Interview Only w/ Wright Thompson - The Barn, The South, And The Stories America Still Won’t Tell - The Chuck ToddCast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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That's getsold dot Com promo code toodcast for thirty percent off. Well,
joining me now is somebody I've never met, but I'm

(01:24):
big static to finally interview him because I've been reading
It's right Thompson. Who if these days, if there's a
great profile of a sports figure that you couldn't put down,
I promise you the byline was right Thompson. But right,
it's good to meet you, good to see it.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
It's great to meet you, and it's a real treat
to be here, so thank you. Well, look, man, the
treats mine.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
And I booked you because of a book that wasn't
about sports. It's about where you grew up. It's about
one of the most wrenching stories of civil rights in
our history, and it's a book called The Barn and
it's just everything that I love about your writing is
showcased in this book because it's both personal factual relevant. Look,

(02:15):
you tell me this was clearly a work of love,
meaning whether you had a publisher willing to do this
or not, I'm guessing you were going to write this book.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
You know it. The barn Rymintill was killed was twenty
three miles from my family's farm, and I didn't you know,
the barn had been completely erased from history, and so
I really, look, I don't know the right way to
say this, but if you don't know something that essential
about the place that you claim to know best in
the world, then you're kind of not actually from anywhere.

(02:48):
And so it you know, it was important to me
to understand how this came to happen in this place.
And you know, like one of the interesting things. Don't
know if you've had this with your work, but you know,
when the public gets something, they you lose control over
sort of how it's you know, how it lives. And

(03:09):
so one of the things that was so interesting, it's
been so interesting to me is people understand that like
it's a story about nineteen fifty five and it's a
story about right now, and you know that that you know,
in a certain way, like separate from whether you were
for it or against it. Like in some ways, what
the MAGA project really is is an attempt to go

(03:31):
back before the civil rights movement. And so we actually
have a date for that, because you know, people point
to the murder of him Attil is the starting gun.
And so the America that was Great again was August
twenty seventh, nineteen fifty five. And so it's been interesting
over the last year as people have read sort of
a deep history that more and more feels like a

(03:53):
current events quoes.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
You know, it's interesting about what you said about why
you felt all you felt like here You thought you
knew where you grew up, and yet you didn't realize
what was happening where you grew up. I always say
I was both lucky to grow up in Miami in
the seventies and eighties, when I always say I was
born in Miama and then I graduated high school in Miami.

(04:16):
But I remember thinking about Florida's history, and during the
sort of the George Floyd reckoning that we had with
some various historical events, one that hit me hard that
I didn't know about was called Axe Handle Sunday, and
it was essentially a white supremacist, you know, race riot

(04:38):
that was started in Jacksonville. And I'm like, how come
we didn't tell that? How come I didn't learn that
in Florida history, you know. Never mind Black Wall Street
and Tulsa, never mind you with the barn. I mean,
this is a lot of the history of the South,
isn't it.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Like I'm going to read you a this is what
is being taught about it until the school in the
Mississippi Delta right now, and like so I have a
picture of this textbook and so just in case, like
you know, so this is what they're teaching. This is
like a current textbook to your point about Axe Handle Sunday.

(05:14):
In nineteen fifty five, JP Coleman, the Attorney general from
Choctaw County, was elected governor in Mississippi's first general election
after the Brown v Board of Education decision. Coleman promised
to keep the schools segregated. He proved to be a
moderating force during a very difficult time. Just after the election,
Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago, allegedly made

(05:36):
a pass at a white woman in a rural store.
Two men kidnapped him beat him, killed him, and threw
his body in the Tallahatchee River. The coverage of the
trial and acquittal of his accused murderers, who later admitted
their guilt in an article in a national magazine, painted
a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
I mean, that's that's twenty twenty five textbook.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yes, and so like, oh my god, God, no, I know,
and so like we're not when you wonder, like sometimes
when you turn your TV and you're like, well, who
are like what is like how is my reality so
different than this reality? Because you know, you see people
who how could you possibly think that? And you know,
one of the reasons there's such a war on black

(06:18):
history sort of disguised as a war on like the
excesses of loocism, which, by the way, like you know,
those are two very different things. They've been lumped together,
and so like, the war on black history is being
waged by people who have been rewriting history in textbooks,
specifically for fifty seventy five years, you know, and you
know in Mississippi. I don't know about growing up in Miami,

(06:40):
but in Mississippi, the trick to understanding the state is
the accusation is always the confession and so and so.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
My god, we see that with Trump now, the joke
is always projection, right, whatever he accuses opponents have done,
it's exactly what either he's doing or wants to do.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yeah, and so that's been true Mississippi for a very
long time. And so, you know, I mean, like sometimes
it feels so disheartening because like there's an entire history
of the state that like I certainly didn't know, and
you know the degree to which, uh, you know, all
this is tied to capital markets. You know, the plantation
where Mattil was killed. Until very recently it has been

(07:19):
owned by a publicly traded company. So if you had
a four oh one K with Vanguard Fidelity or black Rock,
you owned a tiny piece of the plantation where Attill
was killed. And so, like, I mean, so much of
the scholarship around America's original sin feels like it stops
at the water's edge, you know, I mean, like it's
some ways the biggest flaw of sixteen nineteen is that

(07:41):
it wasn't radical enough, right, you know that, Like they're
like it stopped at the water's edge as opposed to
following the money to Manchester and Liverpool in London and
sort of how you know, you know Manchester which is
where Rolls met Royce and also where Mark's met Engele,
you know, and like and so like. It is interesting
when you start following the money about how a murder
happen and on a piece of land in Mississippi, you

(08:02):
end up very quickly seeing that like, oh this is
you know, this is not just some backwoar water where
America can store its sins. This is like deeply connected
to the whole world.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
So one way that I try to have some optimism
about this fight that we're having about Franklywood is recent history,
is that there are still a lot of us alive. Now,
I was, I went. I started school about six years
after desegregation in Miami.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
I think you were.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
You were just after you started school just after desegregation.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, Missisi. Yeah, Mississippi desegregated in nineteen seventy. So the
first class in Mississippi that went to an integrated school
all twelve years, graduated from high school in nineteen eighty two.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
Okay, those folks are still alive. Do you hold out
the hope? And this is a weird way of saying
it that when the last person who was essentially raised
and segregated America passes on, that maybe we have a
different we are able to have a different, more honest

(09:12):
conversation about the first fifty years of the twentieth century.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
No, and because the right answer in the test is
painted a poor picture of Mississippi and it's white citizens.
And you know, like, you know, one of the things
people always ask me is because the barn where until
was killed is it's just a barn. It's a guy's barn.
You know, he has his Christmas decoration. Why is it
in a landmark? Yeah, well there you're you know, that's
a good question. And so it's in the process of

