Transcript
Speaker: OAC and Evers, Saturday, October 24th, Gratitude Brewing, 1 p.m. Chuck Klosterman, best-selling author of a million books, is coming to town for a live recording of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
Speaker: We'll be talking about his new book, Rock, a mainstream alternative history of alternative mainstream music. And his book, Football, and Writing, and Voice, and Style. Oh, yeah. He is singular, and you can see him in person. ah RSVP with a free ticket at the link of my newsletters or my Instagram profile at Creative Nonfiction Podcast, or whenever I'm posting, which will be frequently over the next several weeks.
Speaker: The place will be packed. Please secure your free ticket. It's only for a head count. You don't need to show your ticket, but it will help Gratitude Brewing know how much they need to staff. and I'd like to see them have to max out their staff.
Speaker: We always say that each book nearly kills us. don't skip the intro, okay? All right, cool, fine. You know what?
Speaker: You're going to do what you're going to do. Whatever, man. This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell and the art and craft. of Telling True Stories. I'm Brendan O'Meara, face for podcasting and a stomach for radio. Joshua Robinson is here.
Speaker: Now, it was supposed to be a two-headed monster with Jonathan Clegg, his co-author, but somebody got pulled into an urgent news situation with the Wall Street Journal and had to conveniently skip this podcast, putting all the pressure on Joshua Robinson to shoulder the burden that is a conversation with me.
Speaker: JR and JC are the co-authors of four books in nine years. That's four books in nine years. That's four books in nine years. I'm on pace for not that many.
Speaker: Their latest book is The Playbook. The Hidden Forces Shaping Winners and Losers in the Modern NFL. It's published by Mariner Books and edited by Matt Harper, who made the frontrunner as good as it is.
Speaker: You can blame him for how good it is. Speaking of that... I'll be heading down to Austin, Austin, Massachusetts. Road trip reference. Shout out to Tom Green.
Speaker: ah To not receive the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sports Writing in the Best Book category. I say not receive because ah we already know who won. S.L. Price for his book, The American Game on lacrosse.
Speaker: I want to go down there and cheer people on and not be a sore loser. Because being among the 11 other finalists like Christine Brennan, Hanifa Durrake, Seth Wickersham, S.L. Price, and Jane Levy is kind of a victory unto itself. Among the other, i therere the other writers are amazing too, but they jumped to mind.
Speaker: It ain't cheap for me to go. It's like $370 for a dinner plate. And thankfully, I had a bunch of airline miles banked so I didn't really have to pay for a plane ticket. Can't put a price on shaking hands with people, you know? Anyway, that'll be September 17th. I'll tell you all about it. Show notes to this episode more at brendanamara.com. And okay, listen. Here's why you want to visit the show notes.
Speaker: Of course, you get the info, you get the skinny, you get some other links about the featured person. But I also have links to past episodes that I think you'll enjoy based on this current one.
Speaker: And I also have links to the episode from 500 ago, 400, 300, 200, and episodes ago, so you can see a taste of the full bounty of the backloggue without having to hunt though you can very well hunt if you'd like.
Speaker: I've often thought of running like a midweek now in paperback edition of the show where I would like sequentially republish or rerun older episodes just to give them some new life, get them to the top of the podcast feed.
Speaker: The other option is to simply just promote older episodes midweek on my socials and maybe you'll be excited to go hear Susan Kushner Resnick from episode one and laugh at the audio quality or Carrie Hagan or Jericho Brown Or Laura Hillenbrand. Yeah, I talked to her back on episode 132 or something like that.
Speaker: You can also consider becoming a patron over at patreon.com slash cnfpod. Or if you don't want to part with that burrito money, and who really does? Leaving reviews for the podcast and the frontrunner are free and take you less time than you think. And the additive effect of those is worth more than money.
Speaker: Okay, enough of that jazz. Joshua heroically stepped in and did the work of two people. He's the sports editor for the Wall Street Journal and has covered Formula One, European football, what we know here as soccer, or as what my father calls it, the flop fest, the World Cup, the flop fest my father hates so much, the Tour de France, etc.
Speaker: Loves the Tour de France. My dad loves the Tour de France. Not that you care. Not that I care. He and Jonathan are not... He... Okay, got... Get your antecedents right, dick.
Speaker: Joshua and Jonathan are the authors of The Club, The Formula, and Messi versus Ronaldo. The Club and The Formula are rated 4.6 on the place they shall not be named out of more than 1,800 ratings.
Speaker: That's amazing. That'll get the attention of the wayward shopper. Please rate and review The Frontrunner. In this episode, we talk about translating super niche sports, niche, niche, niche, niha who knows, sports for a reader, a lay reader, the co-author shared Google Docs, sometimes being in the same sentence, you see each other's cursor just dancing around each other.
Speaker: Amusing themselves. The big pages stage. That was fun to talk about. How they only write two big drafts. What? Marrying the big idea to characters. Driving the bus. Understanding time value of money in the NFL. And how you're only as good as your last story. Ain't that the truth?
Speaker: This episode will pair well with episode 199 with Keith Loft. as well as a more recent episode like episode 540 with Mitch Weiss and Holbrook Moore. Parting shot on this notion of coaching the athlete as the individual they are, and by coach I mean us, and by athlete I also mean us.
Speaker: Cue it up, friend. Riff.
Speaker: People who do this for fame are foolish. That is, it's so true. I actually would not mind just growing people's flowers for them. Go get a gelato and chill out. And I was like, I can't.
Speaker: but This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
Speaker: Getting you talk about the importance of Sam Walker and how he effectively paired the two of you up. Yeah, Sam Walker is the mad genius founder of WSA Sports.
Speaker: um The section has only existed since 2009, but you know the Wall Street Journal sports section owes everything to him. um And he identified us separately. And over the years, I was living in New York and I was a freelancer for the journal at the time.
Speaker: And they were trying to figure out a way to bring me on staff. And John was over in London running the sports page of the European edition and doing stories from there. And at this stage, we had never met.
Speaker: And then Sam came up with the crazy idea of, hey, we're going to bring the British guy over to cover the NFL. And we're going to send the like sort of American, sort of European guy, which is me, back to Europe. um And he said to me, we want to find a way to bring you on staff.
Speaker: Would you move to London? I said, this is my dream, to go cover European sports and do that. Perfect. So within basically a month of... We talked about it actually, and I went to London that summer. i happened to be there, met John and we went for a coffee that lasted three hours. And then he was going to come over and I like showed him the ropes a little bit of, of how to sort of be around the NFL media side. um He came to Giants camp with me, but he was, he was much more knowledgeable about the NFL than I was already at that point.
