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Learn more at vertexinck.com. This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Joining me today.

It's our senior NFL insider at the athletic.

Dana, how are you?

I am exhausted. I need like six more naps, but I can't sleep here. Indies like Vegas for me. It's the worst. It's the worst. And I know we just came off eight days of this. By the way, for those listening, this is not complaining. This is the reality of the situation. It's just constant conversations. you can't go anywhere without people just wanting people sometimes just want to be polite and say hi they

they don't even really want to talk to me. They just don't want to be rude. This week especially, it's the art of the handshake and walk. Where it's just like, hi, sorry, thank. Great to see you. Got to go. Got a thing. And you have to be deft about that because you don't want to seem rude. But unless you've mastered that maneuver, you're going to have 17,000 conversations a day.

Yes.

And I am queen of the look through, you know, when you're having a conversation with somebody, but you don't want to talk to them because you really want to talk to other people that you're here for, which is the rudest body behavior. It's hard to tamp that down. It's hard to tamp down that instinct. Especially someone like me. I'm already high energy. I already have ADD. And then, oh, wait, I have to have a conversation with somebody with all these NFL people just circling the waters. Like, it's impossible. I just came from standing at the top of an escalator. That's what I did today. I stood at the top of the... It's actually a very good place to stand. It was an amazing. Do you know how many conversations I had about free agency and this draft and just the tone of indie standing at an escalator? Because everyone's got to go up and down. I, this is the transition that happened to me maybe three or four years ago. I think one of it was stopping drinking, but two of it was getting older is that I saw the light in the Mike Sando strategy where he just does all his work at the coffee place in the morning. When everyone else is telling themselves, well, I'll just talk to people at night. It's like, no, you won't. Those aren't going to be fruitful conversations. You're lying to yourself. So that transition to, in the daytime hours, I can really get a lot done is an important one for us at the compound.

So I hit it on both ends.

Well, yeah, you go hard all the time.

I do morning and night.

I know.

And the reason why I do the morning thing, it's not so much because you're a little bit more sound, sane, caffeinated, and people are in a better space.

I try to pick off those that are recovering from the night before.

So they're vulnerable, they're hungover, they're emotional, maybe they made mistakes that they regret, and they just want to talk.

I actually had that happen this morning.

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