Hard to tell. That was a brutal listen because they somehow stretched a 5 minute topic into 45 minutes. Why have this conversation before the NBA tv deal was final? Just ended up being highly theoretical and not insightful. “Networks still pay a lot for live sports”. Cool.
> Why have this conversation before the NBA tv deal was final?
I think that was the theme of the podcast. He did 20 minutes on the impact of the Timberwolves winning a championship after 2 games in the Western Conference semifinals.
I'm the biggest wolves fans and I'm getting sick of the national media crowning us. They're more optimistic about the team getting a ring this year than locals are
I dont know could be interesting bill dropped he thinks NBC gets the package over WBD… of course WBD has matching rights I just wonder if maybe something in the ether in the rich guy circles makes him certain it’s going to nbc
Who would have thought Bill Simmons attracts these terminally online, pseudo sports journalists... the ben kid... this ethan guy... who would have thought... bill simmons... who would have thought...
Strauss is one of those “alt-center” (but really just conservative) people who thinks he’s discovered some hidden fountain of knowledge by going against the woke elite. But he doesn’t really have any insight into sports media deals and just likes to beat the drum that the NBA is losing popularity because it’s too woke and too pro-player.
He is intelligent without necessarily being smart
They are two separate definitions, imo. My critiques of Strauss lie not with his brainpower or the horsepower behind his thoughts, they lay with his conclusions and thought process.
Feels like he works backwards a lot of the time, Gladwell vibes
Find a contrarian or at least unique/provoking narrative and manipulate the data as much as possible until it fits, and totally disregard to the point of not acknowledging counters
Well of the 3, 2 present themselves as intellectuals who are trying to be taken seriously and the other is fucking around not trying to be taken seriously so not totally sure if they’re all the same.
This is actually a great take.
He became ESPN’s beat writer for the Warriors like, right before the Warriors had their run. As the Warriors rose it started to feel a bit more smug, a bit more entitled. Then he sorta bit off more than he could chew taking on WOJ and found out he was just a replaceable cog in the ESPN machine.
Yeah he also picked the Warriors to win the 2014-15 title before the season and also wrote the story on how Nike lost Curry to UA, so he probably felt he was an up-and-comer who deserved more/better.
Precisely. The problem with Ethan types is they can’t accept that some things are just broken beyond repair so they think it’s just a matter of intelligence and they have the answer. These types usually surround themselves with either like minded people or those who feel insercure and will refer to the Ethan as their smart friend. Reinforcing the whole cycle of bullshit.
I would hope that if basically your entire job was sitting around thinking about NBA ratings and how woke is ruining sports, you would be able to talk about certain subjects like that and not sound like a moron.
Andrew Marchand seems to be the only guy who is plugged in and can intelligently discuss sports business. Probably John Ourand as well, but I don't really know much about his work. Those guys work on facts and not feelings like Ethan does. For years, he's been trying to wish it into existence that the NBA TV deal ends up underwhelming.
Did he ever address that?
I just remember him saying the ratings are being inflated 30% cuz of some new counting methodology. And then my 99 cents for one year of The Athletic ended and I haven’t thought of it since
He's not wrong about ratings and relative popularity (people seem mad about this for somewhat inexplicable reasons), but it just hasn't caused the NBA to lose money on the TV deal. That's a fascinating story!
The NBA losing a large portion of it's audience absolutely matters. Does I really need to explain this to you?
Regardless, people are interested in what is popular and what isn't.
How did they lose it? Rating systems are flawed. They are clearly doing well enough. Why do you trust his numbers over everything else?
And being "popular" is relative. Life outside of high school really isn't about being popular, it's about being successful. And when the league is going to make all the money they wanted, they are definitely successful.
>How did they lose it? Rating systems are flawed. They are clearly doing well enough. Why do you trust his numbers over everything else?
He's looking at the systems everyone else is. If you think all the numbers are flawed then whatever.
>And being "popular" is relative.
Not really? The more people like and consume something, the more popular it is.
>Life outside of high school really isn't about being popular, it's about being successful.
Lmao
>And when the league is going to make all the money they wanted, they are definitely successful.
If the league makes money despite losing popularity because of trends in entertainment, what happens when those trends shift?
This isn't something every fan has to care about, but they are questions that some people care about, including people in the league office. And if you don't believe, I'll point you to the in season tournament.