(09:37):
being turned into one, which is an interesting thing. But
like right now, it's just a guy's barn. And so
people always ask, well, you know, how can he sleep
next to it? You know, from his barbecue grill by
his swimming pool, you can see it. It's like right there,
and so people, how can he do that? And I'm like, well,
every single authority figure in his entire life, every coach,

(09:58):
every teacher, preacher, every scout master, every elder, every friend
of his dad's at the hunting Camp. Every single person
with authority in his entire life has told him his
entire life, a very specific version of this history. And
so like, I mean, you know, in some ways, like

(10:20):
you know, Mississippi is you know, Mississippi elected Ray Mabes
not that long ago, right, you know, and like Mississippi
was a place that really had a moment. Miss Mississippi
had a bunch of democratic governors in a row through
William Winner, who I'm sure he.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
Ran, and they all wan on promising to improve public education,
which is really like this was the one through line
that got him elected, right.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, I mean, and you know William Winter sacrificed his
political career forcing through universal kindergarten, you know. But so
Mississippi was a progressive enough place that in nineteen eighty
eight they elected Ray Mabes, and so he know, my
worry is that the opposite of what you suggest is true.
That you know, the Irish, you know, the Irish remember

(11:06):
the defeats long after the British have forgotten the victories.
And like, my worry is that the further this gets
from actual human beings experience, and the more it becomes
the sort of property of myths that the like that
we that we end up in this situation where it's
actually auguring in on itself. But I mean, you know,

(11:29):
the I don't know. I mean, like the question you're
asking obviously is the central question, right?

Speaker 1 (11:36):
No, I I guess I look at it this way, like,
is it progress that most of us now view the
gone with the Wind as a bunch of fictional garbage?

Speaker 2 (11:45):
I think it's incredible progress because you know, I mean,
I was just talking to somebody this morning about this.
You know, Kentucky was a neutral state during the Civil War.
They had three times as many citizens fighting for the
Union Army as the Confederate army. And now when you
go to Kentucky, I mean they draped themselves in sort
of the old South lost couset mythology. So like the
question I love to ask about the state of Kentucky

(12:07):
is is this the only place in the world that
claims to have lost a war at one?

Speaker 1 (12:15):
Have you been to West Virginia? Look, let me tell you, dude,
I mean, I find it hilarious that West Virginia and
Virginia have essentially traded. It's West Virginia. I'll never forget
when the governor chose to join the Southern Governors Association.
This was about twenty years ago, and I'm like, does
the governor understand the history of West Virginia? What are
you talking about?

Speaker 2 (12:36):
Well, I mean, you know, I mean to your question
earlier in my answer, you know, I mean what is history?
You know, also like West Virginia, though, like West Virginia
does have Pepperoni roles. That's their union credit. I like
a Pepperoni role. I used to cover the LSU football

(12:57):
team when Nick Saban was the coach, and one time
his mother, who's from West Virginia, made us all Pepperoni roles.
So you know, West Virginia of course has turned its
back on its entire reason for existing, but it still
has the Pepperoni roles. Suck fair enough.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Well, look, the capital of the state that had the
capital of the Confederacy I think seceded from the Confederacy
about fifteen years ago.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
Well, you know, and all this stuff. I mean, it's
you know, my high school American history teacher in the
eighth grade, Miss Halcombe called it the War of Northern Aggression.
You know, this is not that long ago.

Speaker 1 (13:29):
Well, we used to laugh about this. I mean I
was raised with that, you know, all this stuff, but
the fact that that mythology just sort of did take hold,
I mean, that really was damaging. And I don't think
we fully appreciate how damaging that is when you just
allow the pop culture to oh, that's hilarious. Oh that's funny.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
And also, like, I mean a real like interesting comparison now,
because you know, you have a lot of people now
who campaigned on saying wild stuff and now actually have
to govern. I mean, one of the things, you know,
the people who were agitating for secession in eighteen fifty eight,
fifty nine, eighteen sixty, like, these were just bomb throwing politicians.

(14:10):
It never occurred to them. I don't think that anybody
would actually do this shit, you know. And so like
you know, in the big argument for the Civil War,
this is not the conversation I expected to have, but
this is fascinating. But no, but the argument for the
Civil War was that that this is you know, cotton
was oil, so Mississippi was Saudi Arabia, and this is
the world's most powerful commodity. And so the sorry that's

(14:34):
a jet, I'm right by lax. So that was the
world's most most powerful and important commodity, and that Europe
and all these textile mills would be so desperate to
get the southern cotton back that they would stop the
US and make the US settle the war. The problem
was is that none of these politicians, I guess were
actual cotton farmers. Because every cotton farmer you know, we've

(14:56):
been doing it a long time, will tell you that
the most important thing to know when trying to predict
what the price is going to be is something called
the carryover. And that's how many bales are sitting in
warehouses waiting to go into textile mills, and so what's
the carryover and so, because that determines how much cotton
people need. So the largest carryovers in history to that

(15:19):
point had been eighteen fifty nine and eighteen sixty, which
meant that Manchester, England didn't need a single bail of
Southern cotton until at least deep in the winter of
eighteen sixty three, by which point the war was lost.
So all of these eighteen year old boys who got
convinced to go fight for something went to these far

(15:40):
away fields and died in the most painful ways possible
because their leaders couldn't bother to learn basic microeconomics and like,
and so that's sort of like unwilling uncu the desire
and almost pride and being uncurious and stupid like has
real impact on actual people's lives. And it's just like

(16:02):
it seems like we just you know, do it again
and again and again and again.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
No, it's it's actually I look at this era and
I keep saying, well, we get through these. We've had
these other similar periods in history, we get through them.
And then under my breath, I say, well, it took
a civil war to get through one. It took a
total economic collapse, the Great Depression, essentially to get us
to figure out that we had to regulate business, right,

(16:28):
like we do have to have catastrophic moments essentially close
to death as a country before we pull out of
the death spiral.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Well, you know, and like the idea that you know,
the modern Klan really was sort of came back like
say nineteen twenty two ish, right, and the you know,
the March on Washington was nineteen sixty four, So what's
that forty two years? Yeah, so what's forty two years
from today? You know, Like, I mean, these are long

(17:02):
roads back. I mean, you can vandalize something very quickly,
but it takes a long time to put it back together.
I Mean. One of the things that I like, really
am proud about about this book though about the Barn,
is that there is a sort of playbook of people
who resisted really powerful forces and have managed despite sort

