Bomani Jones

TV boy, It's interesting though. It's a drug, Like you watch how people respond to that drug, and it can it can get people, like I've realized pretty quickly off the TV, like, hey, you kind of gotta dabble in this. You gotta you know, you need to be like you can't. You can't just slam this. You'll be messed up for the rest of your life. A. My name is Boboni Jones, and I host The Right Time with Boboni Jones, A Way Sports and Entertainment and listen to Brian forget how to say my name?

this recording, I tested positive for COVID. Yes, I suspected that I might have it, and indeed I did, so, you know, COVID brain And the whole sentence came out wrong, and I said Bommi, and he came right for me. I deserve it, you know what, O'mani. In exchange, I'm going to give you a privilege that I've never ever extended to anyone else. You can call me Ryan or Kevin, your choice. I'm feeling fine now, by the way, just a little clouded brain, but I so enjoyed this conversation.

Beaumani is one of the smartest, most interesting voices out there today in sports journalism or really anywhere. He's a fascinating guy when discussing really any topic. In fact, the secret to his success is he can connect with people about a lot of different things. He can make a thoughtful and deep argument on any topic he just happens

to get paid to do it about sports. He is or has been, a music and culture writer, a radio host, a television personality, a podcaster, and an economist, though not necessarily in that order. Most recently, you can find him three days a week giving nuanced insight and context to the sports world and many other topics on his new the rebooted podcast The Right Side. He also hosts The Evening Jones, which has been going strong since the year

two thousand and eleven. It's incredible. If that podcast were a person, it would be in middle school by now, and that that's pretty crazy. He is so interesting. His story is interesting, his family is interesting. Talking to him was so much fun. So here is a man that could never have COVID brain even if he tried.

But we're very way more I'd say, I guess regular than that. So intellectually yes, but always without pretense. Which is probably the best thing I got out of growing up with those parents was that you can operate on an intellectual level, but you can also speak English to people. What you're doing is sharing knowledge as opposed to showing it off. Like that's a really important distinction that I've come to find over time.

But I think another thing that's kind of like a larger and like a kind of macro sociological phenomenon, which is like an interesting window or glimpse into blackness, is every now and then you'll catch black people who can be around enough bourgeois black people that everybody's bourgeois. But the truth is they just ain't that many of black people in general, of a bourgeois black people in particular for you to really court yourself off. And that's the

world you're going to live in. And so as black person, what you're going to have to do is learn how to navigate and deal with a bunch of people in different places. And one thing I was like real fortunate with my parents, like having them as the exposure in understanding is people want to be around knowledge, right Like they want to be around the person who knows things, no matter what it is. The person who knows things is generally pretty popular, right, Like that is something that

people want. What they don't want is for you to talk to them like the stud that's the part that they don't like. And so when you figure out that rather than your place as educated person or whatever it is, is not to show people that you're educated, but your place is actually to share what it is that you know, because you recognize that a lot of what you know it's things that people themselves could easily understand but maybe have not been in a position for somebody told them

what it was, you know. So once you can become the person who can do that, then oh okay, cool. But that requires you to stay grounded in a certain way, like I think that generally Southerness we know this a little better than most people because we have to interact with more of each other than other people do. Right, And you learn you've been to learn how to talk to people about this in a way to make them feel good about it. Otherwise you gonna feel bad about it.

the place that I was in. We lived in like suburban northwest Houston, but I went to school twenty miles farther out from that, which was just a completely different life experience for those people. So I wasn't really in line with what, you know, with what they were on. So I figured out somewhat early that I could put on a mask if I wanted to, but I'd be

putting on a different one every time. Like there was like very rarely, if ever it was there a room that I got in and I was like, oh, yes, you know, this is the place that I was supposed

to be not so much now. The one thing that I do, I guess I could definitely say as related to like the mask idea that was probably true, was that in this society, like I was just reading this book not too long ago about Frank Sinatra, and it made the point that Sinatra started off as somebody who had more female fans than male fans, and then by

the end had more male fans than female fans. And the arguments that they were making is that after he had this fall in the late fifties and then got back up, that that's what got men to come around. It's like, the ability to push through the struggle is the thing that people respect. But when you grow up in a fairly comfortable upper middle class enviirement, you really don't have a lot of struggle to report, Like nobody