Speaker: And then, you know, by November, I had moved to the UK. So I became the European sports guy. He came over and did the NFL and then his role evolved and he eventually became my editor, my direct editor.
Speaker: We did the first book together in 2017. And then, you know, eventually he became the sports editor of the Wall Street Journal. So a role that Sam had created. And then, you know, when he was promoted to executive news editor in December, i took over as sports editor. So we've both had Sam's jobs now.
Speaker: That's amazing. And how would you say that being a somewhat outsider so they to to European sports, first, like primarily coming up watching, say, North American sports, and then know on the flip, like ah John covering the NFL having come from Europe, ah how how did you um maybe leverage that ah as a strength and not see it as a weakness?
Speaker: I was only sort of an outsider. I was an outsider because I had come and done my schooling here in the States and started my career over here. But I grew up in London. okay I'm American and French. And so I was fully steeped in all the European sports culture. But to come in with fresh eyes, having been away for eight years and really you know immerse myself in it that way was amazing. And I had i was a one-man band over there.
Speaker: and had sort of carte blanche to travel around and follow my interests and you know discovered things. I completely fell in love with the Tour de France. I was not a cyclist. I had not followed the race before, but the first time I went, my mind was blown by this kind of roving circus that runs around France for three weeks every summer, and I haven't missed one since.
Speaker: So you know that's just an example of something that I thought was super interesting to come in. And also I was covering it differently from anyone who'd been there for a very long time because, and John and I talk about this all the time, what we were able to do effectively was translate all these super, sometimes niche, super parochial, super you know self-contained cultures of European sports for an American audience.
Speaker: um And that's what we did in our first three books, which were ah one on the Premier League, one on the Ronaldo Messi era of soccer, and one on Formula One.
Speaker: All of those things were, let's take this thing that we grew up with, that we know in our bones, framed that that are going through this massive convulsion and this huge evolution.
Speaker: And let's translate them for an American audience. Excellent. And I've had ah a few conversations of late, even just a couple of weeks ago of another like co-byline team of Holbrook Moore and Mitch Weiss. And yeah talk about the vagaries of being a two headed monster on a on a long form story. And, you know, here you and John are like having written now your fourth book together. So, um how did you develop a kind of chemistry that you could co-write something as ambitious and nuanced as the work you do?
Speaker: I think the the starting point is that we have very compatible personalities um and we became very close very quickly and then just thought about things in compatible ways and sort of hold the same values in the way we write, in the work we want to produce.
Speaker: and gravitated towards a similar voice. We have the same sense of humor. um And it helped a lot, I think, that he had been my editor for a time.
Speaker: But then when we started the first book, you know we didn't really know what we were doing, but we figured it out as we went. And we came up with a kind of way to work together, which was discussing, spending most of our time discussing every beat of a chapter or a section, and really working through the ideas. And then by the time one of us sits down to actually take the first pass, um whether it's a section or a whole chapter, you know we're we're already in agreement with what's going to go in there.
Speaker: And then Google Docs has been our savior, where we're just constantly in the same doc, flipping chapters back and forth to each other, rewriting them so much that when we pick up ah one of the books now, couldn't I couldn't tell you who wrote the first pass of a page. Oh, wow. Similarly, that yeah, mentioned Holbrook. They have a similar sense of humor, sensibility. they They even said, like, in a way, we kind of have the same brain in ah in a way. So like in a similar writing voice, too. Is that something that you've found to be true?
Speaker: Absolutely. We have a voice when we write together that is is completely unified through the books. um And, you know, we've also covered World Cups together and been at games where we're working in the same game story.
Speaker: um And even our editors have said this before, where they've sort of been amazed to see us in the same doc on deadline, sometimes with our cursors in the same sentence as we're working through this, because it is truly that, you know, it's it does feel like we share our brain in those moments.
Speaker: That's wild. This idea too, just before we hit record, you were talking about the vagaries of a day jobbiness and writing books around that. And I know a lot of people in the audience too, who listen to the show are always navigating whatever kind of day job it is. It could be in academia or it could be in retail and they have book ambitions and so forth. And so just given the, you know, your role at the paper and your book ambitions with John and this being your fourth in nine years, which is crazy, is ah how do you balance, you know, the the day job and, yeah, these book ambitions you have?
Speaker: ah Balance is a funny word. i don't think that when we're working on a book, there's a whole lot of balance in our lives. you know We do the day job as best we can, which is a pretty intense and fairly all-consuming day job.
Speaker: He was, for most of this book, he was sports editor and I was sort of in Europe and then in the process of moving back, um but you know as a full-time reporter. um In the middle of this one, you know towards the end, we had the Winter Olympics, for instance, where I was in Italy for three weeks and came back and we finished the book after that. And so it's it's relentless. you know And I think we always say that each book nearly kills us, but it is it is a huge sprint to the finish.
Speaker: It's really tough, but we keep doing it. And then you know there were, I think we finished this one by getting on the phone every morning at 5.30. and putting in a couple hours before John had to wake his kids up for school.
Speaker: And then in the office we'd be together. And then like at lunch, we would sneak away for an hour to keep writing. And then we would do it after work as well. And I would go home and work late. It was, you know, you just cram it in as best you can. And a lot of other things in your life sort of fall by the wayside, but those are the, those moments.
Speaker: And this is really one of the values of co-writing is It could be a lonely experience, but there's someone in it with you. yeah And that helps a lot. um And you're writing for an audience of one in many ways.
Speaker: I know that if I write something that John will find funny or interesting, you know, and I'm writing toward that sensibility, then there's a good chance the public at large will find that funny and interesting too.
Speaker: Yeah, it it just, it actually simplifies a lot of things. You know, it's, it's relentless and it's hard, but you have to get it done. And so, you know, every choice is then made for two things to get it done and to write something that John will find interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, the ah ah baked into it all to put yourself through that that kind of ringer, you know you have to really have a ah deep love of the work itself. and yeah Otherwise, you truly would go mad. So yeah what is it about, yeah especially the the book process, that that you, as relentless and unforgiving and sometimes demoralizing it as it as it is, you still come back to it?
Speaker: I think we take just a level of satisfaction from the books that is hard to replicate at much shorter lengths at the paper on the shorter turnarounds. We get to a more immerse ourselves in something that we care a lot about for the better part of two years and just think about it and you know constantly turn over the the arguments and the takes and the the you know the joy of like discovering and learning things about this very niche subject that we keep digging deeper and deeper into, and then either talking through the ideas or actually getting into this getting into the text and working through it and writing as we go to amuse ourselves. that's so you know I think there's ah there's very much an iron sharpens iron thing happening where
Speaker: We sit there and we write and we laugh as we're doing it. and how can we make this even better? How can we make it funnier? How can we push the joke a little further? And there's huge pleasure in that. And that's those are the moments that we kind of want to come back to.