(17:22):
of all of the all of the things conspiring towards
a rasure to keep this story alive. You know. I
mean Reverend Wheeler Parker, who was Immitt Till's first cousin,
best friend, next door neighbor, rode the train south with
him in nineteen fifty five's the last living eyewitness to
the kidnapping. He and I went to the African American
History Museum in DC, and uh, you know, when he

(17:44):
came out of the room wherem Attill's coffin is, I mean,
he was just making noises and like, you know, this
is a guy's a Kojik minister. He's one of the
most sort of you know, this guy's a professional speaker.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
And so yeah, and.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
So we're like halfway up the you know the sort
of ramps, you know, we kind of go back up
until he can talk again, and then the thing he
says is we got to make sure people remember, like
we can't let people forget. And so, you know, I
got invited to this thing in Chicago. I was actually
just you know, this is odd, but you know, I
worked for ESPN, So I was just having breakfast with

(18:19):
the basketball coach Phil Jackson, and we were literally I
was literally telling him this exact story about.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
Knowing Phil Jackson's probably more interested in this than anything
you want to ask about basketball.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
Way more. And also you know, he's a Chicago guy.
And so I said, I got invited to what would
have been him Until's eightieth birthday party. And we go
into this like parish hall essentially in Argo Summit in
Illinois suburban and it's where the Argo starts plan is
they make like kros syrup and and so we're like

(18:50):
we're sitting there and I slowly realized that every living
person who knew him at phill is in the rooms.
So like when I started doing this, there were probably
twelve people, and now they're dying in front of me.
Now they're probably eight. And like there was this moment
where his aunt, I think her name is Thelma, stands
up and in this really really quiet voice says, I
wasn't there the night he died, but I was there

(19:10):
the morning he was born. So and you know, people
talk about him until like he's a symbol, and sure,
he absolutely is, but he's also like he was a boy.
You know, it was such a specific age.

Speaker 1 (19:21):
You know, he uh, you never got to become a man,
despite in Mississippi history books.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
No, and like, you know, he was just like he
was that unique age of boyhood where he was starting
to get his In his fourteenth birthday, his mother heard
him and his friends playing Spin the bottle. But he
also like loved comic books. So he was that age
where you know where you're kind of maybe sorry.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Four or fourteen.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Yeah, yeah, you sort of like maybe you're interested in
maybe trying to kiss a girl, but you still like
Spider Man, you know, and like that that's such a
specific age of boyhood and like and you know, right
now in Chicago there is a like a storage facility
that the family keeps. I guess they don't really know
what to do with it. And in it is his
toy train. We I think as long as there's a

(20:09):
room in Chicago where Emmitt Till's toy trains there waiting
on a boy who's never coming home. It is incumbent
upon every America and almost as an act of patriotism
to say that name over and over and over and
over again, like as some sort of shibboleth. It's like
a prayer on what we want to be.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
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(21:32):
done here, I think is so important. Where you take
a symbol of a larger moment in history and sort
of and by unpacking that symbol you learn a bigger story.
The best history books are what I are, the undiscovered
history that gets resurfaced. And I assume this is this

(21:53):
is you know, is this.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
A one off for you?

Speaker 1 (21:56):
Or do you want to pursue other sort of symbolic
ways that history got buried that you could uniquely resurface.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
You know, I have a couple of things kicking around,
you know I and like, I guess I'll beit a
test this with you right now. I am very interested
in a book that I haven't figured out the structure
or even the characters of it that goes from the
last US soldier off who's out of Saigon in seventy

(22:26):
three and when those before, like you know, before Saigon fell,
but from seventy three to NAFTA, because it feels like
so many of the seeds of our current predicament were
sown in that period of time. And like, you know,
the last US soldier to get on the last transport
out of Vietnam was killed in the Pentagon on nine

(22:47):
to eleven. He was there as a civilian contractor. And
like in like the way those things, you know, the
way those things just start turning in on each other,
you realize, oh, this happened yesterday. I was just in
in Vietnam for vacation, and I bribed a security guard
to let me on the roof of the old CIA

(23:07):
headquarters where that famous photograph is the helicopter where the helicopter. Yeah, people, Yeah,
And dude, there's all all of the mercury lights lands
government made Chicago, Illinois, Like all of that stuff is
still there. It's like we left yesterday. It's like in

(23:27):
like so like I'm into the history that is hiding
in plain sight. And you know, and you know, in
the history of Mississippi. You know, what's the great Malcolm X.
Everywhere south of Canada's Mississippi. You know, I think there's
a way in which you have to understand Mississippi, to
understand America. And like, the thing that haunted me in

(23:49):
the process of reporting this book is that people don't
realize the Mississippi Delta, like Paul Simon had it wrong.
It is not the highway through the cradle of the
Civil War. Most of the Mississippi Delta was uninhabited hardwoods
swamps until around nineteen hundred. Like the land clearing started
like mid eighteen nine.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
We didn't have the technology, right, no, and so if
you couldn't get life insurance if you lived to the
Mississippi Delta until nineteen hundred.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
So I have this map, I mean, so this is
like twenty years after Frederick Turner's essay, is twenty years
after we caught Geronimo, twenty years after the ok Corral.
And like I have this map that shows the railroads
and they haven't joined yet, and this is well after
like the Golden Spike out west, and they're laying these
railroads in Mississippi Delta. And you realize that the piece

(24:31):
of land that is that it is in the middle
of the gaps in the not connected railways is Township
twenty two north, Range four West, which is the exact
piece of land where Emmitt Till was killed. And so
if manifest Destiny is like the you know, I love
Greg Grandon's book The End of the Myth because he
really deals with this. But like, if the well spring

(24:52):
of American identity flows from this idea of manifest destiny,
and if the place where we actually settle the continent
wasn't somewhere out west with cowboys, but was actually underneath
the bar the ground where emm Att Till was killed,
I think that suggests something fundamentally different about everything we
know about American history. And so, like, you know, one

(25:14):
of one of the reasons the book is so in
noted is well one, I mean, in this day and age,
I think you have to show your work. Oh two,
but two, They're like there are ten more immittental books
to be written, and like you just want to make
it easy for the next person to strip it for parts.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
Well, that's I mean, that's that's what a good history
book is supposed to do, because you know most and
it's interesting. You know you can't help, but I always,
you know, I've learned this. I'm obsessed with the the
era between Grant and McKinley, because you know, I'm one
of these people who the more I've learned about Garfield,

(25:54):
the more I've decided, Boy, if Garfield had lived, maybe
we passed a civil rights bill literally eighty years sooner
than we did that, he might have been that guy.
And it's always easy to mythologize dead presidents, right we
did we do with Kennedy?

