Steve Almond

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Steve Almond. Steve spent several years as a newspaper reporter in Texas and Florida before writing his first book, the story collection My Life and Heavy Metal. His books Candy Freak and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. We're both new York Times bestsellers, Almond rights, commentary and journalism regularly for The New York Times magazine and The Boston Globe. He is also the co host of the popular Dear Sugar podcast that he

co hosts with Cheryl Strade. His latest book is called Against Football One Fans Reluctant Manifesto. Hey, everybody, it's Eric with I guess you know who I am. With a couple of announcements, And first is reminder about the t shirts. They are available on the website, both men's and women's one you feed dot net slash t shirt. They are incredibly comfortable, we worked really hard on and I'm really happy with them, so I hope you like them. The second thing is that we are looking for a part

time marketing assistant. So if you are interested in a part time role as a marketing assistant with a one you feed chance to work for a fast growing digital organization, which is a pretty fancy way to describe us, then please go to one you feed dot net slash job. There's also the possibility that we might need a new audio engineer. Just kidding, Chris didn't go anywhere boy, All right, here's the interview with Steve Almond. Hi, Steve, welcome to

the show. Hi. Yeah, it's good to be with you. Yeah, I am excited to talk with you. You co host a podcast called Deer Sugar, which is a very um it's an advice show, and I will talk about that a little bit, which is really enjoyable. And then I've been through a lot of your writing in in getting prepared for this and have enjoyed it. You have that special gift of being able to be incredibly funny and incredibly poignant within about two sentences of each other, and oh, well,

thank you. That's kind of the intersection where I like to hang out. I like my favorite author's Laurie Moore, whoever it is, are hitting that intersection where they they're dealing with their the dark stuff with these little moments of forgiveness that are actually humor. Yep. Yep. Yeah, that's always what I'm aiming for. Yep. And it's you know, there's not that many people that can that can get it tied together that closely. It's it's certainly a definite gift.

So I enjoyed it a lot. So let's start off and talk just very briefly about the podcast. Deer sugar that you do with Cheryl Strait. Now you start the whole deer sugar concept. I think started with you having your advice column. Is that correct? Yes, you know, this is a great example of UM kind of and what I'll call enforced humility. I had. You know, sometimes the world just enforces it on you. Um. I had this

idea when the Rumpus was invented as a website. The idea was that it was going to be a kind of a place where there would be literary discussion, but it would be with the spirit of um, no snark, no grievance. You know enough of that on the Internet. Let's really have a well meaning, empathic, smart place where literature and stuff can be discussed. And I said to Steven Elliott is a wonderful writer who founded the Rumpus. Look, you should have an advice column. You should have an

advice columny. You should let me write it. And you know that's that's fine, that's kind of a stuck up thing to say. But I did have the idea that, you know, what draws people to writing in general is a certain sort of vulnerability, and advice columns have this capacity to allow people in a public way to be vulnerable and about what they're struggling with and and seek help. And the thing is that I said, well, i'll write it, but I won't write it as myself. I'll write it

as this character, Sugar, and it will be. What I had in mind was that it would be a woman of a certain age, you know, and middle age really, who had been through some stuff and she would answer in a kind of noble shit way. Um. And you know, I wrote it for about a year and I just didn't I was faking it. I mean, it wasn't who I am. Uh And and I realized, as you do after a while, you you know when you're faking it,

you know when it's not really you. Good writing finally comes out of people, I think, getting tired of faking it and just being who they are and being real about the stuff that that that is stuck in their craws in one way or another. So I kind of recognize, like, I'm this thing is sort of funny, but it's not digging very deep. And I don't I don't want to

keep doing it. But I did have in mind this woman, Sheryl Strait, who I had really admired her first novel, Torch, and I'd met her a few times and I she talked with my wife when my wife was pregnant, and she just had this vibe that was very much like what I was going for with with this sugar character. You know, she's a woman of a certain age. He was a real truth teller, no bullshit. And so I asked her if she would write it, and she agreed to,

which was very generous. And then she started writing the column, and it was, you know, it's this weird thing of reading the column and saying, that's what I didn't quite have the talent and candor and whatever else discipline to do to to totally take the advice column and turn it on its head, so that rather than the advice give her being this omnipotent figure who sort of dispenses their bromides of wisdom and moves on, it would be this thing that that Cheryl realized, which is that you

