Sooner or later, you just run out of sports. There are currently a couple of regular seasons going on at the moment, but after a thrilling NBA playoffs led directly into a blast of a World Cup, a three-game series against the Cincinnati Reds happening 71 percent of the way through a long season can't help but look weak in comparison. This was a fun way to disrupt our normal sports watching biorhythms, but it was not a permanent one. It was with that in mind that we invited the bestselling novelist Paul Tremblay, author of the new Dead But Dreaming Of Electric Sheep, onto the show this week. The idea was that, with no top-of-the-news sports to talk about, we could talk about basically anything. And so we did.
The episode begins with talk about Paul's prostate cancer experience, complete with thematically appropriate Dreamcatcher comps, an arachnid surgical robot, and a surgeon no-selling his pre-operation attempt at a joke. It is a good deal funnier than it had any right to be, even before the phrase "penile rehab" was spoken aloud. We also spoke about his experience getting roasted by teenagers while continuing to teach high school math after authoring several bestselling horror novels, what it's like to sue OpenAI, and what his own lengthy deposition in that case revealed about big AI's legal strategy and effectively nonexistent capacity to read a room. We also discussed his new book, invented a verb form of Weekend At Bernie's, and talked about the thrills and relatively mild indignities of the contemporary book tour.
After the break, we settled in for a spirited but mostly civilized round of Boston sports chat. We talked about how the Red Sox managed their recent run of success despite virtually all of their most important young players being unavailable or bad, considered the dark consultant vibes of new Red Sox chief executive (and Ron DeSantis's former college teammate) Craig Breslow, and the faint Major League notes attending their surge back into the postseason picture. Red Sox ownership was deservedly kicked around, which afforded us an easy pivot into the Celtics' decision to dump erstwhile franchise cornerstone Jaylen Brown. We considered the mystery of Brown as a player and an object of analytic speculation, and Paul spoke his truth about maniacal head coach Joe Mazzulla, the hazards of three-point dependence, and the fundamental coachly skill of being able to adjust. We ended with a sort of consensus on Mazzulla as a crazy-ass human being, even if he's a frustrating coach, and a brief consideration of the Patriots' gamble on the uniquely disgruntled A.J. Brown.
We answered two Funbag questions. One was an extremely nuanced inquiry about emptying the dishwasher, and the other concerned whether Donald Trump believes in ghosts. This gave us an opportunity to consider a number of important topics, from the film Ghosts Can't Do It to the dimples on the bottom of coffee mugs, and ponder the universe in which Trump is merely a Mr. Wonderful-style cultural villain. Would it be OK, in that universe, for Drew to have compared his best friend to Kevin O'Leary? Was it OK in this one? These are the sorts of things you can talk about when you've only got regular-season WNBA and MLB as your competition. Honestly, it's kind of a relief.
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