Speaker 2 (26:10):
You know?

Speaker 1 (26:10):
I don't. And the more I learned, the more you're like, Eh,
Kennedy probably takes as the Vietnam Let's not pretend he
wouldn't have. But I've read so much on the eighteen
seventy six election, which was sort of planted the seeds
of Jim Crow and got rid of reconstruction, all of
those things. And what you noticed so much is how

(26:30):
much the whatever the author's politics is in the current era,
ends up helping to be their own conclusions about what
they discovered and reported on eighteen you know, And I
don't know if you you know, I don't think you
can separate that right from the writer from the from
you know. I mean, you know, how did you view

(26:54):
your job in writing this history book? Were you trying
to surface it by the way you understand today's politics?
Or by how what was understood back then, right.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
I mean I think, well, look, I think certainly, you
know it is we get into the trap of judging
people from the comfort and safety of wherever we are now.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
I mean take Woodrow Wilson's a great example. We've all
decided he's a racist now and should be almost erased
from presidential history.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Which is I mean, you know, he was a product
of his era. And the other thing. So I've been
I've been working on a book right now that is uh,
it's about a French spy and like VC government minister,
and so one of the things that's so interesting is
to go look at you know, you go read Robert

(27:45):
Paxson's history of VC France and you start to realize like, oh,
this was not this was a you know, this was
a French project where like, you know, the French far
right was going to use the Nazis to settle all
of their old or.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
The Nazis didn't they there were people ready to embrace
Nazis had already lived in Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
The French were writing their anti Jewish laws before the
Nazis told them to. But one of the things that's
interesting is you watch all these people trying to fence
sit because they don't know whether the Germans or the
English are going to win. And so you know, have
you have General Vegan telling Churchill that your next will
be rung in three weeks. So what you have are

(28:26):
people who have who's who never got out from under
their sort of collaborationist decisions, and a lot of them
are just trying to sit the fence as long as
they can. And like the ones who sort of didn't
get wrapped up and brought down in all of the
purges in forty five and forty six were the ones
who understood enough about sort of military operations that when

(28:47):
Germany invaded Russia that it was over and that everything
else was in game, and so they could afford to
support the Allies. Robert Paxton, who wrote the the Great
Books about VC France, told me that he found the
widow of Marshall Paton's chief of staff and she gave

(29:10):
him his diary. And what he realized is there were
two diaries. There was one that was written that was
I'm all about Germany and Italy and the New Europe
and the Fascist experiment, and the other one was all
about Churchill and the Allies and like literally in real
time they were trying to go both ways. And so
I think one of the things we do from the

(29:31):
safety of the future is we don't understand that maybe
the only point, the only thing to do in a
world war is to try to survive it, and what
that looks like afterwards is often very very ugly, and
the price that people pay for their survival is having
to walk around with the things they did to survive.

(29:51):
And so, like, I mean, that's a long answer to
your question about eighteen seventy six. But I also think that,
like people are self interested, and people are in the
moment trying to read the tea leaves and figure out
what to do.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
How'd you end up being a sports writer? I wanted
to be easily been doing this.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
I wanted to write about music, and I was randomly
assigned to sports at the college newspaper. Like you know,
I was a big deadhead. All I really wanted to
do is like, where were you at school? Uh, University
of Missouri, Tigers, there you go, and uh, and so
like this has all been a very odd accident, uh

(30:30):
you know, and so uh but yeah, I mean, like
the thing that's cool about sports is that you have
a group of people who are have nothing in comic
except they all want some sort of genetic lottery. And like,
I'm very into tribal identity, and you know, I love
the line from the Episcopal liturgy we do this and
remembrance of you, and like so much of the ways

(30:50):
in which really complex ideas about home and family are
coded and handed down or through sports, and so like,
I love the way that's sports is a carrying case
for people's mythologies and their family stories. And you know,
so I don't know, like I've never I've always thought
that if I got bored, that I would quit, and
I just have never gotten bored.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
So I had a conversation with Jay Dande recently, Matak
we were talking about, you know, I had a you know,
why is it that sports in the forties and fifties
was leaning in to essentially, you know, the New America

(31:33):
was leaning in on civil rights, even if the sports
owners themselves weren't always right. You know, look that some
of them were just doing it because they wanted to win.
But in some ways sports was ahead of you know,
we desegregated sports before we desegregated schools, and you know,
so I've always held sports up as sort of, hey,
this is the cultural corner of America that can actually

(31:57):
bring us together and maybe it can help us solve
a problem for you know, you know, instead of the politicians.
And then he brought up something he goes, but you know,
we're not seeing that with today's athletes, that today's athletes
have no interest in using a sports platform to fight
for a civil right. And he pointed out the example

(32:17):
of the Latino ball baseball players have been pretty silent
about what's been going on with ice in America. Do
you see that change in the in the sports figure
of today versus the sports figure that you and I
grew up with.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
I think a couple of things. I mean, I think,
you know, they're the exceptions that proved the root. Like
you know, like Lebron James has put his literal money
where his mouth is over and over and over again
and sort of great personal cost to his ubiquity. I Mean,
one of the things that I was just talking to
Phil about was could Michael Jordan. Would Michael Jordan have

(32:52):
been as universally beloved now as he was in the
nineteen nineties, which was a very specific time in America.
It was you know, and you know, I think the
answer is no, Like I think that he wouldn't be
allowed to fece, sit and be and be.

Speaker 1 (33:09):
The North Carolina Senate race is one of my favorite examples, right,
the nineteen ninety race. This was Helm's gant. This was
a big deal of African American mayor of Charlotte, Jesse
Helms the and you know, the myth and I know
that we've never found the actual quote, right, but the
myth was he set that race out because Republicans by
sneakers too.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
And you know, one of the things that's so interesting
about that is that you know, like the like you know,
I think that like my favorite living American writer is
this guy named Kisa Layman who's from Mississippi, who I
just love. And so one of the things KSA and
I talked about in the context of Jordan is he
was like, you have to understand the rural urban interplay,

(33:51):
especially as it relates to Michael Jordan, because if you're
from this people say he's from Wilmington, which is true,
but really he's from link the country right outside of Wilmington,
and you know, he knew his great grandfather, who was
the son of a slaved man, and you know, in
his like, he grew up in a very rural life.