can What people are really looking for ultimately is the right to feel what they're feeling. And the best way that you can make that real is by telling them I've felt that way too. I've been I've struggled with that and telling stories as Cheryl did in these columns so beautifully that illustrate that you know, she too has been in that particular kind of hell, and it really just became this phenomenal um uh venue or community, this place where people came for for comfort and sucker, and

that was exactly what I had had in mind. But Cheryl's the writer who could make it happen on the page. So I give her total props, and I'm thrilled that she was then willing to kind of reinvent the pod, reinvent the column and podcast form and sort of let me tag along. It's a it's a delight just to spend time with somebody who's that smart and deeply feeling about things, And that's basically why I wanted to wanted to do the podcast, was like just to hang out

with her some more. Yeah. Well, her writing, you know, the book that was put together Dear Sugar is incredibly powerful. But I love the podcast. It's great having you both there. But I think you are you're hitting on that very key thing where there is a kindness and a gentleness and an empathy right that comes through in the show that is really really wonderful. Cheryl dealt with this. What you put out into the world is what you get back. You know that that's really what it comes down to.

And um, what what I did with the column initially was sort of put out this sort of smart but more really smart ass and that's what came back. I didn't get serious, deep probative, emotionally vulnerable questions. But but Cheryl, because she insisted on really bearing her soul and telling these deeply moving stories in the column, that's what she got back from the world. And now I see that in the podcast, we get hundreds and hundreds of letters from people who are in a real state of struggle,

in a state of crisis, and it's it's real. They're not messing around. Really lives are at state. And when you read all of those, you realize, uh, you know, this is no time to strike a sophisticated pose. You've got to be as real and think and feel as much as you can and engaging those letters. Otherwise you're being a real can I swear? I mean, it's just being a real asshole. You're being a very unfeeling person, and it's just terrible karma because these people are not

kidding it's not a joke. And so much of what is out in popular culture and especially on the Internet, is this effort to sort of treat everything like it's kind of a battle or a joke or a cocktail banter, and we're not. That's not what we do because the letters that people write are they're not they're not kidding around. They're really applying for a certain kind of mercy and hope and you know, maybe wisdom that's probably dressing it up, but just somebody who will take seriously the place that

they're in. So that's what we're trying to do. Well, you guys do a great job of it. I really, I really enjoy it. In one of your book of essays you write about you write about Kurt von to get the author who's now passed, and I'm going to read a section that you wrote there because, um, I think it's a great way to describe him, and I'd like you to just maybe elaborate a little bit more. But you say that he has been trying to explain to the rest of us for most of his life

that despair is a form of hope. It is an acknowledgement of the distance between ourselves and our appointed happiness at certain moments, it is reason enough to live. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it will come as any great towering shock that you know, like many people who were in the arts in one way or another, Like

a lot of times, I'm very sad about things. And I think a guy like Vonnegut, I think about people like I don't know, you know, William Styrone, Darkness Visible, David Foster Wallace, and almost all of his work there's a sense of um language and storytelling as the thing that keeps us from total despair. UM. And I feel like when I listened to Vonnegut, and when I certainly when I read his work, that's what he was up to.

That he was a guy who was dealing with the ghost of a mom who was a suicide, a kind of depressed legacy, very sad family life, and that he himself had used humor, his sense of humor and his capacity for invention and storytelling to try to deal with the distress that he felt not just about his own life, but about what he saw as the kind of horrible, selfish, self punishing direction that the culture has been taking. I think for the past American culture, I mean for the past, oh,

you know, hundred years or fifty years. And I think he was a guy who really believed in the idealism of the sixties and believed that we were, that the counterculture really stood for trying to correct some of the horrible misaligned priorities that capitalism pushes people into. Um and I really feel like for me, seeing Vonnegutt at the end of his life and reading over his work, I realized,

this is a guy who must be absolutely heartbroken. And when you're that heartbroken and feel that your prophetic message has not gotten through, really the only thing that you can realize is, Okay, well, you know, if I don't keep some hope that things are going to get better, if I treat my despair as a permanent condition, I'm sunk. So I have to view my despair as the possibility of greater happiness to come. I know that sounds like kind of not it's it's the emotional equivalent of damning

with faint praise. But that was the conclusion I came to that somehow, in the midst of seeing in such a clear eyed way how royally fucked American culture was, and and and kind of how badly people have behaved, and how much our technology, you know, for instance, technology has accelerated all the worst tendencies towards distraction and grievance and selfishness and you know, away from attention and mercy

