Wright Thompson on Reckoning with the South’s Buried Secrets

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1:07Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

1:52hey it's ryan welcome to another episode of the daily stoic podcast you probably noticed i don't quote a lot of living writers in my work most of the people whose work really lights me up are from a couple generations ago. I tend to focus on people whose reputation is established, interesting, have a canon of amazing work. But if you read Right Thing right now, I have a line I was talking about myself. I said, all artists are profoundly selfish on some level. Their commitment to their craft naturally consuming them, subsuming everything else underneath it. Wright Thompson, the sports writer whose piece is on Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali, and Ted Williams, I've used in many of my books, talked about the cost of these dreams.

2:40It takes a lot out of a person to be great at what they do, and it takes a lot out of the people around them too. Their spouse, their children, their staff, the people they compete against, the strangers they bump into on the street. The cost of success is largely paid not by us, but by those who love us, who support us, who work tirelessly for us, who even if well-paid are not likely to get the credit they deserve. And Wright Thompson's writing on the complicated lives of great people has challenged me to try to be better and more balanced. And actually, Wright Thompson has one of my all-time favorite books, this book called The Cost of These Dreams.

3:16That's a collection of his amazing sports writing. There's another book called PapiLand that's great. And I think he has one of the best episodes of the Daily Stoic podcast ever. we nerded out about history and philosophy and Bruce Springsteen writes work influenced even the opening pages of the Daily Dad, because he pointed me to this Bruce Springsteen idea of whether you're going to be an ancestor or a ghost. So he is one of my all-time favorite writers and one of my favorite people as well. And so he has this new book, which I read on a flight to Brazil a couple of weeks ago. And in fact, when I told him I was going, he immediately replied with a list of places that I needed to go on that trip.

4:01It didn't work out because I was only there for like a few hours, but he knows so many people. He knows so much stuff and he is just an absolutely beautiful writer. As I said, a fascinating person. He's a senior writer at ESPN and he's been on the podcast before we talked about Happyland and the convergence of sports and culture. But we both clearly love history. That was one of the things we nerded out about in that first episode, how history isn't as far away as we think. And one of the things that maybe you grew up learning about in school, if you're an American, is the murder of Emmett Till.

4:36It feels like it was forever ago, a brutal race, murder, hate crime that feels so inhuman, so depraved, so pointless that it must have been distant, distant history. But as Wright talks about in his incredible book, The Barn, there are multiple people still alive who knew Emmett Till. There was one of his aunts who was there when he was born, are still alive. As Faulkner said, the past isn't past. It's not even dead. And Wright is sort of the patron saint Faulkner-esque Mississippi writer of our time. His family is from there. His writing is so profoundly formed by what he experienced there. And he's also transcended and rose above it in a fascinating way.

5:31And so I wanted to have him on this new book. I'm not joking like reading this book there were moments where I had to put it down actually lots of moments I was talking to my producer about it like I found myself being able to read it only in few page chunks because it was so moving and sad and also frustrating and tragic but yet one of the best books that I've read this year one of the best books I've read on the south period and I don't know why I expected anything else from Ray Thompson in fact I didn't expect anything else I I was so excited to read this book since I read the first ESPN piece about it not too long ago.

6:07So I'll get into part one now of my conversation with the one and only Wright Thompson. I've got signed copies of The Barn and his other books, The Cost of These Dreams and Pappy Land at the Painted Porch. I'll link to those in today's show notes. You can follow him at Wright Thompson Books. And you can go to his website, WrightThompson.com.

6:42It's funny, there's a... Churchill was an author. Oh, and a good one. Yeah, I mean, he made a fortune as an author. He made his living as an author. And he has this thing about how at some point you have to just fling it to the public. You have to kill the thing and fling it to the public, the project. And that's like the hardest part is when you're like, okay, this thing was mine. It was in my control. And now like somebody else gets to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. But by the way, like real talk. I mean, if you were going to write about a place as fraught as the Mississippi Delta, and especially, you know, you're going to be a white guy from the Mississippi Delta writing about the Mississippi Delta, all you're really, you want to do that.