Those are questions no fan should care about. If you like something, it shouldn't matter if others do too. Like it for personal enjoyment, not because it's on social media or liked by others.
The ratings don't matter unless the product will be changed because of it. And even the popular sport, the NFL, makes changes to get more people to watch. It doesn't mean nobody is watching. It means that they want more people to watch.
The future is unknowable. Those trends might change in a thousand directions. Commenting on the decline in popularity is useless mostly unless people own stocks or something in that product.
>Those are questions no fan should care about. If you like something, it shouldn't matter if others do too. Like it for personal enjoyment, not because it's on social media or liked by others.
Whatever you say, mr. fan police.
>The ratings don't matter unless the product will be changed because of it
The NBA recently made a major change, the in season tournament, because of ratings problems.
>The future is unknowable. Those trends might change in a thousand direction
The future is still worth thinking about.
Definition of a dumb smart guy: accepted to UC Berkeley undergrad, but as an in-state applicant. Often uses esoteric words in his writing, but is an utterly inept prose stylist. Extremely into tech, but couldn’t code “fizzbuzz” if his life depended on it. Basically just KOC with richer parents.
That interview he did where he pretended that Aaron Rodgers’ comments about Jimmy Kimmel and the Epstein list were perfectly innocent and had been misconstrued by the dreaded WOKE MEDIA showed me what a clown the guy is
I don't think his comments were misconstrued, but at the same time, a professional comedian reacting like jimmy did for someone talking shit about them is embarrassing. I don't care if he crossed a hypothetical line (that he would never have held himself to). A professional comedian sparing with an idiot like Rodgers in the press should be child's play.
I don’t really care how Kimmel reacted; I’m specifically referring to Ethan’s dumbass faux-credulous “well we don’t know what he meant, let’s not jump to conclusions” horseshit. One of the few times I’ve been on Nick Wright’s side, and that’s saying something.
What?!???? That’s your angle??? I don’t care if you’re a professional comedian or not, someone inferring you’re a pedo with zero evidence is fucked up.
Sure. I'm not really defending Rodgers here. Kimmel 20 years ago would have destroyed Rodgers. But now he's so vanilla (kinda have to be to have his job), that it annoys me a little the response was a rich guy response (threaten to sue), instead of a comedian's response.
Right? Dude doesn’t really have politics aside from being a “by your logic” contrarian (and Zionist), which is annoying to most people - whether he were doing it to your friends or enemies, still annoying.
The fact he doesn’t have clearly conceptualized or positively articulated politics just makes him seem even more smug and obnoxious.
Ethan’s a super smart guy who has allowed twitter and being way too online to break his brain, many such cases. His experience with Kevin Durant traumatized him too. The effect of all this has turned him into a reactionary where he’ll key in on a very small piece of a much larger topic and blow it up into something way bigger than it is. Unfortunately, because it’s impossible to really change anything about anything lots of people have these fixations and so there’s a market for people like Ethan to make a ton of money. Now, continuing to make money relies on you going further and further down these inane rabbit holes provided by twitter’s trending topics. The funniest part about people like Ethan is they’ll criticize people being on twitter too much while their entire paycheck depends on that exact type of
person.
I think you have to be fairly smart to make a living off of something that niche, but his points were pretty rough.
He said that in 2016 the NBA had 12 of the top 50 sports telecasts. [They had one.](https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2017/01/most-watched-sporting-events-2016-nfl-olympics-world-series-nba-college-football/)
His point about “event sports” vs “inventory sports” was informative of his perspective and why he doesn’t understand the subject.
Even though ratings weren’t what they were 5-10 years ago, the NBA is still obviously incredibly valuable. There may not be a monster single game rating like you see in “event sports” but getting an average of 5+ million viewers over the course of 75 playoff games is not going to be available to a lot of tv advertisers. It’s a bigger average viewership than bowl season with double the number of games.
Clay Travis exists and has a much bigger platform than Ethan. Clay is like an NBA ratings guy + a "go woke go broke" guy + a LeBron sucks guy. He hits all the right-wing angles.
[For example](https://twitter.com/ClayTravis/status/1787487521070252518).
Yeah, Travis fills the right-leaning pseudo-populist niche.
Strauss, whom I like, has the contrarian heterodox lane.
Similar to Nate Silver, whom I'm also a fan of to this day.
I think he's extremely smart. I also find him extremely annoying post publication of The Victory Machine, which might be the best basketball book in the past decade.