nobody really thinks it's really cool. Like I always say with people say you ought to write a book, like oh, yes, child of privilege did everything he was supposed to do. That's a page turner, right, anybody trying to hear that. So I do remember that, I, like I probably is some way he's made my life harder on myself than others, because I had, like the luxury of parents that if I needed a little money, I could call them and

get it or whatever. The people I grew up around, of the friends that I had, didn't have that luxury, right, And so I do remember I got to graduate school and that was struggling, and I was talking to a guy I was in school with and he did not have the luxury that I had on the reach back, and I just remember him looking at me being like, hey, cuz you better ask those people for some money. I wish I had somebody to call and ask for some money,

you know. And so I could probably definitely say if that was a mask, it was not wanting to be honest about some of the parts of my life that were easier not lying in the other direction, right, Like I wouldn't pretending like I grew up in a neighborhood that I didn't, but like nobody like going let me tell you I show had it. Easy. Yeah, people don't like that. No, no, it's not really the story.

to do it. And so I just kind of bounce around without a major, and I took an economics class in part just to get my mama off my back, because she just believes that the solution to any problem that you might have in your life is a class of two an economics, right, Like, that's just a solution. So I did the economics class and it was probably more challenging than any class I had taken to that point in undergrad and so I was like, cool, I'm major in that. And then I decided I didn't want

to major in it anymore. But I had something come up in my life where if I was going to change my major, it would take me an extra year to get out of college, which I was all the way here for. Just to be clear, I knew that the real world was not as advertised, right, right, But a couple of things happened. I was like, no, let me hurry up and get out of school. So I got the economics degree. While I'm finishing my senior year, I started freelance writing, and I realized that the media

space is probably where I wanted to go. I was just thinking in terms of writing at that point, that's probably where I wanted to go. And so I graduated from college. But the right thing wasn't really paying no money and I remember I had taken a trip to DC because I was going to have a meeting with a guy who said he was starting a magazine and he was going to feature my work all over and I was hearing what he was talking about. He wasn't talking about paying me all the money in the world,

but he was talking about paying me living money. And I remember I borrowed some money from my parents to get on the road to go up to DC to talk to the dude, and he stood me up. I didn't hear from him. And I remember I had a moment.

I was at my buddy's house, was at his mama's house, and I'm on the couch and my head's tilted back because I'm so stressed that my phone rang and I just picked it up, and it was a woman from Clairemont Graduate University telling me that they had this fellowship that was available and if I wanted to apply for it, and this is August, right, this is August of two thousand and one. And I was like, well, okay, cool,

I said I'd do it. And then in some subsequent email, I said to the woman, I'm like, hey, so this is for January, right, She's like, no, this is for the fall, like this is in.

And so I did that, and then after a year, I did pretty well and I took the gr and I did really well on that, and I was like, oh, okay, so maybe if I got the PhD and I put this along with the other stuff, like I could get into that public intellectual space that was the rage at the top. And so I did that, and then I get to Carolina for the PhD program, and I realized very quickly that I had a massive degree level of

curiosity in this stuff. I did not want to do the things that I was doing, and it's really hard, like it's a lot of work, like just elbow grease hours and everything. I don't know. I was in the wrong place and I'm doing all the writing and everything. But I got myself set up. I had gotten a column writing about music for AOL at the time that was paid me enough to like live. I bought a house at a mortgage. I was taking care of it.

I was living a life doing all that. Man, I fought out of school and a column got camp like all at the same time. And so it was funny because my parents really would like I would have liked, at the very at least one of the kids to get a PhD. And I was kind of the last hope, and all paper was probably the best hope. And then it didn't work out. But yeah, so I wound up getting each one of those degrees for entirely different reasons, but they all really proved to be very helpful in the end.

come up. I could see what was going on in the world and I could respond to that, like, you know, those are the things that I could do. Like getting the sports was completely different for me, at least in my mind, because I knew enough about sports writing to know that there was a way that you got in the door, and I did not have access to that door, you know, Like I was not a beat writer. I had not you know, worked at the student paper. I

hadn't done any of those things. Like if you were to ask me at that time, how do you get a job sports writing? I wouldn't like what I would have thought. I probably wouldn't have known. I couldn't have given you an answer to that. But I got lucky that when I was really getting into it in the

mid aughts. Shall we say it's kind of when the Internet was really booming in terms of writting content, and the way that people were writing about sports was expanding beyond just the things you need to have by getting in the arena and like, you know, being a beat writer, and I would have never known how to get that job or how to go about that, but this other stuff I knew how to do was so I kind of went in through the backdoor of doing that.

