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1-800-1891: basketball is our favorite sport · 1-800-1800

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Ring, ring.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Hello?
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: Is this 1891?
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: As a matter of fact, it is.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Hello?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: You've reached 1-800-1800.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I have a burning question.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
• 0:15
  [music]
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_03: Your real name, as far as I'm aware, is Harry.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: Harry Krinsky.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: And that is awesome.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if Harry's short for anything, if I need to call that out.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's short for Harrison, actually, yeah.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I didn't know that.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: Harrison Krinsky,
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: otherwise known as Harry Krinsky,
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_03: is a podcast host,
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_03: a senior video and podcast producer,
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_03: a consultant, a showrunner, and also my high school classmate.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_03: Most importantly, Harry,
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: you've worked with major media outlets and renowned independent creators,
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: and you have a podcast about basketball and about sports.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's a little bit about sports in general, called Nothing But Respect.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_03: And it's really good.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_03: And I've learned a lot from listening to it.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_03: Have you?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know that you've listened.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I've been enjoying it.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I've been thinking about it.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's lovely to hear.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: We'll sometimes get when people who are not super into sports listen to it.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: The feedback we often get is I have no idea what you guys are talking about in
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: a kind of like really incoherent.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you guys are talking almost in a different language.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: But then I think we will...
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Which I understand,
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: like we are sort of like building this weird sicko world,
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: but I'm glad to hear that there's elements of it that are breaking,
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: that are like not unapproachable.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I would say like the episode I listened to about the Lakers acquisition was hard for me.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't know what you're talking about.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: But the episode about, with Jake Biddle, that's his name, right?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_03: I thought that was more accessible because I feel like he's also not
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_03: a basketball person per se.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_03: So he was like helping me enter your psycho world.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: I understand.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: And he was also very funny for just sort
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: of like having he was like having various Twitter beefs with random people,
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: which was really making me laugh.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm glad you're listening
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_03: back on Twitter.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_03: Well, Harry, welcome to 1-800-1800.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_03: My name is Mabel.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Madeline.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_03: And this podcast is brought to you by Mandylion Press.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: We publish books from the 19th century.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_03: And then every episode of this podcast, we talk about a different random year.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: And we always like to start off by asking people what they learned.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: So Harry, what did you learn?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: I've been teasing this because I was really excited because I learned.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: I felt a fun fact that fits into the 1-800 universe.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: I...
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Was recently,
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: this week,
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: on a date with somebody who grew up for some time on the island of St. Barts.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Ooh.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Love.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: And she told me a really compelling combo of fun facts.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why I keep doing that.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Are you thumbsing up again?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: I can't help it.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: I love this story so much.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, sorry.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: On the Zoom, there was a thumbs up sent my way.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Two fun facts that I've been thinking about.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: One, St. Barts was colonized by Sweden originally.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's a French island now.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: St. Barts was colonized by Sweden originally.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: They made a trade.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: How France got to acquire St. Bart's is they made a trade.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: The French traded the island of St. Bart's for one French building.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: They were like, you can have this one building and we get the island.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: What was the building?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Need to know.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we should figure it out.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't even really understand how that works.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: How could there's just a Swedish building like a consulate or something?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's already very strange that there's a French island in the middle of the Caribbean.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: But if you're born there, you're like a French citizen.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: But then the second fun fact is as part of this deal,
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Sweden was like, okay, we'll do this deal building for an island.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: However,
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: because we love the Swedish people who lived on this island – We don't want
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: the French to ever tax them.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: So it was illegal.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: They were like written into the contract.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: They were like, the French government can never tax the people of St. Bart's if ever.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so for the entire period of time,
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: basically up until like three or four years ago, they amended it slightly.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: The French government cannot tax St. Bart's.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like a perfect
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: tax haven.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And don't people do that there?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: People do that in the Virgin Islands.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's more crazy ones.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think St.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Bart's was less interested in being a complete tax haven,
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: dark money nexus, so they've adjusted it a little bit.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think you have to live there for five years,
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: and then you start not being able to get taxed.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: You can get taxed for the first five years.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you don't get tax bill.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Then the way they make it up, last thing, is the import tariffs are really, really high.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's how, say, Barnes makes the money to build the roads or whatever.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: So the experience is they're like, I'm not paying any income tax on this trade.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's so awesome.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to look into what the building was.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: I just have one question.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: How did the date go?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was great.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: It was excellent.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: I love to hear it.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: We love to hear it.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: I learned a lot.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: We love love.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: A great date is one where you
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: learn a lot, really.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think I've ever learned any amazing 19th century history on a date.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think I have either.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: I guess you guys are giving it out.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody who's gone on dates with you guys surely has.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: Try to keep it under wraps a little bit because it's,
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: you know, it's a bit much more like do you have siblings type stuff.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh huh.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Harry,
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: this is reminding me that we reconnected after a decade of not seeing each other at
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: a really weird Valentine's Day themed party that was like in June.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's where we saw each other again after high school.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, my God.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Was that the one that was at that hotel that was...
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it was a house party.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yes.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: How many valentine themed parties did you go to in June?
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the most ran through guy in Brooklyn.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: No, the one I'm thinking about doesn't matter.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: I do remember the one you were talking about.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I fell down the stairs at the one I saw you at.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't see that.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't see that part.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but it was insane.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of people did see it.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I slid down.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: How badly?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think you told me about that.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: No,
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: I did because that's where I was talking to like an AI startup guy who accused me
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_03: of having consumed like Valerian or whatever.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: Butlerian Jihad.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Butlerian Jihad, which is like a Dune term.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's a term from the Dune verse, which is about people who are like Luddites, I think.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_03: And he accused me of being,
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_03: this was also like kind of before the current AI moment,
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: but I knew enough to be kind of Not interested in anything he was saying.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_03: And then he accused me and my friends of having been committed to the Butlerian Jihad.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one other thing about this party I'm remembering now,
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: and this is kind of ties all of this together,
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: is like this was this particular kind of perverted Valentine's Day party
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: where they made you take your shoes off at the door,
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: which explains why you fell down the stairs.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like you were walking around this fucking party.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: You were slipping inside.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: No traction.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Humiliating.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: You should not meet the love of your life wearing no shoes.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: No, yeah, wiggling your
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: little toesies.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's between me and God.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Madeline, what did you learn
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: this week?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, I learned an etymology thing, which I know you like.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: Do you guys know where the term boycott comes from?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: Is it like related to girls?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: Nope.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: I would have thought a bunch of boys got together and was like, we've got to stop doing this.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: We got caught that.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: It is because there was a man named Captain Charles Boycott.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Who was the agent of an absentee landlord in Ireland and all
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: the Irish people were mad and stopped doing something.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: And it's been called a boycott ever since.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: This was in 1880.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: Pretty crazy, right?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's really crazy.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: That is crazy.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for that.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: It came up because someone was trying to convince me
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: that Martin Luther King invented boycotting,
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: which I was like, I don't think that's true.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like, did he invent it as a political tool?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Literally, no.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: This was like an Irish-English thing.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're right.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: What did you learn, Mabel?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: Mabel.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: I just changed what I learned because I remembered something I learned,
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: even though I tried to prepare something.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_03: I listened to an episode of 99% Invisible podcast, which is about the origin.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: The episode is called 1-800-PODCAST,
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_03: which is a little offensive to me due to the name of our podcast.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_03: But it's about the history of the 1-800 number, which I had actually never thought about.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_03: And it was invented in the 60s as a way basically to encourage shopping over the phone.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_03: So basically what a 1-800 number does is it puts the cost of the long distance call
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_03: onto the company.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like collect call?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_03: It changed it so instead of calling collect, it was just inherent to the dial that you did.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: And it also coincided then in the 1970s with the invention of the credit card,
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_03: which then like really got people shopping.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: Before that, how did you pay over the phone?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_03: I learned apparently there would be like a thing where you could cash deliver.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_03: Like they would deliver you the thing, but you had to get cash on delivery.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, what's that called?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: I actually remember that.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: I'm old enough to remember that.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: That's so cool.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: I remember it as an option in catalogs.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: I never did it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to say, that would make you like in your 60s.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, don't I look amazing?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was like when it came out.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: I remember my mystical relationship with catalogs being like,
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: how do I get the stuff that's in here?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing only my parents could get the stuff that was in there and just being like,
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: I want it so badly.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: You could like leave it sort of passively aggressively around.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's how you got the stuff.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_03: I remember one catalog of like women's clothing and I was like seven and I was like,
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to save this catalog because I know I'm going to want that outfit when I'm
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: an adult.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: I just learned about, this is not 1800s, but the A&F Quarterly.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: Do you guys know about this?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: Abercrombie and Fitch did a quarterly magazine in the late 90s,
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: early 2000s that was basically half catalog,
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: like what we're talking about, half porn magazine.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was like full like soft core porn, like nude, you know, whatever.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then all these random ass interviews.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was like in like nudie mag places,
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: like it would have the film that would block the women's private parts.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: I did just Google it and it asked me if I wanted to turn off my safe search,
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: which I do keep on all the time.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: That is interesting.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'll look into that.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: That reminds me of this probably apocryphal story in my family,
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: which is that my dad's childhood neighbor, they were children.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this kid's grandma heard about a new magazine called Playboy and thought it was
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: for boys who play and got him a subscription.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: And boy, did the kids love it.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's so sick.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Boys who play.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what about a magazine for boys who play?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's actually just a good idea.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to start that.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Real playboy is what I'll call it.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, Harry, why are we talking about 1891?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great question.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking beyond just our Valentine's Day reconnection.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: You pitched me a while ago on...
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: On an episode about the origins of basketball because I have my basketball show.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: I've worked in sports media and it basketball, you know, got in at the end of the 1800s.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, depending on who you ask, which we will talk about later.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: In 1891,
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: this is when Dr.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: James Naismith created basketball,
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: allegedly, at a YMCA as a way to like the story I was told.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it's interesting because you get past just like I played a lot of basketball growing up.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you'd like to learn about this stuff like.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Probably from coaches, so I don't know how academic it is.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: It'll be interesting to test my folk understanding versus your research understanding.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: But it was basically like we need a way for kids and adults to run around
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: and get exercise in the winter because it's cold where we are.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was Springfield, Massachusetts.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: So we need to come up with an indoor running around game.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: And Dr. Naismith created basketball.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: It was called basketball because the two hoops were peach baskets.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a defining part of 1891.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_03: Huge.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_03: Changed the world forever.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: So
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_03: I'm curious...
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_03: Because I did play basketball as a child,
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: but it was like some of the worst time I ever spent as a human being on this earth.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: I quit after I got my period at basketball practice.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, can I give one really...
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think you guys will like this.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: I also had a really traumatic experience playing baseball as a child.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: I was a sporty guy.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: I loved sports, but baseball was really hard for me.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: I have this really vivid memory of playing eight or nine-year-old baseball.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it was the first year where there was kids pitching to other kids.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: This kid accidentally Beamed me and it was scared me.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was like, it's this really traumatic thing.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, fuck man, that really hurt.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't like, I didn't like this.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's like the moment in my mind where I, I fell out of love with baseball.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I quit.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was the only basketball, only sport I didn't play growing up.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: About 20 years later,
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: the guy who beamed me,
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: whose name I'm not going to say because I want to respect his privacy,
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: would go and get in trouble for trying to kill RFK Jr.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_02: So do you think he did it on purpose?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: No, I don't think he did it.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, wait, which part?
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: I do think he tried to kill RFK Jr. on purpose.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think he tried to throw the baseball at me, no.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: You don't think he was exhibiting violent tendencies already?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: I mean...
