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Speaker 1: This is Straight Fire with Jason McIntyre.
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Speaker 2: What is up, Straight Fire fam?
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Speaker 3: It's me, Jason McIntyre Straight. For Thursday, August the 27th. Got a fun guest today.
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Speaker 2: Oh boy, do we.
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Speaker 3: But a programming note quickly. Cowher's taking another vacation. Yeah, nobody vacations with that guy. When you got the kind of dough he does, you take vacations. So I am hosting The Herd today and manana. So obviously check it out. I have a take that he's not going to like to open the show. I have been workshopping it for some days. I'll just give you the quick thesis. Sam Darnold is overrated he is the deluxe dilfer.
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Speaker 2: That's the thesis right there baby check it out on.
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Speaker 3: The herd later this morning but today's guest you probably don't know him his name is fred siegel but you may know him as freezing cold takes he is the kind of guy who will find your old predictions he's beyond sports media guys now it's like anybody he's just calling it out who says dumb predictions whether it's around the draft, around games, around players, coaches, whatever, and he'll dig up your old tweets and then make you look like an idiot. Now, it's funny because when he started doing this back in the day, it was like, oh my gosh, I'm so embarrassed.
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Speaker 2: Oh my God, what a bad take that was. It was so awful.
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Speaker 3: And then, now here we are 15 years later, now you want to get freezing cold take because assuming he links you, you probably get a bump in followers and you get engagement.
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Speaker 2: And that is helping. The algorithm loves that.
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Speaker 3: So it's kind of diminished his handle a little bit.
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Speaker 2: What has not been diminished is his reach. He has written a second book. Yes, that's right. A second book from Twitter handle. No website. Twitter handle to book. Here's Fred Siegel.
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Speaker 1: Mr. Freezing.
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Speaker 2: Cold takes.
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Speaker 1: Guy Jason likes to think he knows everything when it comes to.
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Speaker 2: Sports I know what sports fans want.
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Speaker 1: But for everything he doesn't he knows a guy who does.
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Speaker 4: Let's just say I know a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy All.
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Speaker 3: Right, we got a special guest on Straight Fire today. This guy, now he's been on, I think, before. It might have been on the weekend radio show. But many years ago, this guy came up with an interesting Twitter handle that kind of popped off called Freezing Cold Takes, where he made fun of journalists who were wrong about predictions. And he has now written a book. His name is Fred Siegel. Fred, congratulations on all your success.
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Speaker 2: This is his second book? Fred, I mean, you're living large, my man. How you doing?
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Speaker 4: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, J-Mac.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, so listen, I asked you before we started recording, are you the first guy to have a book just based on a Twitter handle? And maybe I need to adjust it in sports. I mean, honestly, you turned a Twitter handle from nothing into books. That's kind of impressive. Is your family, do they realize how impressive you've done?
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Speaker 4: I don't know. I don't know if they realize it. I think they sound like they do. Okay. But they may, you know, my wife's a pretty solid heavy hitter lawyer. So she does a lot of impressive stuff too. So she's probably, but she sees how hard I worked on these books. So she's pretty excited.
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Speaker 2: Yeah. So talk about the process. We've had authors on before and they're like, you know, a book is heavy lifting, man.
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Speaker 4: You got to do research.
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Speaker 3: You got to do, it takes months, years sometimes to take care of this stuff. And the upfront payment isn't great. The backend sometimes is okay.
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Speaker 1: I don't know.
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Speaker 2: Why'd you, why'd you dive into this for a second time?
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Speaker 4: Well, I love it. I mean, yeah, you have to love it. Like there's some people I'm sure who started doing it and didn't like it and then realized maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze, but with me, I love finding stuff. That's why probably I like doing the feed. I just love researching and finding stuff. And I particularly love doing old, going through old newspapers. That's my favorite because I love the time back when I was like a teenager in growing up and we used to get the newspaper every day. It's just all the news like that. Um, and look at the box scores and things. And, um, I, I love looking at them and seeing what like, You get kind of a better feel for what everything was going on at the time when you look at the newspapers. So I like doing that. And for this book, I mean, there's a lot of stuff, obviously, from bad predictions from the Twitter era. But it also covers and I made sure to do that plenty of stuff from the newspaper era, even sometimes some before even the Internet.
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Speaker 2: And so you were digging into what the 80s newspaper clippings.
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Speaker 4: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's I mean, that was a lot of the research. So I would take it would be like the L.A. Times. Right. And, you know, back in those times, your local newspaper and maybe they would use it from a bigger newspaper. But they they'd they'd have like a every week or so, like on a Tuesday, they'd have like a summary of all some reporter would write a summary of all the college football stuff. like all the storylines. And in that, they would also have little tidbits, like a team who came back and won, or a coach who said something that turned out to be wrong, like little quotes. And that allowed me to, I'd read every single one of those from like 1985 to 2010, each week of the college football season. And then I would come and go, and when each, when I would come up to something that could possibly be something I could look up for my book, I'd look up the local stuff for that. So it was kind of like finding leads. And, but that was really fun to me. It's something that I would probably do not in that much in depth, but on my own time anyway. So I would be doing it for the book. It was great. So that type of stuff. I mean, I had so much, the least fun I had doing for the book was actually writing it, looking up all the stuff, like the most fun part. The problem was I never knew when to stop. So you always tell me, oh, yeah, I got to actually write it now.
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Speaker 3: So let me ask, where do you think all this love of research and digging into archives, did that come from your parents' researchers? Has this been a thing you loved growing up? Obviously, the newspaper connection, I was the same way. My parents would get the Washington Post on the driveway, and I would only devour the sports section every single day.
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Speaker 2: And I got into sports that way. But research is a different animal.
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Speaker 5: Oh yeah.
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Speaker 4: Well, I was a lawyer for 10 years and that was my favorite thing to do as a lawyer was to research certain things and try to find certain ways using statutes and case law to find your way into helping your client. And then that was kind of, I also liked, you know, growing up, my dad had a collection of old magazines. That was like his favorite thing. He'd always, and he you have so many of them. He had like sporting news magazines, which was my favorite ones to look at dating back to like the seventies. And that's, that's where you get your sports history back then, because it wasn't like ready Wikipedia or anything readily accessible to find out what was going on. So when you read that, it was like a brand new story every day of someone coming up and doing something. So that particular part of it, I enjoyed so much that it really fed into my love for doing the newspapers. And when you with now with the internet, you subscribe to a newspaper site like newspapers.com, which gives you just not only the old newspapers, but the actual printout of the newspaper, a picture of the newspaper image. So it's amazing. Like you don't even have to go to the library and use the microfilm. Like it was, it's just, I could use it all day long. So that's really kind of where it all came from. And, This lends to it so much. I don't think if I ever write any books ever again, they're always going to be nonfiction. They're always going to be based on looking up stuff in newspapers.