this is where it took place. Here are the stats here a few and yeah, like I'm not going to give Bill Simmons all the credit in the world, but places like grant Land that start around this time where you start reading writers who are talking, I mean to the point we were just making more pul political or historical or putting a game or a person in context to something larger than itself, which is obviously, I'm sure to you and to me as a consumer as well, so much more interesting.

going to make it happen. But I really feel like the mid auts because I think it's turning back in the other direction now. But that was probably the best era of sports writing that we've had. And the reason that I say that is it was an explosion of so many different things. So we had the train died in the wool journalists, right, who are just incredibly important to have. But also you had like it was a lot of these like the lawyers started getting into the game,

the professors started getting into it. You just had a lot of people who also people who were like well known professional writers who just decided they wanted to dabble in sports a little bit more like I worked at ESPN dot COM's page too, and like Hunter Thompson is writing columns, right, Hunter Thompson not a sports writer, but doesn't really matter, you know, like you're you know right in that page. Show him on a page with a

hundred Thompson Ralph Wiley. Bill Simmons was the one who rose, but I'm there at the same time, and he plays a big role in people like me recognizing that there might be other ways that you could go about getting in and talking about sports. And I think that people are going to look back on a lot of the stuff that was being done in that time and like maybe the ten years after that, and it brought the world into sports coverage in a way that I don't think it really existed previously.

that I want to go in. I do a lot more podcasting now, and so I'm at the point now of people knowing me and I guess of being visible for lack of a better term, that I got leeway where I can talk about these other things, like Cason point. When COVID hit in twenty twenty, sports podcasts in particular, the numbers just all knows did we ain't had no games to talk about, Like why would we do this?

The numbers for my podcast actually went through the roof because people understood that without sports, we still had other things to talk about, you know. So I figured out how to judiciously kind of bring those things into those other spaces. Did I do a few little CNN hits here and there talk about the politics and stuff if I feel like it, because sometimes I just don't like that ain't really the most fun stuff to get into. Like I went up there one night to do the

CNN stuff. It was like ten o'clock, and I think it was after somebody shot up one of them places. I can't remember which one. I feel like Tennessee, but it was one of the places that it got shot up, and I was like, man, this is saying like we just all in here. It is late at night. I'm not even getting paid, and this is say it.

And I mean that in the sense that like Jeff Zuckery's always talk about this with CNN that he kind of want to CNN to be like ESPN. I'm like, well, buddy, what you do over there is actually important. Like we come up with contrived argument stuff over here because it's kind of like a big old barber shop. I'm I supposed to do this with the actual news, you know,

and he's get all stuff. Man, everybody just kind of going home and everybody back and forth, and it's just like, hey, you know, I don't want to talk about these things anymore.

I'm a bit of a polarizer figure. But while there are those that if I'd be at one end of that pole, there's a lot of people in the middle who kind of and this is where sports in a way, I don't want to say it's like a trojan horse necessarily, but I got enough credibility of one space that I can get people to listen to me about some of the other spaces, and they can hear things that they

really might not hear otherwise. And I don't even mean that like in some sort of dogmatic way or like I'm trying to beat people over the head with it necessarily, but just to huh. I hadn't thought about it like that, right, And that's a privilege that's afforded to me, honestly, And I'm very fortunate and lucky in that regard, because you know, sometimes you got to put the medicine in the apple sauce.

I can do that with them knowing that the medicine might be there, and they're still like, oh okay, cool. Well if he says that I might want to give something, you know, maybe this applesace ain't so bad.

everybody looking at my face. Like you ever seen that movie I think it's called soap Dish, like Sally Field, Yeah, you Goldberg, right, you know about the woman and she would stage these moments in the mall where somebody would be like, oh my gosh, is this such and such the sun also sets, right, you know, and just go about it because she needed that drug and that attention and that rush. And I hate that part right like

I enjoyed. I think it's because for me, I came around a lot of this stuff in my like mid thirties. I was a foreign person. I was good with who I was, So like being on camera. There's a level of like looseness with it that I have to learn at different points, in part I admit, because I'm afraid people are gonna be like, boy, he sure loves being on camera a little bit too much, Like you know

that that's not the natural part of me. I like being on the microphone though, like I really there's something that hits me if I'm doing in a podcast or doing a radio show and I'm talking like I like that, And it's not because of the attention as much as I really just enjoyed the act of putting those ideas together and figuring out how to present it largely exceptoraneously. But like, I really I dig doing that part. TV boy.