(34:11):
And so the thing he say says about Michael Jordan
is that his his chase of public excellence and universal
acceptance is political in its own way. And so, like,
I mean, I think one of the things is, you know,
there's a it always used to be better when there's

(34:34):
but to your point, there's a certain you know, the
quarterly earnings report, obsession with accounting, you know, the you know,
like that has invaded sports. Like the entire goat argument
is utterly absurd, and that is a product of a
very specific America that didn't used to exist. And so
if you know, if you look at sort of nineteen

(34:56):
forty five to say nineteen sixty, if you from the
end of the war until Kennedy beating Eisenhower or Kennedy winning.
I don't know if he beat Eisenhower actually I should
know that, but beat Nixon, that's right, So until the
end of Eisenhower's term, Like, you know, the the the
ideal of an American man wasn't Michael Jordan, who was

(35:16):
a zero sum cutthroat who prioritizes winning against everything and
is lauded for it. I mean, the American heroes were
Eisenhower and Jackie Robinson, and I mean Joe Demagia.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
Joe Demaggio, you got to marry Marilyn Monroe, and yeah,
I mean, that'd be a TV pitch man. He was
the first in some way meter coffee, right, he was
the first. He might be the first modern sports celebrity.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
But all of those guys are rooted in a kind
of morality too, like you know, like one of the
sort of you know, the postmodern death of the platonic
ideal of a person you know, is certainly at play
with athletes, where it's just, you know, it's like the
Bill Belichick fundamentally misunderstood everything, you know. I mean it's

(36:04):
the idea that like, uh, like we still deal in myths,
you know, I mean we you know, like, you know,
Bill Belichick, who accidentally drafted Tom Brady, is one of
the greatest coaches ever with Tom Brady and is below
average without him, and like so like we are so
quick to point to the coach as the genius, and

(36:25):
like that's left over muscle memory from that thing. You're
talking about about. You know, all the sports writers come
home from all the war correspondents come home from World
War Two writing about Patent and Nimitz and Omar Bradley
and Eisenhower, and they all go work for the sports departments.
And now they're writing about the coaches using the sort
of hand me down vocabulary. Interesting and like and like,

(36:45):
so a lot of that stuff still exists. Uh, you know,
I think there are a lot of athletes who are
you know, uh, you know, Dale Murphy is eligible for
the Hall of Fame again and like should should be
in because like that's a guy who you know, lives
his American values. You know, Jackie Robinson is a huge

(37:05):
like like archetype of what an American should be. And
so like, you know, I think it goes in waves.
I certainly think we are in a you know, a
moment of reductiveness.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
No, I think that's true. I look at your career
and I think of Richard ben Kramer.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Do you take that as a compliment, Yes, I mean
what it takes is like to what it takes is unbelievable.
And then you know his Ted Williams story, that.

Speaker 1 (37:30):
Ted Willives' profiles, you know, sorry to not say this
about one are your profiles. It's the greatest sports profile
I've ever ready.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
And it's not close. I mean, like you know what
I mean, like I'm trying to think of what might
be the second best, and I mean, you know, maybe
Gayta least on Joe Demaggio. But like, I mean, there's
a you know, it's probably like Frank the Ford on
Bobby Knight.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
And Albert stam on October sixty four. Whether you believe
that's a book or really a big lung magazine piece.
I could argue it's all like Albert Dammon was a magazine,
Like what's the difference.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
You know, I mean like like uh no, I mean
like that that I mean that Richard ben Crimer story
is crazy. You know, there's like this a legend. Somebody
should fact check this for me. If there's a legend
that Esquire tried to cut it and that he went
into the office himself like during clothes and restored all
the cuts. And I want to believe that's true so
badly because it is. It's like the biggest like fuck you,

(38:26):
Like I just love like, you know, no, no, Richard
ben Krimer, You're gonna run his whole story. H did
you know him? Did you know Richard?

Speaker 1 (38:35):
I never got to meet him. He was he was
not far. He was in Annapolis. I knew he lived
in Annapolis. I mean, look, that book was my bible.
That's what I I you know, and I I'll be honest,
I actually think it it taught us a bad lesson
in political journalism.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
Let's do this what what lesson did it teach? Well?

Speaker 1 (38:55):
That that that there is this sort of different I
mean it made us. What it did is that it
turned us all into pop psychologists as political writers. Yet
I found my what's that right?

Speaker 2 (39:08):
No?

Speaker 1 (39:09):
Because I love I'm obsessed with trying to figure out
why do these people think they can be leader of
the free world. They look in the mirror and they
think I should make the decisions for three hundred and
fifty million Americans. I think that is a sickness as
a part of me that thinks that that's a sickness.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
It's a total sickness. I mean, the act of warning
the job should disqualify you from it.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
Yes, that's sort of that's a that's a great you said,
this is why you're such a great writer. It's a
great way of putting it, and yet you know it
is in some ways. He said, you know, look, there's
a there is a DNA that's different with a presidential candidate.
And here's the failed, failed versions of it. And you
will see the successful versions of it over here, or

(39:53):
you'll you'll figure out why it is. And I think
it I think it cheap in political reporting. It's not
Richard's fault. He did a tremendous service. It's the problem
isn't copycatters, right, It's.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
Like the problem. The problem isn't Richard van Kramer. It's
all the people who tried to do it. The problem
isn't Gary Smith. It's all the people who wanted to
write in second person to imitate him. The problem isn't
Bill Simmons, who does this as an incredibly high level.
It's all the people who just think they can riff
and like, no, you're exactly right, like the cheap imitations
of a high wire act, always for sort of like

(40:31):
you know, culture bending in that way I mean that
you know, well, like what, let me ask you this, like,
so is that book more for you than like the
sort of Curtis Wilkie era Boys on the bus.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
Oh it's not even close. Yeah, because you know, and
that's and that's sad. And I've now literally gone the
other way, meaning like I I call myself now a
political anthropologist. I'm more interested in the political tribes of
America than the leaders. I don't care about the chiefs.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
Well, I'm in Like, you know, one of the interesting
things is like, and we could do an entire podcast
about this, but like the idea of the American tribe
has been under relentless assault by the left and the
right for the last thirty years. And if you don't
if you take away people's tribes, they're gonna find a
new one and you're probably not gonna like it. And like,
you know, and so like it is interesting the degree

(41:19):
to which we are still so in our sort of
Foxhole's pointing fingers that people don't realize that, like we're
all to a certain degree guilty. Boy, it's should be
nice to have the founding fathers right now, you know
what I mean. Yeah, Like, there's been sort of such
a war on the idea of there being an American
tribe that I'm not sure there is one anymore. And

(41:40):
I'm not entirely sure anybody has an idea of how
to build one.