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Speaker 2: Interesting.
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Speaker 3: So based on your Twitter handle and the book success, I assume you quit your job as a lawyer?
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Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
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Speaker 4: I quit my job as a lawyer like eight, nine years ago. I was doing it for 10 years. But you see, I was on my way out as a lawyer anyway. Okay. Yeah, I just, you know how things are. For a long time, I didn't like it. And you know how things are. You can't, you don't just decide one day to quit something. It usually lingers in your head for like a long time. And then you do it. And that's kind of what happened. So yeah, so I turned it over to this. Not as lucrative, but still lucrative. much better. And I had so much more time to be with my family, which I didn't have a lot. I didn't have a lot of it all when I was doing as an attorney.
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Speaker 1: Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at FoxSportsRadio.com. And within the iHeartRadio app, search FSR to listen live.
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Speaker 3: So turn back the clock to when you first, first of all, I think I've asked you this before, but it's been a while. What got you to start the idea of the Twitter handle, uh, old takes exposed, AKA freezing cold takes.
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Speaker 4: Oh, that was just an accident. Um, it was just like, cause I was reading, I was looking at Twitter one day and, um, there was a, maybe a journalist, a reporter, somebody sports personality who patted themselves in the back for getting something right. it might be me yeah yeah nobody nobody remembers the hits but uh what happened was i was just like wait that person just got too wrong i remember him completely i've been following this person and i was like someone's got to post the ones that were wrong And, uh, I just decided that that's, I'll be doing that. So I just decided to do that. And then a bunch of, you know, it is in Twitter, a bunch of other sites picked it up and, uh, or accounts, big accounts. And then it became bigger and bigger and bigger. And it just spawned into something bigger than that. And, um, and it really got, it just became like that guy, the cold take guy. So everybody just knows to tag me when someone says something that possibly could even be potentially be a freezing cold.
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Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: So this is what's interesting. And we have something kind of sort of in common.
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Speaker 3: So you just said you became known as like cold take guy, freezing cold take guy.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
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Speaker 2: And for a while after I created the big lead, I was the big lead guy, right?
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Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah.
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Speaker 3: And then I was like, okay, I've been the big lead. I've got to like, I don't want to just be the big lead guy forever. So that's when I started to branch out and try radio. And then I got fortunate with this TV thing. And now I'm like just talking sports guy. I'm not the big lead guy, but it's taken a while. I mean, we're talking, you know, 10, 15 years. Are you still known as freezing cold take guy? Or are you trying to segue into research guy, book guy, college football?
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Speaker 2: I don't know.
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Speaker 4: I'm not, I'm definitely not known as Fred Siegel. So, yeah, I mean, for me, I wasn't so, I was never, I was never that interested in what, I was never that interested in discussing the day, the day's news. That's my problem with sports. Like I'm like, so you like talking about what's going on in each day, but you're, something comes up in the news and you have to talk about it. But I'm not interested in almost anything that goes on except for like the teams that I like or the, you know, to just talk about it. Generally speaking, like something happens today in sports, like whatever is happening in the WNBA. Like, I don't care about that. I don't want to talk about it. If I had a sports show, I'd have to talk about it. Like all the stuff that's going on. I want to pick and choose what I want to talk about, even if it's the sports I love, like college football. So I never got into it. I'm just happy being this guy. But I would definitely love having being the book guy. that's what I'd love to do. If it was a free, the freezing cold takes book was just the one that it allowed to everything that I wanted to do in terms of research. And I was able to do it because with the book companies, I was able to sell this particular book because like I have everything behind it, like the feed and stuff. Cause whenever you're selling a book to a book company there, they first ask you, the first thing they ask you is how are you going to sell the book, like market the book. And if you're just a random, person with nothing going on, they're probably not going to let you do it. So that's how I started it. But if I can move on to anything else, I'd love it too. But in terms of being the sports guy, I never really wanted to be that. But I'm fine being the freezing cold taste guy because my life is pretty solid the way it is. I've never been chasing that other part. I think with like... when you got rid of the big lead, like you still didn't, you didn't have the big lead anymore. So like, right.
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Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. So you had to do something else. Right.
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Speaker 2: Well, it was a weird timing.
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Speaker 4: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 4: I remember the big lead, but I didn't know who you were when I, right.
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Speaker 2: Nobody did.
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Speaker 3: I did it anonymously for like maybe three or four years. And then the SI thing came out, but yeah, like I was, I guess you're right. So I was at the big lead, then they sold, and then they sold again. And that's when the minute media decided, hey, we're going a different direction.
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Speaker 2: And they dropped me. And then I started writing for Fox.
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Speaker 4: So you're right.
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Speaker 2: I guess I had to move on from the website entirely.
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Speaker 4: You had to. I mean, there was nothing you could do. And I've never let anybody... I've never let anybody take freezing cold takes. I really have really kind of attached to it in the sense that I just don't want anyone doing what I guess like happened to your site. You know, I feel like.
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Speaker 3: Here's the thing though. I was paid handsomely for selling the site. What if somebody offered you money for the Twitter handle?
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Speaker 4: Oh yeah. I've been offered money. Definitely. No way. The amount you were offered, I'm sure.
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Speaker 1: Well, I mean, probably.
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Speaker 2: OK, probably not.
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Speaker 3: But it's social media. But that goes to another question. Like, I want to go back to the book thing. So obviously, the social media stuff is valuable when you're selling a book. But where are you on the idea of, hey, we'll give you a book deal because you have 500,000 or whatever Twitter followers. And then this guy might have a phenomenal idea, Fred. But he has like 2,000 followers, so he's not going to be able.
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Speaker 2: To market it. Hey, book company, aren't you the one supposed to be marketing the book?
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Speaker 4: Oh, yeah. No. The book companies– I mean book companies don't do anything unless I guess you're like Michael Lewis or an A-list or a famous person. Any famous person probably gets more from the book company than the– but– You know, a famous person who just writes a book probably didn't write it themselves, like the memoir type thing. Right, yeah.
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Speaker 1: Right, right, right.
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Speaker 4: But yeah, so they're not going to do anything. Yeah, the book company should be doing it. That would be great. If you have a great idea and you wrote a good book, I guess, I mean, it may be different for novels.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fair.
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Speaker 4: It could be different for novels if you could get it on one of those book lists or something, like favorite books or whatever. Ultra list. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Speaker 2: But that's tough.
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Speaker 4: Or someone online. Anyone online who recommends books to young adults. Because my daughter, there's one lady online who recommends a young adult book and says, this is a good book. And my daughter instantly buys it.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's probably pay to play, right? Yeah, I guess. The book company will give you $ 10, 000. Can you mention the book? Because it's going to mean $ 250, 000 for us, right? I don't know.
