Host: Matt Hall

Guest: Jason Gay

Matt Hall (00:07): Welcome to Take the Long View with Matt Hall. This award-winning podcast reframes the way you think about your money, emotion, and time. The goal, helping you put the odds of long-term success on your side. Ooh, today I am so excited because Jason Gay from the Wall Street Journal is here with us. He is the Journal's Sports Columnist and a humor writer for its review section. And he is the author of the 2015 bestseller, Little Victories, Perfect Rules for Imperfect Living. Jason has written for Vogue GQ, Rolling Stone and Outside Magazines. And in 2016, he was named Sports Columnist of the Year by the Society of Professional Journalists and was a finalist for the Thurber prize for American Humor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his family and a passive, aggressive cat. Jason, welcome to take the long view.

Jason Gay (01:03): Thank you very much. And I really appreciate that very generous introduction. I don't deserve it.

Matt Hall (01:09): Well, I think you do deserve it because you are my favorite person to read in the Wall Street Journal, and you bring a smile to my face, which feels funny to say, given that I don't know the Journal is known for humor. But you are funny. And my question is, when did you know that you're funny?

Jason Gay (01:31): Oh, gosh, it's an hour by hour that I have to do on my senses of humor, to be honest with you, especially these days. Look, I don't have a tremendous amount of skills. I'm not terribly accomplished. I can't chop wood. I can't cook. I can't play any sport at any high level. Maybe I can make a joke. Maybe I can tell a story in a relatable way. I have the benefit, as you said, of working at a place that is this tremendous journalistic publication, but as you said, might not be people's first read for humor. So I get to have this element of surprise, maybe that they're not accustomed to getting a laugh in the paper. So I really get an advantage there to be in that context and work with a lot of really incredible people.

Matt Hall (02:16): But is it something that has always been natural for you or have you had to work at and study the craft of humor?

Jason Gay (02:25): I don't know. Look, I know what I was surrounding myself with as a young person. I was somebody who was completely drawn to humorous and funny things, whether it was as a young person listening to Dr. Demento's radio show as a kid. I don't know if you did that, but it was Dr. Demento's quirky radio show, where you had to listen to Phish heads and all kinds of goofy stuff. And talking about that with my buddies in sixth and seventh grade.

Jason Gay (02:50): Then moving on to things like Monty Python and Saturday Live and David Letterman, and I always had an incredible appeal to me. It still does a lot of it and I was just drawn to it. And when I would write, I was drawn to the idea of trying to make myself laugh. I'm not always the best judge of what's funny and what's not, and I'm certainly capable of writing things that I think are funny that prove not to be. But it just matches, I think, my personality which used to be a little irrelevant sometimes, too.

Jason Gay (03:26): But my job, my punitive assignment at the Journal is to write about sports. And one of the things that exists around sports, especially at the professional high level and the super high collegiate it level, it takes itself really, really seriously. You turn on the television to watch a football game and you think you're getting election night results with the bomb blasts and noise around the sports. And to me that's always a great, great table setting to be fun, to poke holes in a little bit of the pretentiousness and the seriousness and the [censoriousness 00:04:01] of that kind of culture. So sports I feel is just ripe for taking a little air off the balloon.

Matt Hall (04:10): Okay. But you also, I think especially in the last couple years, it seems, have been stretching into other categories. For example, one of your recent columns is about a leaf blower, and it's written from the perspective of the leaf blower.

Jason Gay (04:24): Yeah.

Matt Hall (04:24): How'd you get that idea and then how does that get approved?

Jason Gay (04:28): Well, it's a sentient leaf blower, yes. My family and I moved at the beginning of the school year and we moved from the city to the suburbs, and I was fascinated to discover the culture of leaf blowing. It was as simple as that. All of a sudden I was like, "What is that noise?" And discovered that there's a great deal of conversation on the internet, including also in the Journal before I wrote about this, about what's an acceptable level of decibel and leaf blowing and the environmental havoc they create. And I just felt it might be funny. We're so accustomed when things become cultural enemies. Eventually, a company stands up and says, "Okay, this is what I think. Please hear me out." And I just thought it'd be funny from the leaf blower.

Jason Gay (05:17): But to the top of your question, yeah. In the last couple years I have been writing a column for the review section of the Journal, which is the Saturday paper, and that's an idea section. And my job is like, "Look, Buddy, we got a lot of serious stuff in this section. Write something funny". Basically, it's no more complicated than that. There's some really brilliant thinkers and writers who are published routinely in that section. I am not one of them. I am there to be the light appetizer before you dive headlong into the piece about existentialism or modern politics.