Speaker: And so it always happens where, you know, in those periods, we talk more than it to and to each other, more than to anyone else in our lives. And so we'll finish a manuscript, turn it in, and then kind of go through withdrawal. i'm Like, well, we're not doing this for three or four hours a day every day or six hours or whatever it is. Or like, you know, sitting at my dining room table for a 14 hour session. Like we kind of miss it.
Speaker: And then we forget how hard it was. And then six months later, we inevitably started thinking like kind of getting the itch. Should we go again? hmm. Yeah, and um you you talk about the how hard and difficult the process is, and then after six months later, you're like kind of getting the itch again. um But sometimes in that window, there is almost a a postpartum, post-book malaise, if you will, even just try to get the engine fired up again. you know How have you metabolized that period where maybe you're looking for that next idea or you're just in a funk after having put so much into the previous thing that it's sometimes hard to get altitude on the next one?
Speaker: I think for us, we our timing this year was pretty good. you know The spring, we turned in the book and then the spring came. And then pretty before we know it, the World Cup was on us. And so for John and me, that is the biggest thing.
Speaker: So there wasn't really time to sink into anything except... beginning to think about the world cup. Yeah. And so as we geared up for that, you know, it was still, we were still revering, revving the engine pretty hard.
Speaker: And once the world cup actually came, we just had the best time we spent, you know, the five weeks running around games all over the country, writing relentlessly again, it was a pretty, you know, inhuman rhythm, but, um, but it was fun and it was great. And actually I think the funk sort of kicked in after the world cup.
Speaker: And I saw that you got to work with the brilliant Matt Harper on this book, and he edited my Prefontaine biography. And um if it's any good, it's because Matt has his fingerprints on it. And um just what was your experience working with him? ah Because he's such a he's so invested in the story. and Absolutely. yeah I mean, this is our third book with Matt. um And, you know, he's...
Speaker: He's part of our team now. he is really, especially on this one, he's he's so good at and this is really what you want most from an editor. He is so good at taking the 30,000 foot view and saying, seeing the connections that maybe we had either not articulated or maybe not even perceived because we're so in it. And like, we're we're dropping the the breadcrumbs there and he's able to see what the full path is. um And he's been very good about, in all of our books, about just unlocking some of those things for us and saying like, it seems to me that, you know,
Speaker: this is the argument that you're that you're constructing here. And when he artics you articulates it, it just makes it clearer for us in our own minds. And he's he's amazing at that. And his you know his value is is incredible. yeah and The whole process. Yeah. And a word that when I saw like in the book, in the text itself of like you guys writing like thumb on the scale, it might've come in two times. And I remember in my conversations with Matt about the front runner in the Prefontaine book, He would talk about thumb on the scale. You know you have your thumb on the scale of the story. and um
Speaker: So there's a little fingerprint, I feel. But he also got me thinking in terms of like ah the three-part structure and then interrogating the chapters. like what do you want just What work do you want this chapter to do in the scope, in the arc of a part? And then how are those parts feeding into the arc of the book? So just in terms of structure, maybe even your dialogue with John and with Matt and and yourself, like how are you thinking about yeah the structure broken into those parts?
Speaker: we that That's in our books from the very start. yeah The very first thing we do is start to, you know as we turn over the idea in our heads, we start to lay out structure.
Speaker: And that's what we call the big pages stage, where we just take big pieces of paper and start mapping it out you know by hand. And we start to work it out. And with this one in particular, the playbook was, it was so, um because it's so ideas driven, even more so than the previous ones, we went through many iterations of the big pages and it took a real while to get it right for us.
Speaker: It probably took the better part of a year for us to actually land on the arguments and the structure of this book um to get to the place where The arcs could support the story we wanted to tell and actually marry all the ideas together.
Speaker: So what when you're taking that that bigger, I love that this idea, of this big page stage. that's um yeah really I really like that that the the scope of that and the how you describe that. um When do you know or when do you start to feel confident that you're ready to start writing at that point?
Speaker: I think it's really when, you know, we start with that and then we start to do the reporting starts to hang on that structure. And as soon as we have something, whether it's a chapter or whether it's, I think we're we're always really anxious to just like start writing.
Speaker: And sometimes we'll write a chapter that's not necessarily chapter one and we'll do it. And then it'll just sit there for a very long time. And then when we come back to that piece, it's like, well, actually the structure has changed. They're like,
Speaker: we And then we twist it around and and make it what it needs to be to fit within the the arcs. With this one, we started writing late. you know I think we were at least we had done at least like six months of thinking about it and reporting before we put put a word down. Yeah. How long did that first rough draft take you guys to write?
Speaker: um This is another thing about writing... together is that we're each other's editors, we go. So it's only really ever, you know, maybe two big drafts.
Speaker: You know, when we, when we get to the bottom of the first draft, it's pretty close already. ah Because we're editing as we go. And because that's when the work on structure really pays off. We're not doing major st structural changes at that stage.
Speaker: Yeah, do you owe the the dude the degree to which you've been prolific over a nine-year stretch to this idea of you know big page stage, mapping things out, and writing very efficient drafts that you're able to churn out a book every two years, roughly?
Speaker: Yeah. um By the time we start writing, we know where we're going, generally. um And even if we don't, even if we have to take a left turn or something in the middle of the manuscript, we commit to it.
Speaker: And so, but, you know, we've never had to do, we've never had to tear up a manuscript and like rearrange it. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, at the start of the book, you know, the first two words are Howie Roseman, the, you know, and instrumental, uh, GM and executive for the Philadelphia Eagles. Why was it, uh, integral for you to start with him versus yeah anyone else you could have chosen?
Speaker: um I think what he embodies a lot of exact of what the story we wanted to tell was, which is a story of iconoclasts in the NFL. The idea that all of these people realized, and for as long as the NFL has been around, that the entire league is this edifice of rules. And you are operating at all times in a straight jacket if you follow every rule.
Speaker: That NFL orthodoxy is this kind of prison designed to keep you in the middle. And you're not going to build sustained success unless you think outside the box.
Speaker: And you know this book is the story of the owners and players and GMs and coaches who have thought differently about how to run an NFL team and how to build a winner. And Howie Roseman did that. And he his personal arc is so interesting because He was an outsider who became an insider, then was cast out of Eden um for those years under Chip Kelly.
