Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: You know, I went to a game with my dad
Speaker 2: and my brother and it was miserable and awful, and
Speaker 2: we're all frustrated and mad.
Speaker 1: Eric Simon's high school math teacher in northern California. Typical
Speaker 1: sports fan in some ways. He fell in love with
Speaker 1: his favorite teams as a little kid after his dad
Speaker 1: took him to some games. Now he's all grown up
Speaker 1: but still going to games.
Speaker 2: I'm riding home. I'm taking bart back across from Berkeley
Speaker 2: into the city on a Saturday night, and I'm sitting
Speaker 2: there and I have like a headache from wearing a
Speaker 2: dumb hat that is like constricted my head for too long,
Speaker 2: and I've been standing in the sun, and i had
Speaker 2: like a miserable dinner, and there's all these people around
Speaker 2: me riding bart in for like a nice night. They're
Speaker 2: dressed up, they're going to bars, they're going to nice restaurants.
Speaker 1: But in one way, Eric was not typical. He was
Speaker 1: starting to ask questions that most sports fans never do.
Speaker 2: And I'm just looking at myself and I'm crammed in
Speaker 2: the corner, just feeling like shit, like what the fuck
Speaker 2: is wrong with me? Sorry, I don't know if I
Speaker 2: can swim as you get Oh, we do, yes, What
Speaker 2: is wrong with me? Why am I sitting here in
Speaker 2: the corner of a bart train, sweat stained and smelling.
Speaker 2: I'm like eight thirty on a Saturday night, when everybody
Speaker 2: else is leading such a pleasant, normal life around me,
Speaker 2: And I think I just felt that, like, like, why
Speaker 2: do all of us do this so much? Why do
Speaker 2: we do this to ourselves?
Speaker 1: He was on that train around twenty ten. Eric teaches math,
Speaker 1: but Eric also writes the thought crossed his mind. Maybe
Speaker 1: I should write about this. Maybe I should figure out
Speaker 1: what's wrong with me, because someone needs to.
Speaker 2: I was very naive at this point. I was a
Speaker 2: science writer. I wrote mostly about scientists, and I thought,
Speaker 2: you know, I'll go find a scientist, and a scientist
Speaker 2: will answer it for me, because that's sort of what
Speaker 2: I did. I'd have a question and I'd find an expert,
Speaker 2: and the expert would say, oh, yeah, this. I honestly
Speaker 2: sort of thought, you know, there's some guys studies sports
Speaker 2: fans at Harvard and they'll say, yeah, there's this little
Speaker 2: part of your brain there, and if you nuke that sucker,
Speaker 2: you'd be healthy again.
Speaker 1: If only it were that easy. I'm Michael Lewis, and
Speaker 1: this is against the rules. Each season we've taken a
Speaker 1: character in American life who also happens to be a
Speaker 1: character in American sports. The referee, the coach, the expert.
Speaker 1: These characters have changed, their roles, have evolved in ways
Speaker 1: that tell us not just about sports, but about the
Speaker 1: world we live in. This season, the character will be
Speaker 1: exploring is the fan. Being a fan is less a
Speaker 1: role than an emotional state. And that emotional state hasn't
Speaker 1: changed much since the fifth century BC, when Greeks hollered
Speaker 1: at other Greeks racing chariots. What's changing is how that
Speaker 1: emotional state can be exploited. That's a huge deal because
Speaker 1: it's shaping our society in all sorts of ways. This
Speaker 1: fact has been staring me in the face for the
Speaker 1: longest time. Now, I'm thinking right now, when I was
Speaker 1: writing Moneyball, that book was about a baseball team with
Speaker 1: no money, the Oakland A's figuring out that the other
Speaker 1: baseball teams were behaving irrationally and exploiting that they sparked
Speaker 1: a revolution not just in sports, but in business, in politics,
Speaker 1: and all sorts of other things. Even now, you can't
Speaker 1: help but wonder why Oakland. Why did this world changing
Speaker 1: event occur inside this baseball team with not too many
Speaker 1: fans and no money. So few fans and so little
Speaker 1: money that the Oakland A's are as I speak, packing
Speaker 1: up their bags and on their way to Las Vegas
