This audio article is up. Happy Friday, folks.

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Author, filmmaker and ardent basketball fan Sherman Alexie joins me to discuss one of my favorite topics: The 1990s. Though, to be honest, we stray from that subject and get into others subjects of interest. Such as!

* Rob Mahoney thinks “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is bad. Fair?

* Smells Like Teen Spirit changed everything

* What was the last great movie?

* Why, exactly, Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue” became a hit again two decades later

* The cognitive dissonance for White Liberals seeing people who look and talk like them having different politics

* McDonald’s as blue collar space

* Sherman could plausibly be from half the world

* I’m mesmerized by how different the Canadians are

* Sports media’s been socially pressured into softness

* The laudable grandiosity of Timothée Chalamet

* The theory behind YouTube athletic stars

* Is more fictional content political or are we just more sensitive to political messages?

* Who are the ALL TIME “Pretendian” actors

Mike Pesca wrote a fine piece for the Free Press on how oddly not controversial the supposedly very controversial Eileen Gu is. She’s from the United States, but competes for China, and yet receives…mostly glowing mainstream American coverage? What’s with that? And beyond Gu, what’s the elite American consensus on China? But before the topics are introduced…

Per the new Substack/Polymarket partnership, I’m posting an Eileen Gu involved competition. As someone incapable of accurately pricing Winter Olympics events, I’m interested in whether bettors reflect Gu’s true odds for winning the Ski Halfpipe. As of this writing, Polymarket has her favored to triumph. Fame halo effect, or accurate probability?

And onto the Pesca pod topics…

* Would we bet that Chuck Klosterman has a secret North Dakota accent?

* Eileen Gu is certainly beautiful, but does she also look a little terrifying?

* Is the lack of elite anger towards China rooted in corporate considerations?

* America is less patriotic now, especially among the young. Bad thing?

* Is the United States the best country?

* Per the Jeremy Carl congressional dustup, is there such a thing as White American culture?

* Stuffwhitepeoplelike was a great website

* Is there such a thing as a “white guy basketball assist”?

* Is it plausible that Spike Lee’s All-Star Game Palestine outfit had nothing to do with Deni Avdija?

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This pod was so hot, so provocative, that our man Ryan Glasspiegel was worried about career consequences. Personally, I believe we were just being reasonable about potentially fraught topics, such as…

* Not everyone loved Ryan’s reporting on the viewership drop during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance

* Was the bigNBC viewership falloff another “Bud Light” style boycott, or simply lack of American median fan connection with the artist?

* Who SHOULD the halftime show artist be next Super Bowl?

* More people are criticizing Adam Silver these days

* A solution to the NBA All-Star game

* A solution to NBA tanking

* Artists are dropping Casey Wasserman due to Epstein files revelations. But what’s the specific allegation against him?

* I think there’s less to the Epstein story than Ryan thinks

First of all, congratulations to our SportsPredict Super Bowl winners SFZevi, Nathan Shea and Peter V. I had fun competing against all of you this NFL season, even though I reliably fell short of prize territory.

But before we completely say goodbye to football, I present this look back at the game/season with John Middlekauff, absolute contest BEAST for The Volume network. Of course, we got off topic into issues of interest, as tends to happen. Subjects include!

* How much is Michael MacDonald worth on the open market?

* Why are NFL coaches paid so low relative to impact?

* Why does nepotism work better in the NFL than the NBA?

* Should NBA GMs make more than NBA coaches?

* James Pearce Jr., coming off a 10.5 sack rookie season for the Atlanta Falcons, has been arrested and the details are horrific. How would you assess the pick and process if you’re the new GM of the team?

* NFL media seems happier than NBA media. Why?

* Is the NBA past its peak?

* John’s boss Colin Cowherd famously warned against hiring golfers. Does golf nut Middlekauff still find time to play rounds?

* Can Scottie Scheffler reach a higher echelon of fame?

* Why are pitchers better than hitters at golf?

* Is there a big market to watch non golf athletes compete playing golf?

As I told Chuck Klosterman, I planned to do a pod on his Football book with non sports fan Rob Henderson. So what did our favorite sports agnostic intellectual think of such a deep dive into America’s favorite game?

Topics! Include!

* When one’s job is a bigger marker of identity than one’s race

* Is the NFL a more positive racial story than what gets relayed in media?

* Why did conservative media know football was coming back during Covid?

* Most retired NFL players have painful daily injuries. Most of the injured have no regrets

* How does NFL culture deal with certain positions being higher/lower Wonderlic?

* Libs are fine with young women doing Only Fans; Cons are fine with young NFL players damaging their brains

* Rob Henderson is fascinated by the gender implications of how the WNBA reacted to Caitlin Clark

* Why are NBA teammates rarely friends?

* Rob is interested in why soccer is an elite sport in America but working class sport elsewhere

* Rob and I both loved one particular passage in Klosterman’s book about how his dad reacted to Doug Flutie’s miracle play

I highly recommend Football, Chuck Klosterman’s latest book. In this podcast, we discuss his trenchant and personal exploration of the sport, along with the following topics…

* Are we primarily writers or podcasters?

* Many believe that young people are correct about the future, but few think they were smarter as young people

* Will opinions change less often now that we are publicly anchored to opinions?

* Would Chuck lie if his privacy was violated to procure damning information?

* Why do we want coaches to be scary assholes?

* Chuck asks me if I scream at my kids

* Why Mike Holmgren screamed at Andy Reid

* The media driven ego battle between Bill Belichick and Tom Brady

* Why television dominates our sports memories for games we saw in person

* Do we want football to stay American?

* Has history forgotten Roger Staubach?

* Chuck has been a closeted Dallas Cowboys fan

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Great conversation with Mike Pesca in which I, unfortunately, regressed to my old ways of pronouncing Chuck Klosterman’s name incorrectly. This is possibly our most controversial and free associative podcast yet.

* Was Alec Baldwin’s best Trump imitation actually Jack Donaghy?

* “Seinfeld sucks and isn’t funny”?

* Mike disagrees with certain Minnesota ICE takes from my podcast with Kat Rosenfield

* Berkeley made me biased against protestors

* We discuss Brian Phillips’ belief that Trump era chaos is all a devious strategy

* The oddness of initially not knowing whether the 2nd Alex Pretti video was AI

* Should the new Pretti vs. police video have any influence on how one feels about the possibly unrelated deadly encounter 11 days later?

* We aren’t conquering Canada and also, adding Alberta would look so stupid on the map

* Mike weighs in on whether the NFL should All 22 itself

* Most people agree that a man’s morality shouldn’t influence his NFL Hall of Fame case, but nobody will make the Hall of Fame case for serial rapist Darren Sharper

* Is Robert Saleh good or just good at playing the media game?