It's interesting though. It's a drug, Like you watch how people respond to that drug and it it can it can get people, like I've realized pretty quickly off the TV, like, Hey, you kind of gotta dabble in this. You gotta you know, you need to be You can't. You can't just slam this. You'll be messed up for the rest of your life.

fair to say. I do think I think Bill is probably one as most of the guys on around the Horn work because they were all we got to remember, they're all newspaper guys, and this is before we were putting all those guys on camera. I think a lot of them had to get comfortable with the idea that they are now people on camera. Because they also had a value system that had them thinking that, like, there's room for judgment in this, right, like they had always looked down on the TV people, right.

person like when you're seeing them on TV. And that show did really adjust that, which is literally because now when I read Bill Plashke, I'm I am taking what I can see about him and his personality and the little comment that I just made that he likes being on TV, that there are certain things that now when I read his work has changed the way that I read his work because I see him.

those people as the people they were on television. And so over the course of I guess we'll call it a decade, I got to know the people on TV, Like I had to divorce myself from what I may have thought not necessarily bad, but just preconceived notions I had of these people based on television and then actually get to know them as people and be like, oh wow,

I had this completely wrong about insert person here. Did I think from watching on television the Jim callistalls the dude that goes to radiohead shows with his son never would again.

know who I am. Like English speaking men in this country are very, very very familiar with me, and so when I started doing stuff like I did the HBO show with some of the things I'm trying to get, you know, going after having done that, there's rooms where people know who I am at the very least they know my name. That isn't the case if I do this really in any other space or any other media,

right Like, I can calls, I can get meetings. I have been able to make legitimate friendships with like people I grew up idolizing because I'm the guy on TV now the guy and he you know as the guy on ESPN. And that's something that I realized very quickly. People still really care a lot about the fact that you were on television. Even in this day and time. They're like, Oh, the kids o't really care about this, They just care about streaming. Let what are these streaming people?

Wind up with a TV show and they gonna act like it's different, Like it's it's a powerful currency in this society.

It's what he things, but it's often the same thing you're a local columnist is saying, But it's my dad that's doing the thing. Where I was helpful to Dan though in that regard is Dan doesn't get that people do want to take this fort stuff seriously, and so you can dismiss that idea all that you want. You still got to give them some of the serious stuff because that is why they're here. They just don't need it to be as serious as it is in some

of the other places. But yet Dan. Working with Dan was very helpful and having a reminder that you don't have to make this scene more serious than it is. Like, if this part of it is a joke, then you can kind of ride out with the idea that this part of it is a joke.

experience of sports journalism. And I feel like you have largely avoided feeling like you need to do that to get attention. Talk to me a little bit, if you would, about your feelings about this, And of course I'm talking most famously about Undisputed with Skip Bayless and First Take with mister Smith.

hold people's attention or anything like that. Now, with the industry of television, I agree with you that what most people would term the hot take is a problem, right, And I think there are a lot of people who feel like they need to have this thing to say, and that's what's going to make people jump out and get it. Now, I don't mind your hot take. Like my good friend Nick Right, for example, what he is

brilliant at is. It's a different form of what I call the Bill burd model, with Bill Burr is so good at starting off with some crazy premise that makes you all comfortable. It's like, why not let me explain? And then you start explaining and you're like, oh, that's not nearly as crazy as I thought it was going to be. At the beginning, I thought we were all going to get fired. I thought I was going to get fired just having a ticket to this shit right right.

My buddy Nick is very similar to that, where he says crazy thing, but he always has like a real defense that comes behind it. Where I get worried about the hot take stuff for me. And this is really a conclusion I've come to more recently than anything else, is that is us making the story about ourselves, right, is us making it about our ability to win some

kind of argument and go back and forth. And what I think gets lost in the grand scheme of that is how much like the people that we cover are incredible, Like the people that we cover are better at their jobs than ninety nine point nine percent of us are at our jobs. And we don't spend nearly enough time just talking about how much we enjoy watching these people do these incredible things that we buy and large of ourselves try to like reproduce a reasonable fact simile of

like we don't do enough of that now. Like with those two shows, Skip Bayless is that person and stephen A is the person that you see there. Like neither of them are particularly contrived. I watch First Take a lot more than I watch Undisputed, and I will actually say I think that Stephen A is more thoughtful and

measured than he gets credit for. But also he is understanding of the fact that he is expected to drive, for lack of a better term, the entertainment of that show, and we'll dial it up and we'll get to these places and will seem kind of loud and everything else.