Speaker: And through sheer force of invention and circumstance, came back and proved himself to be a winner. It's a perfect you know distillation of everything we wanted to do in this book.
Speaker: Yeah, his his arc is really fascinating. The fact that even ah when he was cast aside in the Chip Kelly regime, that he wasn't thrown out of the building altogether. He was just put in another corner, and the degree to which he was willing to wait it out.
Speaker: I just felt like kind of just patiently waiting in the bushes for his chance to pounce again. And, you know, you quote him, it was the best thing professionally that ever happened to me. I got to step back. I got to work on my deficiencies. And most importantly, I got a freaking master's degree in running sports teams. So there's ah an entree into his mindset, too.
Speaker: Yeah, it's perfect. um And he, you know, I think we wanted to give it also a personal, you know, personal kind of angle, because he's such a fascinating character as a human.
Speaker: um And so to do that, I feel got us right into the the meat of the book before we step back and explain really what the kind of philosophical and and intellectual, like underpinning of this book was going to be. Yeah. How do you how are you thinking of the fact that you've got a ah subset of ideas that you really want to articulate on the page, but without character ideas or some some kind of like a hard baggage to get the reader to metabolize? So you have someone like Roseman and you're to have several throughout the course of the book. yeah So just how are you looking to like marry idea with character? So we're pulled along.
Speaker: We were constantly, you know, as we're figuring out what the stories are and what the what's going to go into ah book um looking for.
Speaker: You know, any example that with all of these big topics, whether it's the NFL or the Premier League or Formula One, there's a million different characters you can pull, a million different anecdotes, and the reporting takes us into so many fun directions. But I think the discipline that we've learned is to remind ourselves it has to be in service of the ideas, has to be in service of the arcs and the argument we want to make.
Speaker: um So if it doesn't do that, and if it's a story that maybe we don't bring extra value to, it doesn't go in. And you know you mentioned thumb on the scale, but with the thing we tell each other all the time is we're driving the bus. e you know This this bus goes where we want it to go yeah So if a character doesn't doesn't suit that, he's not getting on the bus. yeah That's something Matt would tell me too. In his coaching, is just like he he would say, you're driving imagine you're driving the car and you have people in the car. You got to point to things and tell them it' ah this is important and why.
Speaker: And like even in biography that's not first person driven. It's just like, yeah, you're still the narrator. You're in charge and you're like, your thumb is on the scale. You tell them why it's important. And i was like, oh, it really clicked. You know, he has that way of articulating things as you already mentioned. And ah yeah, to your point, it's just like yeah, this character. yeah Yeah. If you're not in service of this story, this lean propulsive story, then unfortunately yeah you're off the bus and unless need in Sean McVay are coming on.
Speaker: Exactly. Exactly that. um You know, and those are guys who, again, really suited, you know, had something to bring to the narrative. And so they, they kind of like propelled us forward and got us to another stage of the idea. It's like, okay, we have the idea.
Speaker: How can we complicate it a little bit? And who's going to help us build that next step? Who's going to help us put another twist on it? Where, who's going to embody the moment where the whole paradigm changes? Every character has to be in there for something. Yeah. And in order for there to be that that character that to to your point, like the paradigm shifts. Yeah. There there has to be a various institutional inflection points across the arc of the league. So ah how did you lock into those particular inflection points yeah throughout the the history of the NFL?
Speaker: Well, I think it helps for us that we had written books about sort of leagues before. um you know We had written the club about the English Premier League. We knew the arcs of that. We wrote about the evolution of Formula One in the formula, and that was also a way for us to capture a whole evolution. So we knew that the $100 billion-ification of the NFL was going to be in the background of this one. And we found the moments where...
Speaker: things We knew things had changed irrevocably. um And some of them were surprising. Some of them were also not what we expected, but they were they were pretty clear once we identified them.
Speaker: One was the introduction of the salary cap, because for a book about roster building and team construction, that changed the the dynamic. That was a whole new puzzle.
Speaker: And two, the biggest change since then was the introduction of the Rookie Wage Scale. It was like another giant switch flipping in this exercise. So we knew that those would be two massive inflection points that changed the calculus for everyone who's trying to rack their brains, trying to figure it out.
Speaker: So building around those, we also knew that the league was getting bigger and richer and more ah popular and and more commercially savvy in all of that time. So that was always going to be the background. And we were trying to figure out what the moments were to weave that in. So whether that's the commercial success of Jerry Jones, that was an opportunity to tell some of the rise of the NFL.
Speaker: The TV success, which... um which helped explain a lot of the the salary, which happened concurrently with the introduction of the salary cap. That's when the Fox deal came in and forever changed the economics of the NFL.
Speaker: As we talk about Mickey Loomis and the Saints and kicking cap money into the future, or kicking cap hits into the future rather, The reason that works is because the NFL is getting so much richer and the cap is defined as a percentage.
Speaker: And so a $10 million dollars cap hit in one year, five years from now, represented a smaller percentage of the total salary cap. But that's because the NFL is such a ah juggernaut.
Speaker: Yeah, truly. It would appear that, you know, in the early years of the NFL, there were a couple owners who stood to lose in the short term, like the Maras and some other so some other owners who were perennial winners because they were in these giant media markets. But then there were other teams in smaller markets who simply could not compete. at all. So yeah just take us to that early watershed moment of thinking of spreading the revenue around to try to ah rise the tide and lift as many boats as possible.
Speaker: Well, it's it's really an incredible insight from the owners. And that goes all the way back to Burt Bell, who was the visionary early commissioner of the league. Understanding that you know we we joke that we have this inflection point in every book but the idea that the owners and the people behind a sports league understand that they're not in the sports business they're in the entertainment business that's a real thing and that they need each other they cannot exist as one team or just a handful of cities because you have to have people to play and you to be popular you have to be everywhere
Speaker: And so you know that understanding that if some of the teams gave up a little bit of money, it would help other teams survive and stay in business. That if you were the giants, yeah, you had the New York market, but not everyone had that. And if you gave up just this much money, then we could also have a team in Green Bay.
Speaker: and build the lure of the NFL that way, then it was going to be better for everyone. And they they succeeded in doing that. And that is really one of the you know the articles of faith of the NFL. This redistribution, this socialist model and in the world's most capitalist country um was the way to keep the NFL alive so that all of them could prosper. Yeah. And then, of course, in the you know late 80s, Jerry Jones swoops in yeah before the Sally Cap era, and he was someone who was very much willing to open up the open up the checkbook and and pay, pay, pay, pay. pay And it you know speak to what that moment was when he comes into the league really kicking the door down.