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Speaker 3: You just had said that about, hey, they love you because you have this huge following. And obviously, you're going to do some book sales, which is nice.
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Speaker 2: But the whole process- Not really hard. What's that?
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Speaker 4: It's still really hard. I mean, to convert people to buy your book, it's still really, really hard. So it's not like a guarantee. type thing but.
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Speaker 3: Oh hell yeah yeah by the way how much do you read fred how many books have you bought this year uh if you don't want to answer i'm putting you on the spot i haven't.
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Speaker 4: You know honestly i'd listen to books i've listened i do as well for books i actually read them i don't think i've read any.
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Speaker 3: Yeah no no audible is it's great um i i listened uh to 1929 uh.
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Speaker 2: About the stock market crash, the New York Times author. I can't believe I'm spacing on this.
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Speaker 4: Oh, yeah. Those are always really good.
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Speaker 3: And then there's another one about AI that I'm listening to now that's great.
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Speaker 2: But I did read a book this year. It's called Ender's Game.
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Speaker 4: Yeah. Is that a fiction book?
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Speaker 1: It is.
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Speaker 4: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: Have you heard of it?
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Speaker 4: No. I haven't read fiction in years. But I've been considering it.
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Speaker 2: It's from like the 80s. It's awesome.
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Speaker 3: And I only read about it because I heard about the book while listening to the book on AI. All these smart AI guys happened to read that book growing up. It's kind of like end of the world, blah, blah, blah. And then my son is reading Frankenstein for English. And the Mary Shelley 1819 version.
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Speaker 2: So I buy the book.
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Speaker 3: Fred, I can't get past like page 15. I mean, every time I start reading it, I'm falling asleep. Reading is so hard right now because of the short attention spans. You go on social media, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, move on. Reading can be tough, no?
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Speaker 4: Yeah, it is. But hopefully my book lends to that because I don't have any, they're all in different sections. There's all sections and they're very short. And it's not a novel. There's no narrative. So you can like skip around to various different parts. And that's really kind of what I was going at. You could pick it up sometime and then read a few things and then put it down, but there's nothing longer. There's no section longer than four pages. So everything about a certain topic. So like you could keep moving on and you could skip some. So it's not going to be something that you have to read from start to finish or all the way through. But yeah, I mean, the reading's tough. I thought I figured that too. I figured that it's going to be like, you're trying to sell to a young audience and, um, It's hard. And there's no Audible yet for my book. I'm not cool enough yet to get it. I got it last time, but it took like six months for them to decide to do it.
00:19:09
Speaker 2: And who did the reading on the book for Audible?
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Speaker 4: A professional guy, not me.
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Speaker 2: So that's an interesting job, huh?
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Speaker 4: It sounds a lot better than me.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, I've heard that's a thing, and obviously Audible. But I guess if you do it and you're the author, you may make more. Because the author of the New York Times 1929 book, he did the entire book for Audible.
00:19:36
Speaker 2: I'm sure that makes more money.
00:19:38
Speaker 1: Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at foxsportsradio.com. And within the iHeartRadio app, search FSR to listen live.
00:19:50
Speaker 2: So I don't know. What do you think is the next iteration of this? Social media, books. Do you think.
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Speaker 3: There is a merging down the road where they kind of unify? Or is AI going to kind of upset the apple cart? I read a terrible story in the Wall Street Journal about how all these books from rare bookstores are being bought up. And essentially, everybody was like, oh, that's weird.
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Speaker 2: Why would they want so many books?
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Speaker 3: And it turns out that AI companies were buying them, feeding them into the quote unquote wood chipper, and then putting them in AI. And the books were getting just shredded, which is really kind of depressing.
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Speaker 4: When you think about it. Yeah, and it's depressing. I mean, I don't know. I hope not.
00:20:31
Speaker 1: I mean, I hope.
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Speaker 4: I don't know if they use AI to write the books or whatever, but there's not, I can tell you there's no book that can be used that AI can do about what I did.
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Speaker 2: No, hell no.
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Speaker 4: I mean, like it's just impossible because there was so much thought that went into each thing that I don't, I don't get the AI. I don't really even get it, honestly. I mean, I know, I know it's good for, it's good. It's only good for me when I'm looking up something on the internet. I only use it when I'm looking up something on the internet, like, I needed to go get my son. What did my son need to do to get his driver's license? And I put that in for Florida. And AI spit out all the rules right then and there. That was good. But otherwise, I don't even know what to do. But whenever something pops up with AI, it's always poorly written. I know that.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't disagree with that.
00:21:25
Speaker 3: AI doesn't have the creativity to write a book from scratch.
00:21:28
Speaker 2: They're not doing that.
00:21:30
Speaker 3: But I did a lot of gambling this summer on the World Cup. And I had Claude build me a model for it. And as long as you're feeding the right information and giving the right questions, it can clean up.
00:21:41
Speaker 2: So you're saying you're not using a lot of AI, huh?
00:21:44
Speaker 4: I don't know how, really. I don't really know what to do. The only time I use it ever is when I type into Google and it does it for me. ah okay um yeah yeah that's like what i'm talking about like like i needed my i needed to figure it spits out the rules really quickly like the ones that you used to have to go to different websites to find out like some sort of bureaucracy bureaucracy right my driver's license like what did i need to what kind of documents i need to sign what i need to bring in and uh it set it up right there for me you need to bring this this is that was cool i'll tell you that.
00:22:16
Speaker 3: Yeah no no listen it can do that for bro so we we were uh somebody approached me a friend And was like, hey, we might be selling our house.
00:22:24
Speaker 2: I know you had looked in the past. So would you have any interest?
00:22:28
Speaker 3: And within like 10 questions and 25 minutes, Claude, Google, Gemini, they can turn up all the comps.
00:22:36
Speaker 2: Anything you want on the house. Like you don't even need to hit up a realtor or do the research. You just ask the AI.
00:22:43
Speaker 3: Now, obviously, you've got to double check with everything. But it's becoming so easy and second nature now. Once you start using it, then I do wonder, like I'm on social media less.
00:22:53
Speaker 1: Are you?
00:22:54
Speaker 4: Yeah. I'm on a little less because I don't really like the tenor in which it's, I don't really like the way it's, just the way it is now.
00:23:06
Speaker 3: Hold on, hold on.
00:23:07
Speaker 2: Do you think that's since Elon Musk took it over?
00:23:10
Speaker 4: Oh, the account?
00:23:11
Speaker 1: You know what?
00:23:13
Speaker 4: I think it's something to do with it, just the way that the X is structured. I think we were going that way anyway.
00:23:20
Speaker 2: We were, yeah.
00:23:23
Speaker 4: He certainly, I don't really like the way it is now with X, like all the different, what is the incentivized, what is incentivized to be posted to get a lot of engagement?