Speaker 1: in search of more fans and more money. Back when
Speaker 1: the Oakland A's were inventing moneyball, their lack of resources
Speaker 1: was obviously important. It forced the A's management to think
Speaker 1: differently to compete with the teams with more money. But
Speaker 1: another explanation was the Oakland fan or his absence. Back
Speaker 1: when I was writing the book, the Oakland management said
Speaker 1: this thing over and over. We are so lucky. We
Speaker 1: don't have a big, noisy fan base paying much attention
Speaker 1: to what we do. The Oakland's front office didn't have
Speaker 1: this loud mob hollering at them to do the same
Speaker 1: stupid stuff that the other baseball people were doing. They
Speaker 1: weren't being egged on by their fans and by their
Speaker 1: local media in the same way that say, the Yankees
Speaker 1: or the Red Sox were a lot of people who
Speaker 1: manage baseball teams were effectively playing craps to impress the
Speaker 1: crowd around the table. The Oakland management was off quietly
Speaker 1: counting cards at the blackjack table. They could ignore fan
Speaker 1: emotion and rid themselves of fan biases, and that was
Speaker 1: just a huge tactical advantage. A weird sort of combat
Speaker 1: line runs through the modern economy. That's what this entire
Speaker 1: season is really about, the gap between the people who
Speaker 1: count cards and the people who don't even realize the
Speaker 1: cards can be counted. Either you're one of these smart
Speaker 1: people able to measure and analyze and calculate probabilities and
Speaker 1: place your bets as rationally as possible, or you are
Speaker 1: their prey.
Speaker 2: A fan, so you know, just like Google, you know,
Speaker 2: sports fan researchers.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: And to be honest, not that much comes up. And
Speaker 2: it's like, well, why is that?
Speaker 1: I definitely have a weak spot for writers who come
Speaker 1: along and point out something important that's just been sitting
Speaker 1: there forever unnoticed. Fifteen years ago, Eric Simons did just that.
Speaker 1: He noticed how weirdly he behaved as a fan, his irrationality,
Speaker 1: how unhappy it could make him. He asked, what's the
Speaker 1: matter with me?
Speaker 2: This is a thing that is you know, billions of
Speaker 2: dollars and everyone does it, and it's true across culture
Speaker 2: is like, why isn't there this, you know, the Institute
Speaker 2: for the Study of Sports Fans at every university on
Speaker 2: the planet, and so you know, I started started there.
Speaker 1: They're all too busy going to the football games, right,
Speaker 1: That's why there's a lot.
Speaker 2: Of truth to that.
Speaker 1: Eric Simon set out to find someone, anyone who could
Speaker 1: help him to explain the weird things his mind was doing,
Speaker 1: and back then, if you did that, you eventually ended
Speaker 1: up meeting Dan Juan. I can't figure out, for dramatic purposes,
Speaker 1: whether it's better to call you Professor Waller Dan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I I will leave that up to you.
Speaker 4: The only thing I care about is what my grand
Speaker 4: shaw calls me Dan Dan. Beyond that, I really don't
Speaker 4: really there.
Speaker 1: Danje is a psychology professor at Murray State University in
Speaker 1: Western Kentucky. Professor one's kind of great because it's the
Speaker 1: professor of something that nobody else is a professor of.
Speaker 1: Sor Dan or his students have written some huge number
Speaker 1: of serious academic articles with titles like is there really
Speaker 1: no Crying in Baseball? Examining the acceptance of crying in sport?
Speaker 1: And feeling suck and so does your team, exploring the
Speaker 1: link between restrictive emotionality and dysfunctional fandom. But for a
Speaker 1: long time, as far as Dan knew, he was the
Speaker 1: world's only full time sports fan researcher. He invented the
Speaker 1: field by accident. As a graduate student back in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty seven. On the first day of class, his professor
Speaker 1: gave him a homework assignment find some testable hypothesis about
Speaker 1: human behavior. He'd gone home and watched Sports Center instead.