Matt Hall (05:52): I love the Saturday Journal more than any other day, just so you know.

Jason Gay (05:55): Yeah. A lot of people-

Matt Hall (05:56): That's the best day.

Jason Gay (05:57): A lot of people do. And candidly, I think that we both know that the way that people get and appreciate and consume their news has radically changed in the last generation. And more and more people read the Journal, not just electronically, but read it on their telephone. But I think the Saturday, and with other newspapers, the Sunday paper, still retains a little bit of moat around it as being the newspaper experience, right. More people will get a weekend paper than they'll get a weekday paper now, just because you have a little bit more time. You might have a half an hour to put your feet up and read a newspaper. And I think that a print newspaper, though I've made my peace with the fact that the vast, vast majority of reads are going to be happening electronically, I do believe in the different experience of print reading, the kind of...

Jason Gay (06:48): There's a word I'm looking for that's escaping me. But just the way in which your eye will track from whatever you're interested in immediately, to reading things that you wouldn't naturally be drawn to electronically. And I just think of how I began as a person who read the newspaper. I was a paper boy. I delivered the newspaper. Just like a great deal of my newspaper reading was stuff that I didn't set out to read in the first place. And, of course, the newspaper in those days wasn't curated for my taste. It was a bunch of people's taste, and I benefited enormously from that happenstance of that experience of reading print paper. So there's a long-winded way of saying, I'm right there with you and I know how great many Journal readers are there too, simply because that Saturday remains an experience product.

Matt Hall (07:34): Yeah. You just nailed exactly what I do. I don't get the physical paper or read the physical paper as much during the week. But on Saturday I really look forward to walking down the driveway and grabbing my newspaper and praying that it didn't get wet by a sprinkler system or rain.

Jason Gay (07:48): Right. Right.

Matt Hall (07:49): Let's talk about a quote that really caught my attention and the people at my firm's attention. You were talking about Aaron Rogers and you said, "Nobody gets clicks and famous for taking a long view. Hell has to be served in a handbasket, preferably with a clever-baiting headline. If you haven't freaked out about at least three things you've read by 9:00 AM, you're not doing it correctly."

Jason Gay (08:12): Yeah. Okay. So, where that's coming from is really personal like, the idea of a nuanced conversation happening in a public way now is increasingly endangered, I feel. We all know that the world is complex. We all know that people's individual responses to things that are happening in their world are sometimes complicated and shaded in many layers of gray. However, in the social media environment, gray doesn't register, it's almost invisible. The idea that conversations are nuanced and complicated and people's responses might have different motivations and layers, is not something that the algorithms are set up to explore or certainly not promote.

Jason Gay (08:56): And so what it creates, I think, and I don't think this is any original discovery on my part, but just that what it gets incentivized is conflict, is black and white, is the notion of, there's a right and there's a wrong. Political spectrum, we see that incredibly supercharged where everything is set up as extremely divisive or binary. But also it applies to sports now too, the way that sports gets covered and the way that things get, especially on television where they don't get up there and say, "Well maybe the Packers are good," or, "Maybe they're not so good."

Jason Gay (09:31): No one gets on television to say that. They say, "They stink," or "They're great. They're going to do it all." Or "They're terrible, Aaron Rogers is a hero. Aaron Rogers is a dummy." All this incredibly binary thinking, which I find really boring and tedious, but candidly, is the way the world is rotating right now. I thankfully work with people who don't require that kind of thinking. And I'm grateful to have audience or readers who are willing to go along with my sometimes wandering brain. But I think there's real values still in having those kinds of wandering brains and conversations.

Matt Hall (10:09): Yeah. And with respect to that, the piece on Aaron Rogers, I think the story was they had, had a not-so-great start.

Jason Gay (10:16): Yeah.

Matt Hall (10:16): And he was saying, "Hey, slow down-

Jason Gay (10:18): Yeah, yeah.

Matt Hall (10:20): ... This short term outcome may not be the longer term story."