and uh and and empathy and generosity. In order for him to simply remain hopeful and remain um you not kill himself, basically had to view his own despair as the as the possibility of greater hope down the line. That's the way that I view it as well. I sit there and go, well, if I really look at it, and I'm totally clear eyed about it, I get too heartbroken to just even go on. And so I have to say, you know what, this state of unhappiness, this

bad diagnosis, is not my fate. It's uh, it's something that I need to somehow be able to muster a sense of hope and some kind of resolve towards. Otherwise I'm gonna get crushed by it. Right. And you you have a you know, a bunch of points throughout your writing where you make a lot of commentary on American culture and kind of what what we look like today.

And I'd like to explore that in a minute. I think, in my excitement to get into the interview and start talking with you, I skipped the way we always start the interview, which is with our parable. So happens when I'm excited. But we'll go back to it now. So the show is called The One You Feed, and it's based on an old parable where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to ask you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I can see why it's a parable, because

it's really the whole ball of wax, you know. It's it's this idea that inside of everybody are these two impulses. You don't just have one if you had one, there wouldn't be human anguish. We'd just either be pure vicious killers who just are out for ourselves and you know, are nihilistic and it's lord of the flies. Or we would be in this utopian world where it was free love and none was ever jealous and everybody had enough to eat and so and so, and that's not the

world we live in. We within ourselves and in the larger world around us, these wolves are constantly fighting with one another, sort of what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature versus you know, the devils that are in there as well. And it's you know, I think about this all the time because HI publicly in my writing and in my podcasting and to the extent that I can, and you know, when I moved through the world, tried very hard to be this hopeful, loving, humble, kind, empathic,

brave person. But inwardly, inside the experience that I have is often of anger and jealousy and greed and self hatred and resentment. And you know, I think that experience, that that that division is a lot more common than people generally talk about. You know, we have these two

stories that we're constantly telling. The world, telling our elves and telling the world, and one is about how we want the world to believe we are, and the other is about how we know ourselves to be truly and most good literature, in fact, is the result of those two stories colliding and coming against one another. And somebody who appears to be good and tries to be good, that the anger and jealousy ingreed and the darkness within

them suddenly intruding upon the light. Were vice versa somebody who's you know, a fallen person like St. Augustine, you know, sitting there as Saul on the road to damaskus, a person who's given into their base or instincts, and there, you know, the brutal, angry, libertine parts of themselves who suddenly has a moment of grace and realizes, all my gracious, I'm I'm missing the human mission. It's it's I've got to I've got to um straighten up and fly right. So I wish that I had a you know, I

wish that I was always feeding the right wolf. But I think the human arrangement is that not always. And you know that's why I try in to the extent that I can. That's what I'm trying to work out in the stories that I write and in the podcast advice I give in the essays I write, is some

way to through storytelling. UM kind of recognized that that that angry, screwed up wolf is in there, and that it's part of me is always wanting to feed that and UM sort of remain stuck in those negative feeling states, and there's another part of me that is trying to feel hope and joy and humility and empathy and somehow put that into the world. And I think it's such

a wonderful parable. And you know, neither wolf wins. I think the truth is, unless you're the Dolli Lama or you're the Buddha, you've reached total enlightenment or nirvana, those wolves are you know, they're still fighting one another until you're in the casket. And that's one of the things I really like about the parable too. I mean, one is, like you said, I think it's it's a parable because you read it and you instantly it conveys a lot

of truth in a in a very small chunk. But it's also that like it's not like one wolf is going to wipe out the other or it's not about you know, starving one wolf. It's like, this is a this is a close battle, and uh, you know, it

takes it takes effort. You know what I love Also Eric is just you know, this is gonna sound crazy, but I think about a guy like Dick Cheney and I sit there and go, okay, well, there's one part of me that says, here's this guy who was full of anger and jealousy and greed and resentment and paranoia and you know, sort of the nihilistic pursuit of power, and he abused that power and he sort of pushed this militaristic agenda that resulted in all this death and destruction.