00:23:36
Speaker 2: And now you can profit off of it, which is what he wants. And he wants the bots. He doesn't dissuade from, oh, we don't want bots. He invites them.
00:23:45
Speaker 3: And that's what makes, anytime Fred, somebody's coming after me and saying stuff, I look at the date of their account and it's like 2026.
00:23:52
Speaker 2: They started like three months ago.
00:23:53
Speaker 1: That's a bot.
00:23:54
Speaker 2: Nobody's jumping on Twitter in 2026.
00:23:58
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know. Nigeria account. Yeah, I get way less engagement now, I tell you that. Probably because I do the exact same thing as I've always done. I just post a screenshot. I don't do whatever you're supposed to do to get more. But I just don't like the discussion. Everything, every discussion is, is fragmented and there's always complaining about everything that it just, it, it's not good for the soul. I mean, like, it's just, well, it's weird.
00:24:25
Speaker 3: You say not good for the soul, because I'm sure you've seen all this disinformation. And if you were an international country wanting to sow dissent in this country, what would you do? You would mess up the soul by everything being fragmented and negative. This is like 50 times worse than if it bleeds, it leads.
00:24:43
Speaker 2: Remember that when we were newspaper guys reading all that stuff? This is way worse.
00:24:49
Speaker 4: Yeah, nothing's real. And I can tell you this, details, basic details are out the window in social media. Nobody cares about sex.
00:24:59
Speaker 5: But not even....
00:25:02
Speaker 4: Facts, like someone will post a picture of something or a video and say, and go, this is cool or whatever. And the video or picture is from five years ago. And they won't say that. And it's like, you think it just happened. And it's just all these details, basic details that are just out the window. And also the fake stuff. My dad, I mean, my dad sends me so many news breaks from the fake accounts for the fake story.
00:25:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're not on it.
00:25:28
Speaker 1: It's weird.
00:25:29
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:25:30
Speaker 4: If my dad's sending me these sports stuff about fake news, like all this stuff, can you imagine the important things that people are believing are true?
00:25:38
Speaker 2: Oh gosh.
00:25:39
Speaker 4: It's sad. Like it just, I mean, it's harmless enough when it's just a fake trade or guy, but.
00:25:47
Speaker 2: Now it's like actually stuff that matters in society.
00:25:49
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it's, I can't, uh, Yeah, I try not to use it as much as I do. I mean, I've been using a lot more during when I have released this book last week. But yeah, after a while, I'm going to stop again.
00:26:03
Speaker 2: All right.
00:26:04
Speaker 3: Well, Fred, sorry to get out Debbie Downer there, but and rant sound like an old guy ranting in a cloud.
00:26:09
Speaker 2: Both of us.
00:26:10
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah. I'm at that level now.
00:26:13
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, honestly, 2011 was like the heyday, right? Um, but maybe it'll be better once the NFL games start up again, but you're right. Like, um, this week I saw an.
00:26:21
Speaker 2: Interesting video of Puka Nakua. He's like, Oh, all I do is eat hamburgers and I'm not eating healthy. I'm like, this might be fake.
00:26:27
Speaker 3: So I send it to a producer and he's like, yeah, that's from a year ago. And I'm like, well, why are you, why is this guy posting it now?
00:26:33
Speaker 4: Exactly. Exactly.
00:26:35
Speaker 1: And you know why?
00:26:36
Speaker 2: Engagement and clicks and videos.
00:26:38
Speaker 4: Yeah. No facts. Yeah. And it's, but, but it'd be going back to the book. I do have the, The formal announcement you made that Saquon Barkley becomes the first player in college football history to win the Heisman in October.
00:26:53
Speaker 2: Oh, wait, I made that?
00:26:55
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah.
00:26:56
Speaker 1: Wait, what happened in October?
00:26:57
Speaker 2: So did he do something great in October?
00:27:00
Speaker 4: Well, he was dominating.
00:27:01
Speaker 2: Oh, was it the Ohio State game?
00:27:04
Speaker 4: It was the Ohio State game. Saquon was dominating even the previous two games. And then they went up 21-3 on Ohio State. I think Saquon returned the opening kick for a touchdown.
00:27:15
Speaker 2: That's right. Yes, that was the game.
00:27:17
Speaker 4: I remember it.
00:27:18
Speaker 3: So 2016 or– it must have been 2017. 2017.
00:27:22
Speaker 2: Yes, I see it.
00:27:24
Speaker 4: You wrote, Saquon becomes the first player in college football history to win the Heisman in October. It's done. Hand it to him. Win or lose here. And I think that was it. That was the jinx. His season went down the tubes. Right after that tweet.
00:27:40
Speaker 3: Well, he did have a buck 58 against Nebraska.
00:27:43
Speaker 2: They lost the game.
00:27:44
Speaker 4: They lost the game. Oh, to Ohio. Yeah. Yeah, to Ohio State. And he didn't even win. He didn't even make it to New York.
00:27:52
Speaker 2: Well, it looks like he finished fourth in the Heisman.
00:27:54
Speaker 5: Damn.
00:27:55
Speaker 2: Who won that one?
00:27:58
Speaker 4: It was 2017. It was Mayfield probably, right? Where is it?
00:28:01
Speaker 3: Consensus All-Americans.
00:28:02
Speaker 2: Consensus All-Americans.
00:28:05
Speaker 4: I think it was Baker Mayfield.
00:28:07
Speaker 2: Oh, it was probably Baker Mayfield. Bryce, that was the year Bryce Love, remember that guy?
00:28:10
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:28:13
Speaker 2: Wait, Saquon wasn't, oh no, yeah, he was an All-American.
00:28:17
Speaker 4: He didn't go to New York, yeah. I jinxed him. No, you jinxed him. The last book I had you with Hackenberg, I don't think you could even jinx Hackenberg. He was already dead in the door doornail before it even.
00:28:32
Speaker 3: Oh i was so excited for that i mean so i'm two for two making it into your books all right man.
00:28:36
Speaker 5: That's awesome really honored thanks fred uh and thanks for stopping by good congrats on all your success and i will continue churning out the takes um some right some wrong and hopefully they get highlighted
00:28:50
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah yeah thanks for having me j mac
Speaker 1: This is Straight Fire with Jason McIntyre.
00:00:11
Speaker 2: What is up, Straight Fire fam?
00:00:12
Speaker 3: It's me, Jason McIntyre Straight. For Thursday, August the 27th. Got a fun guest today.
00:00:21
Speaker 2: Oh boy, do we.
00:00:22
Speaker 3: But a programming note quickly. Cowher's taking another vacation. Yeah, nobody vacations with that guy. When you got the kind of dough he does, you take vacations. So I am hosting The Herd today and manana. So obviously check it out. I have a take that he's not going to like to open the show. I have been workshopping it for some days. I'll just give you the quick thesis. Sam Darnold is overrated he is the deluxe dilfer.
