Intersections
The 2025+ Gunn Show Thesis
Hey everyone! 👋🏻
Happy first Sunday of yet another New Year, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. I hope each of you had a fantastic holiday season spent celebrating with friends and family and are looking forward to all of the special things ahead in 2025.
It was a busy yet fulfilling one on our end as we hosted our first Christmas at the new house here in Texas. After a great couple of weeks spending time together as a family, we are refreshed and recharged for the exciting journey to come - which is set to kick off this month with the arrival of our little one. We are patiently awaiting the day when Grayson decides he is ready to join our family and can’t wait to share the journey alongside you all.
And so, after a brief period of relaxation, it’s time to get back on schedule with the newsletter.
While the holiday season presented us with the opportunity for connection, it also gave me space for something else: reflection. As such, I’ve been spending the past couple weeks looking back on year 1 of this publication and wanted to kick off 2025 by sharing some thoughts on the path taken to this point, and even more importantly, the direction in which The Gunn Show will be heading for the foreseeable future.
After embarking on a project that was once but a vague outline of an idea, I believe iteration has finally helped me reach a point of clarity on what I want this newsletter to be about. That vision had already begun shaping more recent editions of the publication, but even so I realize it is time to step back and clearly outline the core philosophy behind my writing - and ultimately, my life.
So let’s get to it. Time to start the New Year off with a bang. This is the 2025+ vision for The Gunn Show.
Hope you all enjoy, and looking forward to sharing what is to come with each of you.
- CG
Intersections: The 2025+ GunnShow Thesis
Past
Let’s start with a confession: when I first started The Gunn Show back in January of last year, I had absolutely no idea what in the hell I was doing.
It was a new experiment on two fronts: first in putting my ideas to paper, and second in sharing them on a public forum. I didn’t exactly know what I wanted it to look like, but I did know one thing - that I wanted to get started.
At the onset, my rationale for the newsletter was selfish - I’d noticed a consistent theme cropping up in my life, a problem I was in need of solving. After a period of deep reflection, I had come to the realization that I was losing the battle for my attention. That I was letting apps and algorithms control my focus, and ultimately, my thoughts. And in the process, I felt like I was losing a piece of myself that I desperately wanted to get back.
My first post, Philosophy of Focus, was a direct commentary on this problem and attempted first step in rectifying it. In it, I shared the following quote to contextualize the place I found myself at in that point in time:
“For the past few years, I’ve been on the journey to regain control over my attention. Searching for strategies to fight back against the information waging war on my mind.”
My hope was that The Gunn Show would serve as a Forcing Function to reclaim what I felt like I’d lost. By putting pen to paper and finger to keyboard, I felt I could create a weekly antidote that would help me shift from consumption to creation, allowing me take back control of my mind in the process.
To start, I wanted to ensure I made it as easy as possible to build the habit of writing. I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew and sabotage my goals too early, so I devised an easily replicable format that turned into the ‘What I Read This Week’ series in which I simply shared summaries of the most insightful pieces of content I’d come across in the week prior. My thought at the time was that by forcing myself to shift through and pick out the best of what I’d been consuming, I’d start to develop a better filter for my attention - and provide you all with some valuable information in the process.
And in the beginning, it worked.
From January to July, I published close to 20 editions of What I Read This Week while carving out time for some more in depth thought pieces like Intellectual Dividends and Simple is No Guarantee of Beautiful. By the midpoint of the year I had already hit my goal for published newsletters and felt confident that I’d established a writing habit that was I enjoying.
But while it was a good start, I couldn’t help but feeling like there something was missing.
Present
As I was thinking about this Substack at the midpoint of the year, I found two things to be true.
First, I’d accomplished what I set out to at the start of the year: start a publication, share some ideas on a weekly cadence, and publish them for others to see. Come July, I’d taken a previously non-existent habit from zero to one while having fun in the process.
But second, I felt it was starting to grow a little stale. I couldn’t help but thinking that I was mostly regurgitating the thoughts of others rather than exploring ones of my own. And while this strategy had been effective in overcoming the necessary activation energy to start a writing project, in order for it to truly serve the function I hoped the newsletter had to evolve.
Looking back, I think what I uncovered over those first few months was a fundamental truth about writing and creativity: sometimes you just have to put things in motion before you can calibrate your bearings.
It took me a bit to realize this, because it ran somewhat counter to a pre-existing belief I had. I’d long operated from the standpoint that direction supersedes action - if you find yourself wanting to go to New York City from Dallas but start heading towards Los Angeles, it doesn’t matter if you are traveling at the speed of light; you are simply moving fast in the wrong direction.
But this writing experience has taught me something different: while direction is undoubtedly key, starting a new venture often means that you have no idea where it is you want to go in the first place. And in order to figure it out, you need to get moving first. Life is often a constant process of recalibration, of moving the compass around and watching how it shifts to point you towards True North. So while direction may be the determinant of things in the long run, action is often highly informative to direction at the outset.
In the case of the newsletter, action simply looked like putting words on a page. And as I’ve done that over time, the result has been a more finely calibrated compass that points me towards the things I like to write about. The ideas that spark my curiosity, the pieces that get me excited to get out of bed at 5AM and head to the keyboard.
If you’ve been following along, you’ve probably started to pick up on what those look like: sports.