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: No, I don't want to dox this guy,
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: but he went to our high school, Mabel, and he was not a- Are you serious?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: I can say his name, but you'll have to bleep it.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: I will bleep it.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it did seem like, you know, I wish him the best.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like maybe it was a bit of a manic episode, but- A bit.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's just interesting that he also beamed me in baseball.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: It is interesting.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: No, there's a lot there.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: So- You'll be dining out on that story for years to come, Harry.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's really compelling.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, not to make it about me, but I do love that it happened.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: He got what was coming for him.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Iconic.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, so baseball, basketball was not a, you didn't like basketball.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, God.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_03: I hate it.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I, now I like watching it.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: I just don't know what it was about playing.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I didn't like any sports, I guess.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't enjoy playing them.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_03: It was just so humiliating for me.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: I think being a girl,
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: it's really,
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: really humiliating to play sports in a way that like it's not when you're a boy.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: I just have to like it does feel that way.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: I coached a little basketball as a teenager and something I did not realize
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: about youth sports is that the way like when you're in the eight year old
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: to 12 year old zone,
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: the way puberty shakes out is that most women that age are like taller and bigger
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: and stronger than the men.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then it flips somewhere in the 13, 14 range.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I could just see all of this being very confusing.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's confusing.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: Your body is in the way, in a way that's new to you, and it's a lot to deal with, I think.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: I couldn't really play sports past fifth grade.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: You're just so embodied and also so disembodied.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, obviously I was also like a bookish child and just could not understand
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_03: the what was entertaining or fun about doing something that required me
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_03: to physically move.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_03: So you loved basketball from an early age.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: I did.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: I loved basketball from an early age.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: I was, I was, I was, yeah,
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: I just always was like,
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, like my, my, my parents enrolled me in playing basketball with kids.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: I went to this Jewish middle school,
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: but for some reason my parents enrolled me in the school team of
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: a different middle school.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: Not like with the school,
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: but like the sort of I don't know how to explain,
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: but the short answer is like basketball especially was like this open this world
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: to this whole other social universe.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it was both like I enjoyed being a and I was I was much better relatively
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: at basketball as like a 12 year old than I would eventually grow to be
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: because I also did not stop growing or I mean start growing.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: I did not stop growing.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, basketball, I was a huge part of my growing up.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I did always love the history of basketball too.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: I was a big nerd about who's the best of all time and all these fun debates and
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: the kind of history of the game.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: Unlike other sports, like basketball is one of the more...
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the most popular sport in America or whatever.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: American football is very popular in America and then also soccer as a global game.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: But basketball is an extremely narratively rich sport.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's really focused on the individual,
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: but enough within a team concept that you get a kind of interesting context
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: where it's not these...
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of indoor kids like tennis players who just like are alone all the day.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: You need to be like socialized enough,
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: but it's also like about expressing yourself in a way that football is more
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: about subverting yourself to the team.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's just always it's it's always kind of captivated me as as maybe somebody
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: who likes expressing myself, but also likes being part of a team.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's like it was like a great, great middle ground.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's so beautiful.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: And thank you.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: Totally.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_03: In 1891, James Naismith does this thing, which is invent basketball.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: I just wanted to kind of paint a picture of what else is going on in the world
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: because I feel like also basketball feels to me more contemporary
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_03: and also feels way more 20th century.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: So understanding it as a 19th century thing is complicated.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_03: But in 1891, we have Benjamin Harrison as president.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_03: Harrison Krinsky, kind of relevant to you.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_03: And Queen Victoria.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: I honestly do not remember Benjamin Harris as a president.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: He was not doing much.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_03: Unremarkable.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if he's like number one most forgotten,
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_03: but he's like definitely top 10 most forgotten.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_03: Madeline, are you okay?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you sound like you wanted to keep...
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: How would you calculate the most forgotten?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's like one of my favorite things because all we do is look at
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: the Wikipedia pages of presidents and there are these weird rankings.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: I just was like sort of swallowing that question, but it was a bubble to the surface.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't you forget?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's complicated.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: Well, Harrison is also an interesting president because he beats Grover Cleveland in
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_03: the 1888 presidential election,
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_03: and then he serves one term, and then Cleveland beats him in 1892.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: So he might actually be the most forgettable because his term is sandwiched by Cleveland.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe Biden's coming for him.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: I was going to say, who else did that happen to?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: You can't remember the most forgettable, so you can't calculate it.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's an unknowable, yeah.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's a really interesting,
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: you're taking a very interesting kind of philosophical angle here,
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: Madeline.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: These are the things that haunt me.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: I hope you'll join us for the rest of the episode.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_03: to be stuck on that one.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_03: So technology-wise,
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_03: You know,
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_03: it's interesting to think about the history of the telephone with the 1-800 number,
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_03: but in 1891 is when the patent was filed for the rotary dial phone,
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_03: which of course has now been eclipsed several times over as a phone technology.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_03: But that was huge because with the advent of the commercial telephone line,
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_03: it became really important to people to know how to dial or to be able
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: to dial easily without errors.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: So I thought that was interesting.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and Thomas Edison invents like a prototype of kind of an early film camera
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: and it's called the kinetoscope.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: And what I thought was interesting for our purposes too,
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_03: is that in 1894,
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: he made one of the first films with it,
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: which is of a fight between one guy named Leonard and one guy named Cushing.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I feel like the history of like the televisation of basketball and
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: of sports generally is important here.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's a huge part of the growth of the game,
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: like TV,
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: sport in general,
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: like these various advances in technology because it's like kind
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: of that's what allows basketball,
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: that's what allows all these sports to be the giant spectacles that they are is
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: because essentially the sort of economics of the TV rights are really important.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's good business.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: LeBron James can make $60 million.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: You forget that.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's why.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's because you can sell ads against this stuff and it's very valuable.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that will come up is you couldn't play basketball
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: without electric light,
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: which Edison had invented within the last decade in this period that we're talking
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: about.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's very new.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so like, you can't really have an indoor sport like that until that's invented.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't even consider that.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: But you're so right.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like, that's why they were like,
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: we got to come up with an indoor because I've always I've wondered that
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: where I'm like, why did they like?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody had tried to do an indoor sport before basketball, but that's so interesting.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_03: Or at least not an indoor sport at night.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: Or during the winter where there's not a lot of daylight.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the day is short.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: The rise of nighttime activity is a very 19th century thing because of
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_03: the industrialization of the world.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_03: Because also people are working all day.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_03: They're working 12 hours a day,
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_03: but they might still have some energy left at the end of the day and they want
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_03: to get their ya-ya's out, but they don't.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_03: They're not as tired perhaps as they might be if they were like working on a farm
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_03: and there was no light and you just go to bed or something.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: Like the fact that people want to do something at night is interesting.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_03: And also like on the television, I can't say this, the television version of sports.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_03: I was watching sports recently.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_03: I think I was watching the US Open and they like played a series of clips
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_03: that was like Famous football highlights from the last six decades.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_03: And so they were playing football clips from like the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_03: And it's just even amazing, like even from 20 years ago in our lifetime, the lack of definition.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's crazy.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: Like you see so much more of the sports now on TV or just in general,
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_03: like something I'd be interested to talk to you about is just like what like that,
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: like when they're able to analyze the footage now in sports that they used
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_03: to not be able to do.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's so much stuff there.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like,
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: Chuck Klosterman recently wrote a book called Football,
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was just called Football.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: And he makes all these arguments about football.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the arguments he makes is that football is the sort of,
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: like, perfect televisable, televisual sport.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's, like, exactly designed for basically modern linear television.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: The argument is that football is this kind of like
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: the way football is set up is it's extreme must see moments,
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: people crashing into each other and then like long breaths of exposition
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: where you're kind of like you can kind of do other stuff because it's TV
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: and you can sort of like then you get these this rhythm of like of sort
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: of passive list watching and then active watching and then passive watching
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: and active watching that has sort of with second screens
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: and iPhones also is like completely.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, uh, become even more important where,
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: where so much of content ends up being like a second screen experience.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: And, and, um, it,
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: you just, the, the,
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: you can't separate the popularity of these sports from
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: the specific technological ways in which they are consumed,
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: even down to like something as hard to almost like esoteric as like the rhythm of
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: the game or whatever,
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: like when you have to look or pay attention versus,
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: um, When you can look away, when you can look on your phone, when you can whatever.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: And even like certain sports,
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: you maybe are seeing elevated popularity because they look good in
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: a vertical orientation compared to a horizontal orientation because now
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: so much content is consumed through phones.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just crazy how powerful those forces are.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: I was also going to say, I feel like more people are watching tennis now than they used to.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, maybe that's just like my- No, no.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: 100%.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: But I grew up in a family that was obsessed with tennis and it was impossible
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: to see what was happening if you were watching it on TV.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: There was just no way to see where the ball was actually.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: And now you can see it so clearly.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: I think people are interested in it more.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, even down to get really nitty gritty is like,
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: There are certain places where the cameras can be on when you're broadcasting
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: the US Open or whatever.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: Influencers could have their iPhones out wherever.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you were getting these influencers taking videos of tennis from the baseline,
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: like from the crowd.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a really useful camera angle,
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: so much so that then ESPN was like, wait, we need a camera there.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: And put a camera there to simulate this,
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: not one-to-one,
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: but simulate kind of like They realized that there was demand for that
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: from influencers uploading stuff.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's really cool.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's crazy.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: That is amazing.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_03: And it's crazy how the sports are changing.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously,
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_03: we want to talk about betting and stuff and how that's changing sports throughout
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: the history of basketball.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: But as the medium through which you're consuming the sport changes,
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_03: the sport also changes over time.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_03: Totally.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_03: So I looked up like what else was happening in sports in 1891, just for context.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought it was interesting that the speaking of boycott
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_03: and Irish English tension,
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: but in 1891,
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_03: they introduced the penalty kick or it's like the penalty kick is first allowed
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: in soccer or football.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: But it's originally called the Irishman's motion.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_03: Which I thought was crazy.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it was very controversial, as you can kind of tell.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: Still is.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like the name or the act?
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think the act.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: I see.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't, I don't know.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Harry, maybe you understand Phyllis in there.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: the modern controversy around penalty kicks is they decide games,
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: like the World Cup games can be decided,
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: but it isn't quite a simulation of the game.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost like you're playing this side game that never actually happens in
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: the flow of play, where it's just a goalie and a person standing next to each other.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so people don't like that this...
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: Other side part of the game ultimately ends up being the most important part of the game.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of the controversy.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: But even that,
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: it's interesting to think about the idea of it's possible that
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: the reason penalty kicks were instituted is
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: because days are becoming more structured in life.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so you need a way for the game to end that wouldn't just be like,
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: we're going to play until one of us gives in a goal.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why this...
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: This sort of like rule advancement may have arised.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sort of speculating, but I could imagine it being something like that.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like you need the game to come to a conclusion because we're contorting
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: the industrial, you know.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's just something
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: that keeps coming up,
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: I guess,
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: through this is like one of the things that was in the book we were reading,
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: which was by Robert Peterson.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: Mabel and I read a book called Cages to Jump Shots or something.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: And he talks in the introduction about how kind of like people like to tell
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: the history of baseball because the game itself has like a sort of neat arc.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: And that basketball in the early days, especially had this like more of a melee mentality.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: So it was like harder to discuss.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like this,
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: like also the narrative arc of a soccer match,
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: like all of the ways that these sports games and the rules are actually constructing
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: a narrative is like really important.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: In the invention of basketball,
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_02: one of Naismith's like big things was like the timing of it and the,
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: you know, the sort of flow of the game.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: This is interesting.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_03: And like Naismith was at a point in the abundance of sports and recreations
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_03: that he was able to analyze their rules and analyze what made them successful.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_03: And so I feel like that's what makes basketball to me feel like a very 19th century sport.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas like baseball has like ancient roots or not ancient,
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_03: but like, yeah, like I did read about the history of baseball.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_03: Like basically people have been playing a version of baseball for like centuries,
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_03: but basketball requires like analyzing other sports in order to produce it.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_03: And also requires this like infrastructure to play it.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, like you need to have an indoor space.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: You need to have a building and you need to have light,
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_03: which are things that people didn't really have access to in the same way for most
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_03: of human history.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_03: And it's kind of like what we're talking about with watching sports is like
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: the medium is the message.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_03: And like basketball is also medium is the message in the same way,
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: because it's like it's the sportsman's sport.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what Naismith is like he's he literally has a Ph.D. in physical education.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: Which I wonder, I wrote in our notes, is that something you can still get?
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think yes.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to get an MFA in physical
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: education.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_02: They offer it somewhere.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: I know they do.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_03: So should we talk about Naismith a little bit?
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: He was born in 1861.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_03: So he was a ripe 30 years old in 1891.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_03: He was Canadian.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_03: And
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_03: This is a quote he spent,
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_03: I think from Wikipedia,
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_03: he spent his days outside playing catch,
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_03: hide and seek,
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_03: or duck on a rock,
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_03: a medieval game in which a person guards a large skipping stone
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_03: from opposing players who try to knock it down by throwing smaller stones at it.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_03: Are you guys familiar with this game?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know it had a name, but I have certainly played a version of this with my brother.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like that is reminding me of Kick the Can, which is a kind of similar.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: What do you do in that game?
