Hi, I'm Jamie from Florida. The Sound of Young America is an independent production supported by listeners like you and me.

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Live on tape from my house in Los Angeles. I'm Jesse Thorn and this is the Sound of Young America from MaximumFun.org.

MaximumFun. MaximumFun. MaximumFun.

It's the Sound of Young America. I'm Jesse Thorn. My guests on the program are three of the authors of the blog, Free Darko.

They go by the name Bethlehem Shoals. That's Nathaniel Friedman.

And Jesse Einhorn, who goes as Silver Bird, 5,000, and Jacob Weinstein, who goes by Big Baby, Belafonte.

They've compiled a new book called The Macro Phenomenal, Pro Basketball, Almanac.

Style, stats, and stars in today's game. It is a spectacularly lovely, irreverent, and bizarre guide to Pro Basketball.

Almost certainly the only professional sports guide to feature complex graphical simile based on the Aztec calendar.

Gentlemen, welcome to the Sound of Young America. Thanks for having us.

Okay, so here's the question. Well, here's the first in a series of questions, I hope.

What was it that drew you guys to write this blog? What was it that wasn't out there that you thought you could bring to the table?

I think what started the blog initially was, despite the whole sort of quasi Marxist manifesto shadow the top of your lungs, pretend you've everything figured out, quality of the blog.

I think we just sort of got this sense that we had a way of watching basketball that wasn't really reflected.

Obviously, it wasn't going to be reflected in the mainstream press, but also just wasn't reflected in the growing crop of sports blogs out there.

These things, they don't begin as any sort of purposeful thing you're trying to present to the world.

They begin as a little joke among friends that you hope maybe 250 people read once a week, and all of a sudden, four years later, this happens and you're not quite sure how it actually, how it got started.

Yeah, I would also say that I think there was a certain level frustration with the lack of most sports appreciation is sort of oriented toward teams and team fandom.

I guess we wanted to put out something that was more sort of dedicated to the appreciation of individual players, individual playing style, and wasn't necessarily tied to any kind of team based fandom, which we found both aesthetically and also politically limiting.

Well, it also helps.

That's actually what I was going to put up on.

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