He was completely morally blind to it. And uh, you know, and there's that wolf that you know, he's kind of like for for you know, liberal America or maybe just compassionate saying conscious intact America. He's sort of this big wolf. But then there's another part of me say, but you know what, he also loves his family and had a daughter who was you know, wh who's gay, and he

loves her, and he loves his grandkids. And there's some other part of him that believes that what he was doing was joyful and hopeful and loving and empathic, and he kept America safe and whatever, whatever the stories that we tell ourselves, this is the thing that that strikes me as as missing from discourse. People wind up getting

flattened out. Uh. And the truth is that you know, good literary characters and reflect what all human beings contained, which is this maddening combination of beautiful, blessed impulses and behaviors and thoughts and absolutely cursed, selfish, curdled awfulness. And you know, it would be easier if if people were just one way or another, and we we wish that to be the case. Um, but that's not the way

it is. You know, Rush Limbaugh, whoever it is, the guess boogeyman you can identify, um, somehow was also a part of the human family and had all sorts of beautiful, joyful, hopeful things that somehow, I think in the case of people who are really angry and monstrous, it's love that gets distorted into evil. That's the Freudian way of looking at it. It's not that people are just plagued with

indifference from birth. Everybody's deeply feeling and hopeful and wishful and and somehow life biochemistry, family environment, disappointment, whatever it is, distorts the love that we feel into evil order. And now here's the rest of the interview with Steve Almond. One of the things that you've said about our culture is that we've made convenience our godhead, and thinking of people in that way, in that black and white, good

or evil way, is convenient. Yeah, because you just get to write off everybody else who doesn't agree with you. I mean, this is what we do in our in our discourse. There is uh, you know, one side, you know that that sees themselves as preserving tradition and um, you know, keeping family uh safe and making sure that there's a sense of order in the world and that authority and whatever the rap is for for people who are you know, maybe on the right politically, and then

there's the left. And we see ourselves as compassionate and thoughtful and impact that can idealistic involved And you know the problem is we can now self select and live within the bubble where we never we We can just

vilify the other side. They're useful idiots, well, they're sheep, Well they're just The reality is that that's a lot easier way to go through life, to just live within that bubble where you never have to be disabused of the idea that the person you're or the set of people that you're painting with whatever brush, are actually just individuals who have about of their hopes and desires in common with yours. They want their kids to do well in school and have opportunity just as much as you do,

you know. Um So, I think that that's one of the ways. One of the basic forms of convenience now is the convenience of not having to see people you disagree with politically or socially or otherwise as fully human. That's much more convenient, you know. For people who are pro choice, they can say that everybody who's anti abortion is um, you know, a religious nut or wants control of their body, and they've got their dogma about that.

And even though I might agree with that with a large partner and said, well, gee, if I had a religious code that said know life begins at conception, then I would I would be duty bound by that teaching, by that inherited sense of morality and ethics to think that anybody who wanted an abortion was a murderer. And you know, I happen to have been raised in in in the world an ecosystem, and that says, actually, um, women get to decide what to do with their own bodies. Period.

That's my ultimatum. But I can't sit there and say that somebody who has a different view it hates women or wants to control that they just that could be it. But it could also be that they really have this basic belief about when life begins and at that point, you know, for them it's a matter of life and death and murder versus you know, sparing an innocent soul. So it's this complicated thing where if you're really gonna it makes the world very inconvenient when you actually view

everybody as a human being. Yeah, it definitely does. I mean, I think that idea that there's you know, things aren't black and white is the at least for me, has been certainly a path to maturity and I think greater happiness and usefulness in the world. Yeah, I think a lot about There's a great writer, Charles d Ambrosio, and I love his fiction, I love his essays, and he's got this great collection of essays that I read a year and a half ago or so, and it's it's

called loitering, that the essays are called loitering. And he writes about how his essays are mostly sort of they investigate doubt and the things that he doesn't really know, and that most good writing ultimately is about our confusion. Um, you know the fact that there are the two wolves and neither one ever wins. They're they're constantly in battle, so that we never really even quite know whether we're fully good or evil. People were in conflict about the

very nature of our goodness. And I love that idea that ultimately that's what binds us is our uncertainty. When you see demagogues of whatever stripe, what they're selling is moral surety. What they're selling is the very seductive and convenient idea that whoever they disagree with are evil and anemical, and they and their values and what they want are

purely good. This is what you hear, whether it's Rush, limbar or whoever the left wing equivalent of Rush is, you know Lenin or who not Lenin, but I mean Stalin was an authoritarian, but whatever I mean, if there was some lefty demagogue who was so convinced of his or her righteousness that they were absolutely unable to see that anybody who disagreed with them, um, you know is also had a valid, complex, nuanced point of view, had

