every friday morning still every friday right now he lives 15 minutes from me drives over we play in a court in my development and i every friday morning we played best of three uh games to 11

and since he's moved here a year and a half ago i have not won i win games all the time 11 through 30 but i never he just he's tall he's an inch too taller me better basketball player but we play all the time and so winning that game to 50 i was like am i i'm this is wait hold on but you're a good brother for this because like my brothers and i we that uh tradition would end quickly if like one person didn't win i know i think it's an age thing like i won i beat him plenty of times growing up yeah it's just i think i've reached the point where like when i reached out for that third year and our games you know some games he just mops for me but like most of the time like i'll win one he'll win one and the next one's a battle but he can always just go down those way better

down low and like i just get cold at the wrong times i'll file the shit out of them i'll do all the stuff i'm supposed to do but and i've come i'm right there it's not like i win all the time just not that third clinching game yeah so winning the 250 game was amazing but to the piece you're talking about going back. So on the, so after playing for years and I love everybody to read up on the final night, we're moving. I'm moving to LA. My brother's moving to LA and my parents moving to Florida. So the house is empty. We've lived there for 10, 12 years and nothing's in the house. It's like, we're all leaving the next morning. The only thing out, and this is like a movie, but the basketball, no one had ever gone to 50 ever. My dad hit the forties, maybe five or

six times got the 30s with like what i would say is like startling regularity like almost like 30 32 33 it was just a regular like sunday night for my dad which is ridiculous because i couldn't get like seven or eight but my brother would get a couple and win and so last night we're like all right we'll go we decide you know we decide who go first we ever had a random order and my dad steps up and just goes and goes and the piece i really build it up but like i won't draw it out but like he goes and goes and goes and he gets like we're all sitting there thinking and we weren't we weren't idly sitting there watching him like we're doing all the little kid bullshit like i'm whipping it at his chest so he has to like like hurts like my brothers you know like

used to put a hex on the ball like throw it like 30 feet in the air so like if you're on the foul line you had to like move over to catch it of course whenever to break the rhythm and all of a sudden he's like 33 5 40 42 and all of a sudden we're just like no one's talking and it's just like dribble swish dribble swish and then my brother and i look at each other no one's saying like a like a pitcher in a perfect game yeah hits 50 and he stops and we're like brother of course being who he is he's like you got to keep going and i'm like what do you mean you got 50 he's like i can get 51 i'm like no one's ever come close and my dad's like he's right and he went and i think he was 66 or 67 but it was the most it was the last night in the house most magical moment

i've ever had in my whole life of sports and like i get tingles thinking about it made it best american sports writing it was like an honor i mentioned in the book and like every year i post on a father's day and every year gets this influx of people reading whatever game they played on the driveway and my brother hit like 10 or 12 in a row i hit like seven or eight so no we didn't come close but it was just like last night after all the years he i called it slaying like the driveway drag like it was amazing so thank you for bringing that up because it's probably one of my favorite stories of all you you ever watched the movie uh basketball yes right so like that's the that's the movie i think of when you're playing driveway basketball with your brothers of like all the

shit talking all the things that you can do to distract them and like all this stuff for those who haven't watched this this ridiculous game we literally recreated uh playing that game like you know you hit a shot it's like a single a double a triple like whatever we're just inventing stuff yeah but like if you recreate the game that means that it opens up the complete approval to talk as much shit as possible to each other and uh i remember literally more fights from that stuff than like anything else so to not only have your dad hit 50 yeah but to do it while you guys are talking shit like no layups no easy games nothing right i remember like we would do that my dad you know he was older he had like a tricky back like we would walk up and place the ball like one foot

in front of his feet on the ground and walk away so like total dick move for like an older guy with a tricky back so he has to step off the line he has to move his foot position he has to pick up the ball and then it was just like boom boom boom just a machine i love it was he was he uh did he appreciate the moment it was like it was like the natural and i'm saying it in the clearest sense that's what whatever that would have felt like in real life if it happened when hobbs hit this like the ball hit the ground and it like snapped us out of a trance because he hadn't moved in like 15 minutes it was like he was just there and we all looked at each other and we had to do our turns and then we just sat like i remember sitting we they're all our whole house had like steps going