00:00:51
Speaker 2: That's the thesis right there baby check it out on.
00:00:54
Speaker 3: The herd later this morning but today's guest you probably don't know him his name is fred siegel but you may know him as freezing cold takes he is the kind of guy who will find your old predictions he's beyond sports media guys now it's like anybody he's just calling it out who says dumb predictions whether it's around the draft, around games, around players, coaches, whatever, and he'll dig up your old tweets and then make you look like an idiot. Now, it's funny because when he started doing this back in the day, it was like, oh my gosh, I'm so embarrassed.
00:01:28
Speaker 2: Oh my God, what a bad take that was. It was so awful.
00:01:34
Speaker 3: And then, now here we are 15 years later, now you want to get freezing cold take because assuming he links you, you probably get a bump in followers and you get engagement.
00:01:46
Speaker 2: And that is helping. The algorithm loves that.
00:01:49
Speaker 3: So it's kind of diminished his handle a little bit.
00:01:53
Speaker 2: What has not been diminished is his reach. He has written a second book. Yes, that's right. A second book from Twitter handle. No website. Twitter handle to book. Here's Fred Siegel.
00:02:04
Speaker 1: Mr. Freezing.
00:02:06
Speaker 2: Cold takes.
00:02:09
Speaker 1: Guy Jason likes to think he knows everything when it comes to.
00:02:13
Speaker 2: Sports I know what sports fans want.
00:02:15
Speaker 1: But for everything he doesn't he knows a guy who does.
00:02:19
Speaker 4: Let's just say I know a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy All.
00:02:24
Speaker 3: Right, we got a special guest on Straight Fire today. This guy, now he's been on, I think, before. It might have been on the weekend radio show. But many years ago, this guy came up with an interesting Twitter handle that kind of popped off called Freezing Cold Takes, where he made fun of journalists who were wrong about predictions. And he has now written a book. His name is Fred Siegel. Fred, congratulations on all your success.
00:02:50
Speaker 2: This is his second book? Fred, I mean, you're living large, my man. How you doing?
00:02:55
Speaker 4: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, J-Mac.
00:02:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, so listen, I asked you before we started recording, are you the first guy to have a book just based on a Twitter handle? And maybe I need to adjust it in sports. I mean, honestly, you turned a Twitter handle from nothing into books. That's kind of impressive. Is your family, do they realize how impressive you've done?
00:03:22
Speaker 4: I don't know. I don't know if they realize it. I think they sound like they do. Okay. But they may, you know, my wife's a pretty solid heavy hitter lawyer. So she does a lot of impressive stuff too. So she's probably, but she sees how hard I worked on these books. So she's pretty excited.
00:03:43
Speaker 2: Yeah. So talk about the process. We've had authors on before and they're like, you know, a book is heavy lifting, man.
00:03:48
Speaker 4: You got to do research.
00:03:49
Speaker 3: You got to do, it takes months, years sometimes to take care of this stuff. And the upfront payment isn't great. The backend sometimes is okay.
00:03:57
Speaker 1: I don't know.
00:03:57
Speaker 2: Why'd you, why'd you dive into this for a second time?
00:04:01
Speaker 4: Well, I love it. I mean, yeah, you have to love it. Like there's some people I'm sure who started doing it and didn't like it and then realized maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze, but with me, I love finding stuff. That's why probably I like doing the feed. I just love researching and finding stuff. And I particularly love doing old, going through old newspapers. That's my favorite because I love the time back when I was like a teenager in growing up and we used to get the newspaper every day. It's just all the news like that. Um, and look at the box scores and things. And, um, I, I love looking at them and seeing what like, You get kind of a better feel for what everything was going on at the time when you look at the newspapers. So I like doing that. And for this book, I mean, there's a lot of stuff, obviously, from bad predictions from the Twitter era. But it also covers and I made sure to do that plenty of stuff from the newspaper era, even sometimes some before even the Internet.
00:05:01
Speaker 2: And so you were digging into what the 80s newspaper clippings.
00:05:05
Speaker 4: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's I mean, that was a lot of the research. So I would take it would be like the L.A. Times. Right. And, you know, back in those times, your local newspaper and maybe they would use it from a bigger newspaper. But they they'd they'd have like a every week or so, like on a Tuesday, they'd have like a summary of all some reporter would write a summary of all the college football stuff. like all the storylines. And in that, they would also have little tidbits, like a team who came back and won, or a coach who said something that turned out to be wrong, like little quotes. And that allowed me to, I'd read every single one of those from like 1985 to 2010, each week of the college football season. And then I would come and go, and when each, when I would come up to something that could possibly be something I could look up for my book, I'd look up the local stuff for that. So it was kind of like finding leads. And, but that was really fun to me. It's something that I would probably do not in that much in depth, but on my own time anyway. So I would be doing it for the book. It was great. So that type of stuff. I mean, I had so much, the least fun I had doing for the book was actually writing it, looking up all the stuff, like the most fun part. The problem was I never knew when to stop. So you always tell me, oh, yeah, I got to actually write it now.
00:06:33
Speaker 3: So let me ask, where do you think all this love of research and digging into archives, did that come from your parents' researchers? Has this been a thing you loved growing up? Obviously, the newspaper connection, I was the same way. My parents would get the Washington Post on the driveway, and I would only devour the sports section every single day.
00:06:52
Speaker 2: And I got into sports that way. But research is a different animal.
00:06:56
Speaker 5: Oh yeah.
00:06:56
Speaker 4: Well, I was a lawyer for 10 years and that was my favorite thing to do as a lawyer was to research certain things and try to find certain ways using statutes and case law to find your way into helping your client. And then that was kind of, I also liked, you know, growing up, my dad had a collection of old magazines. That was like his favorite thing. He'd always, and he you have so many of them. He had like sporting news magazines, which was my favorite ones to look at dating back to like the seventies. And that's, that's where you get your sports history back then, because it wasn't like ready Wikipedia or anything readily accessible to find out what was going on. So when you read that, it was like a brand new story every day of someone coming up and doing something. So that particular part of it, I enjoyed so much that it really fed into my love for doing the newspapers. And when you with now with the internet, you subscribe to a newspaper site like newspapers.com, which gives you just not only the old newspapers, but the actual printout of the newspaper, a picture of the newspaper image. So it's amazing. Like you don't even have to go to the library and use the microfilm. Like it was, it's just, I could use it all day long. So that's really kind of where it all came from. And, This lends to it so much. I don't think if I ever write any books ever again, they're always going to be nonfiction. They're always going to be based on looking up stuff in newspapers.
00:08:27
Speaker 2: Interesting.
00:08:27
Speaker 3: So based on your Twitter handle and the book success, I assume you quit your job as a lawyer?