But rarely. The only times I see Steven A talk about something on TV and I feel like I don't know if he knows what he's talking about, is because that man works so many hours in a given day, in a given week that now they threw something out there because they need it for business, and he's trying to carry that sort of thing too. Skip Bayless believes that he was put on his earth to argue about sports like he believes that this is a god given path.

I have read him saying this, so he goes about this and sees it in a much, much, much different way. But there was a point I guess it was about ten years ago, like that was when Richard Sherman went on and hit them with them better at life than You, and Janel Rose hit skipped with the thing about being on junior varsity. It had gotten so ramped up and it had gotten so hyped up that it is defined that whole genre of television in a way that I

honestly think it is largely moved away from. They had people have the back and forth, but you don't have nearly as many and like the shouting matches and stuff that you would see people having on television back then, you don't have nearly as many of those. But I also think that this current time that we're in post Kaepernick, where we had all this stuff come up with Kaepernick and people, you know, the whole stick to sports thing, need stick sports and needs to stick to sports. But

I don't think people realize how far that went. Like I think it was one thing when you were just saying that to get people to not talk about the police. But now when you look at it, so much of this stuff that sports is really just just sticking pall.

That's it, And that's not like I don't think that's really that interesting either, And I think to your point, that takes away from the ability to talk about things and more nuanced way, because how much nuance can you have just talking about the sports, right?

roller coaster ride, right. And so he gets in the NFL and I look up and all these people are talking about him like he's just a game manager guy that just makes all the throws. And we're like, baby, you got no idea. What's coming in the last three weeks have been Oh that's the guy we saw at I was stayed. But the NFL people had no idea. So all they had to lean on was every trope and cliche that they ever had. It's like, oh, he's not that big, he's a white dude. He's gotta be smart.

Otherwise how could do the seventh round pick still be getting this? And I'm like, oh, no, no, no, you're ready, You're in. He's gonna do a lot of dumb stuff. You're gonna see He's gonna do some stuff that blows your mind too, but old dumb stuff is all the way.

up on the wiki. You went to college at a place that when you got there didn't have a football because crazy people were doing crazy things, you know, So like on that level, they're basketball, probably just because it's a game. I think it's easier to understand. I got probably more participatory knowledge of doing that. But like college football,

and it is really a wild thing. Becase I've had this problem in the entirety of my career because people think the college football is kind of like the exclusive purview of white men. Like I could. I never could get people. I'd be like, yeah, I'm really into college football, but really I didn't. I didn't think that, Like what what what is the reason that you didn't think that? If I, I mean, if I said baseball, they would

have had less of a surprise. But I enjoy talking about college football more than anything else because you just wind up with these wild stories are like, yeah, this guy tried to get that guy fired so he could stay there because if he stayed there one more year, he would have ten years in the state system and then he could get a pension. Oh okay, I'm.

could get Urban Meyer. Urban Meyer ain't walking through the door from Michigan, right, So I think they'll probably get some other suspension in the NCAA will try to wallop him just to try to prove some sort of point. Because look, now that the kids can get paid, they don't really got nothing to do. They gotta be bored as hell now that they can't just stop the kids from getting paid so they don't have to come down

on somebody like hardball and make it happen. And it's just wow, this is the nonsensical nature of college football. We're here because some dude was stealing signs. That's the controversy that we got. But just a couple months ago they said at Northwestern the boys were slapping each other with they meet, and we didn't have no time to really delve into that. I don't really understand what we're doing out here these days. It's sports coverage?

he first came out. When Kaepernick did his thing, and he was like, I don't stand by what he's doing or the message, and then went back and was like, Okay, I overreacted, and then wrote so other for Time magazine about how he had overreacted and how he started doing work with people about trying to make sure the folks have proper legal representation when they have to go into the system and everything else. And I don't agree with him on this, but he is a pretty staunch anti

abortion guy. And he had given some talk where he talked about how he just doesn't think that people should have abortions, which I mean as just that right there. I don't think it's a nonsensical premise until you add all the real world factors into it. Like I could see how somebody would get there and somebody says something to him about, well, who's going to take care of these unwanted kids, and he was like, well, if you

don't want them, bring them to my house. And I'm telling you right now, he meant that if you showed up in his house and put a baby in a basket and said you said, leave this kid here. He is crazy enough that I think that he might take that kid in there and be like, all right, well,

eighteen more years, this is what we're gonna do. Right, But he's so intense, and he runs so many people the wrong way, and he's one of the few personalities left in college football that anybody has a passionate opinion about.

