The One You Feed - Steve Almond

Episode Date: November 3, 2015

This week we talk to Steve Almond about the good and bad in all of usSteve Almond spent seven years as a newspaper reporter in Texas and Florida before writing his first book, the story collection My Life in Heavy Metal. His books, Candyfreak, and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us were New York Times Bestsellers. His short fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and his collection, God Bless America, won the Paterson Prize for Fiction. Almond writes commentary and journalism regularly for The New York Times Magazine and The Boston Globe. A former sports reporter and play-by-play man, his latst book is called Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto.He is also the co host of the popular Dear Sugar podcast that he co-hosts with Cheryl Strayed.  Our Sponsor this Week is Athletic GreensClick here to get 50% off your first order!!  In This Interview Steve and I Discuss...The beginnings of the Dear Sugar columnBeing funny and poignant at the same timeWhat makes good writingHow to make an advice column goodThe culture of treating everything like a joke or with ironyKurt VonnegutLanguage, storytelling and humor as a way to fight of despairThe declining American cultureThe One You Feed parableThe two stories that we are constantly telling the worldHow the two wolves keep fighting all our livesThe flattening out of character in American discourseHow we all contain great and terrible qualitiesHow our culture makes a god out of convenienceFor more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

All human beings contain this maddening combination of beautiful, blessed impulses and behaviors and thoughts and absolutely cursed, selfish, curdled awfulness. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, 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. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 in Heavy Metal. His books Candy Freak and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life were both New York Times bestsellers. Almond writes 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 Strayed. His latest book is called Against Football, One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto. Hey, everybody. It's Eric with, I guess you know who I am, with a couple of announcements.

And first is a reminder about the t-shirts. They are available on the website, both men's and women's. OneYouFeed.net slash t-shirt. They are incredibly comfortable. We worked really hard on it. 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 oneyoufeed.net slash job. There's also the possibility that we might need a new audio engineer. Just kidding, Chris. It isn't going anywhere. Oh, 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 Dear Sugar, which is a very, 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 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. Oh, well, thank you. That's kind of the intersection where I like to hang out. I like my favorite authors, Laurie Moore, whoever it is, are hitting that intersection

where they're dealing with the dark stuff with these little moments of forgiveness that are actually humor. Yep, yep. So yeah, that's always what I'm aiming for. Yep. And it's, you know, there's not that many people that can get it tied together that closely. 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, Dear Sugar, that you do with Cheryl Strayed. Now, you start, the whole Dear Sugar concept, I think, started with you having an advice column. Is that correct?

Yes. You know, this is a great example of kind of what I'll call enforced humility. I had, you know, sometimes the world just enforces it on you. 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 and the internet, let's really have a well-meaning empathic, smart place where literature and stuff can be discussed. And I said to Stephen Elliott, who's a wonderful writer who founded The Rumpus, look, you should have an advice column. You should

have an advice column. You should let me write it. And that's fine. That's kind of a stuck-up thing to say. But I did have the idea that 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 write 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 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, in middle age, really, who'd been through some stuff, and she would answer it

in a kind of no bullshit way. 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. And, and I realized, as you do after a while, you, you know, when you're faking it, 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 is stuck in their craw in one way or another. So I kind of recognize, like, this thing's sort of funny, but it's not digging very deep. And I don't want to keep doing it. 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, Cheryl Strayed, who I had really admired her first novel torch, and I'd met her a few times. And I'd, 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, who 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 totally take the advice column and turn it on its head so that rather than the advice giver being this omnipotent figure who sort of dispenses their bromides of wisdom and moves on, it would be this thing that Cheryl realized, which is that 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 struggled with that and telling stories as Cheryl did in these columns so beautifully that illustrate that she too has been in that particular kind of hell. And it really just became this phenomenal venue or community, this place where people came 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 column, reinvent the column in 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, 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're hitting on that very key thing where there is a kindness and a gentleness and an empathy 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's really what it comes down to. And 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 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 and a state of crisis. And it's real, they're not messing around, really lives are at stake. And when you read all of those, you realize, 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 in engaging those letters. Otherwise, you're being a real, can I swear? I mean, 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 a 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. Yep. 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 Vonnegut,

the author who's now passed. And I'm going to read a section that you wrote there because, A, 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'll come as any great towering shock that, you know, like many people who are 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 Styron, Darkness Visible, David Foster Wallace, and almost all of his work, that there's a sense of language and storytelling as the thing that keeps us from total despair. 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, oh, you know, 100 years or 50 years. And I think he was a guy who really believed in the idealism of the 60s, 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.

And I really feel like, for me, seeing Vonnegut 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, 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 – it's the emotional equivalent of damning with faint praise. that somehow in the midst of seeing in such a clear-eyed way how royally fucked American culture was and kind of how badly people have behaved and how much our technology, for instance, has accelerated all the worst tendencies towards distraction and grievance and selfishness and away from attention and mercy and empathy and generosity, in order for him to simply remain hopeful and remain, you know, not kill himself, basically, he had to view his own despair 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-ed 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 something that I need to somehow be able to muster a sense of hope and some kind of resolve towards. Otherwise, I'm going to get crushed by it. Right. And you have 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.