Jason Gay (10:24): Right. How funny is it that this was like several Aaron Rogers controversies [inaudible 00:10:29] now at this point? Yeah, absolutely. And that's a thing that exists in sports that is often really to make fun of too, is that the fan base that flies completely off the handle after a single result [inaudible 00:10:44] work on. You can see franchises and fan bases that go crazy when their team gets out the gate, one and the only think that the Super Ball is coming and obviously doesn't always happen. So, again, putting a pin in that kind agitation is really fun.

Matt Hall (11:00): Yeah. Can you think of an example where you in your own life have taken a longer view and it's really paid off, where your patience and discipline has really been rewarded?

Jason Gay (11:12): And that's a very good question. I'll try to answer it in the respect that I... I certainly didn't set out with any master discipline plan, anything like that. I was never somebody who was... Well, I got my five year plan and my 10 year plan, never, never, ever. I think that newspapers are metabolically right for me in that, you are writing regularly, but you're not writing every 10 minute minutes. In my case, you're not writing every single day, but you're writing a few times a week. So you do get a chance to say something with some regularity. I don't know what I would do in a world where I was writing once a year. I marvel at people who do that, authors and book-publishing people who are just tremendously disciplined to go off the grid to come up with what they're doing next. I'm not built that way.

Jason Gay (12:03): But the long view part of it is that... Let me answer this in a different way, which is that, the longer I do this, the longer I have had the privilege of having this column and audience, the people, the more I really develop a respect for people who can just keep doing it. We're younger, we have very strong opinions of "This person's good, this person's not so good." And now I just look at anybody in any walk of life [candidly 00:12:31], who's been doing it for a long time, especially if they're doing it a long time at a pretty commendable level, and just give them my full admiration.

Jason Gay (12:40): To maintain a career, to maintain the discipline, to not just stay in a career, but want to self-improve, it's a really admirable thing. And I hope I get to that point in my life. But my admiration is really for people who stick it out, who prove that they're not chasing whatever ribbon of the latest trend is, and can stay in whatever field it is that they are pursuing for a long extended period of time.

Matt Hall (13:08): That connects to a story that I saw you highlighted from the Journal on Twitter about Steph Curry trying to use data to become a better shooter, even though he's one of the best shooters ever. He wanted to make almost a swish within a swish. He wanted to get his shooting so precise. And his method was to shrink the basket by I think, two or three inches. And so my question is, how do you do that in your own profession? Well, what's your technique.

Jason Gay (13:39): I will not stand for any comparisons to a virtuous soul like Curry. It's just tat I'm not anywhere near that kind of aerospace. I admire greatly the tenacity, someone who is so accomplished at something, and Steph at this point is pretty inarguably the greatest jump shooter we've ever had in the history of the sport. But the fact that there's no rest, that there's not like, 'Well, I've hit the level I want to hit." And there's always something, and that's a marvelous thing to have witnessed. And I've seen it in a number of sports.

Jason Gay (14:13): My own instance, I think where experience has been helpful is just not freaking out at the steering wheel a little bit. Having had the opportunity to do it for a long enough time that I know what happens when it all goes sideways. I appreciate when it's easy and it doesn't go sideways, but I'm not going to get overly flustered in the moment. I can't say that I was like that always when I was younger. I was definitely capable of freaking out, and being the person who thought everything was going to hell in the hand basket. But the more I've done it, the more I just keep that calm.

Jason Gay (14:49): In fact, I like it when things get a little wild. I still believe strongly in writing on deadlines and writing for events on deadlines. So whether it's the Super Ball or whatever event that we're covering, having that opportunity to have to put it together in minutes, which is something that doesn't happen as much in newspapers anymore, or certainly in online publishing, but I like that. I like making it hard, but I like the calm of it that I feel now versus what I know I felt like when I was younger, which was freaking out again.

Matt Hall (15:23): Yeah. Okay. Let's talk for a second about some things I really loved in your book Little Victories.

Jason Gay (15:28): Oh, thank you. Okay.

Matt Hall (15:29): You have a section there where you say, "Free yourself from trying to be cool." I especially love this little section here. "You may be cool at the exact moment you do not think you are cool. You were cool when you stopped everything you were doing to help someone, when you listened instead of talking, when you met the person who would become your partner and you were so nervous, you could barely string words together. You are cool when you talk to your mother on the phone. Please do not let your mother know this because telling her is uncool and she will never stop calling." That section to me is so Jason Gay, because it's funny and truthful and poignant.