Speaker 1: There were only two students in Dan's class, and when
Speaker 1: it was time to present, the professor called on Dan. First.
Speaker 4: I had one hundred percent forgotten about the assignment. I
Speaker 4: am now just making cramp up as I go along,
Speaker 4: and I said, well, I think there had been this
Speaker 4: story on the sports and about a soccer rise. Well,
Speaker 4: I think that if an individual is really highly identified
Speaker 4: psychologic connected to their sports team, they're probably more likely
Speaker 4: to get violent when they're watching the team.
Speaker 3: If things don't work.
Speaker 1: Out on the spot, Dan cooks up his testable hypothesis.
Speaker 1: He believes the sports fans most likely to start fights
Speaker 1: after a loss are the sports fans most devoted to
Speaker 1: that team. This hypothesis will be a breeze to test.
Speaker 1: He thinks, surely someone in the world of psychology has
Speaker 1: already looked into it.
Speaker 2: When you go.
Speaker 5: Back and you look back at people who've studied fans,
Speaker 5: what do you find a random study or two on
Speaker 5: fan viol And if you ever found anybody who wrote
Speaker 5: like an opinion or an essay about sport fandom, they
Speaker 5: all just slammed it.
Speaker 4: Everybody loves sport except for the you know, the eggheads
Speaker 4: are actually studying sport.
Speaker 1: So Dan designs his own study. He discovers, to his surprise,
Speaker 1: that there's little correlation between fans devotion to their teams
Speaker 1: and their willingness to punch people. He starts to look
Speaker 1: further into the lives of dedicated fans.
Speaker 3: Sports fans are more politically active than non sports fans.
Speaker 3: They're more likely to go museums and non sports fans.
Speaker 4: They're more likely to play sports, they're more likely to
Speaker 4: go to the theater, They're more likely to donate.
Speaker 3: They're also more likely to have higher GPAs.
Speaker 2: So they're not lazy.
Speaker 3: No, they're not.
Speaker 4: Now again, okay, some are right, I mean, they gotta
Speaker 4: always admit right that they're out there.
Speaker 3: But no, the vast majority are are quite involved.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Obviously all fans aren't the same. There are nuances here,
Speaker 1: and Dan one began to explore them. What began with
Speaker 1: a forgotten homework assignment became a stream of published papers, the.
Speaker 4: Reviews, and the response I got from academics and journals,
Speaker 4: and that the media was so positive that I just
Speaker 4: basically scuttled everything else and decided to just study this.
Speaker 3: For thirty five years.
Speaker 1: It's kind of odd if you think about it. Basically
Speaker 1: no one else wanted to study sports fans, but lots
Speaker 1: of people, even people who ran serious academic journals, were
Speaker 1: curious about them.
Speaker 4: It's this social category where the editors and their reviewers
Speaker 4: there's a decent chance, no guarantee, there's a decent chance
Speaker 4: that they're sports fans, and they're like, yeah, why in
Speaker 4: the world am I doing this.
Speaker 1: It's that same question again, and no one's answering it.
Speaker 4: People are so curious as to why it is such
Speaker 4: a large chunk of the population will dedicate such time
Speaker 4: and money and love and desire and emotion and sadness
Speaker 4: and whatever you know to this voluntary activity. Right, no
Speaker 4: one's like twisting their arm and making them go do
Speaker 4: this and they have very very little, if any, controlled
Speaker 4: over the outcome.
Speaker 3: I mean, you can't find another place in society where
Speaker 3: that's the case, right.
Speaker 4: Where people care so much about something and they walk
Speaker 4: in going, yeah, you know, there's about a fifty to
Speaker 4: fifty chance that I'm gonna hate this at the end
Speaker 4: of consuming it.
Speaker 3: I can't control the outcome. Let's go.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to nineteen eighty seven is a starting point,
Speaker 1: the year danjan forgot his homework and stumbled into a career.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty seven, the highest rated TV program in
Speaker 1: the United States, according to Nielsen research, was The Cosby Show,
Speaker 1: followed by a Different World, Cheers and The Golden Girls.