Speaker 1 (41:43):
There never were. There's been multiple tribes. We've been a
coalition of it's what makes us. Look I sort of yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's no other country like us that's tried to do
this well. And I don't know if we're a success
or a failure yet.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
Well, and like you know, you know, look, I grew
up the you know, my father was a lifelong liberal
Democrat who cried every time they played the national anthem
at a sporting event, and you know, and so I
very much sort of believe in there is something exceptional
about even the attempt of the American experiment. And so

(42:17):
it feels like it was out of vogue to sort
of traffic and American exceptionalism. And I think that's clearly
a mistake, because like, we are trying to do something
that is really really hard, and the reason that we
keep taking one step forward and two steps back is
that it's really hard to take a group of people
and turn them into a new trial.

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human beings are tribal, very much, right, and so and

(44:20):
so we're trying to you know, it is no, it's
it gets at I think that why we've are political journalism.
You know, you default to looking for the great, the
great hope.

Speaker 2 (44:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
It used to be the great white hope, but now
it's just simply the great hope and everybody.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
And this is in a.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Weird way what what Too many young reporters took away
from Richard's book, right, which was well, let's go find
you know, and and frankly, it turns out Milton Friedman
had was more accurate about things when he says you
can elect bad people or you know, it's not whether
you elect good people or bad people, it's whether you
have good incentives or bad incentives.

Speaker 2 (44:59):
And ultimate Lee, like, what makes us.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
Different is if we create a structure that allows us
to have a certain type of politician, and instead we
spent too much time as political reporters for a generation
coming at it from that somehow the great leaders created
the politics when actually no, it's a it's an entire
structure that did it well.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
And you know, there was the sort of real trauma
of World War two meant that you know, and a
lot of people like on a lot of people on
both sides like attacked this, which I understand why, but
we I think we took it for granted that one
of the Trump trauma responses, it's politically, it seems of
World War two was of the idea of we could
never you know, eighty five million people died, Like we

(45:42):
can't do that again, Yeah, let's not do it. Yeah,
it was let's prune every extreme, so we're going to
govern from here to here, and like that's going to
leave a lot of people behind. But that seemed to
be a very intentional choice of we cannot let we
cannot do that again.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
Yeah, so let's it worked until the Berlin Wall fell,
That's right. I mean I look at this and I'm
I'm obsessed with this that it turns out the era
you and I grew up in might be the outlier
era of American history.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
Well it you know, it certainly feels like a pause.
That the collective action required to survive the Great Depression,
followed by the collective action required to win World War
Two and the sort of countrywide pr campaign that had
to be waged about the moral reasons for the war

(46:34):
to convince people to send their boys to go die
in places they'd never been and couldn't pronounce like that
created a pause in the history of America. People forget,
Like like the Harriman family who found in Sun Valley.
They were also the primary funders of the was it
the Coal Springs Harbor Eugenesis eugenics research facility in Long Island,

(46:56):
And like you know, Nazi Germany sent lawyers to the
University of Arkansas to study Jim Crow Laws to learn
how to write the Nuremberg Laws. The head of the
Cole Springs Harbor facility got an honorary doctor from University
of Nuremberg in nineteen thirty six. Like before Roosevelt and
the government could attack fascism in Europe, they had to

(47:18):
defeat it in America and it wasn't a slam dunk
which way we were going to go. So like to
your point, like I do feel like we have a
huge pause in what was happening. So like, in some ways,
what's happening now is it new? We've just gone back
to action previously in progress.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
We're in the nineteenth century again with modern tools. Yeah,
and like that's terrifying, because like absolutely terrifying. Yes, you know,
and you know, and.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Like you know, like Obama made that funny joke when
the Jonas brothers were at the White House because you know,
his daughters had crushes on him, and he was like,
you know, I got two words boys, predator, drones, and
like it was funny, but it's also you know, not funny.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
Oh you want to talk about I had Dexter Filkinson
recently and.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
The two The Forever War is my favorite war book,
not named the things they carried.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
He he went into Ukraine recently, and warfare is changing
before our eyes and I don't think people understand it.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
The drones. So yeah, I was in Ukraine twice in
the first year of the war, and it's like the drones.
Man it's it's not B fifty two's you can't see
and it's like, you know, if you're seeing a video
of the drone finding Drake on this outdoor patio and
playing the Kendrick Lamar song, and I'm like, I'm like, dude,
nobody's safe. Like you know, these things are.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
Terrifying and this is coming, and this is this is
an age that I don't think we're fully well.

Speaker 2 (48:46):
It'll be war without myth and war without heroism and
war without sacrifice and like in some way and.

Speaker 1 (48:53):
Scare mean if you don't have the human element, what
you know does if war is easier to wage without
risking lives, are we going to pre perpetually at war?

Speaker 2 (49:04):
Yeah, and that's terrifying and you know, and like but
like you see, I love the political anthropologist is a
really interesting way to describe it, because I don't. I
don't think anybody has any idea what we're going to
look like in ten years, during fifteen years or in
twenty And I feel like anybody who says they do,
if you really knew you would be running a campaign

(49:24):
like you, if you really knew you'd be Josh Lyman.

Speaker 1 (49:26):
You know, I know what I want to see happened.
I'd love to see a lot of things happen. I
just don't know whether we're capable of it.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
I hope so, because I genuinely, like, I genuinely believe
that that what most people want is to raise their
kids and to save some money for retirement, and to
be to be around their parents and to be around
their friends, and to like, you know, have a normal Thanksgiving,
And like, I like, there has to be at some

(49:56):
point everybody's got to put their guns down, r like,
And so I don't know what the moment will be,
but I do. You talked about your hope earlier that
like if all these people who remember this are gone,
I mean, like, my thing that I really hope for
that might be totally naive is that America longs for
a kind of radical cynerism. And I like, a, like,

(50:17):
we got to stop screaming at each other and realize
that the problem isn't somebody who disagrees with you. The
problem is it's the algorithm. The problem is the entire
nature of the structure of the debate. And if like
the story I like to tell is my wife's grandfather
was a German prisoner of War and stalligloof III, which
is the prisoner of war camp from the Great Escape.

(50:38):
And so you know, they have these reunions and I
went to them, and then you know, it'd be all
these old men who show up at a Marriott and
Cincinnati or somewhere and they'd sit around and tell stories.
But the craziest thing happened the very end of their lives.
They started inviting their German guards who would show up
with their families and their children and their grandchildren. And
they would be all these old men who didn't see

(51:01):
each other as enemies. They saw themselves as allies, and
the enemy was war itself. And like you do get
the sense that when you when people with wisdom are
thinking about these conflicts, that like people are desperate for
your for your enemy to not be your fellow citizen,
but for your.