Jason Gay (16:16): Yeah. And reminds me that I'm doing a lousy job of calling my mother on the phone, which she helps remind me of. Cool's a fun, fertile topic, right, because it's probably the human quality that is most sought after, through advertising, through imagery, through those things that we are constantly bombarded with, whether it's in advertising environments, social media environments, just our walkabout, way we look at people we desire, covet, how we inter-relate with other people, how we fall in love. Cool is just this very indescribable quality and yet, so incredibly present in the way that we are told to behave.

Jason Gay (16:57): And I think the thing that is very hard to put your finger on is that, what we find most cool or the people, or the individuals or the actions that we find most cool are the things that are unconsciously cool. We're all very aware of the person, and maybe we've been that person at times of our lives. I certainly have, what we think we're cool, we've got the right jacket on and our hair's looking pretty good, and we're going to the party and our friends are going to be there and, you know... That person isn't cool. They're probably a little bit of a cartoon of it.

Jason Gay (17:31): The people that we hold up as iconically cool, whether it's a Paul Newman or an Aretha Franklin or Aaron Rogers in the Pocket of Third Down, or whomever it is in our lives that we look up as cool, they're not actively seeking out to be cool in the moment, they just are. And so it's this interesting quality, and that we're all chasing it. We're all being sold products and qualities and life enhancements that are going to give us cool. But in the end, eventually it's just this intangible quality that certainly can't be bought.

Matt Hall (18:11): In the book, you talk about something that I can relate to. You have a cancer story. And I like one of the things you share where you say, "You know you're on the other side of cancer when you start sweating the small stuff again." And my question to you is, while true, do you fight that, or have you given into that?

Jason Gay (18:31): Oh, God, I long since gave into that. It's sad to say, but, yes, of course. I'm 20 years out from my episode now. I was very fortunate in the moment and I remain very fortunate now. But that was wisdom that was given to me by somebody who was going through cancer at the same time, and was saying that, "You are going to realize that you're on the other side of it when you start blowing up at mundane things, whether it's a long line somewhere or somebody putting you on hold. Funny of this standard BS stuff that we get agitated about, because there is this instinct that happens when people are diagnosed, and certainly the way that people start talking to you, they're like, "Are you going to somehow become this fount of wisdom, the long view, because now you have the benefit of staring at mortality."

Jason Gay (19:18): In my case, I should be very clear that I was not staring at mortality. I had a very beatable diagnosis. But it's still the C word. And so people treat you a little differently and there's this thing like, oh, well you are going to start at climbing mountains when you get done with this. You're going to climb Everest. You're going to sell your possessions and travel the world. Are you going to be a different person? I'm sure there are people who have endured things like this who have made significant life changes. However, I think for great many people, life just progresses in a way that, if things go hopefully positively, you do return to the banal stuff. And I do think that appreciating that and in my case, yeah, looking around and realizing that I was getting annoyed at something that used to annoy me before my diagnosis was a real moment for me, of realizing, yeah, this is what recovery actually looks like.

Matt Hall (20:11): You have interviewed a lot of famous people or been around a lot of famous or important people. And I really enjoyed a section of your book where you talk about riding a bike, and you mentioned your interview of Robin Williams. Do you remember what he said?

Jason Gay (20:27): Sure. He said to me that... Rob Williams's a public record, but he was somebody who struggled with psychological issues. He had addiction issues in his life that he overcame, but he really threw himself into cycling to the point that I would hear from people that I knew in the Bay area where he lived, that if you ever wanted to sell a bicycle, just put a bicycle in the window and Rob Williams will walk by and buy it at some point. So I knew his reputation as a collector and as a super fan. But in the conversation, he knew everything about everything in terms of the technology and the sport and all the individual characters in it.

Jason Gay (21:03): But he was most interested in the experiential quality of it. He truly loved it for what it gave back to him and what he said and the quote that I'll never forget, which is that, "It's the closest you can come to flying." And if you ride a bike, that's the kind of thing you hear and the little hairs on your arms stand up on end, because you know that to be true. Now there are other worlds and sports and things like that, where that same adrenaline rush can be achieved. I interviewed an 89-year old skydiver the other day who said the exact same thing. It is the closest you can come to flying, and he might have a better point. He is literally in the air, 5,000 feet above the earth.

Jason Gay (21:41): However, it speaks to just what is a universal feeling of people who are interested in adrenaline sports and in things that might be risky, actually find a meditative quality to it. I'm really interested in people who compete in, for lack of a better word, dangerous sports or sports that carry a good deal of risk because they actually feel driven to finding this meditative equilibrium in that chaotic environment. You look at a bike race and you think, "Wow, that looks beautiful. They're winding their way through French countryside and castles and chalets and stuff like that, and going down the face of mountains and so on," and you are like, "That's really beautiful."