something to teach them. That ultimately is very comforting when you get sort of when you're inside your dog mine, it's never challenged, and it's also incredibly seductive because jeez, it's much easier to walk around with a pretty clear sense of you know, well, I'm really right and those who disagree with me or wrong, and the problem is that it's phony. Like the people who watch Fox News, I don't think are really deeply assured that they are

right inside. I think they just have to keep shouting as loud as they can that they're right and everybody who feels differently is crazy and wrong. And that's because the feeling of uncertainty and insecurity and dislocation and fear are so tremendous that they need that sense. That's why everybody's you know, flipping out about Donald Trump, because he has this huge, monstrous sense. He's telling two stories. The first is America is broken, it's lost, it's it's it's

where losers were not winners. Anymore. And I think for people who feel inside very frightened and dislocated about what's happening in the culture, people you know, old white people basically, who are quite frightened and feel like, oh, we're no longer the majority, our patriarchal prerogatives being taken away all of a sudden, It's okay to be gay and even get married and even have kids. You know, all this stuff that for them is really difficult for them to

adjust to. It means they're not as powerful anymore. And the world that they grew up in is not the world that surrounds them. All that stuff is really frightening. And somebody like Trump is like this kind of big daddy, slick business guy who's essentially saying, I know the world's broken, it's a fallen world that we're living in, but I'm the guy who's going to fix it. Don't worry, don't don't trouble me about policy. I'm gonna make it fabulous.

I'm gonna tell those Mexicans what they can do with their while I'm gonna tell those Chinese. And it's such, it's so, it's I mean, you know, again, kind of objectively living in the real world. It's such nonsense. You're like, my god, this guy doesn't even know how government functions. But people are sufficiently frightened and as sufficiently uh, sort of desperate for somebody who appears strong that they'll buy any kind of barna bullshit that comes along at this point.

And he you know that's people kind of just keep going, well, how could this happen? You know, in America? How can we have this guy who's this sort of bankrupt see uh, you know, parasite who has become because people really, when they're frightened, they want somebody who who plays a really strong person on TV. And you know that's he's he's

making hay with that. Yeah, he definitely is. And I think a line you've used as you're talking about Louis c k and why you had hoped he might become the new guy for the Daily Show and you said that, you know you were rooting for him because for the past five years he's been speaking truthfully in a way few others have about the private anxieties and terrors of

a population too well insulated from their internal lives. He's willing to attack the basic disease of American life a kind of entitlement psychosis that arises from loneliness and fear right and plenitude. I mean, you know that that's that's a lot of it as well, you know, And I have these kids, right, and it's it's really my My daughter just said to me the other night, she said, last night, she said, UM, I want to eat and Frank's diary. She's really precocious reader. And she's emotionally and

psychologically very precocious. But um, as much as she uh can process a lot of intense stuff, we haven't talked with her about the Holocaust and the details of that atrocity. And I wanted to read an Frank. But there's a part of me that also recognizes that it's really going to shake her up. And it's going to shake her up because really, we live in this insane, insane plenitude,

I mean America. To be an American living in this era is to be insulated from most of the fundamental terrors that most of the world experiences on a daily basis right now, and that historically human beings have experienced for almost all of our history. The possibility of a sudden, calamitous death, not having enough food to eat, you know, economic and nutritional insecurity, migration that's forced migration to all the stuff, disease and plague, and you know, you think

about everything that we're insulated the possibility of invasion. Americans have been living this life in a kind of golden bubble. You know. Is this description of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in and the Great Gatsby, where so they were rich people who just broke things. It's the Vonnegut heartbroken profit

part that's saying that's America in Toto. Even those of us who feel earnest and noble for driving prius is we're still driving our cars and we are still part of a sort of consumption convenience culture that's completely unsustainable. And for my daughter, I sit there and go, you know, I want her to have some sense, and I want my other kids as well to have some sense of

just how royally and supremely lucky we are. We get to fly on magic silver birds all the way across the country to visit, you know, loving grandparents on the other side of the country, a trip that you know, hundred years ago people died making, and you know, they have no awareness of how fortunate they are You know, if if if Jet Blue doesn't have the right snacks, it's a calamity, and there's a part of me that wants to go. Would you get real hold on a second.