00:08:34
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
00:08:35
Speaker 4: I quit my job as a lawyer like eight, nine years ago. I was doing it for 10 years. But you see, I was on my way out as a lawyer anyway. Okay. Yeah, I just, you know how things are. For a long time, I didn't like it. And you know how things are. You can't, you don't just decide one day to quit something. It usually lingers in your head for like a long time. And then you do it. And that's kind of what happened. So yeah, so I turned it over to this. Not as lucrative, but still lucrative. much better. And I had so much more time to be with my family, which I didn't have a lot. I didn't have a lot of it all when I was doing as an attorney.
00:09:21
Speaker 1: Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at FoxSportsRadio.com. And within the iHeartRadio app, search FSR to listen live.
00:09:33
Speaker 3: So turn back the clock to when you first, first of all, I think I've asked you this before, but it's been a while. What got you to start the idea of the Twitter handle, uh, old takes exposed, AKA freezing cold takes.
00:09:45
Speaker 4: Oh, that was just an accident. Um, it was just like, cause I was reading, I was looking at Twitter one day and, um, there was a, maybe a journalist, a reporter, somebody sports personality who patted themselves in the back for getting something right. it might be me yeah yeah nobody nobody remembers the hits but uh what happened was i was just like wait that person just got too wrong i remember him completely i've been following this person and i was like someone's got to post the ones that were wrong And, uh, I just decided that that's, I'll be doing that. So I just decided to do that. And then a bunch of, you know, it is in Twitter, a bunch of other sites picked it up and, uh, or accounts, big accounts. And then it became bigger and bigger and bigger. And it just spawned into something bigger than that. And, um, and it really got, it just became like that guy, the cold take guy. So everybody just knows to tag me when someone says something that possibly could even be potentially be a freezing cold.
00:10:47
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:10:48
Speaker 2: So this is what's interesting. And we have something kind of sort of in common.
00:10:51
Speaker 3: So you just said you became known as like cold take guy, freezing cold take guy.
00:10:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
00:10:58
Speaker 2: And for a while after I created the big lead, I was the big lead guy, right?
00:11:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah.
00:11:03
Speaker 3: And then I was like, okay, I've been the big lead. I've got to like, I don't want to just be the big lead guy forever. So that's when I started to branch out and try radio. And then I got fortunate with this TV thing. And now I'm like just talking sports guy. I'm not the big lead guy, but it's taken a while. I mean, we're talking, you know, 10, 15 years. Are you still known as freezing cold take guy? Or are you trying to segue into research guy, book guy, college football?
00:11:36
Speaker 2: I don't know.
00:11:37
Speaker 4: I'm not, I'm definitely not known as Fred Siegel. So, yeah, I mean, for me, I wasn't so, I was never, I was never that interested in what, I was never that interested in discussing the day, the day's news. That's my problem with sports. Like I'm like, so you like talking about what's going on in each day, but you're, something comes up in the news and you have to talk about it. But I'm not interested in almost anything that goes on except for like the teams that I like or the, you know, to just talk about it. Generally speaking, like something happens today in sports, like whatever is happening in the WNBA. Like, I don't care about that. I don't want to talk about it. If I had a sports show, I'd have to talk about it. Like all the stuff that's going on. I want to pick and choose what I want to talk about, even if it's the sports I love, like college football. So I never got into it. I'm just happy being this guy. But I would definitely love having being the book guy. that's what I'd love to do. If it was a free, the freezing cold takes book was just the one that it allowed to everything that I wanted to do in terms of research. And I was able to do it because with the book companies, I was able to sell this particular book because like I have everything behind it, like the feed and stuff. Cause whenever you're selling a book to a book company there, they first ask you, the first thing they ask you is how are you going to sell the book, like market the book. And if you're just a random, person with nothing going on, they're probably not going to let you do it. So that's how I started it. But if I can move on to anything else, I'd love it too. But in terms of being the sports guy, I never really wanted to be that. But I'm fine being the freezing cold taste guy because my life is pretty solid the way it is. I've never been chasing that other part. I think with like... when you got rid of the big lead, like you still didn't, you didn't have the big lead anymore. So like, right.
00:13:37
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:13:38
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. So you had to do something else. Right.
00:13:41
Speaker 2: Well, it was a weird timing.
00:13:43
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:13:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:13:44
Speaker 4: I remember the big lead, but I didn't know who you were when I, right.
00:13:47
Speaker 2: Nobody did.
00:13:48
Speaker 3: I did it anonymously for like maybe three or four years. And then the SI thing came out, but yeah, like I was, I guess you're right. So I was at the big lead, then they sold, and then they sold again. And that's when the minute media decided, hey, we're going a different direction.
00:14:04
Speaker 2: And they dropped me. And then I started writing for Fox.
00:14:07
Speaker 4: So you're right.
00:14:08
Speaker 2: I guess I had to move on from the website entirely.
00:14:13
Speaker 4: You had to. I mean, there was nothing you could do. And I've never let anybody... I've never let anybody take freezing cold takes. I really have really kind of attached to it in the sense that I just don't want anyone doing what I guess like happened to your site. You know, I feel like.
00:14:32
Speaker 3: Here's the thing though. I was paid handsomely for selling the site. What if somebody offered you money for the Twitter handle?
00:14:39
Speaker 4: Oh yeah. I've been offered money. Definitely. No way. The amount you were offered, I'm sure.
00:14:45
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, probably.
00:14:46
Speaker 2: OK, probably not.
00:14:47
Speaker 3: But it's social media. But that goes to another question. Like, I want to go back to the book thing. So obviously, the social media stuff is valuable when you're selling a book. But where are you on the idea of, hey, we'll give you a book deal because you have 500,000 or whatever Twitter followers. And then this guy might have a phenomenal idea, Fred. But he has like 2,000 followers, so he's not going to be able.
00:15:09
Speaker 2: To market it. Hey, book company, aren't you the one supposed to be marketing the book?
00:15:13
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah. No. The book companies– I mean book companies don't do anything unless I guess you're like Michael Lewis or an A-list or a famous person. Any famous person probably gets more from the book company than the– but– You know, a famous person who just writes a book probably didn't write it themselves, like the memoir type thing. Right, yeah.
00:15:35
Speaker 1: Right, right, right.
00:15:36
Speaker 4: But yeah, so they're not going to do anything. Yeah, the book company should be doing it. That would be great. If you have a great idea and you wrote a good book, I guess, I mean, it may be different for novels.
00:15:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fair.
00:15:52
Speaker 4: It could be different for novels if you could get it on one of those book lists or something, like favorite books or whatever. Ultra list. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:16:01
Speaker 2: But that's tough.
00:16:02
Speaker 4: Or someone online. Anyone online who recommends books to young adults. Because my daughter, there's one lady online who recommends a young adult book and says, this is a good book. And my daughter instantly buys it.