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Same idea.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: You guard an object and the goal is for people to go and kick the object.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't heard of a throwing rocks thing, but it's still kind of at a high level.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're guarding and you're attacking.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: Got it.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to go play that after this.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, So in 1883, Naismith attends McGill and he was a star athlete there.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_03: He played football, lacrosse, rugby, soccer and gymnastics.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_03: I also thought like gymnastics played a role in a lot of this and like calisthenics
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_03: because the options,
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_03: the indoor sport options at the time were like doing cartwheels indoors
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_03: and like lifting weights and stuff.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: And it was like not good at entertaining boys enough.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I love that.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_03: So then the big thing that happens in the Naismith arc is that he leaves McGill
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_03: after having been their director of athletics, their first director of athletics.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_03: And he goes to study at the YMCA International Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_03: So the YMCA, the Young Men's Christian Association, is a relatively new organization.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_03: It was founded in 1844 in England.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_03: And its founding was based off of This fear that under industrial capitalism,
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_03: young men did not have enough healthy activities to do in big cities.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_03: So the options available to them before the invention of the YMCA was going
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: to brothels and taverns.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_03: So drinking and fucking.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really struck by how that almost directly mirrors
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: the so-called male loneliness epidemic of today.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: It really is the same thing.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, history repeats itself.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_02: You just had all these young boys moving to the city for these jobs,
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_02: leaving their families behind,
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: and nothing better to do than go to the brothel, go to the bar.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: But there's community in that, I will say.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: The men of today struggle more.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, interesting.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, because I was going to say the one difference is that men,
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: I guess, are purportedly moving to cities and not fucking them.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they're not doing either.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: They're
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: doing some third thing.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I knew what it was.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's really interesting.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: And like in the gender roles part,
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_03: it's interesting because the YMCA was originally founded for young men
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_03: who particularly worked in the fields of drapery and embroidery,
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: which I feel like we now consider to be Right.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_03: And the YMCA, I didn't, I'd never heard this term before.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_03: The YMCA is an offshoot of a larger religious movement called muscular Christianity.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that's what it was called at the time for the record.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if I was Christian, I would choose that kind.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like there are echoes of, I feel like I'm seeing muscular Christianity every day.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_02: We're talking about yesteryear,
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: which this is like,
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_02: that's like obviously women,
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_02: but it's sort of the same attitude as the trad wife,
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: like meat, tallow, beef lifestyle.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, totally.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: Or even the kind of like...
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: Not quite the clavicular manosphere,
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: but the sort of like you should, like almost the Jordan Peterson kind of thing.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like you should make your bed and lift weights and believe in God.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: Which doesn't seem that bad.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: There's more nefarious parts of it, but.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: No, totally.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's decently, again, for like wayward people.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's a pretty good place to start, you know?
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_03: So Naismith is at the YMCA and it's a terrible winter in Springfield, Massachusetts.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's very cold.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's dark.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's just not a good time.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_03: And the boys who are studying at the YMCA International Training School are going bananas.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_03: And everyone's complaining on the faculty that they're incredibly short tempered.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_03: And they have no way to get their ya-ya's out.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_03: And so Nate Smith's boss gives him a deadline.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_03: He says,
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_03: you have 14 days to create an indoor game that will provide,
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_03: quote, athletic distraction.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_03: And he was given some parameters.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: He was told to find a game that wouldn't take up too much space,
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_03: that would help athletes stay in shape in the winter,
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: and was fair for everyone and not rough.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_03: So what would you guys have come up with?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_03: If given this task.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: He had 14 days.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: You're giving us no time.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what I would say to the point about basketball is this sort of like one level
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: of abstraction in sport.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I always think about how soccer is the most intuitive sport.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you were just put like monkeys on a thing,
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: they'd be like, let's try to kick – let's see who can kick the ball in.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas basketball is just a much more abstracted sport.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: I would maybe do like some kind of fighting –
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: But it can't be rough.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, fuck.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: It can't be rough.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_02: Fail.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: Were you guys allowed to play dodgeball at your high school?
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, dodgeball would be good.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if we played at high school.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_02: It got banned from my high school.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: There was a really violent dodgeball tournament and it got banned from my Quaker high school.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: We were allowed to, well, we didn't have PE.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned that, Mabel.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, when I was looking you up, Harry,
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: before the show,
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: I was on our high school newspaper website and
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_03: I found an op-ed written by one
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_03: of our classmates about how the school should have instituted PE as a class,
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_03: which I thought was a controversial take.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you remember that op-ed.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: I can't say I remember that specific op-ed,
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: but I do remember the I remember the whole athletic credit situation.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: We kind of had a decentralized phys ed program.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_03: Which I never completed those requirements.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_03: I should have not been allowed to graduate, but I was grateful that I was.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it's funny that you just played sports and that's how you got the credit.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even know about that.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: I always thought it was this complicated game of trying to convince a teacher
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: that I swear I'm going to rock climbing.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: But you're saying that if you just played sports, you were exempt.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's interesting.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: Good to know if I could redo everything.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_03: And I regret to say I don't remember ever going to see you play basketball.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think I ever attended a single game.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_03: I'm really sorry.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's okay.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: What about soccer?
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because you and I played soccer
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: with our mutual friend, Sam Linkenberg.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_03: I did play one game of indoor soccer with you guys.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_03: I got thrown out because I was being too violent.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: You may have graduated at that point.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember that.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's really not what I was expecting you to say.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: You got thrown out for being too violent.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: I guess like you, I would have come up with that.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you should have played field hockey.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we had that, but yes.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: No, we didn't.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_01: My mom played college field hockey, though.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: I did play that for a season in sixth grade and it is fun.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_02: You get to hit other girls in the shins with a stick.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you do that now for free.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: I did it for free then too.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: You went pro.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: I was semi-pro in sixth grade.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so how did Naismith solve this puzzle of having to create a sport in 14 days
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_03: that is safe, pretty compact, and also not rough?
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_03: So here's what he does.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_03: He analyzes the other sports,
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_03: as I mentioned before, and he notices something about the ball.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: He notices that when you use a small ball, it often requires additional equipment.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_03: Say, a tennis ball requires a racket.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_03: A baseball requires
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: a bat.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: A field hockey puck requires a field hockey stick.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know the names of those.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: Ice hockey would be a puck.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so he's like, okay, it should be a big ball.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_03: And then I think he's aware of football and soccer,
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_03: but, and that's also a big ball, bigger ball.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_03: But because the players were, um,
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_03: what they were allowed to run with the ball in those sports,
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_03: which made it more violent because then you're chasing somebody else.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_03: So originally basketball,
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_03: one of the rules is that you can't run with the ball,
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_03: which I guess you still can't run with the ball, but you kind of like work around.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_03: And then he decides that one way to make it even safer is to put a goal high up
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_03: because if the goal is like at your level,
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_03: like in soccer,
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_03: then you're going to like pile up there and you can kind of like,
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_03: I guess, throw your body on the line.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_03: But if it's higher up, it's harder to do that.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_03: And it makes the goal unguardable too.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_03: There's not a goalie in basketball, I believe.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_03: There's not.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_03: So he he looks for a ball.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_03: I think he finds a soccer ball and then he needs something to he needs goals.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_03: So he asked the janitor at the YMCA if he has any boxes.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_03: And the guy's like, no, I have peach baskets.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's why basketball is called basketball and not box ball,
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_03: which is a line in the book
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_02: just to jump shots that I enjoyed.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's an amazing read.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_02: I also do like imagining him sitting there for a week going,
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_02: okay, small ball, stick, small ball, stick, big ball.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: It is, yeah, he like created it from first principles.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's awesome.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's also interesting because my grandma is British and she used to play netball.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_03: Do you guys know about netball?
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_03: Is that lacrosse?
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's like British basketball basically.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've seen it.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's very confusing to me.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's more like you're throwing a volleyball into a net with no, it doesn't have an opening.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_03: So it's more like original baskets.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's what the baskets looked like when there were all these drawings of the original baskets.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_02: And they didn't have a, it didn't go through.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then there was like a string and the referee would pull the string and
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_02: the ball would like shoot back out.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: So cool.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: That is cool.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_03: I also loved that there was a referee and an umpire originally.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I didn't know that.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_03: What would be the difference between them?
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_03: They did different things.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know now what the difference is between those terms.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, in basketball,
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: in professional basketball now,
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: there are three referees, but they're all basically the same.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_03: And where do those guys come from?
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: How do you mean?
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you...
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: I dream of being an NBA ref.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: How do I do that?
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think you work your way up in like you ref high school and then you ref college
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: and then you ref the NBA.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: Something that is interesting about the economics of reffing is one, they have a union.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's a fairly good union.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: But then two,
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: it has to be a job that pays a lot of money because if it doesn't,
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: It would be very easy for refs to get seduced by gambling.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this thing that you need to be paying these refs enough to
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: where it would be a really,
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: really bad move to take a gambling debt because
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: that would compromise the integrity
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: of the game or whatever.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I think you get paid a lot.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_03: So you can't buy a ref?
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there have been some scandals in the course of the NBA,
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: but they try to make it pretty hard.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody has their price.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_03: Well, when basketball was originally becoming a professional thing
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_03: and teams were traveling,
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_03: I read that it would be that the home team would choose the ref and
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_03: the travel team would choose the ump to make it more level so
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_03: that you couldn't just choose your home ref to call it in your favor.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_03: So Naismith comes up with this sport and the first game is staged in December 1891, allegedly.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_03: And there are nine players on each team.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_03: And for a long time in the history of basketball,
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_03: there's some uncertainty about how many people should be on the team.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: There's a part in this book where they play a game of 40 on 40.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_02: Pretty intense.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_02: I can't even imagine that many people.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_02: And guess how many?
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: Harry, guess what the score at the end of that game was?
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to decide if it was really high scoring or really low scoring.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think I'm going to go low scoring.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was like 20 to 14.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was 0-0.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that's important too.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_03: Like the early basketball years, it was a very low scoring game.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_03: Peterson is an NBA player of today would not recognize this sport.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know when it became that one basket was two points,
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_03: but the scores would be 1-0, 3-0 at
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: the end.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: It requires a great deal,
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: even just the fact that there's a bottom of the crate and it doesn't go through,
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: that requires an incredible amount of finesse to throw it Just
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: so it won't bounce out of the crate.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: There were some other sort of critical differences.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_02: There were no backboards.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_02: And the ball was made of leather and had laces like a football.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: So it was unpredictable when you threw it.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_02: And if the laces hit the rim,
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_02: there was really no way to know what was going to happen, basically.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there's these amazing quotes from early pro basketball players who were like,
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: you just never knew what the ball was going to do.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the games would be like two to four.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: really interesting.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that inside those leather pieces that were sewn together was
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_03: a bladder like from an animal that had been inflated.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, it was a rubber bladder.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_03: It was a rubber bladder.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_02: Oh.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: When was the rubber bladder?
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: I looked into this.
• 50:56
  Okay.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was scared to look into it.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to know.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: I love calling it a pigskin.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: I do too.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: You really got to
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_02: think about what you're saying.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_03: Well, also,
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know, Harry,
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_03: if we've shared this,
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_03: but Madeline and I met doing a master's in material culture,
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_03: and I just felt like the material culture of basketball is so ripe for analysis.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_03: All the limitations,
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_03: like the fact that it's not called box ball,
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_03: but it's called basketball, that's because of what was available.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_03: They're peach baskets because they're in Massachusetts where there's a stone fruit
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: crop.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_03: All these things.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I really want to talk about the architecture of basketball
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_03: because it's all determined by Basically the arrangement of the YMCA gym
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_03: in Springfield, Massachusetts.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: And just that sort of material...
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: Analysis also ends up really adjusting on a macro level
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: where like basketball takes hold in cities because it's a very cheap sport,
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: both from a like macro,
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: you can like city plan a bunch of basketball courts and it's very cheap to play.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like you just need one basketball and there's public thing,
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: which then creates like,
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: there's a lot more basketball in urban environments with more black people.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: And like that, that it takes hold in the black community.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: But then there's like,
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: In the 50s and 60s,
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: all these colleges weren't recruiting black athletes,
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: even though because it would take a hold in these urban environments,
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of the black athletes were a lot better than their white counterparts,
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: whatever.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: So that kind of balloons out
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: because of the kind of confines of the material conditions as well.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_03: I was reading, too,
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_03: that it was much cheaper for an average high school to put together
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_03: a basketball team than it was to put together a football team.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_03: And even all the specialized equipment that we think of as being required
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_03: for basketball, that came so much later.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_03: The first basketball shoe was invented in the late 1890s, and it was unique.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_03: It was a canvas high-top shoe with laces and a rubber sole.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's really cute.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's adorable.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_03: But you don't need that.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_03: Like the first players,
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_03: the Naismith team,
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_03: they're wearing these adorable little leather like ballet flats basically.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_03: So now I want to read you this quote from Naismith about the first game
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_03: because there's more in here.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_03: So this is me as Naismith.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, maybe Harry, you should read it because you're a man.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: Wait, hold on.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: Let me pull up the dog.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: Here, I'll put it in the chat.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_03: Read this.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_03: Read this man.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: When Mr.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: Stubbins brought up the peach basket to the gym,
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: I secured them on the inside of the railing of the gallery.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: This was about 10 feet, three meters from the floor, one at each end of the gymnasium.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_01: I then put the 13 rules on the bulletin board just behind the instructor's platform,
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_01: secured a soccer ball, and awaited the arrival of the classmate.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: The class did not show much enthusiasm, but followed my lead.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: I then explained what they had to do to make goals,
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: tossed the ball up between the two center men,
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: and tried to keep them somewhat near the rules.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: Most of the fouls were called for running with the ball,
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: though tackling the man with the ball was not uncommon.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: That paints a very vivid picture.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: I can imagine what's going on here.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so cool to invent something,
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: like to ask someone to do something for the first time is wild.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking about like, yeah, the, the,
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: what a kind of
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: absence of kind of like Understanding of self-consciousness,
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_01: that's the word I'm looking for,
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: to just be like,
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: try something new,
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: this crazy,
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: weird, awkward sport, and then everybody's just like, okay, sounds good, I'll do it.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like that's not so common anymore.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: No, well,
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_02: also something that comes up a lot is because it was so uncomfortable to not be able
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: to run with the ball,
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_02: the way they were playing was they would catch the ball
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_02: and you would basically be planted.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so the invention of dribbling went through many phases,
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_02: including like a period where they were kind of like volleyball,
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_02: bouncing it over their heads rather than dribbling it on the ground.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's so awesome to think about like people inventing ways to do that on their own.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_03: And the double dribble is really important to early basketball.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_03: I don't even remember what a double dribble is in real basketball.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: Harry, what is that?