Speaker 1: Only one of the top thirty TV shows in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty seven had anything to do with sports. Monday Night
Speaker 1: Football came in sixteenth. TV's changed a lot since nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty seven. In twenty twenty three, ninety three of the
Speaker 1: one hundred most watched broadcasts in the United States were
Speaker 1: sporting events. Twenty NFL games drew bigger crowds than the
Speaker 1: State of the Union address, fifty eight NFL games, and
Speaker 1: one college football game had more viewers than the oscars.
Speaker 1: Only when you get to the second hundred most watched
Speaker 1: TV shows, does football start to get some competition from
Speaker 1: basketball and baseball, pro golf and the Kentucky Derby. There's
Speaker 1: no longer any question of whether sports and sports fans
Speaker 1: are central to our culture. The question is does our
Speaker 1: culture have a center without them?
Speaker 6: What about the fans? What about the fan?
Speaker 1: Andrew Brant runs the Center for Sport Sorts Law at
Speaker 1: Villanova University, but before that he spent a decade running
Speaker 1: the business end of the Green Bay Packers.
Speaker 6: And I feel for the fan because listen, I cover business,
Speaker 6: and in these business negotiations between leagues and players, associations,
Speaker 6: media networks and leagues, municipalities and teams about stadiums and
Speaker 6: taxpayer money, the fans are not party, right, There's no
Speaker 6: negotiation where well, let's see what the fan thinks.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 6: So I understand sports is fun and games, and I
Speaker 6: tell my students all the time, but it's not at
Speaker 6: this level. It's not. It's a business, and it's a
Speaker 6: cold business. You see players shipped out left and right.
Speaker 6: You see fans kind of a pawn in the process,
Speaker 6: but they keep coming back, They keep coming back.
Speaker 1: It's such an alluring product that the dollar doesn't have
Speaker 1: to pay much attention to the interests of the buyer.
Speaker 6: Well, they come back despite despite prices rising, despite cable
Speaker 6: bills rising, despite all those things. If there was a
Speaker 6: breaking point where fans say that I've had enough, maybe
Speaker 6: prices would change, maybe availability would change. We just don't know, but.
Speaker 1: We sort of do know. Booming ticket prices, teams jumping
Speaker 1: around from city to city, players jumping around from team
Speaker 1: to team, college sports becoming a raw money grab. People
Speaker 1: used to say that greedy capitalism would kill fan interest,
Speaker 1: but not a chance. No matter what you do to
Speaker 1: the fan, or to his team or to his sport,
Speaker 1: he's been willing to take it and come back for more.
Speaker 1: The Green Bay Packers are the only pro sports teams
Speaker 1: that's owned by their fans, and so they publish their
Speaker 1: financial results. Andrew Brent knows this better than anyone. The Packers'
Speaker 1: finances over time show you the dollar value of fan interest.
Speaker 6: So think about gross revenues, right. Gross revenues when I
Speaker 6: got there in nineteen ninety nine were about two hundred million.
Speaker 6: By the time I left in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 6: Packers had revenues of four hundred and fifty million dollars,
Speaker 6: so more than double that amount in a decade.
Speaker 1: Back in nineteen eighty seven, the Packers, if they could
Speaker 1: legally be sold, could have been bought for roughly ninety
Speaker 1: million dollars. Forbes now values the team at five point
Speaker 1: six billion. The Packers didn't publish their players' salaries back
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty seven. They weren't that interesting, but no
Speaker 1: one made more than six figures. Last year, the team's
Speaker 1: left tackle made twenty one point three million dollars. Who's
Speaker 1: ultimately paying for all this the fans, of course, through
Speaker 1: ticket sales, through cable bills, through less tangible ways like
Speaker 1: taxes and viewership. There is a word for people who
Speaker 1: pay more and more for the same product, and who
Speaker 1: will continue to pay more and more no matter how
Speaker 1: badly it makes them feel. Addict.
Speaker 4: I have spent the better part of three and a
Speaker 4: half decades studying how sports fans cope with losses.
Speaker 1: Professor Dan Wan again, the world's first sports fan researcher.