Jason Gay (22:29): But the reality is, if you're in it, it's like having your face in a furnace because it's risky and you have to be smart. You have to keep your wits about you, and you're exerting yourself at a 103%. I just find those personalities and those individuals who are in those worlds really interesting. And Robin was like... One thing that happened after his terribly unfortunate death was, I got reached out by people in his world who said, "Listen, we're going to auction off his bike collection. And we'd like you to write about it. We're going to do this for charity." I can't remember exactly what charities they were, but he had this incredible collection.

Jason Gay (23:08): I remember going into this garage in San Francisco. And it was just as far as you could see bikes and bikes and bikes. And it was like looking at a bike museum because he had everything. He had the most beautiful, expensive tour de France chariots. And he had the little red bike like a grizzly bear rides in a Russian circus or something like that. He had choppers, he had everything imaginable. And I felt like a real honor because there was this world in which people really reacted to the way that he talked about cycling.

Matt Hall (23:46): You tell another story in Little Victories that has stuck with me and that's of a man named Marty from Minnesota who turns out to be a Nigerian prince.

Jason Gay (23:58): Yeah. Well, this is a story that I think about probably once a week because it was really a life-changing event for him, but also a life-changing event for me to be able to witness something that's happening to somebody that's going to forever change the way that he views the world. I'm going to try to do my best to recollect it, but he was African American guy who grew up in an adopted family. And at a certain point grew interested in who his birth parents were, and discovered that his mother was a student at a college in Iowa, and that his father was a visiting student from Nigeria who had returned to Nigeria, which at the time was in the throes of a very painful civil war and never came home, never came back to the United States.

Jason Gay (24:44): So he was given up to adoption and raised by... He had a very happy and loving childhood, but like a lot of people at a certain age, became very curious about where they came from and did the research. And this was not 10 minutes of Googling. This was years of him seeking, records being open to him and so on and eventually was able to locate his mother and then was able to locate, via email, his father who was still alive and living in southeast Nigeria. And I read a little story in a paper in Minnesota saying, "Local man discovers he has princely roots," that the father was in fact this tribal leader in Nigeria.

Jason Gay (25:27): And I was like, this is interesting. And I wrote to him and I said, "If you ever go to see him, will you let me come with you?" Just like throwing that off, like a lottery ticket. Never imagined he'd respond, much less write to you. And that's what happened. He did invite me and I went with him, and a photographer and a couple other people. Again, think of what it is like to be able to bear witness to somebody seeing their father for the first time at age, I think he was 40, 41 years old at the time. Imagine what it's like for a father, who is in the seventies at the time seeing his son for the first time. Just incredibly raw emotions that are almost indescribable.

Jason Gay (26:08): It's really hard to tell a story like that, because the people who are experiencing it can't even articulate what it means to them. Certainly not in the moment, it takes a long time to do that. But, yeah, that was a story I'll never forget because the graciousness of the family to let us into that very intimate, and I should add complicated, family event, it's not you're just like, "Oh, thanks, dad. Great to see you for the first time." You're unpacking a lot. And so I think about that story all the time.

Matt Hall (26:38): And that story is in a section on travel and the importance of travel. And you end that section with saying, "At its best, travel is going somewhere else to find home." And I thought that was just such a great statement and a fabulous story. People should buy the book for many reasons, but that story alone is really worth having it. I also need to talk about someone I have an unnatural level of love for. I'm a Federer fanatic.

Jason Gay (27:07): You're a Fed head?

Matt Hall (27:08): Yeah. I don't know if I'm in any clubs where I have gear or whatever, but one of my lifelong dreams was to see him play at Wimbledon on center court, and through a couple buddies, I was able to do that. And it's one of the great moments of my life. You wrote about Federer and said, I like this note you have, "On occasion, I've seen Federer at a press conference after a loss. And a question will come that suggests he should be morose as if a train has just hit his dog. And Federer will grow a little snippy and fix the interrogator with a glare that says, "Do you realize what amazing good luck it is to be me?" And it is." I like to imagine Federer saying everything while wearing a gold cape and petting and albino tiger. I love it.