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's basically like once you stop dribbling, you cannot start dribbling again.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_03: You can't?
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_01: Not without passing it to somebody else.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so I have the ball.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_03: I run down to my side of the court.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_03: Dribble, dribble, dribble.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_03: I'm dribbling, dribbling.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_03: I stop to see where Madeline is, and she's far away.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_03: I have to throw it to her.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_03: I can't keep dribbling over to her or something.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, yes.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_03: I actually didn't remember that's what double dribble was.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know that.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_03: That's why I was so bad.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_03: You're allotted.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: You're allotted two steps.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you do that pivot thing, right?
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: You have like one foot planted.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_02: I can still picture people doing this sort of like planted,
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_02: holding the ball,
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_02: not knowing what to do,
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_02: which is what I think the entire thing looked like
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_02: when Naismith was putting it together.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to release some photos when we post this episode
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: of myself playing basketball because there's actually like a huge archive
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: and I just think it would be good to share.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's lovely.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_03: So as you noted as Naismith, tackling happened in the first game.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_03: And he goes on in a different interview to say there ended up being a free-for-all
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_03: in the middle of the gym floor.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_03: And at the end of the game,
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_03: there was several black eyes,
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_03: one separated shoulder, and one player knocked unconscious.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_03: So he really failed to meet his requirements of safety.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was really fun and everybody loved it.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's like that's maybe boys will be boys.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like that part of me is just feels like if the problem was
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_01: that these crazy kids were like cooped up all day,
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: just like any sport was going to end up in a fight.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_01: Just sort of by the nature of the necessity of the thing.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, okay, well, that's the you got to charge that to the game.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like this.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_00: Go ahead.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: No, you go ahead.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was just going to say
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: that this topic brings up these like huge philosophical questions
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_00: about why anyone does anything.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was about to bring up like a really sort of well,
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_02: I basically like we didn't get too much into muscular Christianity.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the things that it's combating is this obsession amongst
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_02: the working classes of the period with animal blood sports like cockfighting
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_02: and dogfighting.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_02: And there's like a real moral concern over what happens when you have a generation
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_02: of young men like betting on cockfighting.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so they're trying to- That's really interesting.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, promote these like healthier ways to get these violent tendencies out by going
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_02: and doing sport and like wearing yourself out instead of this like really,
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_02: really violent.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's like not- The thing I read didn't really talk about boxing,
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_02: which I would think would actually be the manifestation of that
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_02: that would be most concerning,
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_02: where it's like human on human,
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_02: but this sort of like bloodlust that these young men were thought to have.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, or it's interesting that the panic is around the – right, that boxing is fine.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that there's like – because that makes sense.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean sort of like war is fine.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's the idea of like the passivity.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's a panic around the men being reduced to like passive consumers,
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: which – To bring it to, like,
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_01: the current day,
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: there's a lot of,
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think, panic around how passive, like, gambling on your phone makes you.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: It would be interesting if,
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_01: like, in 10 years, there's this, like, don't go gamble, go play movement.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_01: That would be, like, history repeating itself a little bit.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_03: Well, also,
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_03: but the thing with boxing is that, like,
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_03: boxing is an ancient...
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_03: Boxing and, like,
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_03: other types of,
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_03: like, staged fighting are, like, ancient... Boxing
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_02: is the original sport.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and, like...
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_02: The first job, boxing is the first sport.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I'm just thinking about, like,
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_03: I recently was learning a lot about Oscar Wilde,
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_03: who notoriously had an affair with this, like,
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_03: other gay guy whose dad had, like,
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_03: invented the formal,
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_03: like, the sort of current rules of British boxing, which still rule the world.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_03: And it was a gentleman's sport, you know?
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_03: Like, and even if you've watched, like, Bridgerton, there are boxing matches that people go to.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_03: And it's, like, it is, like, in some ways a pathway to legitimacy.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_03: And...
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_03: Madeline's been making me watch Gangs of New York,
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_03: which I'm watching in piecemeal increments right now.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm just thinking about like,
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_03: I think there's a scene at the beginning where they're like,
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_03: you guys, gladiator rules.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's just, it goes back really, really deep.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_02: But gladiator rules means like you can bite and like knives are allowed.
• 1:00:25
  Right.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I get there's like pomp and circumstance to battling.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's this thing that Yeah, yeah, that's not how I associate fighting with.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever gotten into a real fight?
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: Other than being hit by that baseball?
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, not really.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: When I was in college, when the first Conor McGregor fight instilled such...
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: Virality in my college frat that a impromptu slap boxing tournament was scheduled
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: at two in the morning that night.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I participated in that tournament.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: But that was more of an open hand slapping fight.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_03: Did you did you slap or get slapped or both?
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I, but I kind of,
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think I lost,
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't like get my ass beat,
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_01: but like my friend Jonathan Sussman, I, I would say one by decision.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't win by knockout, but he, he, he outdueled me.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I have to say, well, sorry, level one final thing on this.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: It, it, is so thrilling to,
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: I was like,
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: so we were just,
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: it was like, we had like all, we had not literally all ripped lines.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_01: It was as if we had all ripped lines all night because we were like,
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: stayed up basically all night being like, that was so sick.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: We've got to fight more.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_02: We have to fight more.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_02: I've like,
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_02: I've never been,
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_02: I've never had the fight,
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_02: but I've witnessed fist fights a few times and it is like, it's electric.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's nothing
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_00: else to say.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_00: You're screaming.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: As you said before, you're the girl screaming.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the girl screaming.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like we're doing like an anthropological interview with a straight man.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm fascinated.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_00: We need to have you on like once a quarter to like discuss a male topic.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm happy.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_00: I would love that.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's really important for us.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's good to remember.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, did you guys read Naismith's 13 original rules?
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_00: I read like the first five and then I got bored and
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_02: I sort of papered off.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of had the similar,
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: I was finding them in a sort of combination of like it's old English
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_01: and I couldn't understand what he was saying.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_03: They're complicated.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, the first rule is the ball may be thrown in any direction with one or both hands.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_03: Is that still true in basketball?
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_02: This is the kind of thing that I'm getting bored even as you just said that.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_03: The ball may be batted in any direction with one or both hands, never with a fist.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_03: That was my favorite line.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_03: You can't punch the ball.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's still allowed mostly, yeah.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_03: A player cannot run with the ball.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_03: The player must throw it from the spot on which he catches it.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_03: Allowance to be made for a man who catches the ball when running at a good speed
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_03: if he tries to stop.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: They've changed that rule, but they've kept the spirit of it.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know more, but we have 13 more rules.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_02: not reading them
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_00: all.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_02: We will all die.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_03: Really what I want to say is, Again,
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_03: to the material culture,
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_03: my favorite is the like document itself,
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_03: the hand typed and then his sort of annotations and not to jump to the sort
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_03: of controversy, which I know we're all interested to discuss.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_03: But so these are the 13 typewritten rules.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_03: He's written basketball, two words, both capitalized on the top of it.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_03: And then he's written a note at the bottom.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_03: And this document's interesting for a couple of reasons.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_03: One is that this was sold at auction for $4.3 million dollars.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_03: And donated to the University of Kansas,
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_03: which is where Dr.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_03: Naismith ended up coaching and teaching for the rest of his career after he left
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_03: the YMCA.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like enshrined at the university, apparently.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you've been... Well, in Kansas, yeah, has a...
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's...
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_01: The gym is called Rep Arena.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like, they have their own real history with basketball that we can't get into on this show.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like...
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's a big part.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like, they have kind of like...
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: Perpetuated lore as being one of the ancestral homes of basketball.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's interesting that like that's what everybody wants to be.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_03: And the kind of smoking gun of the controversy
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_03: of basketball's origins is this erasing mark on the bottom of the rules.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_03: So Naismith has written first draft of basketball rules hung in the gym that
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_03: the boys might have.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_03: I can't read that word.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_03: That the boys learned the rules.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_03: And then it says, December 1891, James Naismith.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_03: And then it very clearly underneath December, you can see that something has been erased.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_03: And also underneath 1891, you can see that he's erased and rewritten the date.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_03: The date once read February 1892.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_03: And then he replaced it with December 1891.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_03: Which is extremely important to those people who are from
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: Herkimer, New York.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_02: Home of the Herkimer Diamond.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_01: What did you guys think when I sent you this article?
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's one of my favorite, like I was revisiting it today and I was like giggling.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like the funniest article.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's so good.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's just like full of these like, well,
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_02: Herkimer in New York is known for Herkimer diamonds,
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_02: which are these fake diamonds that you can go get yourself from a cave.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_02: But I was, so when I say this, it's a pun.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm explaining my joke before I tell.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_02: It was just full of these little gems.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_02: It was, like, so, like,
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_02: the last woman who was hung,
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_02: who was ever hung in America was,
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_02: like, hung in the town square and hurt her out of nowhere.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's just, like, amazing.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: And, of course, like, the man at the center of it all.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like, the fact that this man.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_02: Who's a human calculator, right?
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's such a good,
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_01: like the lead to it being like,
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_01: there's a guy who's telling you that actually basketball was invented in Herkimer,
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: New York.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_01: But in case you don't trust him, how about this?
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_01: He's the human calculator.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_01: What the fuck are you talking about?
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_03: And this line in the first paragraph,
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_03: between bites of two eggs,
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_03: three pancakes,
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_03: and a ham slice the size of a
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_00: paperback, he politely defied accepted American lore.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike the stuffing of the pancakes in the mouth while making this.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's crazy.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_03: So his name is Scott Flansburg, but he's known as the human calculator.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_01: Which is also, I mean, Scott Flansburg.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_03: You literally you would think
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_02: this is made up.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_02: So also like what he like can do addition or something.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's like not.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_02: No, I think it's not really impressive.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the other, I mean, the subtext is that he has autism.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_01: They're like,
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_01: he's like,
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_01: they meet you and,
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_01: or one of the other anecdotes in here is like,
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: it's like, he has a habit of when he meets you, asking you what day you were born.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then he can tell on his head what day of the week that was.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_02: I had a cab driver who could do that once.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_02: It was impressive.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, it's incredibly impressive.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, uh, uh,
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_03: It's amazing.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_03: And it's so cool.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_03: I love the moment in the article when nine-year-old Scott Flansburg is in school and
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_03: then realizes that he can process numbers at a breathtaking speed.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_02: He awakes to his power.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's like Spider-Man.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_03: So Scott Flansburg,
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_03: for complicated reasons having to do with the loss of a family member and
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_03: the COVID-19 pandemic,
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_03: becomes extremely passionate about the idea that basketball was actually invented by
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_03: a teenager in Herkimer, New York, who was throwing cabbages into a basket.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_03: And that they played the first game in 1890, I think.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_03: Which is way before the first game happened in the Naismith story.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's way, way earlier.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_03: My favorite part of the article,
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_03: there's so many favorite parts,
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_03: is the Basketball Hall of Fame historian and curator
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_03: whose official statement was no comment.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's so good.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's a real threat.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_02: I like this.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_02: This bit where Ian Naismith says he's ready to kick some ass.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'm 260 pounds.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody can touch me.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then the journalist starts the next paragraph with George Foste,
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_02: who weighed about 300 pounds at the time.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_01: So awesome.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_01: And who knows, right?
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's one of life's unanswerable questions.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_02: I guess the thing about this article that I was thinking about is
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_02: at what point does throwing something into something,
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_02: which I think is a pretty natural human impulse, become the game of basketball?