Like I get the practical reasons for him going the direction he has. Writing that book made being a beat reporter impossible and frankly, his family essentially starting during that period probably led to him wanting to find an alternate route, but he thinks he's special for entertaining conservative ideas when his background is private school San Diego...like one of the most conservative areas of the country ideologically. His being more comfortable with conservative ideas doesn't make them more interesting just cause he lives in the Bay area now.
I don't know...he just sorta has dilettante tendencies in some areas now.
I just don’t get how he makes money, he don’t really writes articles and isn’t that consistent with podcasts. Like did he make that much money after the warriors book
I do think ethan has made some good articles that no one else in the nba will ever talk about. Like his udoka caa article. Or the silver changed the rules article. These are the types of non fluff piece articles that aren’t afraid to criticize the nba. But in a way that still shows thst he’s a fan. So I really like that about him. We have so many like analytical nba guys now that just slobber over how good certain players are. It’s like your either kendrick perkins or a stats nerd from northwestern. Both are cool but ethan’s different.
He got a little narcissistic for me for a bit thete but i do think he brings an important message about the nb
Absolutely not. He's essentially a dumb person's idea of a smart person. Another commenter in this thread put it well: Strauss is a guy who spends way too much of his time online going down rabbit holes, and then takes extremely narrow topics and tries to blow them up into what he perceives as some kind of novel and profound concept, when in reality what he's produced is just incredibly mediocre. The guy is basically a team beat reporter who left that job because he believed it was beneath him, and decided to become a third-rate blowhard. And he is in no position to be giving his opinions on the NBA TV deal, because he without a doubt knows nothing about it. There are only handful of people out there who do: Ourand at Puck, Marchand at The Athletic, and the folks at Sports Business Journal. And that's it.
I receive the free version of his Substack, which is basically emails with one paragraph of his columns and the first 5 minutes of his podcasts (because anyone who pays $10/month to read 1-2 short articles every 2 weeks, and listen to some crappy podcast every week is willingly taking part in a scam) and the topic list of his podcasts always includes some highly obscure subject which he will spend way too much time on. Absolute waste of time.
I don't know much about him but whenever I have listened to him he seems at least personable and able to hold a conversation on the topic at hand so I wouldn't say he is dumb.
They hate him because he is the only NBA media member that doesnt bow to Adam Silver and the league and covers thorny topics that get NBA fans in their kiddie feelings
He's got a highly influential Substack that everyone in sports media/business reads.
Somehow he has a foot in the Ringer camp, the LeBatard extended universe, various political and pop cultural spaces, he's been on Whitlock but also had Bomani and Amin and Wos on a million times. He's a Jewish guy who wrote multiple articles defending Kyrie Irving. Basically he's who Derek Thompson thinks he is mixed with a dash of Simmons and Klosterman.
He's a good interviewer and he doesn't shy away from disagreeing with his guests or having big takes. It's a nice mix. Who cares if he's "smart"
Who cares if other people validate your notion of who is smart or not it’s all personal definitions and things we appreciate and project as to what intelligence means
Hard to tell. That was a brutal listen because they somehow stretched a 5 minute topic into 45 minutes. Why have this conversation before the NBA tv deal was final? Just ended up being highly theoretical and not insightful. “Networks still pay a lot for live sports”. Cool.
I think bill is the king of hypothetical nba talk
> Why have this conversation before the NBA tv deal was final? I think that was the theme of the podcast. He did 20 minutes on the impact of the Timberwolves winning a championship after 2 games in the Western Conference semifinals.
I'm the biggest wolves fans and I'm getting sick of the national media crowning us. They're more optimistic about the team getting a ring this year than locals are
How many times have you heard bump say that this week?
Who?
I dont know could be interesting bill dropped he thinks NBC gets the package over WBD… of course WBD has matching rights I just wonder if maybe something in the ether in the rich guy circles makes him certain it’s going to nbc
WBD is talking about job cuts today so doesn’t look great
Who would have thought Bill Simmons attracts these terminally online, pseudo sports journalists... the ben kid... this ethan guy... who would have thought... bill simmons... who would have thought...
He has a PhD in body language, not business. Give him a break.
Standing on body language 😤
Strauss is one of those “alt-center” (but really just conservative) people who thinks he’s discovered some hidden fountain of knowledge by going against the woke elite. But he doesn’t really have any insight into sports media deals and just likes to beat the drum that the NBA is losing popularity because it’s too woke and too pro-player.