You know, we we have got to all collectively take a big step back and go, you know what, we've got way too much. We've got way too much of everything. We're being distracted by the everything that we have, and we need to consume less materially, lead simpler lives, slightly less convenient lives, and somehow, you know, try to figure out a way of living in the world that's sustainable. It's not like it's impossible. I could live. I live in a pretty small house. I could live in an

even smaller house I did growing up. I mean, you think about basic stuff. It's like, man, people just used to as a matter of course, people didn't drive if they were going. You know, when I was a kid, I never drove or was driven by my parents anywhere. We just rode our bikes. That's just what we did. We just rode our bikes. And now it's like, well, you know, now the kids have to be chauffeured around. It's like that's crazy. But we consent to it because

it becomes the new normal. And so I guess I envisioned my daughter reading in frank and realizing how insecure and frightening uh periods of history have been recent history.

And hopefully she's not too freaked out by it, and we can have a discussion in which I say, yeah, you know, this is why mom and I are constantly talking about you get what you get and you don't get upset because we're actually really fucking incredibly lucky, like nobody's ever been luckier historically, and our luck's going to kind of run out because our luck is really almost too good at this point. It's not a sustainable sort of luck. Let's change the topic to football, okay, speaking

of total decniques. Yeah, so you you grew up a football fan. Um I think you you you know, declared yourself a you know, most of your life a member and good standing of the Church of football, and probably Butcher in that line, but something to that extent. And now you are really wrestling with that love of football and there's some things about it that are really troubling you. Do you want to explain a little bit more about that? And that's you that's your latest book, right, Yeah, So

this book called Against Football One fans Reluctant Manifesto. And you know, the name against Football is a little bit of a misnomer. It's not um, it's not against football. It's much more sort of about football and trying to, I guess, sort of describe the two wolves in a sense.

The one wolf that that that says, oh my god, the the ecstasy of the body at play, the joy of watching athletic grace and poise and strength and teamwork and discipline, and the strategic density of football, how suspenseful and exciting it is, the spectacle of it. Um, all these aspects of football, how communal it is, how it allows people to to bond and connect. All these sort of unassailable good parts of football are very true and real, and I you know, for forty years I indulged in

those parts. And then over the last two or three years I started to realize that there's this other wolf, and that football is in addition to everything I just said, which is true and real and beautiful, there's this other

part of football that is totally nihilistically, greedy, brutal, sanitized violence. Um. You know, exploitative, completely distorting the educational mission of this country, comple lately medieval, and its gender roles and and its attitudes about masculinity and sexual orientation militaristic in a way that's kind of that's it's just despicable, you know what I mean, Like those two things have to live side

by side. If there is kind of a single example of those two wolves fighting inside of me, it is around football. And for for now, you know, I'm I'm boy, I'm not boycotting, I'm personally. The point of Against Football isn't to try to like lead a boycott or to shut down football or any of that stuff. It's just for people to to try to tell people exactly everything that football is. If you're not a fan of football, the book is trying to explain to you why football

is so exciting and important to so many people. If you are a fan of football and you're also have a functioning conscience, it's trying to say, hey, when you're sitting there with your chicken wings in front of your TV watching a game, here's what you're actually sponsoring. You know. It is the beautiful, wonderful, enjoyable gratification of whatever you

get from watching the game. And it's also all this other stuff that you probably either knew about and didn't want to think about a whole lot, or just chose not to even know about. You just listed a bunch of things that you you find objectionable about football, and one of them, you know, I think we could spend a minute or two on, is you know, the sort of news that continues to emerge about what happens to

football players later in life. The thing about football that makes it distinct from other sports, and in addition to the fact that it's like ten times more profitable than any other sport and about ten times more popular in America, is that it is a game that is extraordinarily violent, but it's a sanitized violence. You don't see as you did in boxing, or you would maybe in rugby. Bloody heads, broken bones, you know, sticking out of somebody, out of

the skin, or these gruesome injury you see. Really, because the guys are in these huge costumes, they've got shoulder pads and pads all over them, in their heads, are in helmets, you don't see the full extent of the violence. And because you're seeing it on TV and not in real life, you can kind of. I think we really see these guys as sort of superheroes. They're also bigger and stronger and faster than any other kind of human

that we've ever seen before. You have a guy who's two eighty pounds and can run the forty yard dash in under five seconds. You're dealing with a human being who simply just never existed, or maybe there was one