I skipped the way we always start the interview, which is with our parable. So it 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. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad 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. 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 are nihilistic and it's Lord of the Flies, or we would be in this utopian world where there was free love and no one was ever jealous and everybody had enough to eat and so on and so forth. And that's not the world we live in. 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 I publicly in my writing and in my podcasting and to the extent that I can. 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 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 ourselves 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 or Saul on the road to Damascus, a person who's given into their baser instincts and their, you know, the brutal, angry, libertine parts of themselves, who suddenly has a moment of grace and realizes, oh, my gracious, I'm missing the human mission. I've got to straighten up and fly right. So I wish that I had a, you know, 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 you're 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, uh, recognize that, that, that angry screwed up wolf is in there and that it's part of me is

always wanting to feed that and, 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 Dalai Lama, or you're the Buddha, or you've reached total enlightenment or nirvana, those wolves are, you know, they're still fighting one another until you're in the casket. Yeah. 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 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, you know, and there's that wolf that, you know, he's kind of like for, you know, liberal America or maybe just compassionate, sane, conscience-intact America, he's sort of this big wolf. But then there's another part of him. He says, but you know what? He also loves his family.

He had a daughter who was 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 the stories that we tell ourselves. This is the thing that strikes me as missing from discourse. People wind up getting flattened out. And the truth is that good literary characters reflect what all human beings contain, which is this maddening combination of beautiful, blessed impulses and behaviors and thoughts and absolutely cursed, selfish, curdled awfulness. And it would be easier if people were just one way or another, and we wish that to be the case.

But that's not the way it is. Rush Limbaugh, whoever it is, the biggest boogeyman you can identify, 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 so forth. And somehow life, biochemistry, family environment, disappointment, whatever it is, distorts the love that we feel into evil. 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. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stunt man reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 discourse. side, you know, that sees themselves as preserving tradition and, you know, keeping family safe and making sure that there's a sense of order in the world and that authority and whatever the rap is 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 empathic and idealistic and blah, blah, blah. And the problem is we can now self-select and live within the bubble where we never – we can just vilify the other side. They're useful idiots. Well, they're sheep. 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 95% 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. 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 part of me, I say, well, gee, if I had a religious code that said, you 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 and 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 hates women or wants to control them. 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, for them, it's a matter of life and death and murder versus sparing an innocent soul.

So it's this complicated thing where if you're really going to – 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 um 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 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. You know, the fact that there are the two wolves and neither one ever wins. They're constantly in battle so that we never really even quite know whether we're fully good or evil people. We're in conflict about the very nature of our goodness.

We're 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 inimical. And they and their values and what they want are purely good. This is what you hear, whether it's Rush Limbaugh or whoever the left-wing equivalent of Rush Limbaugh is, you know, Lenin, 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, you know, is it 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 mind, it's never challenged. And it's also incredibly seductive because, It's never challenged. And it's also incredibly seductive because, geez, 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 are 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's broken. It's lost. We're losers. We're not winners anymore. And I think for people who feel inside very frightened and dislocated about what's happening in the culture, people, 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 and 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 of 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 trouble me about policy. I'm going to make it fabulous. I'm going to tell those Mexicans what they can do with their wall. I'm going to 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 barnum bullshit that comes along at this point. And he, you know, that's people kind of keep going, well, how could this happen? You know, in America, how could we have this guy who's this sort of bankruptcy, 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. He's making hay with that. Yeah, he definitely is.

I think a line you've used is you were talking about Louis C.K. and why you had hoped he might become the new guy for The Daily Show. 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's a lot of it as well. I mean, I have these kids, right? And it's really – my daughter just said to me the other night, she said't talked with her about the Holocaust and the details of that atrocity. And I wanted to read Anne 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, 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, you know, all this stuff, disease and plague. And, you know, you think about everything that we're insulated, the possibility of invasion. I mean, Americans have been living this life in a kind of golden bubble, you know, is this description of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, where they were rich people who just broke things. It's the Vonnegut heartbroken prophet part that's saying that's America in toto. Even those of us who feel earnest and noble for driving Priuses, 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, a hundred years ago, people died making and, you know, they have no awareness of how fortunate they are. You know, if, if the, if JetBlue 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? Like, hold on a second. You know, 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.

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. 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, now the kids 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 Anne Frank and realizing how insecure and frightening 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 decadence, yeah. So you grew up a football fan. I think you declared yourself most of your life a member in good standing of the Church of football. I'm probably butchering 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 to you. Do you want to explain a little bit more about that? And that's your, that's your latest book, right? Yeah. So this book called against football, one fans reluctant manifesto,

and you know, the, the name against football is a little bit of a misnomer. It's not, And, you know, the name against football is a little bit of a misnomer. It's not against football. It's much more sort of about football, trying to, how suspenseful and exciting it is, the spectacle of it. All these aspects of football, how communal it is, how it allows people to bond and connect. All these sort of unassailable good parts of football are very true and real. And I, you know, for 40 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, you know, exploitative, completely distorting the educational mission of this country, completely medieval and its gender roles and its attitudes about masculinity and sexual orientation, militaristic in a way that'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 now, I I'm 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 try to tell. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just

stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 find objectionable about football. And one of them, you know, I think we could spend a minute or two on is, questionable 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 10 times more profitable than any other sport, and about 10 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, sticking out of the skin or these gruesome injuries. You see really because the guys are in these huge costumes, they've got shoulder pads and pads all over them and 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. and faster than any other kind of human that we've ever seen before. You have a guy who's 280 pounds and can run the 40-yard dash in under five seconds. You're dealing with a human being who simply just never existed, or maybe there was one of them named Samson or Goliath. But now we've got a world of Goliaths, 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 he got his bell wrong, or maybe he's seeing stars, but we don't think, oh, that's actually a small car accident. And it's probably having a pretty bad neurological effect on that person. Well, now the medical research has finally caught up and it has become clear to medical researchers, scientists basically, that the accretion of all these sub-concussive hits that football players get, in addition to concussions,

are causing people to have brain damage. The NFL themselves, the big story that went under-reported last last year is that they themselves, after years of denying the link between football and brain trauma, their actuaries estimated that up to 30% 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 U.S. military, if you said, you know, the truth is, if the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you know, submitted court documents saying, you know, 30% of soldiers are going to wind up with long-term cognitive ailments, it's just the nature of the workplace, I think there'd be a lot of congressional oversight. People would say, well, that's completely crazy. You can't have almost a third of our soldiers

ending up brain damaged. That's just not okay with us. But when it's in the context of football, it's totally okay with us. Not only is it okay with us, we're 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, your writing on it, 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, the stories of the suicides and the 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 writing 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, like in visiting the slaughterhouse, basically, you know, we all love bacon, but we don't want to visit the slaughterhouse. So I said, okay, well, I'm going to, I'm going to visit. And the thing that caused me to do that was seeing my mom, you know, suffer this dementia. I didn't, I never really spent time with somebody who, especially somebody I loved, who'd suffered any kind of serious cognitive ailment. Plenty of friends who were depressed

or struggling with mental illness in one way or another, but not somebody who's lost their brain. And seeing that is completely chilling. I mean, it's just absolutely, it's heart-wrecking. And 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? Would 10% be enough if it's just 10% of players? What if it's just 5%?

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 Peterson or whatever it is, but I guess I'm sponsoring what is ultimately an outcome where a third of the guys I'm watching or maybe it's 10% of the guys I'm watching, are going to be in a state where they lose themselves. They literally are robbed of their selfhood. I just think because the American formulation is gratification in the short term, and I'm not going to think about the long term, that mindset is so deeply ingrained. It's the attitude we have, for instance, towards soldiers. It's the attitude we have, for instance, towards soldiers. You know, we'll send them over there when it when when our, you know, infantile omnipotence gets knocked around by a terrorist attack. You know, we'll we'll absolutely send tens of thousands of young men and some young women over to shoot and be shot at and drop bombs and 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 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. Yep. 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. Yes. 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 refer to them as drooling fanatics, the people who were 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 accessing our emotions. Right. And you go on to say that in 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 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 passageway to emotion, a way of locating what I was feeling before I entirely understood it myself. I can remember, you know, 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. 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 on to or a good album, I'm just 70% happier and more hopeful and optimistic and the rest of it. And again, for somebody who's oftentimes kind of at the edge of struggling with either depression or just feeling down, whatever it is, the black dogs out there barking. 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 anyway. And, you know, I'm sort of, I think, I think of 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 to allow me to get to where i can i can experience grief rather than grievance you know the not the lesser 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 in it. So we are near the very end.

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 refuse to give up, period. Yeah, so I mean, people are always saying, you know, they kind of, they think whatever the artistic endeavor is, they have this sense that, you know, there's some formula, or there's some, maybe you're blessed with talent, you know, capital T talent, or there's some formula or there's some maybe you're blessed with talent you know capital t talent or there's some way that you can um you know there's some fairy 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 the 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. There's also talent that really does exist out there. You know, you read, when I read a Saul Bellow or I read Laurie Moore or I read Jane Austen or whoever it is, you just realize, wow, I read Laurie Moore or Jane Austen or whoever it is. You just realize, wow, some people just have language and insight and powers of observation and the capacity to commemorate feelings through language at a level that I can only admire. I will never get there. But I also think that there's almost none of those people who also wasn't dogged, who just absolutely, through reading, through observing the world, through 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 Walter, who's just a fantastic writer. And he, I could see him that he was constantly writing in this notebook observations, you know, he was in a 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 or whatever, that he was going to get it down on paper or on the keyboard before it got away from him. And that kind of constant dedication is how people succeed. There's no secret to it.

It's just really exhausting, and it's really hard to keep up. I spent a little bit of time with Elizabeth Gilbert and that is somebody whose work ethic is just phenomenal. She is just absolutely dogged 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. And 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 parents. 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. And I can't always do that work, but I can always recognize it. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us this evening, Steve. I've enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you. It's so nice. You know, oftentimes I'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 it 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.net slash almond