00:16:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's probably pay to play, right? Yeah, I guess. The book company will give you $ 10, 000. Can you mention the book? Because it's going to mean $ 250, 000 for us, right? I don't know.
00:16:28
Speaker 3: You just had said that about, hey, they love you because you have this huge following. And obviously, you're going to do some book sales, which is nice.
00:16:35
Speaker 2: But the whole process- Not really hard. What's that?
00:16:39
Speaker 4: It's still really hard. I mean, to convert people to buy your book, it's still really, really hard. So it's not like a guarantee. type thing but.
00:16:49
Speaker 3: Oh hell yeah yeah by the way how much do you read fred how many books have you bought this year uh if you don't want to answer i'm putting you on the spot i haven't.
00:16:56
Speaker 4: You know honestly i'd listen to books i've listened i do as well for books i actually read them i don't think i've read any.
00:17:06
Speaker 3: Yeah no no audible is it's great um i i listened uh to 1929 uh.
00:17:13
Speaker 2: About the stock market crash, the New York Times author. I can't believe I'm spacing on this.
00:17:16
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah. Those are always really good.
00:17:18
Speaker 3: And then there's another one about AI that I'm listening to now that's great.
00:17:22
Speaker 2: But I did read a book this year. It's called Ender's Game.
00:17:25
Speaker 4: Yeah. Is that a fiction book?
00:17:27
Speaker 1: It is.
00:17:27
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:17:27
Speaker 2: Have you heard of it?
00:17:29
Speaker 4: No. I haven't read fiction in years. But I've been considering it.
00:17:34
Speaker 2: It's from like the 80s. It's awesome.
00:17:36
Speaker 3: And I only read about it because I heard about the book while listening to the book on AI. All these smart AI guys happened to read that book growing up. It's kind of like end of the world, blah, blah, blah. And then my son is reading Frankenstein for English. And the Mary Shelley 1819 version.
00:17:54
Speaker 2: So I buy the book.
00:17:55
Speaker 3: Fred, I can't get past like page 15. I mean, every time I start reading it, I'm falling asleep. Reading is so hard right now because of the short attention spans. You go on social media, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, move on. Reading can be tough, no?
00:18:10
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is. But hopefully my book lends to that because I don't have any, they're all in different sections. There's all sections and they're very short. And it's not a novel. There's no narrative. So you can like skip around to various different parts. And that's really kind of what I was going at. You could pick it up sometime and then read a few things and then put it down, but there's nothing longer. There's no section longer than four pages. So everything about a certain topic. So like you could keep moving on and you could skip some. So it's not going to be something that you have to read from start to finish or all the way through. But yeah, I mean, the reading's tough. I thought I figured that too. I figured that it's going to be like, you're trying to sell to a young audience and, um, It's hard. And there's no Audible yet for my book. I'm not cool enough yet to get it. I got it last time, but it took like six months for them to decide to do it.
00:19:09
Speaker 2: And who did the reading on the book for Audible?
00:19:13
Speaker 4: A professional guy, not me.
00:19:16
Speaker 2: So that's an interesting job, huh?
00:19:18
Speaker 4: It sounds a lot better than me.
00:19:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've heard that's a thing, and obviously Audible. But I guess if you do it and you're the author, you may make more. Because the author of the New York Times 1929 book, he did the entire book for Audible.
00:19:36
Speaker 2: I'm sure that makes more money.
00:19:38
Speaker 1: Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our shows at foxsportsradio.com. And within the iHeartRadio app, search FSR to listen live.
00:19:50
Speaker 2: So I don't know. What do you think is the next iteration of this? Social media, books. Do you think.
00:19:56
Speaker 3: There is a merging down the road where they kind of unify? Or is AI going to kind of upset the apple cart? I read a terrible story in the Wall Street Journal about how all these books from rare bookstores are being bought up. And essentially, everybody was like, oh, that's weird.
00:20:11
Speaker 2: Why would they want so many books?
00:20:13
Speaker 3: And it turns out that AI companies were buying them, feeding them into the quote unquote wood chipper, and then putting them in AI. And the books were getting just shredded, which is really kind of depressing.
00:20:25
Speaker 4: When you think about it. Yeah, and it's depressing. I mean, I don't know. I hope not.
00:20:31
Speaker 1: I mean, I hope.
00:20:34
Speaker 4: I don't know if they use AI to write the books or whatever, but there's not, I can tell you there's no book that can be used that AI can do about what I did.
00:20:44
Speaker 2: No, hell no.
00:20:45
Speaker 4: I mean, like it's just impossible because there was so much thought that went into each thing that I don't, I don't get the AI. I don't really even get it, honestly. I mean, I know, I know it's good for, it's good. It's only good for me when I'm looking up something on the internet. I only use it when I'm looking up something on the internet, like, I needed to go get my son. What did my son need to do to get his driver's license? And I put that in for Florida. And AI spit out all the rules right then and there. That was good. But otherwise, I don't even know what to do. But whenever something pops up with AI, it's always poorly written. I know that.
00:21:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't disagree with that.
00:21:25
Speaker 3: AI doesn't have the creativity to write a book from scratch.
00:21:28
Speaker 2: They're not doing that.
00:21:30
Speaker 3: But I did a lot of gambling this summer on the World Cup. And I had Claude build me a model for it. And as long as you're feeding the right information and giving the right questions, it can clean up.
00:21:41
Speaker 2: So you're saying you're not using a lot of AI, huh?
00:21:44
Speaker 4: I don't know how, really. I don't really know what to do. The only time I use it ever is when I type into Google and it does it for me. ah okay um yeah yeah that's like what i'm talking about like like i needed my i needed to figure it spits out the rules really quickly like the ones that you used to have to go to different websites to find out like some sort of bureaucracy bureaucracy right my driver's license like what did i need to what kind of documents i need to sign what i need to bring in and uh it set it up right there for me you need to bring this this is that was cool i'll tell you that.
00:22:16
Speaker 3: Yeah no no listen it can do that for bro so we we were uh somebody approached me a friend And was like, hey, we might be selling our house.
00:22:24
Speaker 2: I know you had looked in the past. So would you have any interest?
00:22:28
Speaker 3: And within like 10 questions and 25 minutes, Claude, Google, Gemini, they can turn up all the comps.
00:22:36
Speaker 2: Anything you want on the house. Like you don't even need to hit up a realtor or do the research. You just ask the AI.
00:22:43
Speaker 3: Now, obviously, you've got to double check with everything. But it's becoming so easy and second nature now. Once you start using it, then I do wonder, like I'm on social media less.
00:22:53
Speaker 1: Are you?
00:22:54
Speaker 4: Yeah. I'm on a little less because I don't really like the tenor in which it's, I don't really like the way it's, just the way it is now.