7:25You want to say, I'm trying to move the ball an inch. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Like you won't like, and it should be the world's. Like there's actually, like if you could separate your own sort of anxiety about it, it should be. I mean, the only way to get a place like this right is for everybody to tell the truth and then put it out in the world. and like one of the great joys I have and this is in the acknowledgements and it's sort of like an easter egg for future researchers is like they're gonna be writing books about this murder for the next 200 years yeah and I love the idea of somebody coming along and mining and like stripping this for parts yeah and fixing the mistakes and pushing the ball forward and like there's such a community of people writing about this specific murder and about the Mississippi Delta that I read every word of it.

8:22And so you do feel like you're just a link in a, you know, like you're just, you're just pushing the ball forward a little, and then somebody else is going to pick it up and push it forward. And like slowly one act of truth telling at a time, we will sort of replace the erasure of the place with memory. No, I feel that way with stoicism because it's weird when you're writing about something that you didn't invent. So you're like, it's not your thing. Like the specific phrasing of the words and how you ordered it and what you decided to do, that's all creatively yours. But you have no ownership of the source material.

9:00And so it's kind of this, it's this sensitive thing because like you, you're doing it for yourself as you do all creative projects. And yet you, you understand it's like collectively owned. And the idea of like, you know, I mean, I had the thought at multiple times writing this book. Am I comfortable with Emmett's cousin Wheeler Parker reading this? or frankly I mean I don't know him at all but like would I be comfortable if Chuck D read this? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, you have an obligation But like really, like am I prepared to stand by this forever? Yeah. And you know I mean I think the answer is yes Well I love the book, I want to talk a bunch about it but I also, you owe me an apology because this is how many notes I now have to go through?

9:51Perfect. Like so when I read I fold the pages and then And when I read a book that I like, I have a love-hate relationship with it because I know that when I finish, then I have a bunch of work I have to do. I have to write all this out by hand. It's going to be exhausting. I know. I do that, too. I highlight, and then I have to go back and type. Yes. Yeah. Like, I have a whole thing. Yeah. And it's a little like— What is your thing? How do you, like, read a book? So if I have a highlighter, I'll highlight. Yeah. If I have a pen, which I like better, I'll underline and make notes. Yeah. uh and uh and then my notes are off i go back and read them like sometimes like especially if it's a book where i get mad at the writer yeah i'll just write oh fuck you yeah in the margins it should be an argument like i feel like yeah yeah yeah like i'll circle stuff and just be like what that's not true and then and then what'll end up happening often is you realize that the thing you thought very often the book is right and you're wrong yeah but you had an immediate immediate like well that's not right uh and then uh and then i will type notes out yes and so like i have a do you type up passages from the books like do you like i like yeah when there's really good writing and your feet like the again it's a chore but you're getting in an important kind of reps by like playing somebody else's song i i it depends i mean like for the last four years i have read only a few things that weren't for this book yeah like i just read this book i loved called uh that it's just a masterpiece which is fentanyl tools we don't know ourselves it's a history of modern ireland and like i wanted to read it for fun yeah and like halfway through it i'm underlining yeah like and so it's sort of even when you don't want to do it yeah no i look it's funny you mentioned highlighters let me see if i think it's early in the book but um oh so i was i was like eating with my kids and i was like give me that fucking crayon like you know we were eating at a restaurant i was like i need that crayon i love it dude i love it let's get in the weeds man i was thinking about this though because i was writing upstairs uh as i love your book the cost of these dreams i was writing upstairs before you came here about this thing i'm trying to nail for the end of the book i'm finishing now about okay so you know you accumulate these like skills these this knowledge the books about wisdom, but I was thinking like how many people actually use what they have for good?

12:16Like how many people are really great at something? And I'm not saying that like, oh, you're a great basketball player and that's not good. I'm saying like, how many people just become great and then aren't just monsters or assholes? You know what I mean? Like how, like I was, I'm trying to, I can't figure out exactly what I want to say, But there's something about the rarity of being like great and good. It's almost impossible. That's when you meet Magic Johnson. Yeah. Or somebody who's like, you're like, how are you a billionaire and a nice guy? Yeah. Because like every billionaire is someone who had$500 million and was like, you know what?