Speaker: Well, his hack, you know, he he did not come from the the sports business, but his hack was effectively spending everyone else into oblivion. And he understood that that was a way to exploit something that no one had exploited yet, at least not in the same way.
Speaker: And so he turbo charges the Cowboys finances by doing all of these independent deals with Texas stadium so that he couldn't get dinged by the league for, for making those deals for the Cowboys.
Speaker: And he was really a revolutionary in that way. But even he, who was constantly butting heads with the league and, and, you know, for breaking with like league think, which was what they would say um at the time, even he eventually fell into line and was made to understand,
Speaker: hey What's good for the league is good for the Cowboys, not the other way around. And then the introduction of the salary cap effectively ended the the Cowboys dynasty. they ah you know They win their last Super Bowl, but that was still a team that was built in the pre-cap era.
Speaker: And then you know and then they they haven't won another one since. Yeah. Yeah, yeah you wrote you wrote, like, to him, competitive balance didn't prop up the league. It acted as a barrier to progress. um But yes, to your point, he came around to the idea. and you know, as a result, and his franchise one of the richest in in the world, despite not despite not winning a championship since the hard salary cap was instituted.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly. um You know, and and by then appointing himself and members of his family to the GM role, You know, you look at who the people now who are super smart about these things are, they are people who have spent all of their lives thinking about how to game the salary cap. yeah And they have accounting backgrounds and things like that. And it's not necessarily football people anymore. I know this is a matter of coincidence and not entirely tethered to football, but like 94 is such a – talk about a labor year. You know, the hard salary cap in the NFL and then the strike in baseball. And that's where like baseball was maybe still the top two sport, maybe most popular. Who knows? Like NFL was creeping in on it. Yeah. Talk about an inflection point year where that starts to turn. yeah People sour on baseball and the sour you know no salary cap. NFL gets the salary cap and then starts its ascendancy into total domination. Not just that.
Speaker: The NFL appears on Fox too. And they you know we we could have done so much more on this, but um we had to move the story along at that stage. But the arrival of Fox on the NFL scene is incredible. They put more money on the table than the league has ever seen from broadcasts.
Speaker: And they not just they they not only flood the league with cash, they also change the very look of the NFL. you know the The sounds we associate with that era of the NFL all come from Fox. It's louder. It's brighter. They write a theme tune that's inspired by like a Batman ah ah theme park ride. The robot. Exactly. The robot. John Madden. you know all of that.
Speaker: was a fox invention and that's an incredible like cultural moment for the nfl too yeah and so as you as you're as you're moving forward of course you know the cap there there's a major inflection point and then prior what was happening in the nfl before the rookie wage scale that is another moment that is a fulcrum moment You know, the NFL at that stage, we're talking about the 2000s, is richer than ever, highly competitive. College football has also progressed and professionalized.
Speaker: And the competition, everyone has agreed that the way you build for the future is by drafting a franchise quarterback. You must go get one.
Speaker: And without that, you're nothing. Or without, you know, without drafting like the stars of ah of college football. And so they had more money than ever and they were prepared to spend more. And so they were promising absolutely astronomical numbers to guys who had not taken a professional snap.
Speaker: And the moment it all kind of jumped the shark was Sam Bradford, who'd been an absolute stud at Oklahoma, had put together one of the great college seasons by a quarterback, and was you know straight out of central casting for an NFL quarterback. He looked the part. He was big. He was good looking. He was multi-sport. He was an athlete. He was everything he wanted and had this arm that could throw like as far as he liked.
Speaker: He's promised a $60 million dollars deal, guaranteed money, the moment he's drafted, which is absolute lunacy. He was one of the highest paid players in the league before entering the league.
Speaker: And around the league, these whispers turned into full-throated screams of, this is crazy, what have we done? with you know These market economics have just completely spiraled out of control. So we need a different way of thinking about this. We need to somehow cap it. The veterans were going crazy because they were like,
Speaker: you know, what happened? We've put in years of service here and suddenly these kids are coming in, making more money than we could dream of, and they haven't played a single snap. So all of that conspired to, to really it's one of the rare moments where everyone in the league agreed, the owners, the commissioner, the players union, something had to be done and they imposed the rookie wage scale.
Speaker: um In doing that, they capped the amount of money that players can make in their first four years in the league. But they also, and this is the really fascinating part, completely changed the math for building a successful team.
Speaker: Suddenly, you have players who had gone from being massively overvalued to players who are massively undervalued. Your draft picks are coming in and making, most of them, less than million bucks a year.
Speaker: That is peanuts in a $300 million dollars salary cap world. So you could actually stock lots of parts of your roster with these cheap rookies or cheap players on rookie deals.
Speaker: and spend the money elsewhere. The question then was how do you spend it most efficiently and what are the positions that you should actually pay? Yeah. And it would seem that the Seahawks were the first team in your chapter of the asterisk where they where they find Russell Wilson. And you know you have about a four to five-year window. a Clock is on.
Speaker: Clock has started. tock. As soon as you draft that guy, the clock starts. That is your championship window. Yeah. and Yeah, and so in reading that chapter, too, it just talking about just the the sheer brutality of how ruthless the league is, too. like pete um Pete Carroll was just thinking, like yeah, a lot of these players are cannon fodder. and you know There was a shuttle going to to and from the airport nonstop. It's just how disposable these athletes are, especially you know when you have that that quarterback window to to possibly win a championship.
Speaker: Look, you have to remember that most guys don't really get paid in the league until after that four-year deal, after that four-year rookie contract. The second contract is where you you make the life-changing money.
Speaker: But it's important to remember also that the average lifespan in the NFL is three years. yeah So most guys never get to the second contract. Most guys get chewed up by the league and spat out, and they're on the shuttle back to the SeaTac.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. It just it's amazing. The the meat grinder of the NFL that that a lot of that is kind of it's there. It's kind of like, a I don't know, like a a big ah you're at a wedding and there's just there's like a little the bread baskets going stale or something. don't really see it, ah but it's there on the table nevertheless. And that's the kind of thing with the end of what you see is the cake. Yeah.
Speaker: Right. Yeah. You know, for every Patrick Mahomes, the cake, yep there are dozens and dozens of guys who are going to stay on in a basket. Yeah, 100%. And in the league and the media puts those those faces in front of us. So you get this ah an illusion that the yeah making it to the league is this you know incredible status-defying and life-defying thing. And for a few, it is.
Speaker: But my gosh, for the vast, vast majority, you are churned churned out and spit out with no safety net to fall into. Exactly. And that is the that is the bet that a lot of players are prepared to make.