My life has orbited around them for as long as I can remember - I’ve been an athlete from the time I could walk, a fan from the time I could watch. Fast forward to today and it’s only natural that sports form the foundation for what I do every day for my profession.
So naturally, my writing compass slowly started to orient back to what has been my True North all along. For the second half of the year, The Gunn Show has mostly been an exploration of key ideas from the world of sport, leading to pieces like The Sports Singularity, Athletic Excellence, and Rise of The Generalist Athlete. And it’s exactly that idea that I’ll be doubling down on in 2025 and beyond.
But with a bit of a twist.
Future (Intersections)
Now before I explain where we are heading, let’s address the elephant in the room (it’s big, pink, and standing over there in the corner).
Some of you are reading this because you are close friends or family and want to offer your support - and for that I am truly grateful, more than you know. But for those of you I don’t know that have stumbled upon The Gunn Show, you may be thinking the following: “Aren’t there already thousands of writers covering the world of sports at big publications? Don’t they have journalism and broadcasting degrees, years of experience that allow them to do this at a high level? What makes this newsletter any different, or any better?”
Let me explain.
From my lens, there are two differences in perspective that will make this publication different from the normal sports centric newsletter.
The first is somewhat small: I believe that much of the sports centric content in the world operates from an outside-in viewpoint rather than an inside-out one, and that the distinction is important.
What outside-in means is that the perspective comes from a distance. Decisions and happenings are covered rather than made, such that a combination of surface-level metrics, game outcomes, public statements and external observations are the building blocks with which to craft a story. Outside-in content takes a big picture perspective and weaves them into digestible narratives for mass consumption, a critical piece in the sport landscape from which many of us - myself included - gain insight and understanding. It is the what, much more so than the why.
Inside-out coverage, however, stands in contrast. Where outside-in stems from a necessary amount of removal from the day-to-day environment, inside-out necessitates being fully embedded in it. These types of perspectives stem from ‘living in the arena’ - bearing full responsibility for influencing and making decisions, rather than simply observing them. Inside-out sees the why that underlies the what, as it is in the doing of things where understanding truly lies.
And it is exactly this viewpoint that I bring to the table. So, while a healthy balance between both is key, I hope that my experiences behind the scenes can be informative in providing a slightly more nuanced - and thus balanced - commentary on the world of sports.
Which brings us to the second point of differentiation, the twist I believe will be the key evolution for The Gunn Show in 2025 and beyond: rather than talking about sports as a separate entity of life, I want to explore them as a critical subset of it.
I think the way we talk about sports today frequently misses the boat. Too often we treat them as if they are an isolated part of the world, a separate entity from everyday life that operates by different rules. They are merely entertainment, ‘just a game’ as the saying goes - whether for the athletes that play them, the coaches that coach them, or the fans that watch them.
I could not disagree more.
Sports aren’t just a game. At least not to me, and I’m guessing many of you feel the same. To fall in line with this reductionist viewpoint means to be dismissive of the deep significance the institution of sport has carried in society for thousands of years; to ignore the power of the attraction that people feel towards the ethos of competitive athletics.
Because the truth is this: we aren’t drawn to sports because they are a distraction. We are drawn to them because they are an extension; an extension of life itself.
Sports are life, or at least a major subsection of it. They don’t exist in a different realm so much as they live within the same world each of us inhabits. They are an integrated thread in the fabric of life, a critical patch in the blanket of our experiences. And since they exist within life, that means that they must be reflective of it.
What does this mean? Simply the following: that sports operate according to many of the same fundamental principles that govern our daily lives. The rules of sport aren’t different from the ones we already know, like we are often led to believe. Instead, they are frequently one and the same. Put simply, sports are the lessons of life put on display in the arena of competition.
As I reflect on my own experiences, I’ve come to view my own life as an exploration of this idea. Because while sport has been a constant for me, it would be disingenuous for me to say that it is my singular focus. My interests vary far outside of them, spanning domains of life such as mathematics, science, philosophy, and psychology. I’m probably the rare sports professional that enjoys studying Tversky and Taleb just as much - if not more - as I do Saban and Smart.
And because I view sports as a canvas integrated with that of life itself, they do not constrain my interests so much as they amplify them. It is for this reason that I’ve never viewed my work in baseball as a ‘job’ - in contrast, I’ve always thought about it as an exploration of the fundamental principles of life applied to a game oriented around a white leather ball with 216 red stitches. It’s a space in which I have equal opportunity to integrate my love for math, science, and the human condition - all through the lens of competitive athletics.
Said differently, my work is an exercise in finding the intersection points between life and sport; in finding the time-tested principles around which the world operates and figuring out when and where those apply within the domain of athletics. It is this idea that gets me out of bed in the morning and keeps my gas tank full.
And so at this point, there are many of you who have read nearly 50 editions of The Gunn Show and seen the following cover image just as many times:
But I now realize that I’ve never explained where it comes from. At its core, this visualization is the representation for how I think about the world of sports - it is the nexus of sport and the world itself, the intersection between the two rather than either insolation.
And so that, in one sentence, is exactly what The Gunn Show will be focusing on moving forward: the time tested principles of life, applied to sport itself.
I’m excited to explore them moving forward, and hope you are as well.
Let’s have a year.