12:56This isn't enough. Yes. Yeah. I need to go take more from someone else or I need to go dominate this industry. like, yeah, the not enoughness usually doesn't lead to a great place, even if it leads to success. That's right. So I'm writing about Lincoln a lot in the book. And there was this quote from, you know, his secretaries, Nicolet and Hay, one of whom is crazy. And I know you love these things. But so Lincoln's secretary, his legal secretary, who brings with him to the White House, goes on to be secretary of state for Theodore Roosevelt, which someone said would be like, if colin powell had been a secretary in kennedy's administration so so like and this is hay like the hay adams hotel john hay uh i don't know if it's the hay adams but john hay the you know we a splendid little war that guy that no it's the i think it's the hay adams hotel that's a that's a great bar yeah the off the record is it it's either on the record or off the right it should be off the record if it's yeah it's where all the reporters hang out right yeah but you're just like So anyways, he has this line because they were obsessed.

14:04Lincoln was like their hero because they're like 20 years old, 25 years old, working for this great man in the biggest moment of the country's history. And he had this line and they wrote the first biography of Lincoln, like the first sort of history of Lincoln. So they had all the papers. Anyways, he said Lincoln was a great man in a great era, but he's like, and what's incredible about him is that he has nothing to apologize or explain for from beginning to end. And he's like, oh yeah, like Washington, a lot of greatness, lots to explain for and apologize for. Like Napoleon, you go down the list of these sort of great men and women of history, and there's always like, but what about this?

14:51There's not many people that you don't pay that for. It's the first line of the obituary thing. I love the question, will Monica Lewinsky be in the first line of Bill Clinton's New York Times obituary? Probably, yeah. Or certainly the impeachment. Like William Jefferson Clinton, comma. Yeah. You know? Right. Like, who presided over a period of financial prosperity and whose career was troubled by— I just wonder, that's an interesting game. It's like, what do you have to apologize for? I mean, like one of the, and we'll get to it, but like, I mean, the part of the book that I'm most uncomfortable with is like, I have a really tough part in there about somebody in my family.

15:33And like, I didn't want to do it, but like at some point they were inserting themselves into the news cycle. Well, you said basically he was a great man who lived a good life. And then there was a decision point and he made as wrong a decision as you could make. And will never escape the gravitational pull of it. And I mean, like, one of the things that's interesting is, you know, I sort of see the guy who owns the barn, who's a really nice guy named Jeff Andrews, who I like a lot. His barbecue grill was like with an eyesight of it. Yeah. And I used to just be like, how could he cook hamburgers and drink Miller Lite?

16:12Yeah. And then so that was very early after I learned that the barn existed. And I was I started wondering, well, how how could he live so close? And then the next question is, well, how far is far enough? Yeah. And so one of the many things I wanted the book to do as it deals with the forces and systems that were building and building and building, as opposed to sort of try to say, oh, well, it was just the forces. Like I wanted expanding concentric circles of blame. Yeah. So like one of the things is like I tried to every inflection point where someone in the last thousand years could have stopped this.

16:51Yeah. I wanted to make sure that I stopped and pointed. Well, don't you think one of the reasons that sort of great driven, the person who says$500 million isn't enough, one championship, one Super Bowl is not enough, one bestseller is not like that, whatever drives the person to do. I think Evan Thomas said like, wrote a bunch of biographies, a bunch of different presidents. He's like, how many presidents would you say were honestly self-aware? And so the lack of self-awareness is probably what allows for the unmitigated total commitment to a thing, but also the compartmentalization. Well, there's that my favorite scene maybe ever in the West Wing is Jed Bartlett comes down to the situation room and it's all the joint chiefs in the CIA and the national security advisors and all of that.

17:41And he's basically like, yeah, I just left a there's a delegation from the American Cardiologist Association. And you wouldn't think there were 12 more arrogant people than the 12 of us. But there they are up in the green room. Yeah. And it was just like, it's funny because like, oh, there's a moment where Jed Bartlett realizes that he's also a narcissist. Yeah. That's what's so fascinating. You read these like huge biographies and you realize like, I just spent like a couple of days and I understand this person better than they understand themselves. And they spent their whole life in their thing.