into like the front store the front the side still had a side door in the house by the driveway and we just sat and it was like this weight was just that you could feel the moment i'm looking at the sky i'm like i'm gonna like there's no cell phones like you couldn't just take a picture of the three of us after the moment like but i could in my head like i know exactly what that moment felt like i remember it clearly i could picture the ball the hoop like the square was gone it was so faded like it tilted a little to the left i remember every nuance of that and of that night and then i did the piece um it was i think we were trying to the anniversary but i did it for father's day for my like you know what do you get my dad every dad has what

they need for this part and i published it and tell them and i asked my mom on the side like you have pictures of us playing basketball i know we don't have any from that night and so i got it and got this uh this cool blog that used to compete with uh grantland for yahoo sports it was called the post game who i used to write for and i was like i want to do this father's day piece for my dad and they were like obviously yeah sure i'd already written a bunch for them and so we posted and all i did was just send the link and like waterworks and he shared it with it actually went i don't know viral is the word but like amongst people who cared about this stuff yeah like it just got picked up and it was this little goofy story that got into this like the best american

sports anthology which is not the whole piece but like a mention of it and uh it's just one of those things that i'm so glad i wrote forever and now as you bring it up full circle a month ago like we're playing now with our kids and it's just hopefully it's a through line that for you know hundreds of years finkels are battling into 50 your kids are going to be like i gotta win yeah yeah and when they do they'll have legitimately beat us like if your dad has the flex factory you have to care about winning my son's version will come in he'll like just show up one day and bench like 325 and be like what it's easy you just sit down and just press it yeah that totally dad you just all you have to do is take the weight and just put it off your chest i don't know what

the problem is i do not want to have smart ass kids it's the best dude it actually is great because like you just my you know when you know your wife my wife didn't have like like it's just seeing go through it like i know i know everything he's thinking like it's not the modern version but you just know what's going through his head because it all went through your head you know what he thinks is funny like he just says balls all the time now because it's funny and i remember i remember like being yelled at like stop saying balls like why it's funny because it is funny a kid just like what are you doing balls that's funny i don't know i don't tell you but like i think i appreciate that stuff so much more now as to like the kids who were doing all that stuff

like basically end up one of two ways like they end up really successful and like they work hard they like figure it out whatever and then obviously there's some that kind of you know end up in jail or whatever but like there's very much this like okay you are not going to end up as like the mid-level manager of an accounting firm at like you know middle of nowhere uh kansas yeah like you are going to get one of the extreme there's a creativity of element that that my son has my daughter had my daughter like she like displays like her abilities more she's a very like caring person i could see her being a vet or something along those lines like who knows but my son is like at that creative thing that like you see in people when you look back on what they're

going to come up with of like entrepreneur or whatever like he just makes up stuff which is what i did all the time like he has his own exit like when he leaves for school or wwf you picture like whatever the guys say he'll say like he goes he goes i brush my teeth i comb my hair and i'm gonna walk out the door like i don't care and he goes dude it's the coolest thing ever like wouldn't you if you were 29 where did you learn that yeah just came up with it i uh uh my wife and i have talked about what's the number one thing we want to teach our daughter and it's decision making but the second thing kind of like a like a 1a to me maybe is um somebody would call it negotiating i think of it as like the the bullshit ability right like the shit talking ability because if

you're able to do that i've always thought that like that's basically what you do all day long right and the people that i see get the most stuff done whether they are negotiating with uh people they work with whether it's people they run into in life whether it's uh business like just all throughout their entire day they're bullshitting yeah right and not in like a negative connotation where they're like making stuff up lying like whatever but just like it's like this like street level version of negotiating that ends up getting you stuff. And I think like a lot of it is if you're, you know, if you're doing that walk into school, like you probably are doing some stuff at school when you're negotiating in the cafeteria too. Yeah, he's a kid who's going to