Speaker 1 (51:19):
Well, well we're sort of seeing that now at the
Vietnam generation, right, you're seeing more soldiers wanting to meet,
wanted to You see those types of reunions with Vietnam
as well, where you'll have.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
And onercent and like there are a lot of soldiers
who go back. You know, I this terrifying thing a
friend of mine, Ken Moorefield, who was literally on the
last helicopter out of sawg Got in nineteen seventy five.
He physically put the ambassador on the next to last helicopter,
and he was on the last one. And he was
a tet offensive as like a like I think a

(51:52):
company I think he was a captain, will make him
a company commander. And he went back to that battlefield
with the opposing commander in the nineties when he when
he worked for the Clinton administration and went back to
Vietnam and the State Department, and that guy walked him
around the battlefield and he described he realized how little
they knew about where the enemy was and what they
were trying to do, and he was just like, man,

(52:12):
it's a miracle any of us lift. Because he was like,
he was showing me where they were and that is
not where we had been told they were. And he
was just like and it was terrifying to sort of
to go back as an old man and see it
and be right, I mean it. You know. The hope
is that people realize that the algorithm is the enemy,
and it's not somebody who discounts me. It is it

(52:34):
is what I ran about the most.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
I mean, the fact is the founders created a constitution
that was all about a compromise that the whole point
was to constantly realize, if you're going to put a
bunch of tribes that don't normally govern together to govern together,
you're gonna nobody gets to nobody gets their way. Yeah, no,
and and and like so, like you know, that's the

(52:57):
radical quote unquote centrism. Like I got called a radical
centrist once and I thought, well, that's a huge trament.
I'm just an incrementalist. It said, I don't believe you
can move three hundred and fifty million people by leaping
a foot ahead. You've got to go a centimeter at
the time.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
And you know, it's like I do obviously acknowledge the
fact that that you know, it is cruel to ask
people who've waited for so long to keep waiting. You know.
It's the idea of the dream deferred is.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
Like, well, like civil unions versus same sex marriage, but
guess what, you weren't going to get same sex marriage
without first getting civil unions.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
And you know it also like you know, I remember
Obama couldn't admit he was in favor of getting like,
that's not that long ago, and so like you just.

Speaker 1 (53:40):
This century, you know, this was this was the twenty
first century.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
I know the uh so, if Trump runs again, can
Obama run again? Well?

Speaker 1 (53:48):
See that to me is the great way to stop
him from running. I've always I've always thought that the
liberals out of wink and just say, okay, you do
know that if you get a third, if you get
to run again, they Obama gets the run again.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
How's that?

Speaker 1 (54:02):
And one could argue it's sort of like Obama I
love a sports argument. Right, Let's see, you know, let's
see the Lebron Miami Heat. Play the Michael Jordan, you know,
ninety two team. Let's see the Lakers. If Magic doesn't
get HIV, play Jordan and see who gets you know
my favorite. You know, the point is maybe Obama v.

(54:24):
Trump is the cultural showdown this country needs.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
I mean, do you think that all of this started
when Obama said at the White House Correspondence Center said
uh humiliated him. Yeah, yeah, I said, you know, Donald
Trump says, I'll go down as the works president history.
At least I'll go down as president huh did in
his anger translator didn't he like name drop you I think,

(54:48):
oh I've yeah, I've got I got all. That's just
a no.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
I've gotten a few of those. But you know, with Trump,
I'm convinced that in the reason I'm convinced, I'm convinced
he never thought he was going to be president and
he never really wanted the job. What he wanted was
the recognition, and he wanted to get to where he got,
which was that nomination proved that he could do it.
Because the fact that he didn't have a victory speech written,

(55:14):
the fact that they were shocked they actually won, is
to me the tell of oh God, I've got And favorite,
my favorite anecdote that never has gotten a lot of
attention is when Trump met with Obama after he's president
elect and Obama's hosting him, and Trump says he learns
in that moment that the White House staff doesn't come

(55:35):
with the White House, Like he knew that there was
a residential staff, but he thought that the people that
worked in the West wing, you know, that this was
like a corporate takeover, and the employees of Barack Obama
would then become on January twenty at the employees of him,
and then somebody told him, no, you've got to hire
all that anyway. Oh my god, Like that's when it

(55:56):
would hit him that suddenly he didn't have a network
of people. He's never had a network of people. He
only surrounds himself with four to six people that will
suck up to him until that relationship deteriorates and he
then moves on. He never has the same eight people
for an eight year span, but he is the same.
But he always has a circle around him. And that's

(56:17):
why I'm convinced he never actually wanted He wanted the
idea of the presidency, he wanted a profit off of it,
all of those things. He didn't want to actually have
to do the job.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
Well you know, I mean the job is it's the
impossible job. Like you know, it was either Obama or Clinton.
Book somebody said, like, by the time the problem gets
to the president, there are no good options. They're all bad.
Like everything. If it's that complex that it gets to
your desk, everything is a bad option. Uh. I would
like it would be terrifying to wake up and be president.

Speaker 1 (56:49):
No, and you would and the idea that one person,
you know, frankly, it probably should be a committee of
people are doing these things.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
But or just if we could just put the people
in charge of Chick fil A in charge of everything,
or waffle House, get Joe Rogers to just run the
country like like like you know, like the like every
time I go into waffle House, I'm like, this is
the greatest, Like, can they just be in charge of everything?

Speaker 1 (57:16):
Their logistics are fantastic, It's unbelievable. I mean, it's all
very good. Hey, natural disasters come. Waffle House is a
comm shop is pretty good.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
Well that and the thing about Chick fil A that
I would love to know is that they don't the
the pickles are never slimy, and.

Speaker 1 (57:34):
So I was curious, how do they do that?

Speaker 2 (57:36):
Yeah, I would just like to know, like what is
that like and why? Like what's the difference between McDonald's
pickles and Chick fil a pickles? Because there's a there's
some sort of something in the process where someone has
decided that we care about pickles, And I just would
like to know how you go from being a guy
in a room who cares about pickles to actually manifesting

(57:57):
that at scale.

Speaker 1 (57:59):
Well, well, you gotta get Todd, that's a fair point,
all right, let me get you out of here on this.
I got to ask you one sport, who's somebody you
haven't profiled right now in sports that you'd like to
but you can't break through. And if they won't give you,
I assume you don't get a certain amount of access,
you won't write about well.

Speaker 2 (58:19):
I mean, sometimes you can, but sometimes it's just the
doughnut hole. Like if you don't have access to the
sort of someone's interior monologue, it feels still born. I mean,
you know, like Sandy Kofax, who promised.

Speaker 1 (58:36):
Please, what's Jane, what's your last Jame?