18:14Like they didn't see that they were so obviously like the rosebud moments that are so obvious to like any third party, the person had zero awareness of. Well, so what's so interesting is, I mean, I know the Mississippi Delta better than I know anywhere else. It is my literal and metaphysical home. And so during the pandemic, this is how this started. I kind of got obsessed with two parallel questions that led to the book. One of them is somebody told me that the barn where Emmett Till was tortured and murdered was just somebody's barn out on a road in between Drew and Ruleville. And so I got just obsessed with that.

18:55And as we'll get into, when you start looking at what all is around this, it makes its own connections. And then the other is, you know, I grew up, my family farm is 23 miles away from this barn. I'd never heard of the barn. I'd never heard of Emmett Till until I left home to go to college. And so the idea that I actually didn't know the most fundamental thing about the place that I knew best in the world, that really couldn't stand. I think cognitive dissonance is like the most power. Like they say compound interest is the most powerful force in human history. But I think cognitive dissonance might be it.

19:32Like our inability to know things that we don't want to know or that it's painful to know or that would force us to do things if we did know. That's what drives like 95 % of human behavior. So here is what the jury said happened to Emmett Till. Yeah. This was the story that the defense lawyers told that they believed. and talked about in interviews. This is not, none of this is like, this is real. They believed that the NAACP and communist spies went and got a body out of a morgue, threw it in the Tallahatchie River so that people would find it. And that all of the witnesses who reported seeing the murderers, They were all coached by communist agitators.

20:25And they, Mamie Till came down and lied on the witness stand when she said that was her son, and that she had been paid off by collecting on a life insurance policy, and that Emmett Till was alive in Detroit. And that all of this had been done to make the white citizens of Mississippi look bad. That's the story that the jury believed. and believe I think is an interesting word because it's like it's believe but it's also let me not think about it so it's I can continue to believe it well and also like you think that it would be oh they were all in on it and they knew they killed them and they just did their duty yeah but you go read it like the jurors were mocking Mamie Till in their interviews afterwards if she'd have tried a little harder maybe she'd have squeezed out a tear is a direct quote yeah And so the question then becomes, did they know they were carrying the water?

21:22Yeah. Or did they actually believe it? And I think the answer is they actually believed it. I think it's both. I think these QAnon fuckers really believe it. But it's both, right? Because to believe something that's nonsensical means like you are deliberately not exploring all the things that would challenge the thing that you believe. And it becomes reinforcing over time. But I think there is this – it's not so much a conscious choice. I have a note card on my desk, actually, that I think connects to this. But I wrote, like, be wary of thinking things that require you not to have to—I forget if I said it exactly—but be wary of thinking things that, like, let you off the hook.

22:02You know, like, because if you think that, then you don't have to face anything. You don't have to change anything. You don't have to do anything. So that's what cognitive dissonance is. It's like a get-out-of-jail-free card. And you have to really like, it's like when you're writing the detail you love, you need to triple check. Yes. Cause like, so the, my researcher and fact checker on this book is a woman named Katie King. And there are a couple of things in there that were so crazy that I started trying to, I was like, man, could this possibly be? Yeah. So there were a couple of things I sent to her and I was like, I love this so much.

22:36Yes. I need you to like red team the shit. Like I need you to try to against it. And so we did that. We had a fact check where I rented a house and we moved into this house for like a week. And all we did was tear it apart because I got to the point where page after page of details that are so ominous and menacing and crazy that I started to think almost the opposite of the cognitive. I started to think, this can't be true. Yeah, but that's a really important skill that you have to build. And a lot of people not only don't build it, they build the opposite of it because it's sort of hard work.