Jason Gay (27:56):

Well, thank you. I had a similar reaction the first time I got to see him. I actually saw him in Wimbledon for the first time play when it was the Olympics in London, 2020. So it wasn't actually literally Wimbledon, it was at the all England club where Wimbledon happens, but they were playing on center court. And I had the same goosebumps feeling, because he is somebody who exists at this higher orbit in the world of sports. Not just because he's this incredible champion, but he gives people this aesthetic joy. I was talking about this with a colleague of mine last night about Steph Curry. Curry has reached this point now in his career where he's getting cheered on the road.

Jason Gay (28:31): The fans who are supposed to be booing him are cheering for him to succeed. In Brooklyn last night, they were cheering [MVP 00:28:38] when he was at the foul line. That's just unimaginable for most athletes. But I feel like he reaches this Federer or so be because, you're not just seeing someone performing at a high level, we both know that there are two other tennis players in the men's field who are remarkably iconic, Djocovic and Nadal, and Federer is this complete package of both champion and an aesthetic. He plays it away, that is almost [ballet 00:29:02]. It's like watching [inaudible 00:29:03] play a sport and it just is different.

Jason Gay (29:06): And I think also the other part that happened in his career was that there was this pretty bleak lull in his mid-30s where he did not win a major title for about five years until he won in Australia. And I think in a weird way that, that humanized him and made him more relatable and more popular than ever, because if you remember at the early stages of Federer's career, the grumbling was like, "Oh, he wins all the time, boring. Can't tennis get other people to do this?" Well, nothing makes you more empathetic and more interesting as an athlete and then to have some real setback in your career. And he had many of them, many, many, many heartbreakers along the way. Five setters lost.

Jason Gay (29:45): And I just feel like it built almost this cult around him and the cult is too strong a word because he's actually just enormously popular. And you're not alone. And I think that to bring it to the present day right now, he's in a situation where he had another knee surgery at the end of this year. There's real question marks as to whether or not he's going to be able to come back. He is 40. But a very hard thing to do, to come back and play at a high level after having multiple surgeries in your 40s. We've not seen it in tennis. I don't like the idea of him sputtering to the finish. You want him to walk off triumphantly on the second Sunday at Wimbledon or some other major event. That's one of the things about sports, is you don't get to book those kinds of things.

Matt Hall (30:30): Yeah. Well, I remember I was sitting close enough that I could see the smirk on his face when he would hit a ball to one of the ball kids and they wouldn't have to move. It would almost go in their pockets without them touching it. And he looked as proud of that as he did a winner down the line. And it's like the Steph Curry swish within a swish sort of thing. It's like he's on a level... He was playing a world-class opponent who he dismantled with ease, but his game within the game, like the way he would hit the ball back to the ball kids, was really incredible because it looked like he was getting as much joy out of that game that was happening on the side. And the way he answers press conferences in four or five different languages. It's-

Jason Gay (31:15): Yeah. He's otherworldly in those respects and you're smart to watch tennis that way, because I think that if you go to a match, obviously there's the match, there's a scoring and the way that they are performing actually on the scoreboard. But there's also these other things that you can pay attention to, whether it's their demeanor in between games when they had breaks, or the way that they interact with, whether it's ball boys or line judges, back in the time they had lines judges, or the crowd or just how they handle setbacks. Tennis is a very unique sport in that, you're out there on your own for a very long time. You have to comport yourself somewhat reasonably. Obviously not everybody does it every time and Federer has occasionally had an outburst of his own.

Jason Gay (31:57): But for the most part, his ability to move on to the next, is unrivaled. All the great champions, whether it's Roger Federer or a great champion in any other sport, one of the things that does make them distinct is not the way that they win, because they're going to win, but the way that they lose, and their ability to turn the page and continue to get at it and move on to the next. Not everybody is built that way. And history has seen many, many champions who have come along to the scene may be at an early age and you think, "Oh wow, this person's just going to pile up the championships." But the first little setback that comes along undoes them and the greats are the ones who can go on to the next thing.

Matt Hall (32:41): I could talk about tennis and Roger Federer and just the game in general for a long time. I like the Tom Ford story and dressing up in your day of the week socks. And I also wanted to talk maybe about parenting and that awesome bit you had at the end of your book, where you talked about your friend who was an old biking pal holding Jesse.

Jason Gay (33:02): Oh yeah.

Matt Hall (33:03): And then your line saying, "I was hoping that Jesse would poop so we could find out how much [Candy 00:33:08] missed that."