of him named Sampson, you know, or bias. But now we've got a world of Goliath and they're smashing into one another at great speeds, even at the high school level on the college level, and there's this magic, magical thinking that prevails when we watch sports, and football in particular, that says, well, you know, maybe you got his bell wrung, or maybe he's seeing stars, but we don't think, oh, that's actually a small car accident and it be having

a pretty bad neurological effect on that person. Well, now the medical research is finally caught up and it it has become clear to medical researchers scientists basically that the accretion of all these subconcussive hits that football players get, in addition to the concussions, are causing people to have

brain damage. The NFL themselves, The big story that went under reported last year is that they themselves, after years of denying the link between football and brain trauma, their actuaries estimated that up to thirty percent of the players

would suffer long term cognitive ailments. And you just can't think of another workplace where that would be even close to acceptable, even the US military, if you said, you know, um, the truth is, if the Joint chiefs of Staff, you know, submitted court documents saying, you know, thirty percent of soldiers are going to wind up with long current, long term cognitive ailments, it's just the nature of of of the workplace. I think there'd be a lot of Congress final oversight

people would say, well, that's completely crazy. You can't have almost a third of our soldiers ending up brain damage. That's just not okay with us. But when it's in the context of football, it's totally okay with us. Um, not only is it okay with us, we were like champing at the bit to watch it every Sunday. And that's again because football isn't just brain smashing into each other. It's this incredibly exciting, suspenseful drama that we get deeply

involved with as fans. Since reading some of your You're right now, it's it's caused me to sort of look at it a different way. I mean, it's when you because I think even the terms you know, cognitive, you know, ailments all that. I mean, what's happening is that these people are are you know, the the stories of the suicides, and it's it's more than it's not a mild thing.

It's not like they forget where their car keys are occasionally, right, No, I mean, and again, I think the thing that brought me to eight in the book, to saying Okay, I need to like sit down and really look at football and like, you know, do that horrible thing that Americans hate to do of like in visiting the slaughterhouse. Basically, you know, we all love Pacan, but we don't want to visit the slaughter House. So I said, Okay, well

I'm gonna I'm gonna visit. And the thing that caused me to do that was seeing my mom, you know, suffer this dementia. Didn't I never really spent time with somebody who, especially somebody I loved, who suffered any kind of serious cognitive ailment. Plenty of friends who are depressed or struggling with mental illness in one way or another, but not somebody who's lost their brain. And seeing that

is completely chill. I mean, it's just absolutely it's just it's a heart wrecking and um, that's really what happens. That's really what happens to these guys, not all of them, but a significant number of them. And at a certain point you say, well, what would be enough to trouble you? It would ten percent be enough? If it's just ten just ten percent of players. What if it's just five percent? Is that okay then? Or at what point do we

say I shouldn't sponsor that. I know it's really exciting when Tom Brady throws a touchdown pass or Peyton Manning or Adrian Puce or whatever it is. But um, I guess I'm sponsoring what is ultimately an outcome where a third of the guys I'm watching, or maybe it's ten percent of the guys I'm watching, are going to be in a state where they lose themselves, that they literally

are robbed of their selfhood. I just think, because the American formulation is um gratification in the short term, and I'm not going to think about the long term that that mindset is so deeply ingrained. It's the attitude we have,

for instance, towards soldiers. You know, we'll send them over there when it when when are you know, infantile omnipotence gets knocked around by a terrorist attack, you know, will will absolutely send tens of thousands of young men and some young women over to shoot and be shot at and drop bombs whatever else. And you know, we will

cheer them and we'll clap for them in airports. But when it comes to really dealing with them and the physical and psychological disfigurement that they take back from from that experience, we really don't want to deal with it. We really don't want to have to take account of what they've been through. And I think the same thing prevails with athletes, you know, and maybe to some extent with celebrities. We kind of chew through them in this culture. Yea.

So let's wrap up, or get close to wrapping up by talking about a subject that we both love, which is rock and roll. And you wrote a book called rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, which is a wonderful read. I'm going to just read a section out of it here. Sure, so you're describing, you know, jokingly referred to him as drooling fanatics, the people who are just crazy crazy about about rock music. Can you say that this is the most important indicator, which is that

we're chronically emotional. People who have trouble will access in our emotions. Right, And you go on to say that in my own case, though I suspect this is broadly true, repression was our family religion. I didn't admit to anyone else that I was feeling sad or frightened or angry because I saw a little hope of being regarded or soothed and a good chance of being mocked. When I wanted to numb myself out, I watched TV. But songs

had the opposite effect. They became a secret passage way to emotion, a way of locating what I was feeling before I entirely understood it myself. I can remember, you know, uh, the only times I felt genuine ecstasy and also have been brought into a real state of experiencing my sorrow has been with musical accompaniment um And I remember that

very powerfully. That there are certain songs and albums that immediately make me feel I think that's what music does, I think, more than any other art form, is immediately put us in touch with feelings that are otherwise out of reach. They allow us to experience unbearable and sometimes those feelings are feelings of absolute hope and joy and possibility.