23:17Well, it's also, as opposed to building, I think the natural state of being is cognitive dissonance. You have to go out of your way to sort of even come up with an intellectual framework to start trying to chip away at it. I mean, you know, this idea that like, you know, I drove from Austin here today. It gets rural pretty quickly. Yeah, I know. That's why I like it. And there are a lot of barns. Yeah. And you read this book. Editors say books can either go deep or wide. And I wanted this one to do both. And I think that like, because it did this thing where I didn't know about this barn. Yeah.

23:54And now what it does is because it's a profile of 36 square miles and one barn, but really it turns into this history, the entire history of the United States of America. Yeah. And so every barn I drive by now, whether in Mississippi or in the car on the way out here today, you start to wonder. What happened? I wonder what happened in that barn I don't know about. And the answer is that there is uncovered menace and blood in the dirt everywhere. Sure. And like knowing that is like the first step to sort of chipping away at your own cognitive dissonance.

24:36Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation, it getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

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27:42As being someone who's not natively from the South, although my grandparents are. I said, no, you're not from Texas, but Texas wants you anyway. But like, there's just a lot of magical thinking in the South about things that people want to be true or want not to be true. And like, like I have an old house up the street that was built in the like 1919. So not that old, 1915 thing. And I remember when we bought it, the people we bought it from told us a story. I was like, what's this little thing? There's like kind of like this barbecue, like overhang with like a little hut next to it. I was like, what is this like closet in the middle of the yard?

28:18And he goes, oh, that's an outhouse. And I go, an outhouse? Why does this have an outhouse? I mean, this is built like after indoor plumbing and it's a very nice house. And he goes, so the, the, the man and wife who funny, crazy story, the guy who bought this house, he builds his dream house with his wife. And then like a year later, he gets hit by a streetcar at the world fair in Chicago and never like dies, never lives in the house. Like the devil in the white city world fair. Yeah. That's great. But so I go, what's with the outhouse? And he's like, okay, so the man and wife who lived here, they never had kids.

28:51She would always have her friends over to the house or like book clubs and things. And he just didn't feel comfortable using the house with these women in the house. So he built an outhouse in the backyard that only he would use. And I remember, oh, okay. And other people had told me about this outhouse. And I go, what an interesting story. And then my wife and I were talking to someone. And they go, you know, you just described the plot of the movie, The Help, you idiot. And I was like, oh, yeah, of course. He didn't build an outhouse in the yard for himself. He built an outhouse in the yard so their black housekeeper would not use their bathroom.

29:26That's what this is obviously for. But this nonsensical story that's been repeated now for three generations, it's literally written like in the description of the listing when I bought my house. It's just more convenient to make up this nice story than to have to face the virulent racism inherent or the casual racism inherent in this other silly story. Well, you're sort of taught to believe that they're good people and bad people. Yeah. And what I've found, both in my life and especially researching this book, is that that's not really true. They're brave people and then they're cowards. Yes.

30:03And almost everyone is a coward. Yeah. And my mom is unbelievably politically active on Facebook. She's like, you know, one of the only Democrats in Mississippi. But I asked her one time because like it makes me nervous because people say really mean stuff. Yeah. And it makes me want to first of all go fight them. Yeah. Because I'm like, I will come like. Yeah. Fuck you. Yeah. Leave my mom alone. Leave my mom alone. But also like it just makes me nervous. She lives alone. And I'm like, why are you antagonizing these crazy people? Yeah. And she said it's because she was born in 1947 in the Mississippi Delta.

30:41And she's like, so I was there for all of it. Yeah. And she's like, I didn't know it was happening. And she's like, and the reason I didn't know what's happening is that I didn't want to know it was happening. And she said, I told myself that there is no excuse for silence. Yeah. And that I would never do it again. Well, it's like this whole edifice is built on these sort of polite fictions. That's a great word for it. The polite. That's right. There's obviously the really dark fictions also and the lies and the misinformation. But there's just these kind of things. And it's just like, don't challenge it.

31:17Don't say anything about it. It's like you call Tulsa a riot. Yes, exactly. It's not a riot. Yeah. It was a murder. And at the time, no one was calling it a riot. It was all over the newspapers. Everyone knew exactly what it was. It's just like in the aftermath of... of January 6th, different people with different agendas work really hard to describe and explain something a certain way. And they're hoping to win a certain narrative. And people who don't want to be, don't want to have to face certain things will go towards the narrative that, and that's what I was trying to write in that thing.