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great question.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's like those diagrams that go from like a tadpole to a monkey.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, where is the basketball along that human chain?
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it's true.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's also interesting because like no matter what,
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_03: Herkimer is important to the history of basketball because basketball blew up in
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_03: the Northeast originally.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_03: It was like a local empire very quickly.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_03: The fact And I think we should talk about that, like the early professional leagues.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_03: So basketball quickly spreads to other YMCAs.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_03: And so there's like, you know, leagues are forming between different YMCAs.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_03: One of my favorite things that Madeline and I were texting about
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_03: before was it's not just at YMCAs, it's also at Oh my god, that's amazing.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_00: For those who are listening,
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_00: it's just for some reason like the lowest resolution image of all time
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_03: that it just says Hebrews in like really janky font and then a Star of David.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it looks like an Israeli flag, but that was the spas.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_03: And what's interesting, Harry,
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_03: for the San Francisco of you is that the guy who founded the spas ended up starting
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_03: the Philadelphia Warriors, which then ultimately became the Golden State Warriors.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many funny things here.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_01: The change to spas and the, quote, Wandering Jews period.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_02: Is that why they were called the Wanders?
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_02: I was obsessed with the team names.
• 1:12:10
  SPEAKER_02: There were the New York Wanders and I couldn't figure it out.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_02: That's probably it.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, no, a lot of people, a lot of, a lot of, well, so there's this big, um,
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_01: Debate in kind of super contemporary basketball around like how much do you value
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_01: the history of the game as it relates to like who the current NBA players like.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_01: And a great example is for the Philadelphia Warriors,
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game.
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like the most anybody's ever scored.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this kind of this question of like,
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_01: well, how much do you consider that when you're like, who's the best player ever?
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_01: Do you say him because he around his time?
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_01: Or do you say all these people?
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that People who are dismissive,
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_01: as I am one of them,
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_01: of the old game,
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_01: is they like to be like, well, he was playing against firefighters and plumbers.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because the idea is that all these people actually had part-time jobs, or full-time jobs.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_02: So you have a classist response to that.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's what you're saying.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_01: But what I should be saying,
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_01: this is why I'm saying this,
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_01: is what I should be saying, is he was playing against Jews.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's really what it was.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_01: I should be more...
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_01: More specific.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_01: Anti-Semitic.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's a better way to phrase it.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_02: Harry, you can do it all.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I was interested in the kind of like,
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_03: how do you compare question because that was coming up a lot in the Cages
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_03: to Jumpshot book.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I also kept,
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_03: while researching basketball,
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_03: I kept searching on the internet and on Spotify audiobooks being history
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_03: of basketball.
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_03: And then it was just a history of the last 30 years of NBA players.
• 1:14:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, can we go deeper, please?
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I think Peterson's argument is basically
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_03: a modern NBA player would not recognize this game or anyone who was playing.
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_03: And I think we should talk about height because this really was killing me.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's so funny.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_03: So Naismith puts the basketball hoop, the basket, sorry, the basket at 10 feet.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_03: And pretty quickly people are like,
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_03: it's helpful to be tall to play this game,
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_03: which I love that that, again, that's something that had to be discovered.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:14:36
  SPEAKER_02: But there was like, There was a quote in it that was like nobody was really that tall.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_02: Tall was like 5'10".
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_02: And there was a quote from a guy who was playing at the time who I think said he was like 6'1".
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_02: That was like about what tall meant.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, if you were 6'4", your parents put you in a closet.
• 1:14:54
  SPEAKER_02: You would never go out and play basketball.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_02: Because you were a freak.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's likely that the average height during basketball's first 50 years was under 6 feet.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, my God.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 1:15:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so, I don't know, Harry.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe you'd still be pro.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, that's why I am so dismissive not along class lines.
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's more along sort of like health science lines.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Height is the health.
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Why are people taller?
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I always assumed.
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's like they're like eating better.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think there are more nutrients.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_03: I don't really know either.
• 1:15:47
  SPEAKER_00: So long before players were over
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_03: six feet tall,
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_03: the Trenton basketball team becomes the first professional team.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_03: Their first season is 1896-97.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_03: And
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's interesting because they had started out as a team at the Trenton YMCA
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_03: and it was very controversial when these teams go pro because the YMCA is like,
• 1:16:08
  SPEAKER_03: you can't be getting paid to do this fun recreation that's supposed to be good
• 1:16:11
  SPEAKER_03: for you.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_03: And Madeline and I were talking a little bit about this before.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_03: Like, what does it mean to be a professional athlete in terms of this history of Christianity?
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, well, it makes me think of like, because one of the early ways that I don't get it.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_01: I don't get it.
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_01: The Harlem Globetrotters are basically the most famous barnstorming team of all time.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_01: We don't think of it as such,
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_01: but they are essentially doing barnstorming, which is almost like a circus.
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_01: You take your show on the road, and you're like, we're the Trenton YMCA team.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_01: We'll go to Des Moines, Iowa, and we will play the Des Moines, Iowa YMCA team in a kind of...
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Scheduled event of us showing how good we are,
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_01: and you guys get your local five guys to try to beat us, and it's this whole event.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_01: We sell tickets, basically.
• 1:17:27
  SPEAKER_01: I see.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there was like a door take, it seemed like.
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_02: It was reminding me of The Wrestler, like the movie The Wrestler.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's it.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's the thing.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_01: It looks a lot more like these older ideas of like standup comedy or
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_01: or traveling plays and stuff like it was way more grounded in in that.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like the show is the we are doing recreation at such a high level
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_01: that it's compelling to watch basically.
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_02: And it probably was really fun.
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's like circus, too.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_03: The skills that people...
• 1:18:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's acrobatic.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_03: In that way,
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_03: basketball is not that much of a diversion from the history
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_03: of entertainment more broadly.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's like Punch and Judy, the puppet show that has been a hit since...
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_03: Like the Renaissance, which is basically like punches Judy, you know?
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_03: And like that's when the guys,
• 1:18:30
  SPEAKER_03: when the basketball players 40 on 40 start beating each other up
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_03: and scoring zero points, it's still entertaining.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, I don't know.
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's also where an interesting,
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_01: it's probably like an,
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_01: or not probably,
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_01: it is kind of this early place where Sport
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_01: professionalization
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_01: and like marketing comes in where like you get
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_01: the there's this there's this old there's a story of this San Francisco team.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_01: That was called, I think, the...
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was an all-Chinese barnstorming team called, I think, the Hongwar Qs, I believe.
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Hongwar Qs.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_01: And there was this whole marketing apparatus around them as they would, like, come.
• 1:19:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like, wow, look at this Chinese basketball team.
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_01: And they play in this crazy way and, like, come watch them.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_01: There was no way of telling if they were actually the best.
• 1:19:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was just, like...
• 1:19:36
  SPEAKER_01: They had a good promoter, essentially.
• 1:19:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that has kind of changed now with leagues where the goal is to kind of find out
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_01: who objectively is the best team.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas before it was just like, we're exciting.
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_01: You should pay for us.
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:19:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_02: There was a story in this book.
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember if it was the Celtics or the like the Globetrotters
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_02: when they were actually like playing With the possibility of losing.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_02: But one of them had like a kind of manager marketing guy who was traveling with them.
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_02: And he brought a bunch of pennants that said world champion on them.
• 1:20:21
  SPEAKER_02: And he would,
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_02: if they lost,
• 1:20:25
  SPEAKER_02: he would recoup the like money that they lost by selling the pennant to
• 1:20:29
  SPEAKER_02: the winning team being like, you guys are better than us.
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_02: So you get our pennant, but you just have to pay me $50.
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, now you're the world champion.
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_02: And now you're the world champion.
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the scam.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's really funny.
• 1:20:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, exactly.
• 1:20:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's also that gets into the kind of tribalism thing there,
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_01: which is a huge part of professional sports now.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you care about the team near you and you're able to make tons of...
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's the sort of irrational thing that still carries into modern sports
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_01: that you like...
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_01: This is a tangent,
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_01: but it's like sports teams,
• 1:21:12
  SPEAKER_01: people will literally pay taxes or cities will be like,
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_01: we will pay taxpayer money to fund some billionaire stadium,
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_01: all wrapped up basically in the idea that I love the Warriors
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_01: because I grew up near San Francisco, which is kind of a funny thing.
• 1:21:34
  SPEAKER_01: In almost every other element of politics, I think people aren't really thinking like that.
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody wants to invest in their communities otherwise.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of amazing, honestly.
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I lived in Detroit for a period,
• 1:21:48
  SPEAKER_02: and the fact that they built a football stadium in downtown Detroit
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_02: when there is nothing else,
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_02: it's just incredible that they got people to agree to that.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_03: That took a long time.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_03: The tribalism took a long time to develop because in the early professional leagues,
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_03: everybody was jumping ship from their home team to go play for another team
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_03: that would pay them a little bit more money.
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_03: So you couldn't be like,
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_03: I'm rooting for my team or rooting for this player because
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_00: the teams were
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_00: so inconsistent for a long time.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_02: Something else, I mean,
• 1:22:27
  SPEAKER_02: maybe this brings us back to this sort of question of modern sports betting,
• 1:22:31
  SPEAKER_02: but the problem with paying them in the minds of the sort of YMCA,
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_02: like muscular Christianity cohort, was that it's ungentlemanly.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_02: If you're playing for money, then it's not a gentleman's game.
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like I hear echoes of that now in the concern.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not like pro sports betting,
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_02: but like the concern about the way that parlay is changing the game and like
• 1:22:57
  SPEAKER_02: the they're encouraging like sort of these you don't have to throw the whole game,
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_02: but you can like behave badly.
• 1:23:06
  SPEAKER_02: And there is a moral question that it's creating about the integrity of the players
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_02: that seems related to this question at the beginning of if we're paying you $5
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_02: a game, is that ruining your moral investment in the outcome?
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_01: No, there's a huge...
• 1:23:26
  SPEAKER_01: There's a huge, yeah, people are obsessed.
• 1:23:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of get it.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_01: I get why.
• 1:23:31
  SPEAKER_01: But people are obsessed with maintaining a purity of sport at various levels.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, a ton of ground has been given.
• 1:23:40
  SPEAKER_01: People are paying exorbitant about the money to play.
• 1:23:43
  SPEAKER_01: But people are still obsessed with this idea and obsessed with the idea of amateurism.
• 1:23:49
  SPEAKER_01: In our lifetime,
• 1:23:50
  SPEAKER_01: that's been a huge change in the college football and college basketball
• 1:23:54
  SPEAKER_01: and all this stuff where like,
• 1:23:56
  SPEAKER_01: There was basically until maybe five or six years ago,
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_01: there was this real understanding of amateurism such
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_01: that college athletes were not getting paid, and now they get paid lots of money.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_01: I see both sides of it,
• 1:24:11
  SPEAKER_01: but what is definitely true is this idea of amateurism has been just nuked.
• 1:24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody thinks that there are amateur athletes anymore.
• 1:24:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:24:21
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, even like I have a cousin who is in high school who is very good at hockey
• 1:24:26
  SPEAKER_02: and is going to be recruited.
• 1:24:27
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like they've known that since he was 11 years old.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's not there was no point at which he was ever not going to play hockey.
• 1:24:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's crazy to me.
• 1:24:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's a kid in my mind.
• 1:24:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he's the sweetest guy.
• 1:24:40
  SPEAKER_03: There was also a big article in New York Magazine a couple of weeks ago,
• 1:24:43
  SPEAKER_03: which was about all the pay to play league's In all children's sports,
• 1:24:49
  SPEAKER_03: like I think the headline was like pay to play childhood.
• 1:24:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't know if you were on like a travel team or something like that, Harry,
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_03: but like I had a sibling who was and I always thought that was it was just crazy,
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_03: like the amount of devotion and intensity required of a child.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's crazy.
• 1:25:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's there's there's all that kind of stuff.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's also a thing,
• 1:25:09
  SPEAKER_01: a kind of developing thing in
• 1:25:12
  SPEAKER_01: in professional men's professional basketball is basketball.
• 1:25:17
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things,
• 1:25:18
  SPEAKER_01: one of the ways in the 2000s,
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_01: especially like the end of the 2010s,
• 1:25:22
  SPEAKER_01: whatever, like was that basketball sold itself as this like cool urban sport, right?
• 1:25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was like Allen Iverson is this guy.
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_01: He's cool,
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_01: but he's like kind of basically like,
• 1:25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Taking black culture and being like, look how cool this is.
• 1:25:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why you should watch basketball is because we're the coolest parts of
• 1:25:43
  SPEAKER_01: the black culture.
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, also whatever.
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's complicated because they were also like not wanting him to have tattoos or whatever.