Speaker 5: All, it's like, give me a little toolbox, give me
Speaker 5: the toolbox for coping.
Speaker 4: Okay, So, first of all, sports fans are great at
Speaker 4: seeing the past through incredibly rose colored glasses. Right, So
Speaker 4: you ask people, okay, ten years ago, how many games
Speaker 4: did your team win?
Speaker 3: They actually will overestimate that.
Speaker 1: Coping strategy Number one for the addict, you ignore the facts,
Speaker 1: you rewrite history, so whatever actually happened becomes what you
Speaker 1: wish had happened.
Speaker 4: They also had a sendency to see the future as
Speaker 4: being prettier than it's probably gonna be. So we like
Speaker 4: construct our reality based on the fact our team's not
Speaker 4: doing well now, but man, it was so great before,
Speaker 4: and man it's gonna.
Speaker 3: Be so great in the future.
Speaker 4: Every crappy NFL team, well, all the fan bases to
Speaker 4: talk about next year's draft. That's what they always talk about,
Speaker 4: because we're gonna have a good pick.
Speaker 1: Coping Strategy Number two and active Fantasy life. Whatever just happened,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter because it has no bearing on what
Speaker 1: will happen.
Speaker 4: Another thing that fans do is they will find a
Speaker 4: way to move the cause off of the team and
Speaker 4: onto some other entity.
Speaker 3: It was the ref's fault.
Speaker 1: Coping strategy Number three, my personal favorite. We were robbed,
Speaker 1: the game was stolen, rigged. It's all rigged. The fans
Speaker 1: need to believe is so powerful that it warps reality.
Speaker 1: You never need to change your belief, which brings us
Speaker 1: to the weird stuff. Dan loves the weird stuff.
Speaker 3: One person said that his superstition was that when watching
Speaker 3: his favorite team on TV, he had to go up
Speaker 3: to the opposing team's free throw shooter and put his
Speaker 3: hand over that person's eyes to distract him on the TV.
Speaker 3: On the TV.
Speaker 4: This is a person who is getting a master's degree
Speaker 4: from our psychology program.
Speaker 2: Here's the thing.
Speaker 4: Not only I mean I have to rub I have
Speaker 4: to rub my favorite pack of baseball cards on my cat.
Speaker 4: I have to light incense to the Buddha out back.
Speaker 4: We can't let mom in the room because she's bad luck.
Speaker 4: But here's the thing, Michael, here's the thing. We asked
Speaker 4: him on a one to eight scale, one not at
Speaker 4: all eight hundred percent, how convinced are you that your
Speaker 4: superstitions impact the outcome of the sporting event?
Speaker 3: And the average score was about five.
Speaker 4: Think about that. These are educated people, right, and were like, well,
Speaker 4: are you gonna stop? Well, I know it's silly, but
Speaker 4: I still.
Speaker 3: Have to do it.
Speaker 1: This isn't just people doing obviously dumb shit. It's people
Speaker 1: capable of knowing they're doing dumb shit and somehow still
Speaker 1: refusing to know it.
Speaker 3: We had one person he actually did his own study
Speaker 3: with this lucky Saint Louis Cardinals' hat, where he kept
Speaker 3: track for a whole season of how many they won
Speaker 3: when he wore the hat and how many they won
Speaker 3: when he didn't.
Speaker 4: And he showed us this is scientific. Now, this is scientific.
Speaker 4: He showed us how they had a better winning percent.
Speaker 4: So now he asked to wear the.
Speaker 1: Hat, warping reality, blaming others, embracing superstitions, all to cope
Speaker 1: with a very basic situation that you can't control all
Speaker 1: symptoms of fandom. All right, let's get back to Eric
Speaker 1: Simon's the math teacher and science writer who was on
Speaker 1: the Bart train after his team lost, wondering what was
Speaker 1: wrong with him. You established pretty quickly there was not
Speaker 1: some part of your brain that was responsible for this, right,
Speaker 1: It's all your brain. Eric eventually writes an entire book
Speaker 1: about all of this, It's called The Secret Lives of
Speaker 1: Sports Fans. Trying to figure out what's underneath all the
Speaker 1: weird behavior, Eric winds up talking to neurologists and psychologists
Speaker 1: people had learned all kinds of interesting stuff about the
Speaker 1: human brain, but hadn't thought to apply it to the
Speaker 1: brains of sports fans.