so there's no way anything's gonna happen there. So really, as I understand it, the only way they can get punished is by the Big Ten, which has a financial so it's in not punishing even if they don't like him and he rubs them the wrong way. They need Michigan to get into the College Football Playoff and get that big payday.

the big boys, they were pulling them off television. Alabama got to the brink of the death penalty at one point they were willing to do that, and then they realized, Man, all that's doing is costing people money. Ain't doing that no more crazy, you know, So they decided they were gonna stop doing that. And so you're absolutely right. Is there any real incentive for there to be any real

like mechanized punishment against Michigan. Probably not. But at the same time, you're not gonna get me all bored with well you really got to shut them down for this science stealing thing.

to where people are. And I think that people who thought they would not appreciate it at first ultimately did come to appreciate it, because I think they came to respect the way that I choose to go about this. My brother made a point to me when I first started writing that has been a guiding light in my career, which was a good argument is not one that a genius cannot refute. It is one that a fool cannot refute.

And so I've given example. This is when I was working in North Carolina and it was one of those Confederate flag stories that come up, like I think South Carolina was doing their Confederate flag thing and the ACC was supposed to have some event there and yeah, it was all I'll never forget. Yeah, yeah, And I remember I did a tournament, you're right. And I remember I did some event or some show in South Carolina where a guy who'd always been very nice to me on

Twitter asked me to come on. He had three names, like he's that kind of country like I want to say, it's like Alan Wayne or something like that, and he had me come on and then next thing I know, he's like the ACC or as I called them, the acc PC, and he just started rolling and said in the N double ACP said this, bonbonni? Why did the N double ACP do that? And I go, you talking to me? He says yeah. I was like, my bad, I don't work for them. I don't know, right. I

was like, oh, what's going on here? And so I came on my show and I know how people feel about that flag. And honestly, I grew up in Texas and like had a next door neighbor who had stars and bars, bumper sticker, but it was always very nice to me. Whenever we talked in the driveway, like I didn't. It doesn't hit It didn't hit me viscerally in the

ways that he hits a lot of other people. But anyway, I was like, I want to talk about this because I'm not buying the arguments that people are getting back from me. And I never felt more accomplished in my career than this moment. So I get on the mic and I say, hey, I understand that a lot of you are making this argument that the Confederate flag for you, is an emblem of Southern pride, and that's really all

you're trying to say. You're not jumping off for slavery, you're not supporting any of that, You're just supporting your Southern identity. And I said, that's cool. I get that, And I'm like, I as a very proud Southern to feel the exact same way that you do. So I just want you to tell me, why don't you come up with something for Southern pride that we can all get with? Like, you know why I can't get with that? So why don't you come up with something that we

can all get with? And I went to the commercial break. You know, people love to call the show, right, And I went in, and people love to call me happy, they love to call me mad, they love to call me anyway they wanted to. And we went to the commercial break and I said, all right, cool, well, anybody want to give us a call and let us know, just like, why can't you come up with something that we could all share? And I looked over at that phone for those four or five minutes of that commercial break,

and it did not rain. One time. I had stumped them. I had completely left them flumixed and left them in a place where they had to say to themselves, damn, he's got a point, right. Those people who did not call probably didn't think that they would appreciate me. I bet you in that moment, a lot of them did. And so that's what I You know, a lot of people get mad, and a lot of people say the angry things, and they may say all kinds of things about me that I think are like accusatory and inaccurate.