• 1:25:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was a fraught relationship.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_01: As all this money is getting poured into the youth sports,
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_01: a strange thing is happening, which is like basketball is...
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_01: And now a middle class sport like it is no longer this or it's like
• 1:26:10
  SPEAKER_01: an upper middle class sport like it's fucking hell expensive to play basketball at
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_01: the professional levels like there's something like 30 of
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_01: the 400 professional basketball players in the NBA.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Their parents were professional basketball players, which also is a genetics thing, whatever.
• 1:26:28
  SPEAKER_01: But it's also like they're millionaires.
• 1:26:32
  SPEAKER_01: These are kids who are less and less,
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_01: I should say,
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_01: the sport that sold itself as this urban,
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_01: it can just be you in a basketball,
• 1:26:43
  SPEAKER_01: you don't need all this stuff, sport is quietly essentially not that anymore.
• 1:26:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it makes for, there's all kinds of contradictions in that.
• 1:26:55
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the, and then these players are also like not allowed to be kids anymore.
• 1:27:01
  SPEAKER_01: They're like professionalized at 11 years old such that they are thought of
• 1:27:08
  SPEAKER_01: as professionals and treated like everything they say could be used against them,
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_01: which is kind of true from 12 to 13.
• 1:27:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that makes for very boring athletes.
• 1:27:18
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this crisis of like, well, where are all the cool athletes?
• 1:27:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, well, because they're getting sanded down.
• 1:27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like they don't get to be cool.
• 1:27:27
  SPEAKER_02: They never got to like live a real life.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:27:30
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_02: And they're so media trained.
• 1:27:32
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, like the other sort of interesting thing in this book was about like
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_02: the first endorsement deal ever.
• 1:27:39
  SPEAKER_02: Which was in 1901 and it was this team that,
• 1:27:44
  SPEAKER_02: it was the New York Wanders, the Wandering Jews as I now like to call them.
• 1:27:50
  SPEAKER_01: The Jewish team had the first
• 1:27:52
  SPEAKER_02: few doors to it.
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_02: Someone had to say it.
• 1:27:57
  SPEAKER_02: They were paid $5 and got a free sample of the product.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_02: And the product was a Hood Laboratories spring tonic,
• 1:28:07
  SPEAKER_02: which I looked up and I think it was basically a sarsaparilla drink,
• 1:28:10
  SPEAKER_02: which is like, you know, whatever, like a bitters type thing.
• 1:28:13
  SPEAKER_02: And they were mocked so relentlessly for it that they never did it again.
• 1:28:18
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like another like,
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_02: you know, 20 or 30 years before another team would do an endorsement deal.
• 1:28:24
  SPEAKER_02: And now it's like, I'm sure you're familiar with this, Mabel.
• 1:28:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think you probably aren't.
• 1:28:29
  SPEAKER_02: So even like athletes who are not going to play professionally,
• 1:28:32
  SPEAKER_02: like Yale athletes have these profiles online and you can like go to this website
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_02: and like get them to show up at your car dealership for $80 or something
• 1:28:41
  SPEAKER_02: and they list their prices.
• 1:28:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's almost like, what's the thing you're going to celebrate?
• 1:28:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, cameo.
• 1:28:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's like cameo, but for these kids to do endorsements, it's so weird to me.
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_02: I can't get over it.
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:28:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Totally, I'm with you, and it's like, what the hell?
• 1:29:00
  SPEAKER_01: But then,
• 1:29:01
  SPEAKER_01: on the other hand,
• 1:29:03
  SPEAKER_01: what somebody would say to say, no,
• 1:29:05
  SPEAKER_01: they should be allowed to do this,
• 1:29:07
  SPEAKER_01: not that you're not saying this,
• 1:29:07
  SPEAKER_01: but it's like,
• 1:29:09
  SPEAKER_01: what used to happen was,
• 1:29:11
  SPEAKER_01: not a place like Yale,
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_01: but let's just take Michigan football,
• 1:29:15
  SPEAKER_01: is like, say,
• 1:29:17
  SPEAKER_01: Jabril Peppers, who was a very good Michigan football player when I was in college.
• 1:29:23
  SPEAKER_01: He was number five, I believe.
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so And Michigan would sell number five jerseys without his name on it
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_01: because he's an amateur,
• 1:29:31
  SPEAKER_01: quote unquote,
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_01: and make millions and millions of dollars off of the likeness of Jabril Peppers
• 1:29:38
  SPEAKER_01: that he didn't get to touch any of it.
• 1:29:40
  SPEAKER_01: That is crazy.
• 1:29:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just, I don't know.
• 1:29:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's when I'm like, I don't want my kids to get, or not my kids.
• 1:29:47
  SPEAKER_01: My kids will not be athletes.
• 1:29:50
  SPEAKER_01: Or they'll be, you know.
• 1:29:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I just mean like our kids, our youth.
• 1:29:58
  SPEAKER_01: The collective hour.
• 1:29:59
  SPEAKER_01: Three of us are having kids.
• 1:30:02
  SPEAKER_02: Mabel and I were talking about someone who had five parents earlier,
• 1:30:04
  SPEAKER_02: so we could realize that dream.
• 1:30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah.
• 1:30:09
  SPEAKER_01: Naismith had 17 grandchildren, by the way, which I saw.
• 1:30:12
  SPEAKER_01: That is a lot.
• 1:30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway.
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_01: You don't want them to get professionalized,
• 1:30:18
  SPEAKER_01: but it's like if they are getting professionalized,
• 1:30:21
  SPEAKER_01: you don't want them to get ripped off either.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_01: That sounds bad.
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, not to be like it speaks to the cultural crisis,
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_02: but I do think it speaks to the cultural crisis of like,
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_02: one of the things that kind of came up a lot,
• 1:30:38
  SPEAKER_02: I guess we like sort of talk about it is like,
• 1:30:41
  SPEAKER_02: The way that the Protestant work ethic is infiltrating.
• 1:30:45
  SPEAKER_02: The YMCA,
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_02: for example,
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_02: is a space where the concern is that you have people with leisure time,
• 1:30:56
  SPEAKER_02: and that's a problem,
• 1:30:56
  SPEAKER_02: so how do we turn that into productive space and productive time?
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_02: And We're doing it more and more to younger and younger people where it's like,
• 1:31:05
  SPEAKER_02: okay,
• 1:31:06
  SPEAKER_02: I understand that if someone's making money,
• 1:31:08
  SPEAKER_02: it should be the kid and not the institution.
• 1:31:11
  SPEAKER_02: But the fact that everything has to be turned into
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_02: an economically productive thing is like,
• 1:31:19
  SPEAKER_02: it's just the most American thing in the world.
• 1:31:21
  SPEAKER_02: You can't just let it be about the most important thing, which is winning.
• 1:31:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:31:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're having fun.
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, no, it's, no, you're right.
• 1:31:32
  SPEAKER_01: There's an incredible,
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_01: there's just such a powerful
• 1:31:42
  SPEAKER_01: urge to financialize every single aspect of sport.
• 1:31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:31:47
  SPEAKER_01: And you see with gambling.
• 1:31:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:31:49
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I listened to your episode about the Lakers acquisition,
• 1:31:53
  SPEAKER_03: as I said earlier,
• 1:31:54
  SPEAKER_03: and I've been thinking about that a lot because how many billions of dollars were
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_03: the Lakers bought for?
• 1:31:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was like $9 billion.
• 1:32:00
  SPEAKER_01: No, $12 billion.
• 1:32:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's what it was.
• 1:32:01
  SPEAKER_01: $12 billion.
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was originally, yeah.
• 1:32:03
  SPEAKER_03: Which is the most money anyone's ever spent on a sports team.
• 1:32:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 1:32:08
  SPEAKER_03: I listened to your podcast and I listened to like a daily episode too about why
• 1:32:11
  SPEAKER_03: that happened and just like the idea that sports are like the last frontier
• 1:32:16
  SPEAKER_03: of like culture too where like money can still be made and it's like it has
• 1:32:22
  SPEAKER_03: to happen live and the ad potential is insane and I was just thinking
• 1:32:27
  SPEAKER_03: about it too like in the context of AI like as we continue down this path of like
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_03: a disembodied future sports will be this like It's going to be gladiator roles.
• 1:32:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's like Hunger Games in my mind.
• 1:32:40
  SPEAKER_03: I'm flashing ahead to a dystopian future where it's like we're still watching
• 1:32:43
  SPEAKER_03: the basketball players because they're the last ones who are able
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_03: to use their bodies.
• 1:32:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 1:32:48
  SPEAKER_00: Who's with me in my horrifying future?
• 1:32:51
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to be in that one.
• 1:32:53
  SPEAKER_02: Can I ask, Harry, is there a conversation in sports about AI?
• 1:32:58
  SPEAKER_02: Because I don't know about it.
• 1:33:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, no, not in an extremely charged way, no.
• 1:33:09
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, yeah,
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_01: my guess,
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_01: the place where AI will be most like,
• 1:33:18
  SPEAKER_01: so something I will say about basketball broadly,
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_01: or the NBA,
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_01: I should say,
• 1:33:24
  SPEAKER_01: it's like all these leagues are operating in different cultural spaces and something
• 1:33:29
  SPEAKER_01: that for a long time Like the NBA didn't used to be as popular.
• 1:33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was sort of like thought of as this, this afterthought compared to other leagues.
• 1:33:38
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that it did was it made a bet on like,
• 1:33:41
  SPEAKER_01: we are going to be the league of the future.
• 1:33:43
  SPEAKER_01: We are like the league of the youth.
• 1:33:45
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to like embrace Twitter and embrace Instagram and whatever,
• 1:33:48
  SPEAKER_01: all this stuff in the way that like the NFL did it.
• 1:33:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that I created, it's sort of like a, Faustian bargain, is that right?
• 1:33:57
  SPEAKER_01: Where they're like good and bad.
• 1:34:02
  SPEAKER_01: So there are these elements of it that have been really good for the NBA and
• 1:34:06
  SPEAKER_01: then these other ones.
• 1:34:08
  SPEAKER_01: One weird one is that the NBA has kind of aligned itself
• 1:34:12
  SPEAKER_01: with essentially techno-optimism, which...
• 1:34:17
  SPEAKER_01: In the Obama administration was very popular.
• 1:34:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's very easy to be a techno-optimist.
• 1:34:21
  SPEAKER_01: But now, you're getting these...
• 1:34:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's much less popular among these young people.
• 1:34:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember two or three years ago, a bunch of teams did NFT projects.
• 1:34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 1:34:34
  SPEAKER_01: And all the young people were like, what the...
• 1:34:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, not all of them, but people were like, what the fuck?
• 1:34:39
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas if they had made a Facebook page, nobody would have been like, what the fuck?
• 1:34:44
  SPEAKER_01: They would have been like, totally, we love having a Facebook page.
• 1:34:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:34:48
  SPEAKER_01: With AI,
• 1:34:48
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder,
• 1:34:50
  SPEAKER_01: the NBA will be in a weird position where they are like,
• 1:34:54
  SPEAKER_01: they still need to uphold this idea that they are the league of the future,
• 1:34:57
  SPEAKER_01: or they have been,
• 1:34:59
  SPEAKER_01: but how will they do that when the future and futurism is becoming less
• 1:35:05
  SPEAKER_01: and less popular among young people?
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:35:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's just like an interesting.
• 1:35:11
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously,
• 1:35:11
  SPEAKER_02: I buried the lead,
• 1:35:12
  SPEAKER_02: but my mom is a sports lawyer,
• 1:35:14
  SPEAKER_02: so I actually grew up knowing a lot about the front office type stuff
• 1:35:19
  SPEAKER_02: that was happening in sports.
• 1:35:21
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, there will be AI conversations about those types of things.
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_02: But like what I don't it's just like I don't even you know, I'm in academia.
• 1:35:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's like there is a constant conversation about like where what we need to do,
• 1:35:35
  SPEAKER_02: like how we're preparing, like what how what's our relationship like?
• 1:35:39
  SPEAKER_02: Are we against if are we like abstinence only?
• 1:35:43
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's so intense and constant and it's just like it's kind of
• 1:35:48
  SPEAKER_02: an irrelevant question for a basketball team.
• 1:35:51
  SPEAKER_03: Well, and it's also interesting to me,
• 1:35:54
  SPEAKER_03: like The human body is actually like is the last frontier
• 1:36:00
  SPEAKER_03: that I don't think AI right away or not in the next five years
• 1:36:05
  SPEAKER_03: or something will be able to optimize.
• 1:36:06
  SPEAKER_03: And like I have been watching a lot of tennis this US Open because it worked,
• 1:36:10
  SPEAKER_03: the culture it got to me.