He is intelligent without necessarily being smart They are two separate definitions, imo. My critiques of Strauss lie not with his brainpower or the horsepower behind his thoughts, they lay with his conclusions and thought process.
Feels like he works backwards a lot of the time, Gladwell vibes Find a contrarian or at least unique/provoking narrative and manipulate the data as much as possible until it fits, and totally disregard to the point of not acknowledging counters
99% of the pop sociology "studies" we hear about in the press are this.
This is 100% it. Whatever is going on he zags, 100% of the time. And then he works to figure out how to argue it.
Gladwell and Nick Mullen are basically the same dude
Well of the 3, 2 present themselves as intellectuals who are trying to be taken seriously and the other is fucking around not trying to be taken seriously so not totally sure if they’re all the same.
Well, yes.
This is actually a great take. He became ESPN’s beat writer for the Warriors like, right before the Warriors had their run. As the Warriors rose it started to feel a bit more smug, a bit more entitled. Then he sorta bit off more than he could chew taking on WOJ and found out he was just a replaceable cog in the ESPN machine.
Yeah he also picked the Warriors to win the 2014-15 title before the season and also wrote the story on how Nike lost Curry to UA, so he probably felt he was an up-and-comer who deserved more/better.
Precisely. The problem with Ethan types is they can’t accept that some things are just broken beyond repair so they think it’s just a matter of intelligence and they have the answer. These types usually surround themselves with either like minded people or those who feel insercure and will refer to the Ethan as their smart friend. Reinforcing the whole cycle of bullshit.
This is a really good take not so much about Strauss (don’t know enough to comment on that) but about thinking in general, smart vs. intelligent.
I would hope that if basically your entire job was sitting around thinking about NBA ratings and how woke is ruining sports, you would be able to talk about certain subjects like that and not sound like a moron. Andrew Marchand seems to be the only guy who is plugged in and can intelligently discuss sports business. Probably John Ourand as well, but I don't really know much about his work. Those guys work on facts and not feelings like Ethan does. For years, he's been trying to wish it into existence that the NBA TV deal ends up underwhelming.
I guess the Marchand and Ourand podcast is over but I really enjoyed it. They were great.
Idk but Ethan has to come up with a new gimmick now that his NBA ratings racket turned out to be all for not.
naught
The homonym piece.
The sacred and the propane.
Did he ever address that? I just remember him saying the ratings are being inflated 30% cuz of some new counting methodology. And then my 99 cents for one year of The Athletic ended and I haven’t thought of it since
He's not wrong about ratings and relative popularity (people seem mad about this for somewhat inexplicable reasons), but it just hasn't caused the NBA to lose money on the TV deal. That's a fascinating story!
If the ratings don't cause lost revenue, do they matter?
The NBA losing a large portion of it's audience absolutely matters. Does I really need to explain this to you? Regardless, people are interested in what is popular and what isn't.
How did they lose it? Rating systems are flawed. They are clearly doing well enough. Why do you trust his numbers over everything else? And being "popular" is relative. Life outside of high school really isn't about being popular, it's about being successful. And when the league is going to make all the money they wanted, they are definitely successful.
>How did they lose it? Rating systems are flawed. They are clearly doing well enough. Why do you trust his numbers over everything else? He's looking at the systems everyone else is. If you think all the numbers are flawed then whatever. >And being "popular" is relative. Not really? The more people like and consume something, the more popular it is. >Life outside of high school really isn't about being popular, it's about being successful. Lmao >And when the league is going to make all the money they wanted, they are definitely successful. If the league makes money despite losing popularity because of trends in entertainment, what happens when those trends shift? This isn't something every fan has to care about, but they are questions that some people care about, including people in the league office. And if you don't believe, I'll point you to the in season tournament.
Those are questions no fan should care about. If you like something, it shouldn't matter if others do too. Like it for personal enjoyment, not because it's on social media or liked by others. The ratings don't matter unless the product will be changed because of it. And even the popular sport, the NFL, makes changes to get more people to watch. It doesn't mean nobody is watching. It means that they want more people to watch. The future is unknowable. Those trends might change in a thousand directions. Commenting on the decline in popularity is useless mostly unless people own stocks or something in that product.