You know, when I find a new song that I love, it is a kind of drug because I know that I'm going to be able to take a hit of it and it's going to immediately elevate my mood no matter what's going on, no matter what the background is. If I have a good song to hang onto or a good album, I'm just I'm just se happier and

more hopeful and optimistic and the rest of it. And again, for somebody who's um, you know, oftentimes kind of at the edge of struggling with either depression or just feeling down whatever it is, the black dogs out there barking, UM, I need that, you know, I need to know that, and also to have music as a way of feeling certain unbearable feelings that are in there any way, And you know, I'm sort of I think I think depression as you're sort of stuck in a in a in

a condition of dread and self hatred that really is masking a certain kind of disappointment and despair that if you could experience it would actually contain within it a certain kind of forgiveness, you know. So that's what I look to music to sometimes do, is to allow me to get to where I can I can experience grief rather than grievance, you know, not the less for defense mechanisms, but the big, real emotions that live behind them. Yeah. I just I loved that section of the book and

totally saw myself myself in it. So we are near the very end. I want to I want to wrap up with one sentence that you wrote, and I think this will leave things on a good note. You said, the single biggest reason I got my stories taken in various literary magazines, and I want to stress this is

because I refused to give up period. Yes, So, I mean people are always saying, uh, you know, they kind of they think whatever the artistic endeavor is, they have this sense that, um, you know there's some formula where there's some maybe you're blessed with talent, you know, capitalty talent, or there's some way that you can Um. You know, there's some ferry dust or some methodology or some system or set of tools, and it's I guess that stuff

can be useful around the edges. But for the most part, the people who wind up succeeding and getting their art and their creative work into the world, I think the commonality is that they're dogged about it. Um. There's there's also talent that really does exist out there. You know.

You read when I read a Sawbellow, or I read Lorie Moore or read Jane Austin or whoever it is, you just realize, Wow, some people just um through you know, have language and insight and powers of observation and and and the capacity to commemorate feelings through language at a

level that I can only admire. I will never get there. Um. But I also think that there's almost none of those people who also wasn't dogged, who who just absolutely uh through reading, through observing the world, remaining alive to it through scribbling in their notebook constantly. You know, I can see when an artist is really alive. And I can see it sometimes because by contrast, I'm not you know, I spent some time at a conference with this writer

Jess Waltz, who's just a fantastic writer. And he I could see him that that he was constantly writing in this notebook observations. You know, he was in his zone with a particular story or novel or whatever it is, but he was always always writing it down, capturing it and probably running back to his room and you know, making sure that the idea or thing that he'd observed, whatever, that he was going to get it down on paper on the keyboard before it got away from him. And

that kind of constant dedication is how people succeed. It's no there's no secret to it. It's just really exhausting and it's really hard to keep up. Um. You know, I spend time a little bit of time with Elizabeth Gilbert, and you know that is somebody whose work ethic is just phenomenal. She is just absolutely dogged in in the way that she goes about her work when she's working on a book of whatever sort or an article. And that's what you realize, you know, the badasses of this

world are earning it. It's not a gimmick, it's not luck in to a large extent, art sniffs out the phonies. That's what makes it different than I don't know what reality TV or something. It's not like you know, or capitalism. It's not rigged, you don't inherit great literary prestige from your from your parents, what you you know, there's no way to fake it. And the people who are good and make themselves really good, it's because they do that work. Um, and you know I can't always do that work, but

I can always recognize it. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for taking the time. I'm to talk with this this evening, and Steve, I've enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you. It's so nice. You know, oftentimes they'll talk with people and they kind of have a vague sense of what I do, or they've read a little bit. But I really appreciate that you were able to, like I hadn't heard some of those sentences in quite a while, and I was nice to hear them. So thank you. Oh yeah, my pleasure.

Well take care, all right, all right bye. You can learn more about Steve Almond and this podcast at one you feed dot net slash Almond