Speaker: But, you know, the NFL is is not going to be a kind place. No. No. And I love that you brought up ah Loomis earlier from from the Saints. You know, you guys write in Loomis' game-changing innovation was choosing to bet on the unstoppable rise of the American juggernaut. This idea of kicking cap space down the road, knowing that the growth of the league is going to outpace basically the debt you're incurring in the moment, right?
Speaker: as As he put it, it's understanding the time value of money. The $10 million, dollars as I said, of cap hit now was not going to be the same percentage of your cap in five years.
Speaker: So they came up with all kinds of accounting tricks, like void years, pushing money into the future, because the reason to do it is he had a championship window. Drew Brees, a quarterback like that, a Hall of Fame guy, is a one-man championship window. So you owe it to him, you owe it to your fans, and you owe it to the team.
Speaker: to do everything you can, pull every lever available to put the best guys around him at the moment that he's good. So yeah, you pay guys who are in their primes, you kick money into the future and you'll just deal with it later.
Speaker: You know, and and many people thought that the Saints were in cap hell for the longest time, you know, sort of ah trust in by all of this. But really, you know Loomis himself contends this. says, we were never really in cap hell because the salary cap kept growing.
Speaker: So it was never as bad as it looked. Yeah. Well, and one team in particular, and i me having grown up in Massachusetts, so I was very plugged into the Patriots my whole life. In a league that's meant to drive everyone to the middle and there are no dominant teams, the Patriots were able to.
Speaker: They had a 20-year run that was unprecedented and we might not see anything like it again. Mm-hmm. yeah How were they, with Tom Brady under center and Belichick as head coach, how were they able to you know buck the trend of parity?
Speaker: So one, Brady-Belichick is an all-time league-defining combo. You have those two things together, you know no amount of like accounting tricks or anything else is going to account for that, but just because you know that's history-making.
Speaker: But the sustained success was still incredible. And there were a couple of things there. One was Belichick designed a system team. And so he knew what kinds of players he needed at which roles.
Speaker: And he was ruthless about replacing them. There was always a next guy, you know next man up was the Belichick philosophy. And he always knew every role was so narrowly defined That when you know what you're looking for, you're not just tempted by the shiny objects or the shiniest player in round one or round two. He could actually go shopping in rounds three, four, and five and find the guys that he needed who were who suited those narrowly tailored roles. And those guys not only were useful, they were also cheap. And so he could pay the stars.
Speaker: Yeah. And ah yeah, he didn't pay the stars that much, but he his team made stars who made money elsewhere, but amounted to very little once they left the the glow of Brady and Belichick. But but that's also the you know, it's it's overused in the NFL, but alignment is a real thing. and from For an organization to have the owner, the GM, the coach, the quarterback, and you know every other sort of piece of the staff, all on board, all with the same philosophy, and it helps when your GM and the coach are the same person, they happen to be Bell Belichick.
Speaker: um you know You do things in a very cohesive, coherent way so that you're not wasting money. You're not chasing three directions at once. you know And those are some of the things we saw, we wrote about it as well. But the risk of the Cleveland Browns, who actually did some very smart things, and they tried you know what we came to know in the NBA as the process.
Speaker: where they effectively tanked, stacked up draft picks, and then put together a pretty good team. But they didn't have the alignment to see it all the way through. And if you don't have that, and if you don't have the stomach for the bad years, then you're not going to get the payoff.
Speaker: I love later in the book, I feel like one of the the most real estate you give to ah to a pair of iconoclasts, modern day iconoclasts, Les Snead and Sean McVay. And they've walked into another paradigm shifting mode of fuck them picks. So that's kind of the the next wave, at least with a window in a combo like them.
Speaker: Yeah, because and Snead is so interesting because to to us, he seems like this guy who he was born to be for like football orthodoxy or born for football, the old school way.
Speaker: You know, he's Ufala, Alabama. He grew up in the sec. He was like old school football, but he himself is an iconoclast and, you know, doesn't read like dusty, you know, football manuals. He reads management guides and business books and things like that. And he's always challenging his own assumptions and what he thinks he knows and at various points,
Speaker: You know, he was a draft and develop guy, built that first Ram squad, dragged them out of utter uselessness and was, you know, it helps to be a great talent spotter, which he is.
Speaker: But then realized, okay, we've been building and building. we're If we're ready to win, but you can't apply the same lessons from the building phase to the win now phase.
Speaker: So he changed his behavior and committed, and he's done this many times since then, but went all in. And no one goes all in like Les Snead and the Rams. They did it again this past off season by going for Miles Garrett. you know It's okay, we're gonna mortgage a few things for the future,
Speaker: in the In that case, it was picks. They didn't have a first round pick for eight years. And they were going to bring in established veterans, guys who had already reached that second contract phase. The Rams are a team that think about that a lot.
Speaker: And we're going to win now. We're going to make sure that we have all the pieces in place and maturity and the experience to be competitive right now. And you know what?
Speaker: Whatever happens to a squad that's two years from now, that's for two years from now. Yeah. And ah putting on your like prognosticator hat and you know seeing what you've seen in the past tea leaves, and looking forward, like where are you seeing ah you know you see the box the way it is? you know Who and what might be the mechanisms of thinking outside the current box? Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I think now tactics like void years and borrowing against the cap, you if you're not doing that, you're not a serious front office right now because everyone can see the success of the NFL. Everyone can see the trend of the cap.
Speaker: So, you know, that's the that's the first thing that every team needs to get on board with. If they they need to sort of adopt those tactics and, you know, the Eagles are still doing it, where we've it's basically the return of cash in the NFL.
Speaker: Like how much cash can you spend? And again, you need an owner who's willing to bankroll that. And that's what the Eagles are doing brilliantly. Yeah. Well, if that, you know, part of course, a big theme of the book and an undercurrent is this idea of league thinking group think.
Speaker: And so if, if everyone is going to start thinking like that, and then it's like, all right, well, what's going to be the next wrinkle? know, who's going to be the next Howard row, Howie Roseman to, to do this. And, uh, you know, it's, do you see something on the, on, on the horizon that, that is challenging maybe this current group think? Yeah.
Speaker: Well, i think I think we're going to see you know the arrival of owners who are willing to spend their way into competitiveness in a different way. you know sort of As the as the the strictures of the salary cap loosen a little bit effectively.