• 1:36:12
  SPEAKER_03: I'm interested in tennis.
• 1:36:13
  SPEAKER_02: Because you could see the ball.
• 1:36:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, because now I can see the ball.
• 1:36:15
  SPEAKER_03: So that'll make so much more sense.
• 1:36:16
  SPEAKER_03: But it's like fascinating to me.
• 1:36:18
  SPEAKER_03: I think because it's just one person, you can see it a lot more clearly.
• 1:36:21
  SPEAKER_03: And like these are the best players in the entire world.
• 1:36:24
  SPEAKER_03: And like Sabalenka yesterday, she could not serve correctly.
• 1:36:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, how many times has that woman served a tennis ball perfectly?
• 1:36:34
  SPEAKER_03: And it's amazing that it's different every time.
• 1:36:37
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a combination of the wind and the air and the noise and the ball and the court.
• 1:36:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's not.
• 1:36:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's your head.
• 1:36:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's something that people love about tennis is you're playing against yourself.
• 1:36:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah and it's like it's like literally like I think therefore I am like and
• 1:36:51
  SPEAKER_03: so what AI is offering is artificial intelligence and like I'm thinking
• 1:36:55
  SPEAKER_03: about ex machina or something like the idea that all like if AI is meant
• 1:37:00
  SPEAKER_03: to emulate humans then it too will not be perfect at sports you know chills.
• 1:37:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, just because there is not an explicit conversation about AI,
• 1:37:12
  SPEAKER_01: but there is a huge,
• 1:37:14
  SPEAKER_01: not just in like the weird hipster circles I operate in,
• 1:37:16
  SPEAKER_01: but there's a huge conversation around optimization in basketball,
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_01: in all sports,
• 1:37:24
  SPEAKER_01: which basically gets at this tension that you're talking about,
• 1:37:26
  SPEAKER_01: which is like,
• 1:37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Optimization does help you win basketball games,
• 1:37:32
  SPEAKER_01: but too much optimization starts to feel a little like soulless and people kind
• 1:37:37
  SPEAKER_01: of react negatively to when there's so much of the game that is optimized
• 1:37:44
  SPEAKER_01: that you're losing a kind of either to be humanist or whatever,
• 1:37:50
  SPEAKER_01: like you lose some of that or just even like,
• 1:37:56
  SPEAKER_01: It is kind of,
• 1:37:57
  SPEAKER_01: there's sometimes panics about the game kind of looking aesthetically homogenous.
• 1:38:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like if there is one true way to do it, everybody will just start to do it like that.
• 1:38:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:38:10
  SPEAKER_01: So there's definitely that kind of like optimization thing.
• 1:38:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think basketball will get in trouble with like, once we get like robotic robotics.
• 1:38:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:38:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's when maybe, I mean, I haven't even considered this like an AI robot.
• 1:38:25
  SPEAKER_01: Though I guess I would watch a fucking robot fight another time.
• 1:38:29
  SPEAKER_00: Have you seen that thing?
• 1:38:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's like the robot Olympics.
• 1:38:32
  SPEAKER_03: There was the robot
• 1:38:34
  SPEAKER_02: Olympics.
• 1:38:34
  SPEAKER_02: But there was actually a big in
• 1:38:36
  SPEAKER_03: the New York Times.
• 1:38:37
  SPEAKER_03: There was like a big coverage recently about this like fake Olympics that happened
• 1:38:40
  SPEAKER_03: in Vegas recently for people who.
• 1:38:42
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yes.
• 1:38:42
  SPEAKER_03: Bodies like the people who are like, I am on steroids.
• 1:38:46
  SPEAKER_03: It's disturbing.
• 1:38:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's gnarly.
• 1:38:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's like pro steroids.
• 1:38:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:38:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's what do they call it?
• 1:38:52
  SPEAKER_01: Peter Thiel pro steroids Olympics.
• 1:38:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:38:57
  SPEAKER_01: So cool.
• 1:38:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:38:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to remember.
• 1:38:59
  SPEAKER_02: Thank God someone is giving those people a space to.
• 1:39:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:39:03
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 1:39:04
  SPEAKER_03: The enhanced games.
• 1:39:06
  SPEAKER_01: Enhanced games.
• 1:39:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's what it's called.
• 1:39:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's what it's called.
• 1:39:08
  SPEAKER_03: Enhanced games.
• 1:39:10
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I was also I'm like sounding like such a narc, but I swear this is just coming to me.
• 1:39:16
  SPEAKER_03: Harry, I was listening to your podcast and you guys were talking,
• 1:39:19
  SPEAKER_03: of course,
• 1:39:20
  SPEAKER_03: like I don't understand any of this,
• 1:39:21
  SPEAKER_03: but you guys were talking about like everybody does three point shots now
• 1:39:24
  SPEAKER_03: because that's like statistically the fastest way to get to a winning contest.
• 1:39:29
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:39:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like, yes.
• 1:39:30
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:39:31
  SPEAKER_03: Like, because three is bigger than two.
• 1:39:32
  SPEAKER_03: I'm bad at math, but I know that is
• 1:39:34
  SPEAKER_01: essentially it.
• 1:39:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's like and three is bigger than two and three pointers are not that much harder
• 1:39:40
  SPEAKER_01: than two pointers is essentially the the but you get one more point.
• 1:39:43
  SPEAKER_01: So like the point per shot is much higher on threes.
• 1:39:50
  SPEAKER_03: As the players get bigger and bigger,
• 1:39:52
  SPEAKER_03: and we don't know why, but the players are huge, it's easier to get a three point.
• 1:39:59
  SPEAKER_03: In Naismith's time,
• 1:40:00
  SPEAKER_03: they didn't have a three point shot in Naismith's day,
• 1:40:04
  SPEAKER_03: but it would have been a lot harder because the guys are smaller,
• 1:40:07
  SPEAKER_03: the ball is harder to throw, all these things.
• 1:40:10
  SPEAKER_03: But I was thinking about that.
• 1:40:13
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, Madeline and I were talking about the shooting part of all of this and like
• 1:40:17
  SPEAKER_03: the different strategies that people had to get the ball in the basket.
• 1:40:20
  SPEAKER_00: It makes it sound insane.
• 1:40:22
  SPEAKER_00: But we were.
• 1:40:25
  SPEAKER_00: We could not wait to get on this call.
• 1:40:31
  SPEAKER_00: We could not wait.
• 1:40:31
  SPEAKER_00: So funny.
• 1:40:32
  SPEAKER_00: But until 1915,
• 1:40:35
  SPEAKER_03: most professional leagues allowed,
• 1:40:39
  SPEAKER_03: like you were allowed to say that only this guy on my team does the free throws.
• 1:40:43
  SPEAKER_03: Like he's the best at it.
• 1:40:45
  SPEAKER_03: And so he gets to do it.
• 1:40:48
  SPEAKER_03: And just like these ways, I don't know, that's not optimization.
• 1:40:51
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like now the rules of basketball, I assume, are considered sacred.
• 1:40:56
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas like at this time, in its early days, they were fluid.
• 1:41:00
  SPEAKER_00: But they still change stuff sometimes, right?
• 1:41:05
  SPEAKER_01: The answer is yes to both of them.
• 1:41:07
  SPEAKER_01: They are sacred and they change things.
• 1:41:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like this conversation about how much are you supposed to do that?
• 1:41:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because to all these points, basketball...
• 1:41:24
  SPEAKER_01: Most sports, the rules do change.
• 1:41:26
  SPEAKER_01: They shift and they adjust and whatever.
• 1:41:29
  SPEAKER_01: But it can be really confusing.
• 1:41:31
  SPEAKER_01: When is the right time to make a change?
• 1:41:35
  SPEAKER_01: Will it change often?
• 1:41:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I actually find this stuff to be really interesting that a change
• 1:41:41
  SPEAKER_01: over here might have this way weird downstream effect somewhere else
• 1:41:46
  SPEAKER_01: that you couldn't have picked up on and...
• 1:41:54
  SPEAKER_02: The concern in the book for the free throw rule change was that if
• 1:42:02
  SPEAKER_02: the best player couldn't take the shot, then people would foul the bad players more.
• 1:42:10
  SPEAKER_02: Because the percentage of getting free throws then was way lower
• 1:42:14
  SPEAKER_02: because there was no backboard and it was the basket.
• 1:42:17
  SPEAKER_02: So it was like if you found someone who's bad and they take a shot,
• 1:42:20
  SPEAKER_02: it's pretty likely they're not going to get it in.
• 1:42:21
  SPEAKER_02: So it's safe.
• 1:42:22
  SPEAKER_02: So you should keep the person who's definitely going to get it in as like
• 1:42:26
  SPEAKER_02: to make it real punishment,
• 1:42:28
  SPEAKER_02: which is just like I never would have thought about it that way.
• 1:42:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:42:32
  SPEAKER_03: It encourages better sportsman like behavior, actually.
• 1:42:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm about to work.
• 1:42:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's all, I mean,
• 1:42:37
  SPEAKER_01: one that I always think about that's really interesting is like the, in the,
• 1:42:41
  SPEAKER_01: and we haven't spent too much time talking about the women's game,
• 1:42:44
  SPEAKER_01: which has its own really interesting history,
• 1:42:46
  SPEAKER_01: including like a ton of really kind of basically being like,
• 1:42:53
  SPEAKER_01: well, the rules for women and men clearly can't be the same.
• 1:42:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like we need to, you know, for a long time, it was like women's basketball rules.
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_01: They almost rebuilt the game in this weird Frankenstein kind of way.
• 1:43:08
  SPEAKER_01: But moving ahead, one of these weird downstream ones, it's like NBA games are 48 minutes long.
• 1:43:14
  SPEAKER_01: WNBA games are 40 minutes long, so eight minutes longer.
• 1:43:17
  SPEAKER_01: But both teams, each individual player is allotted six fouls before they foul out.
• 1:43:24
  SPEAKER_01: So if you foul six or whatever.
• 1:43:25
  SPEAKER_01: So that means that each individual player has...
• 1:43:30
  SPEAKER_01: They have the same amount of fouls, but they play eight minutes less of basketball.
• 1:43:36
  SPEAKER_01: So that means you can throw out more fouls per minute as a woman than as a man.
• 1:43:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the downstream effect on that is that they foul more because if you have them,
• 1:43:46
  SPEAKER_01: you can foul more.
• 1:43:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then you get these sort of aesthetic critiques about
• 1:43:50
  SPEAKER_01: the women's game being like,
• 1:43:52
  SPEAKER_01: oh, it's so rough and like it's Clunky and it's not whatever.
• 1:43:57
  SPEAKER_01: And people like to be like, well, that's because whatever women aren't athletic or whatever.
• 1:44:01
  SPEAKER_01: But the but it's it's so built into this like really clear perspective.
• 1:44:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's so interesting.
• 1:44:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's weird.
• 1:44:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a weird...
• 1:44:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:44:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of materialist in a way.
• 1:44:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's like this.
• 1:44:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I am like, I am like, are we talking about like superstructure, substructure?
• 1:44:40
  SPEAKER_02: Like I'm like,
• 1:44:40
  SPEAKER_02: so like,
• 1:44:42
  SPEAKER_02: is it the rules or is it the physical reality that makes the rules or the rules
• 1:44:46
  SPEAKER_02: that make the physical reality?
• 1:44:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's so like it is crazy to think about.
• 1:44:51
  SPEAKER_03: Harry, are you familiar with
• 1:44:52
  SPEAKER_03: the seminal feminist art historical essay called Why Are There No Great Women
• 1:44:57
  SPEAKER_03: Artists, which is published in like 1972 by Linda Nochlin?
• 1:45:01
  SPEAKER_03: And it's the idea that there is no great women artists because they aren't allowed
• 1:45:04
  SPEAKER_03: to go to art school historically.
• 1:45:06
  SPEAKER_03: You know what I mean?
• 1:45:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 1:45:09
  SPEAKER_03: But it's like, why are there so many fouling WNBA players?
• 1:45:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's because they're allowed to foul more in less time.
• 1:45:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:45:16
  SPEAKER_01: And there are these,
• 1:45:17
  SPEAKER_01: you get these narratives that are so,
• 1:45:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
• 1:45:23
  SPEAKER_01: like, I mean, I guess the Yeah, maybe women are fundamentally bad players.
• 1:45:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's what you were saying.
• 1:45:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:46:00
  SPEAKER_01: My point being like, is it, is, is the, is the,
• 1:46:07
  SPEAKER_01: are people being just sort of stupid and not thinking critically or are they like,
• 1:46:13
  SPEAKER_01: enjoy the idea of being able to like perpetuate this idea that women are bad
• 1:46:17
  SPEAKER_01: at sports?