Speaker 2 (58:39):
Jane Levy? Jane Leavy's talking.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
That book is amazing because of how hard it was
to break. I mean, you're right, Sandy Kofax is still
the most anonymous famous person alive in baseball right now.

Speaker 2 (58:50):
So I text with him a little and because I
tried to get him to for a story when he
was turning ninety, and he has promised me, Sandy, if
you're listening, I'm going to hold you to your word.
He has promised me that if he lives to one hundred,
he will let me come spend a bunch of time
with him.

Speaker 1 (59:05):
So I mean he's he's one of those. I had
an uncle who we all knew there was some hidden story.
We just didn't know what the story was, and we
didn't get it until he died and it turned out
he was secretly married to a black woman and he
didn't think his family could handle it. And it was
this is nineteen eighty five. It's it's sort of and
there were always speculation in my family. Oh, maybe he's

(59:26):
closet a gay, maybe he's this, maybe he's that. There
was just like he's just hiding something he thinks the
family doesn't want to know or whatever. And it's there's
it's always been interesting to me. You know, we're going
to learn something about why he always kept to himself
the most right. But he is probably I mean, he's
so important to Jewish Americans.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
Oh, it's incredible.

Speaker 1 (59:50):
And you know, I it looked, you know, we joke
at as Jew's joke. Right, He's he's on the cover
of the pamphlet of Greatest Jewish.

Speaker 2 (59:59):
It's the thing from Lebowski. It's like two thousand years
from Moses to Sandy Kofax. You've got damn right, I'm
living in the past, Like do you know what I mean?
Like you know, and then you know, I'm I'm really
interested in Lebron because like Lebron's school an Acrid is
the real thing, and Lebron uh has over and over

(01:00:19):
and over had great cost to his own sort of
piggy bank of adulation. Yeah, like spoken up for the
things that matter to him and like just you know,
a lot of respect for Lebron.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
Oh, I I find I think Lebron is so under
appreciated because look what we've done to him. Oh and
he I mean what Sports Illustrated putting him on the
cover at fourteen or fifteen, and he actually lived up
to the expectations. Who does that? And dinner Lebron James
And that's it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
And also it's the list somebody with no Like he's
an incredible dad and like he's a really like I
don't know, like in some ways, like that's all you
could really want, Like you're if you had a son,
you would be like, I hope he turns out.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
We always want our sports figures. We always say, are
they good family people? Lebron's And you know, you never
have with Lebron some story about him gallivanting out late
at night.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
You know, I've never heard any but's you know, it's
a funny than Michael. Michael Jordan one time held up
his cell phone and said, I'm glad we didn't have
these in nineteen ninety three. He's like, I might have
had any one of them Tiger Wood situations. The uh.
But like, you know, like I would love to profile Lebron,

(01:01:35):
you know, because I'm a baseball like I'm a little
I'm into sort of Mike Trout, but I can't. I
can't tell if that's just because he doesn't talk like
you know, just because just because they're private doesn't mean
they're interesting. That's fair.

Speaker 1 (01:01:51):
Well, you finally got each yi road to talk. What
took him so long to share?

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
Well, he wouldn't talk to me. I just followed him
around Japan.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
He didn't.

Speaker 3 (01:02:01):
I thought he did eventually talk. No, I just knew
where he would be at all times, because you know,
interesting the uh. But it was such a fascinating look.
I certainly felt like you always something about him that
I didn't know.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
I talked to you know, it'd be easier just to
talk to him, but said, you have to go talk
to like eight hundred other people.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
Well, show Hayes another one none of it. Nobody knows
anything about him.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
No, and like Mookie Betts was just on All the
Smoke talking about him and it was just basically saying
the same thing, like game ends and he leaves. I'm
also like, I think the greatest piece of American media
is All the Smoke. I love that podcast. I don't
know if you listened to that, but it's really well
not enough, dude. They get people to say unbelievable stuff

(01:02:48):
like they are like really really good interviewers because people
say crazy shit to them.

Speaker 1 (01:02:54):
Well, it's my reason why I love the podcast format.
I do think the longer you go in an interview
that you know you can only stay on message for
ten or fifty Look, I've learned this. This is this
was the flaw of the Sunday Show. The Sunday Shows
worked when they were thirty to forty five minute interviews.
When they started to get truncated, and unfortunately I was

(01:03:15):
I was in the era where I was getting this pressure, no, no, no, no,
you need more people on and all this, and you know,
you realize everybody figured everybody. It's like analytics and baseball
at the peak. Horrible part of baseball everybody's figured out
how to hack the Sunday Show interview as long as
it's less than ten minutes.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
Now after ten minutes.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
It's like there's there's a character of Will Ferrell, you know,
if you ask them that question in some movie. I
think it's Austin Powers, where if you ask them a
question three times, the third time you ask me, he
actually has to answer the truth. I think is like
the character, it's like it's like a shtick thing, but
I actually believe that that once you there's a like
the human brain can sort of stick to a script

(01:03:57):
only for so long. And why the podcast format has
turned into a better way to talk to people because
it's essentially it's taken the magazine piece and turned it
into an oral history.

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
Well you know, And and like I'm sitting at a
picnic table in Los Angeles on my laptop and this
is the exact window that all my work zooms look like.
And like, frankly, you just forget that anyone's ever going
to hear any of this, and like that's like a
really danger Like I joked that the most dangerous thing

(01:04:31):
in the world is to think out loud in public,
and like this, like this format gets you doing that
in a way, and it's like like sometimes like you
finish and you're like, I really hope nobody listens to that,
because like I'm really not sure what I've done this.

Speaker 1 (01:04:45):
I've said the road. I'll say things about my childhood
and I'm like, oh, no, I hope my my mother's
still alive. And I'm like, oh she listens. Oh she's
gonna she's going to probe me on that one.

Speaker 2 (01:04:57):
What did I just do? My mom was in still
I think every pot guess I do? Hi mom? Yeah?
And so like I always, I always catch myself being like,
you know, don't don't embarrass the family, embarrass leave the
locker room, talk in the locker room, like like you know,
like just keep it together, be classic.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
Well, right, this was great. I've kept you for an hour.
I don't want to do it any longer because I
feel like I've overstayed my welcome.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
Uh, this was really fun, man, I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
Well, I appreciate it, and like I said, love the book,
and I have I know where my audience thinks, and
I know that if they haven't gotten this book, they
will now.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
Thanks so much, Chuck,

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Interview Only w/ Wright Thompson - The Barn, The South, And The Stories America Still Won’t Tell

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Interview Only w/ Wright Thompson - The Barn, The South, And The Stories America Still Won’t Tell