Speaker: you know We're going to see maybe something like we saw with Jerry Jones in the 90s, maybe something like what we saw in in European soccer with the free spending in the early 2000s. you know It'll be interesting to see also where that cash comes from. If the NFL changes its rules on accepting private equity investment. you know if um If they're ready to then just go spend in a in an insane way to win immediately, are we going to see more short-term planning? I think that's where we're going to see the next sort of convulsion for the NFL. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and and what what effect are you seeing in NIL in college with maybe some players who are making far more money in college than they can in the and the should they declare for the draft for their first contract? This is the other thing I was gonna bring up. I don't think we're going to see the pipeline choked off yet, but there's definitely less of an incentive for guys to jump to the pros immediately. It used to be if you were draft eligible and thought you had a shot,
Speaker: That was the best thing you could do was jump into the draft. But now, you know, you can secure your future pretty well by playing a couple of seasons at four or five million bucks in college. Yeah.
Speaker: Whether or not you're an NFL caliber player um or a guy who's going to go in the top three rounds. um It's also, you know, it's a topic we're talking about in the news this week, where guys who've been cut from NFL rosters were trying to get back into the college game.
Speaker: It seems like that loophole is about to close. But it's an interesting wrinkle that I don't think anyone saw coming. Yeah, well and and and also and in terms of a player electing to maybe stay in college, make more money, for that for that rookie contract in that first four years, you're going to have a quarterback coming in more seasoned. Like a Jaden Daniels. He stayed, yeah, a lot of college starts. Bo Nix had a lot of college starts. Dante Moore is going to have a lot of college starts. Now they're going to come in that first year
Speaker: Far less wet behind the ears in a sense. And i think we're going to see kind of an acceleration of that. People may be betting on that window because these guys are coming in in hot. We have three to four years ah tops to maybe win win this title.
Speaker: Yeah. We also wrote how you know the the pro game kind of down. at some stage to like meet the college game where it was. And they grabbed, you know, we, we had this for the longest time, this huge gap between college quarterbacks who were coming into the NFL and not up to speed on NFL playbooks and and the demands of the, the pros.
Speaker: But, you know, we saw with a generation of quarterbacks, like, Lamar Jackson RG3, where teams were like, okay, these guys have a different set of skills.
Speaker: why don't we Why aren't we adjusting our playbooks to suit them? So I think there was this like this closing of the gap between the program and the college game. So as you say, guys are coming in more seasoned, more NFL ready. And that is how teams draft now. That is the big thing that you hear in a lot of front offices. NFL readiness is what they're looking for. Yeah. And it's a credit to someone, and a coach like John Harbaugh, who had your prototypical pocket passer and a Joe Flacco. And then he has Lamar Jackson. He's like, you know what?
Speaker: i'm go We're going to tear up this playbook in a week and pivot to this guy. Sorry, Joe. and ah cater to this guy's skill set instead of shoehorning him into Flacco rubric.
Speaker: RG3 told us that story because he was actually the the backup quarterback on that Flacco team when Jackson came in. And Flacco went down with an injury and then the Ravens had a bye week.
Speaker: So in the space of two weeks, they redrew the entire playbook for Lamar. Yeah, that is that is wild. It gets to the other ruthless part of the league, too. It's just like, got a flak of injury, bye week, and then bye.
Speaker: like Yeah, it's a goodbye week. Yeah. ah ah Just ah one more thing for you, Joshua, is um there there was a great quote, and this ties into a question I want to ask about writing. It's like Roseman had said, like, anytime you think you arrive in this business, you get your ass kicked. Yeah. And ah just you've been in in journalism in this for for a while and four books with with John. It's just in what ways have you gotten your ass kicked in this line of work and ah and and keep getting off the mat to keep going?
Speaker: Sometimes you just swing and a miss on a story, you know, or you get scooped by someone. And, you know, i think there's a constant feeling of like, you're only as good as your last story is the last thing you published. And it's hard to shake that. And sometimes you have to sit back and sort of take in the whole body of work.
Speaker: But when you feel like a story didn't do very well, wasn't very well read, or that maybe you didn't execute it properly, I find that that stays with me. So the only thing to do is write again and hope to get it right next time.
Speaker: Yeah. And do you find yourself most engaged and alive in that the the reporting process or the structuring in the writing process? I think I think the writing ultimately, I think that's where that's the reward for the reporting. You know, when you've done the reporting right, it makes the writing so much more pleasurable. pleasurable So I think I would skew that way. Yeah. Yeah. I have a tendency to, um, yeah I just get heartburn over cold calling and stuff of that nature. It's, I know it's something we have to wrestle with, but it's, it got to do anyway, but that's, that's the thing. But once I, once I get the conversation going, like that's where the juice ends up being like, Oh, this is pretty cool. Or, or being in the newspaper archives and certain things from 50 years ago are coming to life. I'm like, Oh, wow. Like this is really cool. You can feel the pulse of it. So much fun.
Speaker: Very nice. well Well, Joshua, one thing I love asking guests as I bring these conversations down for a landing is just to ask them for a recommendation of some kind. Just anything you're excited about that you want to share with the listeners out there. And it can be a it can be a book doesn't have to be. But sometimes people are like, oh, I love this brand of coffee or this brand of socks. Yeah, it could anything you like.
Speaker: What do I like? ah been using Lamy fountain pens. Lamy fountain pens. OK. L-A-M-Y. Yeah. um I bought a couple in an airport. They're like 35 bucks and i love them.
Speaker: Nice. It's these little things like something having a nice notebook like ah or a journal or just something like that. It ah it heightens the stakes of like writing the thing. You want to take care of it and like treat it preciously. I agree. And I think the exercise of writing so certain things, writing out ideas longhand and structuring longhand actually changes the engagement you have with it.
Speaker: Absolutely. Well, awesome. Well, this is so great to, you know, they you know read your wonderful book and i get an entree into how the NFL is evolving. and And I just I look forward to the direction that the league takes going forward. But um but in any case, it's just ah what a great read. So just thanks for carving out the time, Josh. This is awesome.
Speaker: Thanks so much. Pleasure talking to you.
Speaker: Yes. Awesome. That was fun, right? That was nice. Too bad John couldn't make it. But I think Joshua more than made up for it on his own. Name of the book again is The Playbook, and it's published by Mariner Books.
Speaker: Those guys. Be sure you're subscribing to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We just crossed 2,000 subscribers on Spotify. Chuck in the 2,500 on Apple and a smattering across other platforms. yeah We got like 5,000 subscribers, which is pretty cool when you think about it for this little podcast.
Speaker: Probably shouldn't say that. I think some people think that it's got a bigger audience than it does. And then they'll be like, o ew, I don't want to go on that show anymore. He doesn't have reach.
Speaker: Anyway, $5,000 is lot. I know it doesn't sound like a lot when you compare it to like the the major celebrity podcast, but for what it is and for who I am, you got to figure, that's quite a lot.