Speaker 2: This is what our hormones do when we're working against
Speaker 2: other people. This is what we do when we're in groups.
Speaker 2: It's affecting your judgments. I think people talk about this
Speaker 2: more in a societal context than a sports fan context.
Speaker 2: But like a basic example, there's cameras everywhere, there's slow
Speaker 2: mo instant replay everywhere. Why is it that with like
Speaker 2: nineteen different instant replays people divide, They get more convinced
Speaker 2: I'm right, the other guys are wrong. How can you
Speaker 2: show two people video clips in super slow motion and
Speaker 2: they still disagree about what happened? Is because, like this
Speaker 2: whole enterprise is challenging your perception. It's changing what you see.
Speaker 1: It's changing what you see. So we not only tolerate,
Speaker 1: but actively pursue interests that lead us to warp reality.
Speaker 1: But what purpose does that serve? One answer that Eric
Speaker 1: found had been supplied long ago by a Polish social
Speaker 1: psychologist named Henry Tagfel. Tagfell had his own curious journey
Speaker 1: to the subject.
Speaker 2: He is Jewish in the nineteen twenties. Nineteen thirties, then
Speaker 2: moves to France just before the start of World War Two.
Speaker 2: He volunteers for the French army he has captured. He
Speaker 2: goes home to Poland after the war and finds out
Speaker 2: that most of his friends and family have been killed,
Speaker 2: and this sort of sets him on this course of
Speaker 2: trying to understand why do people do this? Where do
Speaker 2: these divisions in societies come from, Where does prejudice come from?
Speaker 2: Why do people have this ability to turn against each
Speaker 2: other in such a way to stop recognizing each other's humanity.
Speaker 1: Cag Pellat survived the war only because he'd become identified
Speaker 1: with a group to which he didn't really belong French soldiers,
Speaker 1: rather than to the one he did Polish Jews. He
Speaker 1: wanted to study the power of groups, and so he
Speaker 1: started by taking his students and just dividing them in two.
Speaker 2: And one of his principal findings, which is called minimal
Speaker 2: group theory, is that doesn't have to matter the differences
Speaker 2: between the groups, that you could be divided into groups
Speaker 2: incredibly arbitrarily. He divided kids, mostly schoolboys in his studies
Speaker 2: into groups on the basis of flipping a coin, and
Speaker 2: what he found and what collaborators found is that just
Speaker 2: that arbitrary division you guys are over here, you guys
Speaker 2: are over here, is enough to then produce pretty significant
Speaker 2: differences in how those groups behave toward each other. For
Speaker 2: no other reason than we said, you're in that one
Speaker 2: and you're in that one.
Speaker 1: So much shallower than the difference between the Chiefs and
Speaker 1: the Bengals.
Speaker 2: Then yeah, I mean, these were all kids from the
Speaker 2: same school, they're you know, all sort of the same age.
Speaker 2: They are a pretty homogeneous group. You put someone in
Speaker 2: a group and you tell them you're in this group,
Speaker 2: and your identity becomes I'm part of this group.
Speaker 1: This is my place. I belong here with these other
Speaker 1: people like me. That feeling, once I have it is
Speaker 1: so powerful it will cause me to organize all my
Speaker 1: beliefs and perceptions around it. It'll dictate my reality.
Speaker 2: If we all have these sort of biases, you know,
Speaker 2: and you see them expressed so neatly in sports, then
Speaker 2: maybe sports is a way to look at sort of
Speaker 2: slowly unraveling them, which is where I started to look
Speaker 2: at these questions about you know, like why doesn't instant
Speaker 2: replay change anyone's mind? And you know what do you
Speaker 2: need to to like make a friend from across the aisle.
Speaker 2: You know, where where could you find that sort of
Speaker 2: harmonious utopia?
Speaker 1: Not in Philadelphia, But that's why it's.