Jason Gay (33:10): Ford was just... There are people who aren't terribly up on fashion. He's arguably one of the leading men's wear designers and women's wear designers in the last generation. He was the lead designer for Gucci for a long time, started his own label. You could buy some very, very expensive, but beautiful Tom Ford suits and things like that. But he's also positioned himself in the past number of years as a Vanguard of fashion wisdom. He's the kind of person that says, "Men should never wear shorts, shorts are for playing sports and jumping into a pool. If you're not doing either one of those things, you should never wear shorts," in a good-natured, funny way. He's not this punitive scolder or anything like that, but he is the kind of person who says exactly what's on his mind at all times.

Jason Gay (33:58): And I did have that moment of going to visit him at his studio. And as you would, you'd be like, I was nervous about what I'm wearing. I can't afford a Tom Ford suit, no way. I'm not going to wear that. So I'm going to wear my nicest suit that I have, I got my tie on, I got my shirt and I got everything pressed. I feel, I look pretty good. And then I have these junky little Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday socks that I got as a Christmas present. I'm like, what are the chances he's going to see the socks that say, Wednesdays, all over them? What are the chances? That's not going to happen? And literally, within 90 seconds of the interviews starting, he's like, "You know, it's Wednesday right? I know that because I'm looking down..." "Oh no, I think the sock was the wrong day." I couldn't even get that right. Anyway.

Jason Gay (34:46): But that's an example of, when that happened in the moment, it's mortifying, but I'm also like, "Oh that's great material." I'm so happy that did happen because that humanizes the person, right? It's a lot easier to tell that story than it is for me to tell how a Tom Ford cut of a suit makes it a Tom Ford suit. With my kids and my parenting, and the cunning thing was simply just an early part of my son's life, first child and everything about him. It feels like it's this long slog parenting. You're like, "Oh my God, when are these kids going to grow up? They're so stinky and noisy and wonderful."

Jason Gay (35:19): But punishing and having him around a friend whose kids were all grown up and out of the house and off to college and professional lives and so on. And he grabbed Jesse and he just held him for just a little bit longer of a time than people would normally hold a child. And he's just like, "You're never going to know how much you're going to miss this until you're here, where I am. There's this feeling that I've missed this so much. I've missed this ability to hold this little person loyal to me in my arms in this way."

Jason Gay (35:51): It didn't even take 21 years. I'm there already. My children are older. They're terribly uninterested in me, gripping them, picking... I can't even pick them up if I wanted to because they weigh too much. But it did underline for me in an early moment of parenthood, how quickly it all can go. And I know that sounds like somewhat of a trite observation, but it really is true. And parenthood accelerates a life in a way like nothing else has accelerated my life ever before. It's made it wonderful in every respect. I have no regrets, but it does speed that clock up. You feel like you're actually... You know how people have podcasts and you feel you're going at one and a half or two speed once the kids show up. I really feel that way.

Matt Hall (36:38): Yeah. Well, that's a good note for us to end on and I would tell you, I hope you keep writing for decades to come, because I would miss your voice if you were not there. You are unlike anyone else in your ability to be humorous and also really truthful and candid at the same time. Your voice is original. If you weren't there in the paper or on the web, I don't know where I would go to get my fill. So I hope you keep writing for a very long time.

Jason Gay (37:07): Well, I will do it as long as they let me, and I really am grateful for those kind words and I don't deserve half of it. I'm really appreciative of you taking the time to read all this stuff and ask me about it. And yeah, I will do this as long as they let me, because I feel extremely fortunate to have this job. You can find me at Wall Street Journal, wsj.com/sports. You can find our whole crew there and I'm part of that.

Matt Hall (37:32): All right, Jason. Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate your time.

Jason Gay (37:35): Thank you.

Matt Hall (37:35): Very generous of you. And I'll keep reading and watching and paying attention to all you put out there.

Jason Gay (37:40): Thank you. Grateful to you. Have a great week. Bye-bye.

Matt Hall (37:42): All right. See you, man.

Jason Gay (37:50): Are you a funny writer? Please note the information shared in this podcast is not intended as advice. The intent is to share meaningful experiences. I am likely not your advisor nor wealth manager, nor financial planner and my opinions are my own and not necessarily shared by Hill Investment Group. Investing involves risk. Consult a professional before implementing an investment strategy. Thank you.