Speaker: And that's because you trust the show and you stick around. I hope you will continue to do so. Follow the show on Instagram at Creative Nonfiction Podcast and consider helping out by visiting patreon.com slash cnfpod. Free ways to support the show or simply leaving kind reviews for the podcast. and the frontrunner.
Speaker: And those reviews go a long way towards validating the enterprise for the wayward listener and certainly for the wayward bookshopper.
Speaker: So I'm always in search of trying to perfectly shrink my footprint and keep myself on track. I'm very distractible, as you know. I can't sit still for very long. I have untreated ADHD. So I'm very susceptible to being pulled in myriad directions. And I finish like 79% of many things instead of of one or two.
Speaker: have a very hard time focusing. I read perilously slow because I can barely read one page without needing to stop and look around, or I read a page and realize I hadn't been paying attention at all and have to re-read the page again.
Speaker: i could go on. I often journal about how I can best fix this as if I'm fundamentally broken. you know The self-improvement industrial complex is full of people who promise to fix your problems so you can be as optimized as possible.
Speaker: Well, shit, isn't that just capitalism? It used to be about getting the thing will complete you, the fancier car, the bigger house, the brand name clothes.
Speaker: All a myth. And self-improvement is similar. If if I adopt this system, it will unlock my potential to get more done. meditate as a means of productivity, not a sense of inner calm or for a more harmonious relationship to the world around us. No, to get more done in less time.
Speaker: yeah I've wasted a lot of energy over the years fighting who I fundamentally am. I'm not saying we shouldn't try and grow and better ourselves, in but ah maybe it's more like patching a bug in the software versus a wholesale changing of the operating system.
Speaker: yeah Maybe instead of swimming upstream, always against the curtain, feeling so goddamn frustrated at every turn for not fitting neatly into a system... But it's best to fully understand what our nature is and work with it versus against it.
Speaker: The best coaches don't bend the athlete to their will. They find a way to coach the athlete. And maybe one athlete needs more hands-on attention and reassurance while another is cool with the long leash, self-motivated and doesn't need much by way of hand-holding.
Speaker: Others work well in structure. Some are more jam-banned in their approach. And as long as they reach the destination in one piece, then neither process is wrong.
Speaker: To keep mixing metaphors, what is our out-of-the-box software? How do we fundamentally exist in the world? Now, I'm a bit of a slob and very distractible. could go on.
Speaker: But to combat this, knowing this about me, it's best I don't own a lot of stuff because I won't put things away and things will get messy and dusty. I'm easily distracted, so maybe having my phone out of the room is a good way to assure that I'm not tempted to check things I shouldn't be checking for the sake of checking because it's there.
Speaker: Like having Oreos in the house. If I know Oreo cookies and are in are in the house, like i will I will find them. They talk to me. I know it sounds weird, but like when I know they're in the cabinet, even out of sight, I will hunt them and I will eat them. And then I will feel shame for eating them because they are not aligned with where I want to go.
Speaker: But they taste so fucking good, right? Like they're so good. That's just a couple examples. I could name 10 more. I want to get more done because I have ambitious goals.
Speaker: I'm halfway through this life, maybe more than halfway. Yeah, if you multiply me times 2, that's 92. Yeah, I'm not making it that far. I have pretty good genetics, but I ain't making it that far. So I'm more than halfway through this race.
Speaker: And I have those ambitious goals when it comes to the podcast and my work, my book work, and speaking. And like traveling, my wife and I, I think we've taken, like I shit you not, in the, ah we're almost married, what, 16 years? We've taken like three real vacations in 16 years.
Speaker: and So ah we would like to see the world while we can act where we're still ambulatory and we can move around relatively pain-free. ah and not And then there's like, you know, and knowing this about me in terms of work, like trying to cram my work day into a classic 8 to 4 or 9 to 5, like that just doesn't work.
Speaker: It's like, can I get seven to eight hours of work done over the course of 16 hours? You know, I have a lot of chores to do around the house and that adds to my distractibility. And very often I do them midday to take my mind off of whatever, whatever it is I'm working on.
Speaker: It's usually ah a means of procrastination. Yeah, maybe I edit a podcast for 30 minutes and then need to walk for 10. And then maybe go empty the dishwasher while I listen to another podcast.
Speaker: There are times when you need to, of course, like chain yourself to the desk, but more often than not, I need to be allowed to move around, sweep the floor for five minutes and go work for 23, brush Kevin for 10 minutes, then work for 15 more. Or recorded a podcast or had a reporting call and those always drain me.
Speaker: So maybe that's when I lie on the floor for 20 minutes and stare at the ceiling. I could fight this, and I've tried, but all that it does is make me like twitchy and agitated and frustrated.
Speaker: You know, and I do all the cooking in the house ah for for the house. and And so sometimes I'll go and do food prep. You know, that seems like a more productive use of my time or it's another means of procrastinating. It's a wonder I get anything done. And many times it never feels like I do because it's so piecemeal. And often that frustrates me because then I wonder what the hell I did with all my time. like At the end of the day, I'll sit there and think, what did you actually do today?
Speaker: Often I'll have my normal to-do list, right? But often I'll do things not on the to-do list that matter. So if I don't jot those down, i'll lose like I'll lose a sense of some of the accomplishments. So kind of like an infinite scroll in my bullet journal. And then i'll I'll just add those tasks in. I can tell that i it did in fact do things, even if even if it was like all over the place.
Speaker: But if you tried to plunk me down in a chair for eight straight hours, I'd go insane. It's actually kind of weird. the the little parting This little parting shot, whatever, it took me about 15 minutes to write in total. And I actually sat down the entire time to do it. like I'm not fighting it.
Speaker: And listen, before you say, must be nice that your day is so free and open, just know that I acknowledge that. In the very likely event that I'll need to get a job at a grocery store, I'll find ways to get my important work done around that. The only jobs I can get hired for are grunt jobs. Go figure.
Speaker: I have to lie on my applications that I'm not as quote-unquote educated as I am, so they don't view me as a flight risk. But it's been um a while since I've had to do that. But yeah i feel that I feel that moment coming. na My agent has not responded to my emails in 10 weeks, so that's par for the course. but trying to get the next book off the ground, it would be nice to have a conversation about it, but other people don't want to have the conversation with me, so here we are. Point being, I think we tend to look at certain self-help books as a panacea for fixing something broken in us, or we're just seekers.
Speaker: I'm trying to take that tack that I'm not broken, I'm just me. And there's a customizable set of software patches that make me function and provide what I hope is meaningful work for you.
Speaker: Maybe what it all boils down to is just being kind to ourselves. You know, figure out what works and stop being so damn hard on ourselves. However you might define that. So stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do, interview. See