Speaker 2: So so interesting to look at where where has it
Speaker 2: ever existed? So finding that line, which involves sort of
Speaker 2: changing our own our own perception and changing the perception
Speaker 2: of other people, that sort of that became the big question.
Speaker 1: You'll notice that Eric changed his question. When he started
Speaker 1: he was asking what the hell's wrong with me? By
Speaker 1: the end, he's asking why can't human beings, once they
Speaker 1: identify with some group, see the world as it is
Speaker 1: rather than as they'd like it to be. Why are
Speaker 1: they even less inclined than usual to respond to fact
Speaker 1: and to stats and more inclined to be swayed by
Speaker 1: some story in their heads? Why can't they see that
Speaker 1: the odds are against them? This new question is obviously bigger,
Speaker 1: maybe even better than Eric's original one, but it leaves
Speaker 1: the original one just kind of hanging there.
Speaker 2: I started because I felt like there was something wrong
Speaker 2: with me, and I think I ended up feeling like, well,
Speaker 2: maybe this is more normal than it feels. This is
Speaker 2: just sort of part of being human. That is just
Speaker 2: weird to be a person sometimes, and that sports fans
Speaker 2: is one part of being weird as a person. But
Speaker 2: it has its moments of sweetness, and it has its
Speaker 2: moments of joy as well as it has its moments
Speaker 2: of what the fuck, this is the dumbest thing? Why
Speaker 2: do I do it? And that all that together, I mean,
Speaker 2: that is the package of being alive. And you accept
Speaker 2: it in this context the same way you accepted everywhere else.
Speaker 1: Eric Simons sort of hoped that he might study his
Speaker 1: way out of fandom. He wound up giving up on
Speaker 1: that and just coming to terms with it. There was
Speaker 1: no magic pill to take. There was just this powerful
Speaker 1: force inside him, a force that shapes not just sports
Speaker 1: but lots of other stuff, A force that steam rolls
Speaker 1: over facts in search of feeling. But this powerful force
Speaker 1: that's inside of us. What happens if it can be
Speaker 1: exploited in new ways. What happens if like technology changes,
Speaker 1: their laws change so that it could be monetized, almost
Speaker 1: like a natural resource. What if you can frack the fan?
Speaker 1: That's where we're going with this season against the rules,
Speaker 1: because the fracking it's already happening right under our noses.
Speaker 6: This isn't fantasy as usually, this is Draft Kicks. It
Speaker 6: was one of these things like, wow, we never get
Speaker 6: this lucky. I mean this changed everything.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the big time.
Speaker 1: Turn to him and say, do you know why you
Speaker 1: can do this now? He knew? Regeemed your season on FanDuel,
Speaker 1: play free until you win FanDuel More ways to win.
Speaker 3: Hello, I'm a dinner again and I just placed the
Speaker 3: dumbest bet of my life.
Speaker 7: Get to DraftKings dot com.
Speaker 1: Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael
Speaker 1: Lewis and produced by Lydia Genekott, Catherine Gerardeau, and Ariela Markowitz.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is Jake Krski.
Speaker 1: Our music was composed by Matthias Bossi and John Evans
Speaker 1: of stell Wagon Sinfinett. Our fact checker is Lauren Ves
Speaker 1: Polly Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries.
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Speaker 4: So I went away to cope. Yeah no, seriously, Now, okay,
Speaker 4: I got a story. I got a story for all this. Okay, no, no.
Speaker 3: No, no one.
Speaker 4: Lady said that the night before her football team or
Speaker 4: college football team's games, that for good luck, she makes
Speaker 4: her husband make love to her wearing the team's jersey
Speaker 4: and socks and the team's colors. And ever since I
Speaker 4: read that, I thought, no one looks for the college
Speaker 4: football sus a more than her husband.
Speaker 6: Right, He's like, he's looking for the socks.
Speaker 3: Where did I put those?
Speaker 6: Oh? No, I lost the socks.
Speaker 3: Oh the lucky socks.
Speaker 6: Well one sock, dude.
Speaker 3: No, listen, you wear the lucky socks and you get lucky.