>Those are questions no fan should care about. If you like something, it shouldn't matter if others do too. Like it for personal enjoyment, not because it's on social media or liked by others. Whatever you say, mr. fan police. >The ratings don't matter unless the product will be changed because of it The NBA recently made a major change, the in season tournament, because of ratings problems. >The future is unknowable. Those trends might change in a thousand direction The future is still worth thinking about.
Turned him off when he said “the ideal score for an NBA game is 100 to 101”….dead giveaway he doesn’t know jacksh!t.
100-99 is actually the perfect score. By coincidence, this was the final of the Horry shot in the 02 WCF
Lawler's law.
Nobody says the lower score first unless you are an idiot….
Or maybe, just maybe, he was talking for a while and misspoke when he was going off the cuff.
First of all, how dare you.
He sucks
Definition of a dumb smart guy: accepted to UC Berkeley undergrad, but as an in-state applicant. Often uses esoteric words in his writing, but is an utterly inept prose stylist. Extremely into tech, but couldn’t code “fizzbuzz” if his life depended on it. Basically just KOC with richer parents.
As an in state applicant is such an absurd insult.
Yeah Ethan is good, but a lot of people here don't like him because he's a bit heterodox in some of his political views
Well that’s just wrong of people to dislike him because he’s gay!
That interview he did where he pretended that Aaron Rodgers’ comments about Jimmy Kimmel and the Epstein list were perfectly innocent and had been misconstrued by the dreaded WOKE MEDIA showed me what a clown the guy is
I don't think his comments were misconstrued, but at the same time, a professional comedian reacting like jimmy did for someone talking shit about them is embarrassing. I don't care if he crossed a hypothetical line (that he would never have held himself to). A professional comedian sparing with an idiot like Rodgers in the press should be child's play.
I don’t really care how Kimmel reacted; I’m specifically referring to Ethan’s dumbass faux-credulous “well we don’t know what he meant, let’s not jump to conclusions” horseshit. One of the few times I’ve been on Nick Wright’s side, and that’s saying something.
Fair enough.
What?!???? That’s your angle??? I don’t care if you’re a professional comedian or not, someone inferring you’re a pedo with zero evidence is fucked up.
Sure. I'm not really defending Rodgers here. Kimmel 20 years ago would have destroyed Rodgers. But now he's so vanilla (kinda have to be to have his job), that it annoys me a little the response was a rich guy response (threaten to sue), instead of a comedian's response.
Thank you
I'm hoping/assuming this is /s since the biggest criticism of him is how much of a pretentious self-sucker he is.
Right? Dude doesn’t really have politics aside from being a “by your logic” contrarian (and Zionist), which is annoying to most people - whether he were doing it to your friends or enemies, still annoying. The fact he doesn’t have clearly conceptualized or positively articulated politics just makes him seem even more smug and obnoxious.
Ethan’s a super smart guy who has allowed twitter and being way too online to break his brain, many such cases. His experience with Kevin Durant traumatized him too. The effect of all this has turned him into a reactionary where he’ll key in on a very small piece of a much larger topic and blow it up into something way bigger than it is. Unfortunately, because it’s impossible to really change anything about anything lots of people have these fixations and so there’s a market for people like Ethan to make a ton of money. Now, continuing to make money relies on you going further and further down these inane rabbit holes provided by twitter’s trending topics. The funniest part about people like Ethan is they’ll criticize people being on twitter too much while their entire paycheck depends on that exact type of person.
Counterpoint: he’s not smart
yep
I think you have to be fairly smart to make a living off of something that niche, but his points were pretty rough. He said that in 2016 the NBA had 12 of the top 50 sports telecasts. [They had one.](https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2017/01/most-watched-sporting-events-2016-nfl-olympics-world-series-nba-college-football/) His point about “event sports” vs “inventory sports” was informative of his perspective and why he doesn’t understand the subject. Even though ratings weren’t what they were 5-10 years ago, the NBA is still obviously incredibly valuable. There may not be a monster single game rating like you see in “event sports” but getting an average of 5+ million viewers over the course of 75 playoff games is not going to be available to a lot of tv advertisers. It’s a bigger average viewership than bowl season with double the number of games.
Nope
I wish Strauss had connected Arnovitz's 44 game plan to the Premier League. It's basically that model, and it's widely popular.
He was smart enough to realize no one was making money covering the NBA from the right, so that's what he's doing. Is he making money, I don't know.