00:23:06
Speaker 3: Hold on, hold on.
00:23:07
Speaker 2: Do you think that's since Elon Musk took it over?
00:23:10
Speaker 4: Oh, the account?
00:23:11
Speaker 1: You know what?
00:23:13
Speaker 4: I think it's something to do with it, just the way that the X is structured. I think we were going that way anyway.
00:23:20
Speaker 2: We were, yeah.
00:23:23
Speaker 4: He certainly, I don't really like the way it is now with X, like all the different, what is the incentivized, what is incentivized to be posted to get a lot of engagement?
00:23:36
Speaker 2: And now you can profit off of it, which is what he wants. And he wants the bots. He doesn't dissuade from, oh, we don't want bots. He invites them.
00:23:45
Speaker 3: And that's what makes, anytime Fred, somebody's coming after me and saying stuff, I look at the date of their account and it's like 2026.
00:23:52
Speaker 2: They started like three months ago.
00:23:53
Speaker 1: That's a bot.
00:23:54
Speaker 2: Nobody's jumping on Twitter in 2026.
00:23:58
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know. Nigeria account. Yeah, I get way less engagement now, I tell you that. Probably because I do the exact same thing as I've always done. I just post a screenshot. I don't do whatever you're supposed to do to get more. But I just don't like the discussion. Everything, every discussion is, is fragmented and there's always complaining about everything that it just, it, it's not good for the soul. I mean, like, it's just, well, it's weird.
00:24:25
Speaker 3: You say not good for the soul, because I'm sure you've seen all this disinformation. And if you were an international country wanting to sow dissent in this country, what would you do? You would mess up the soul by everything being fragmented and negative. This is like 50 times worse than if it bleeds, it leads.
00:24:43
Speaker 2: Remember that when we were newspaper guys reading all that stuff? This is way worse.
00:24:49
Speaker 4: Yeah, nothing's real. And I can tell you this, details, basic details are out the window in social media. Nobody cares about sex.
00:24:59
Speaker 5: But not even....
00:25:02
Speaker 4: Facts, like someone will post a picture of something or a video and say, and go, this is cool or whatever. And the video or picture is from five years ago. And they won't say that. And it's like, you think it just happened. And it's just all these details, basic details that are just out the window. And also the fake stuff. My dad, I mean, my dad sends me so many news breaks from the fake accounts for the fake story.
00:25:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're not on it.
00:25:28
Speaker 1: It's weird.
00:25:29
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:25:30
Speaker 4: If my dad's sending me these sports stuff about fake news, like all this stuff, can you imagine the important things that people are believing are true?
00:25:38
Speaker 2: Oh gosh.
00:25:39
Speaker 4: It's sad. Like it just, I mean, it's harmless enough when it's just a fake trade or guy, but.
00:25:47
Speaker 2: Now it's like actually stuff that matters in society.
00:25:49
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it's, I can't, uh, Yeah, I try not to use it as much as I do. I mean, I've been using a lot more during when I have released this book last week. But yeah, after a while, I'm going to stop again.
00:26:03
Speaker 2: All right.
00:26:04
Speaker 3: Well, Fred, sorry to get out Debbie Downer there, but and rant sound like an old guy ranting in a cloud.
00:26:09
Speaker 2: Both of us.
00:26:10
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah. I'm at that level now.
00:26:13
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, honestly, 2011 was like the heyday, right? Um, but maybe it'll be better once the NFL games start up again, but you're right. Like, um, this week I saw an.
00:26:21
Speaker 2: Interesting video of Puka Nakua. He's like, Oh, all I do is eat hamburgers and I'm not eating healthy. I'm like, this might be fake.
00:26:27
Speaker 3: So I send it to a producer and he's like, yeah, that's from a year ago. And I'm like, well, why are you, why is this guy posting it now?
00:26:33
Speaker 4: Exactly. Exactly.
00:26:35
Speaker 1: And you know why?
00:26:36
Speaker 2: Engagement and clicks and videos.
00:26:38
Speaker 4: Yeah. No facts. Yeah. And it's, but, but it'd be going back to the book. I do have the, The formal announcement you made that Saquon Barkley becomes the first player in college football history to win the Heisman in October.
00:26:53
Speaker 2: Oh, wait, I made that?
00:26:55
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah.
00:26:56
Speaker 1: Wait, what happened in October?
00:26:57
Speaker 2: So did he do something great in October?
00:27:00
Speaker 4: Well, he was dominating.
00:27:01
Speaker 2: Oh, was it the Ohio State game?
00:27:04
Speaker 4: It was the Ohio State game. Saquon was dominating even the previous two games. And then they went up 21-3 on Ohio State. I think Saquon returned the opening kick for a touchdown.
00:27:15
Speaker 2: That's right. Yes, that was the game.
00:27:17
Speaker 4: I remember it.
00:27:18
Speaker 3: So 2016 or– it must have been 2017. 2017.
00:27:22
Speaker 2: Yes, I see it.
00:27:24
Speaker 4: You wrote, Saquon becomes the first player in college football history to win the Heisman in October. It's done. Hand it to him. Win or lose here. And I think that was it. That was the jinx. His season went down the tubes. Right after that tweet.
00:27:40
Speaker 3: Well, he did have a buck 58 against Nebraska.
00:27:43
Speaker 2: They lost the game.
00:27:44
Speaker 4: They lost the game. Oh, to Ohio. Yeah. Yeah, to Ohio State. And he didn't even win. He didn't even make it to New York.
00:27:52
Speaker 2: Well, it looks like he finished fourth in the Heisman.
00:27:54
Speaker 5: Damn.
00:27:55
Speaker 2: Who won that one?
00:27:58
Speaker 4: It was 2017. It was Mayfield probably, right? Where is it?
00:28:01
Speaker 3: Consensus All-Americans.
00:28:02
Speaker 2: Consensus All-Americans.
00:28:05
Speaker 4: I think it was Baker Mayfield.
00:28:07
Speaker 2: Oh, it was probably Baker Mayfield. Bryce, that was the year Bryce Love, remember that guy?
00:28:10
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:28:13
Speaker 2: Wait, Saquon wasn't, oh no, yeah, he was an All-American.
00:28:17
Speaker 4: He didn't go to New York, yeah. I jinxed him. No, you jinxed him. The last book I had you with Hackenberg, I don't think you could even jinx Hackenberg. He was already dead in the door doornail before it even.
00:28:32
Speaker 3: Oh i was so excited for that i mean so i'm two for two making it into your books all right man.
00:28:36
Speaker 5: That's awesome really honored thanks fred uh and thanks for stopping by good congrats on all your success and i will continue churning out the takes um some right some wrong and hopefully they get highlighted
00:28:50
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah yeah thanks for having me j mac