But I think that there are a lot of people that are quiet, and the folks realize who would say that they have appreciated some of the perspective that I've offered on these things. Because I'm not. I don't intend to badger every individual about it because I know it's a lot bigger than them. But you can listen, and I think that if you deal with people the right way, you can get them to do so that's awesome.

in Wichita. This is the second one. So if you're ever here in the Kanye West songs where he talks about his mom being arrested at the age of six at the city ins, these are the city ins that

we're talking about. And so I bet my dad was ready to brag to my mama when they met in graduate school about his revolutionary bona fides, and she was right there to tell him no. Actually, I spoke at the national NAACP convention in nineteen sixty and so what is interesting about that though, is generally yes, but specifically no. I've learned probably more about my parents on that front as an adult than I knew and really understood growing up at any point. Like I knew my mother was

involved in these sit ins. I knew my father had been put out of school behind those, But I think I had to truly get older to like really appreciating grasp the magnitude of both what they had done. But I also think for them that it was important. They are not at all self aggrandizing people, and I think

that it's honestly a humility that comes from it. Like when we left that we moved out of the house in Houston in ninety seven, I remember we were going through some drawer and we came across, you know, one of those cardboard cylinders and like, oh, I it was in there, and we look at it and as my dad's PhD, you know, like you know, like we're going about it a little bit differently here, but no, it was my dad made a point about his father that

makes me understand him in a way. He's and he said himself, he's medaled over years, but like what he learned from his father was if there was something to be done, he did it. Consequences be damned, and that's how he winds up getting kicked out of school. He doesn't exactly view it that same way. But what I got from them, more than anything else, is a real

picture of people who've done the real work. So now when you see everybody who thinks they some kind of god damn activist on Twitter just because they said something that made somebody mad, No, I've seen the real thing, right, Like, think you think you about this revolution, you think you about changing the world. No, no, no, no, no no no. I've met people who got stories that will blow your mind.

In that regard, I mean people that have had to take they fight to the Supreme Court and shootouts with the federal government. I've I've met a different caliber of person when it comes to this, and that's, if nothing else, the perspective of understanding what it takes to really get it done. Has been really helpful.

like I take questions from people. I really liked the intimacy in the back and forth of it, right. What I liked about podcasts from the very beginning though, was

the portability of it. Like when I first started doing radio, I was trying to push to people like, hey, how do I get this out of the podcast because I knew that would be the best promotion, Like I rather than being beholden whether or not somebody was in the radio, you know, in the car listen to radio at a specific point in time, like, let me get this to them in little bite and they could go get it

and then as time went on. What I like about doing a podcast now after having done many different forms of television, is it's an opt in product. Like, yes, I need to be conscientious in terms of my topicality and not go too far off the beaten path and what I'm talking about. But I'm dealing with people who decided to come here. I have more leeway, I have

more flexibility. I can go in more directions. So if all of my sports podcasts, my buddy Joel Anderson as Slate just got through doing four podcast series on Clarence Thomas, then we can talk about that series for forty five minutes. Because the people who are here trust me enough that they know, Okay, this isn't sports, but it must be worth something that Bomani's willing to talk about it for forty five minutes.

part of the last twenty years. So I'm not a person that leaves there and has all these terrible things to say about the place.

But I have learned over time, and I've always been able to figure out how to say exactly what I wanted to say within any constraint that somebody has, And so I probably have the freedom to say something stupid in a way that I didn't have before. And I prefer not to flex that, you know, But I've I truly feel like, yeah, I mean, I truly feel like I learned how to do this stuff in such a way that now that I'm here, I'm kind of like, was I really losing anything? Like, oh, I can curse more.

I probably should have been Like thing you learn while doing it, HBO show, it actually turns you into approove right because everybody is like, ooh hbo, let me write fuck and they put it in as many times. You're like, guys, we don't need the.

And by the way, what ified that clause in the laws of the State of Georgia that say the University of Georgia is not allowed to run a single pass play without at least one white person throwing in or catching. I don't think they've called a play in the history of that school. How one of those things being the case? You have to think about it. Well, no, but the year there'sckly year.

but not like this. I've never seen anything like I didn't know, Like you didn't think a human life shack was likely, but it seemed possible in its own way, right, Like you've seen really big guys, you've seen really tall guys. It could be both at once, right, I couldn't believe, like all the things I see this guy do, I just can't believe. Like I say, he looked like it's a grand opening, right, like them plastic things with the wind gets them, except he can really, really really play basketball.

And he's an orderisme bitch too, like he's flexing at people, and shit, imbody did teach you all that in friends?

like this in person. Television just takes some away, Like football is the biggest one where if you ever go watch football game from the sideline, honestly, it's kind of like if you've ever been in a car and your car broke down on the side of the interstate, you really don't know how fast the cars are going until running past you, right, same thing. No, I want to see this with my own eyes.