like bring the like kind bars from home and sell them at lunch or something. 100%. He has a super drink snack stand that we set up by the basketball court in the summers to make money. Like he just has that thought. And I think what you said is 100% true. There's, you know, you sit around in the world of writing, like you'll sit around a magazine writing session room and you look around when you're in your 20s like i wonder is he gonna write the movie he said he was gonna write is this guy gonna run the magazine or start the thing that they're gonna start and so much of the things that end up happening are just because you just talked about it and talked to the people about wanting to do it i remember talking about wanting to do my first book and i was just like looking for an

athlete like that had a moment that i had had some relationship with that i could reach out legitimately and say you know i always when i mentor a lot of younger writers like do something small with someone and do a great job especially in writing or anything creative but probably in any field and then hit him like if they're happy with it bide your time set up we did this this was great here's how we can take it to the next level and here's why i think it would be good for both of us and that was me i did a piece on like helping guys get their vertical up with nate robinson and it was great we happened to talk on the phone we got along you know called up again when the article came out did well it just happened to be that spring when some people remember but

like for about a month he was like the most talked about guy in basketball like he outdueled lebron in the heat he was playing on the the uh the uh the uh the uh what's called the bulls lost derrick rose and he was the guy he was scoring like 24 in the fourth quarter had two comeback wins against the nets and it was amazing and then they got eliminated because you know ultimately they weren't that good but about i emailed him after congratulated him on the run emailed his agent like hey this we should you know this was great we should capitalize and then i put the article together with i still have the email of like you know there's not many guys that have won three done contests that have played football and basketball in college that are five, eight that

played for the Knicks that, that did what you just did. Like, this is a great culmination to like a real success story. I'd love to write the book. And you know, if you don't have that ability to have that conversation and know how to place it into think creatively of how can I take something that will be a win for him? Cause he talked about, he'd always wanted to write a book. It was like a dream thing for him. And I even want to write books in general. And I thought of other athletes, but it was just the perfect situation and we did it and so when i think of my son and how he just thinks of these things i can see him on some level and my daughter too in different aspects of like there's an angle there and i'm not just going to think about i'm going to talk to the guy who's

doing it and figure out a way for you have to be crazy enough to think that you could actually do it like you like you thought that he may say yes you ask yeah i didn't know i mean he did it we talked on the phone and and the reason i thought he'd say yes was because like when you when i do those emails and anyone listening trying to pitch things i think the key is to like start off with why it'd be awesome for them. Like, a lot of people don't even know. I started the email like, do you know how about 80% of Nate Robinson's fans

have no idea he was Mr. Basketball and Mr. Football? I bet you 80%, 90% of the people have no idea that he could have played at USC on the championship team with Matt Leinart, Lendale White, and Reggie Bush, but chose to stay home because he wanted to help build the program. Like, no one knows this stuff. And I think they should know

that he's not just some short guy who's got crazy hops, but here's all the things that he did. And I'd love to help him tell the story because I enjoyed working with him so much. on the basketball piece that is the most airtight pitch you can give anybody for anything yeah right and if you can do that in any field but it works for books especially well they can picture it yeah no one does know that 90 of the people in the fans who see me in the basketball court don't know these things and it's my job to let them know these things about me and a book is perfect for

that yeah and so that's how that came about and it's all from that ability to think and talk a little bit different than other people stand out yeah that's it where can we send people to get the books uh my website is johnfinkel.com at john underscore finkel on twitter is where i post about everything i do a lot of i have a lot of pictures from a lot of stuff i have batista putting me in a headlock from all my muscle fitness stuff that i used to do and like all the you know book signings they do put a lot of stuff out there and you know if you're in a macho man that's the big one i'm working on now and i put updates there too and then go on there and sign up for books and biceps it is like every single person who likes uh you know has a friend who works out

but also reads that's me that's your guy that's it i'll do it for you books and biceps is very good i highly suggest people uh sign up for that and then when is the macho book coming out macho comes out next spring actually we're uh about halfway through getting uh the writing done so there's gonna make people wait a whole year for this i'm gonna wait a whole year i'll come back i'll bring the book we'll jump off the top ropes and we'll talk about it awesome well listen thank you so much for taking the time to do this i really enjoyed it we'll definitely do it again in the future yeah man thanks for having me Thank you.