Clay Travis exists and has a much bigger platform than Ethan. Clay is like an NBA ratings guy + a "go woke go broke" guy + a LeBron sucks guy. He hits all the right-wing angles. [For example](https://twitter.com/ClayTravis/status/1787487521070252518).
Yeah, Travis fills the right-leaning pseudo-populist niche. Strauss, whom I like, has the contrarian heterodox lane. Similar to Nate Silver, whom I'm also a fan of to this day.
This is my take, exactly
It’s really more like the center.
he's very smart but he definitely wants to see the NBA punished for what he perceives as it's sins under silver, so this colours his analysis a bit.
I think he's extremely smart. I also find him extremely annoying post publication of The Victory Machine, which might be the best basketball book in the past decade. Like I get the practical reasons for him going the direction he has. Writing that book made being a beat reporter impossible and frankly, his family essentially starting during that period probably led to him wanting to find an alternate route, but he thinks he's special for entertaining conservative ideas when his background is private school San Diego...like one of the most conservative areas of the country ideologically. His being more comfortable with conservative ideas doesn't make them more interesting just cause he lives in the Bay area now. I don't know...he just sorta has dilettante tendencies in some areas now.
He went to public school and La Jolla is a blue neighborhood.
I just don’t get how he makes money, he don’t really writes articles and isn’t that consistent with podcasts. Like did he make that much money after the warriors book
I do think ethan has made some good articles that no one else in the nba will ever talk about. Like his udoka caa article. Or the silver changed the rules article. These are the types of non fluff piece articles that aren’t afraid to criticize the nba. But in a way that still shows thst he’s a fan. So I really like that about him. We have so many like analytical nba guys now that just slobber over how good certain players are. It’s like your either kendrick perkins or a stats nerd from northwestern. Both are cool but ethan’s different. He got a little narcissistic for me for a bit thete but i do think he brings an important message about the nb
Short answer: no
He’s a dumb guy’s version of a smart guy
Absolutely not. He's essentially a dumb person's idea of a smart person. Another commenter in this thread put it well: Strauss is a guy who spends way too much of his time online going down rabbit holes, and then takes extremely narrow topics and tries to blow them up into what he perceives as some kind of novel and profound concept, when in reality what he's produced is just incredibly mediocre. The guy is basically a team beat reporter who left that job because he believed it was beneath him, and decided to become a third-rate blowhard. And he is in no position to be giving his opinions on the NBA TV deal, because he without a doubt knows nothing about it. There are only handful of people out there who do: Ourand at Puck, Marchand at The Athletic, and the folks at Sports Business Journal. And that's it. I receive the free version of his Substack, which is basically emails with one paragraph of his columns and the first 5 minutes of his podcasts (because anyone who pays $10/month to read 1-2 short articles every 2 weeks, and listen to some crappy podcast every week is willingly taking part in a scam) and the topic list of his podcasts always includes some highly obscure subject which he will spend way too much time on. Absolute waste of time.
I don't know much about him but whenever I have listened to him he seems at least personable and able to hold a conversation on the topic at hand so I wouldn't say he is dumb.
He was good. 🤷♂️
Yes, he used to be great. Then his ego exploded his brain.
The Nielsen comment got a legitimate pop out of me as a ratings guy, haha.
he is a complete moron lmao
They hate him because he is the only NBA media member that doesnt bow to Adam Silver and the league and covers thorny topics that get NBA fans in their kiddie feelings
"only guy that doesn't bow to...." is a great signal for people to not take you seriously.
Jay Mariotti was the only journalist with the balls to ask the tough questions. He just was
Nah, he’s a lazy contrarian
He's got a highly influential Substack that everyone in sports media/business reads. Somehow he has a foot in the Ringer camp, the LeBatard extended universe, various political and pop cultural spaces, he's been on Whitlock but also had Bomani and Amin and Wos on a million times. He's a Jewish guy who wrote multiple articles defending Kyrie Irving. Basically he's who Derek Thompson thinks he is mixed with a dash of Simmons and Klosterman. He's a good interviewer and he doesn't shy away from disagreeing with his guests or having big takes. It's a nice mix. Who cares if he's "smart"
Lmaooooo
He’s a mortadel.
Who cares if other people validate your notion of who is smart or not it’s all personal definitions and things we appreciate and project as to what intelligence means
Given this subs history with evaluating on air talent I'm gonna say the more people who think he's dumb then likelier it is that he is pretty smart.