• 1:46:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like, is there some kind of like,
• 1:46:21
  SPEAKER_01: darker kind of,
• 1:46:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's why they're kind of willfully ignoring the data that says
• 1:46:28
  SPEAKER_01: that there's this other thing going on.
• 1:46:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because until about two years ago,
• 1:46:34
  SPEAKER_01: not everybody,
• 1:46:34
  SPEAKER_01: but mainstream culture would be like,
• 1:46:37
  SPEAKER_01: the game is chunky because I guess women are bad at,
• 1:46:41
  SPEAKER_01: they can't control their limbs or whatever it is.
• 1:46:44
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking from personal experience, that is true.
• 1:46:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:46:49
  SPEAKER_00: I just started the episode off by telling you how I fell down the stairs.
• 1:46:52
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 1:46:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've also been like, I have been making like random
• 1:46:55
  SPEAKER_02: thumbs up the entire time.
• 1:46:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like we have no bodily control.
• 1:46:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's also not to say that women and men are exactly built the same.
• 1:47:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's why it's like,
• 1:47:05
  SPEAKER_01: it's a naughty thing where like there are,
• 1:47:11
  SPEAKER_01: of course, you know, biological differences or whatever.
• 1:47:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:47:17
  SPEAKER_02: But it's sort of like this whole question.
• 1:47:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, just again, I'm an academic, so it's like I'm going to be like this, unfortunately.
• 1:47:26
  SPEAKER_02: But like you want to talk about like in academia,
• 1:47:30
  SPEAKER_02: the century long argument
• 1:47:32
  SPEAKER_02: about like historical materialism versus like more intellectual
• 1:47:37
  SPEAKER_02: or philosophical strains of thought.
• 1:47:39
  SPEAKER_02: And it's
• 1:47:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's the fact that people need it to be one or the other rather than both.
• 1:47:45
  SPEAKER_02: And that is ultimately the reason it's an unsolvable question.
• 1:47:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it seems like the same where it's like, of course, there are physical differences.
• 1:47:55
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, the rules matter.
• 1:47:56
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:47:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, totally.
• 1:48:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:48:02
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there's two things that we haven't really discussed that I feel like
• 1:48:06
  SPEAKER_03: when we're talking about the history of change in basketball
• 1:48:08
  SPEAKER_03: that I feel we would be remiss if we didn't mention.
• 1:48:11
  SPEAKER_03: One is just, Harry, did you know the term cagers?
• 1:48:15
  SPEAKER_01: No, I had never heard of this.
• 1:48:16
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:48:16
  SPEAKER_03: So I just feel like we should acknowledge that all professional basketball for
• 1:48:20
  SPEAKER_03: the first decades was played inside of a cage, a metal cage.
• 1:48:24
  SPEAKER_03: I just feel like we can't not acknowledge that.
• 1:48:26
  SPEAKER_01: That is very strange.
• 1:48:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:48:28
  SPEAKER_03: And that had to do with the rules because like if the ball went out of bounds,
• 1:48:30
  SPEAKER_03: then there was all these delays to the game.
• 1:48:32
  SPEAKER_03: So they put the players in a cage and it was known as the monkey cage, which is interesting.
• 1:48:40
  SPEAKER_01: That is interesting.
• 1:48:41
  SPEAKER_03: And like people liked watching men in cages, like,
• 1:48:45
  SPEAKER_03: and they always have,
• 1:48:46
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 1:48:46
  SPEAKER_03: like, and you would leave the cage with like metal marks all over your body.
• 1:48:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:48:54
  SPEAKER_01: There's a very famous
• 1:48:58
  SPEAKER_01: street basketball court in the West Village in New York City,
• 1:49:01
  SPEAKER_01: and they call it the cage on West Ford Street.
• 1:49:04
  SPEAKER_03: Like the one right above the train?
• 1:49:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:49:08
  SPEAKER_03: I've probably seen him play.
• 1:49:11
  SPEAKER_03: And then not to end on like probably one of the most important themes,
• 1:49:14
  SPEAKER_03: but just like it's important to acknowledge.
• 1:49:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think that 1896,
• 1:49:18
  SPEAKER_03: which is the same year that the first professional league started,
• 1:49:21
  SPEAKER_03: was also the year that the Supreme Court passed Plessy versus Ferguson,
• 1:49:25
  SPEAKER_03: which like wrote segregation into national law.
• 1:49:27
  SPEAKER_03: Jim Crow laws.
• 1:49:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:49:33
  SPEAKER_03: For white Americans and black Americans.
• 1:49:36
  SPEAKER_03: And it's not until the 40s when basketball starts to be integrated.
• 1:49:41
  SPEAKER_03: And it's and,
• 1:49:42
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 1:49:43
  SPEAKER_03: all the barnstorming that we're talking about was made more complicated by the fact
• 1:49:46
  SPEAKER_03: that like black teams would have to travel additional hundreds of miles
• 1:49:50
  SPEAKER_03: to find somewhere to stay because they weren't allowed to stay in the places
• 1:49:54
  SPEAKER_03: where they were performing for people,
• 1:49:56
  SPEAKER_01: even though the Harlem Globetrotters were a I think entirely black
• 1:50:01
  SPEAKER_01: or definitely largely black.
• 1:50:05
  SPEAKER_01: They were the most popular team.
• 1:50:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they were the best and whatever.
• 1:50:09
  SPEAKER_01: To that point,
• 1:50:11
  SPEAKER_01: one of the kind of...
• 1:50:14
  SPEAKER_01: Basketball specifically plays a really interesting role in kind of America...
• 1:50:21
  SPEAKER_01: The like long arc of American race relations,
• 1:50:23
  SPEAKER_01: like the,
• 1:50:24
  SPEAKER_01: there are these specifically,
• 1:50:26
  SPEAKER_01: and this is not so much anymore because it's just like less culturally relevant,
• 1:50:29
  SPEAKER_01: but like college basketball was a huge part of, of this kind of thing.
• 1:50:34
  SPEAKER_01: There was this very famous, I had written it down.
• 1:50:36
  SPEAKER_01: There's this very famous 1996 Texas Western team who had a coach who,
• 1:50:42
  SPEAKER_01: cause it's 1966, like it's, it's sick.
• 1:50:45
  SPEAKER_01: It is, you know,
• 1:50:47
  SPEAKER_01: By law, desegregated, but there's all this sort of like leftover cultural taboos.
• 1:50:54
  SPEAKER_01: And they were the first team to start five black players in a national championship.
• 1:50:59
  SPEAKER_01: They played Kentucky, a team that started five white basketball players, and Texas Western won.
• 1:51:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that was this kind of like seminal moment in the game.
• 1:51:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it continues.
• 1:51:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the basketball has this,
• 1:51:11
  SPEAKER_01: or the NBA,
• 1:51:12
  SPEAKER_01: or like basketball culture,
• 1:51:14
  SPEAKER_01: Continues to have this really complicated relationship with blackness
• 1:51:18
  SPEAKER_01: where it's like
• 1:51:21
  SPEAKER_01: there's so much
• 1:51:25
  SPEAKER_01: like moral panic around the league being too black
• 1:51:28
  SPEAKER_01: at various times,
• 1:51:29
  SPEAKER_01: but then also so much excitement and wanting to talk about the league being black.
• 1:51:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just...
• 1:51:38
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:51:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like this is divorced from this kind of thing is happening in all
• 1:51:43
  SPEAKER_01: of American culture around this time.
• 1:51:46
  SPEAKER_01: But there's something about sport that's like,
• 1:51:49
  SPEAKER_01: because it's such a unifying thing and because there's a dynamic of play,
• 1:51:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think that these very...
• 1:51:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is kind of what I like about basketball or sport in general.
• 1:52:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's like it allows...
• 1:52:03
  SPEAKER_01: People to in an artificially like lower stakes way kind of engage
• 1:52:08
  SPEAKER_01: in these really complicated things like how are we going to kind
• 1:52:13
  SPEAKER_01: of desegregate our culture?
• 1:52:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was these like battles were fought in the world of sport first.
• 1:52:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:52:20
  SPEAKER_01: Or not first, but like.
• 1:52:22
  SPEAKER_01: Very publicly.
• 1:52:22
  SPEAKER_01: As this.
• 1:52:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, almost like how fucking comedians, the president is going on comedy podcasts.
• 1:52:30
  SPEAKER_01: It allows this kind of Trojan horsing, this more meaty political issue into people's
• 1:52:39
  SPEAKER_01: minds.
• 1:52:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that continues to happen.
• 1:52:42
  SPEAKER_01: But one last thing I'll say about this whole thing is a really interesting case
• 1:52:47
  SPEAKER_01: of all of this is this player named John Morant, who is...
• 1:52:52
  SPEAKER_01: Who was under-recruited in college.
• 1:52:55
  SPEAKER_01: So kind of was outside of this universe of like hyper-professionalized
• 1:53:01
  SPEAKER_01: until you were really whatever.
• 1:53:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then he had this really meteoric rise in the NBA.
• 1:53:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he was meteoric right to the end of college.
• 1:53:09
  SPEAKER_01: He was number two pick and played for the Memphis Grizzlies.
• 1:53:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he got in a bunch of trouble.
• 1:53:15
  SPEAKER_01: He's kind of like the last bad boy of basketball.
• 1:53:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like he got in a bunch of trouble for like,
• 1:53:21
  SPEAKER_01: Holding a gun on his Instagram story or all this stuff.
• 1:53:25
  SPEAKER_01: Or not all this stuff,
• 1:53:26
  SPEAKER_01: holding guns on his Instagram story and being at the strip clubs or whatever.
• 1:53:33
  SPEAKER_01: But he was also extremely popular.
• 1:53:36
  SPEAKER_01: Kids loved him and he plays this incredibly exciting brand of basketball and whatever.
• 1:53:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just this weird thing where the NBA wants to They're looking
• 1:53:53
  SPEAKER_01: for players like Ja Morant,
• 1:53:54
  SPEAKER_01: but then they get a player like Ja Morant,
• 1:53:56
  SPEAKER_01: and they're like, well, you can't hold a gun on your Instagram story.
• 1:54:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's fucked up.
• 1:54:06
  SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile, whatever, the owner of the Memphis Grizzlies is selling fucking missiles to Israel.
• 1:54:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's totally insane, the double standard.
• 1:54:16
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, he is this interesting character where he comes...
• 1:54:22
  SPEAKER_01: And he is less of this kind of like whitewashed understanding of what a pro athlete should be.
• 1:54:29
  SPEAKER_01: And people are both love that and certain people hate that.
• 1:54:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:54:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, on that note,
• 1:54:36
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like maybe the history of basketball will give you hope for the future
• 1:54:41
  SPEAKER_02: because there's always going to be a bad boy basketball.
• 1:54:43
  SPEAKER_00: Mm hmm.
• 1:54:44
  SPEAKER_02: There's always a new one.
• 1:54:45
  SPEAKER_02: Starting with James Naismith, of course.
• 1:54:47
  SPEAKER_02: Of course.
• 1:54:48
  SPEAKER_02: The original bad boy or whatever the guy from Herkimer's name is.
• 1:54:51
  SPEAKER_01: The original good boy of basketball, I think.
• 1:54:55
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 1:54:56
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much, Harry.
• 1:54:57
  SPEAKER_02: This was incredible.
• 1:54:59
  SPEAKER_01: This was a blast.
• 1:54:59
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:55:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would love to be your straight guy correspondent.
• 1:55:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:55:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:55:04
  SPEAKER_01: Please.
• 1:55:05
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us your favorite war and we'll come back to you on that one.
• 1:55:08
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's interesting.
• 1:55:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's true.
• 1:55:11
  SPEAKER_01: I've been reading a lot of Cold Wars.
• 1:55:13
  SPEAKER_01: Or not reading.
• 1:55:14
  SPEAKER_01: I've been watching a nine-part Netflix documentary about the Cold War.
• 1:55:18
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 1:55:19
  SPEAKER_00: We'll watch it too and we can discuss
• 1:55:21
  SPEAKER_02: it.
• 1:55:22
  SPEAKER_02: There's definitely something that happened in the 19th century that started the Cold War.
• 1:55:26
  SPEAKER_02: Totally.
• 1:55:26
  SPEAKER_02: So we'll think about that.
• 1:55:28
  SPEAKER_02: You have
• 1:55:29
  SPEAKER_00: 14 days.
• 1:55:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Harry.
• 1:55:33
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.
• 1:55:36
  SPEAKER_00: Hello?
• 1:55:37
  SPEAKER_00: You've reached 1-800-1800.
• 1:55:38
  SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
• 1:55:38
  SPEAKER_00: I have a burning question.
• 1:55:41
  SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
• 1:55:42
  SPEAKER_00: 1-800-1800.
• 1:55:43
  SPEAKER_00: I have a burning question.