31:48It's like, what, what lets me off the hook here? What is intellectually, cognitively, and morally easier? That's where we go. And here you talk about like, one of the things that's interesting is, uh, and I didn't realize this about Emmett Till until I started researching this, which was, so 1954 is Brown v. Board. Yeah. 1955, they had Brown v. Board 2. That was Thurgood Marshall was representing the NAACP. That's the all deliberate speed. They had to go back and basically win it again to enforce it. And so in 1955, there was a governor's election in the state of Mississippi. And it was, I mean, Mississippi's had a lot of rhetorically violent campaigns in its history.

32:31but this might be the worst. And it was a race for the bottom. Ryan, people were saying crazy shit at these rallies. And you go back and read it and you're like, oh my God. And it's a race for the bottom. I mean, the candidates are trying to prove that they are the best ones to uphold segregation. And these speeches are just staggering. And so what I didn't realize, I don't think anyone realizes, is that these politicians give just one violent speech after another for months. The election is, so Emmett Till comes to Mississippi on a Sunday. His first day is a Sunday. The election is the following Tuesday.

33:11Yeah. He whistles on Wednesday. And like, there's such a direct line between political rhetoric and racial violence or class violence or political violence and like it could be 1955 it could be august of 1955 we could be talking about january the 6th politicians have always walked just played with hand grenades with the pentapult yeah yeah and like you you start reading what they're doing and you could just see i was just joking it was you know no like like there are people playing you talked about the narcissism or the lack of self-awareness they are playing with the most dangerous forces possible which they themselves are very insulated from to to to do what to win an election to get rich yeah like that's what it like it's just incredible and so you know the way in which so much of what's happening in our politics now feels like trying to claw back everything that's happened since 1954.

34:17Yeah. And like, in that way, the book is both a history and there is a predictive element of it. I mean, we talk about the structure later, but the reason the last act is tomorrow. Yeah. Is that, is that like, this has happened, this is happening, this will happen. Well, yeah, there are all these, the play fictions are interesting, true, the stories we tell ourselves, because my grandmother grew up in rural Arkansas in a small town like this. and it was just sort of like, oh, this is this Mayberry wonderful place. And it wasn't until later that I started talking to my family about it. And I go, where did she go to high school?

34:53And they were like, oh, she went to Little Rock High School because the high school where she was wasn't great. And I was like, because I met Ernest Green. I interviewed him and I was trying to figure out what class he was. So she went before that, right? So she went to like segregated Little Rock High School, a high school that they descend in the 101st Airborne to integrate. Yeah. And I was like, well, so I was like, was her elementary school segregated also? And they were like, oh, no, no, it wasn't. And I was like, well, what do you mean it wasn't? And they were like, oh, there are no black people in our town.

35:25And I was like, that doesn't sound right. And even if it is right, that didn't just happen. That would have been the result of that would have been the result of a considerable amount of violence and control to create that scenario. And so there's these kind of like, just pull like these things that we say and what you're obscuring, it's like the iceberg thing. There's a tip of the status quo and beneath it was real ominous menacing shit. Well, okay. So, I mean, like I grew up with maybe the most sort of liberal parents in my little town who just hammered into me that these systems were wrong.

36:02And like, I still did not know Emmett Till's name until I left the state to go to college. Yeah. And it never occurred to me, frankly, I mean, for a long time. Yeah. About how hard it must have been to curate a nearly completely white life in such a black place. Yeah. Like it never occurred to me. Right. Like, well, this shit doesn't just happen. Yeah. And so I don't know. I mean, I don't know if you ever feel like this, but I feel like every other thing I ever wrote was just to like put me in the position to write this. and try to understand this place that I know, thought I knew really well.

36:45And this place that I love and still love, by the way. Sure. But like to make sense of it. The best books are the ones where the person who wrote it is the only person who could have written it. And they did it the way that only they could have done it. And I think that's very true for your book. And like, I remember a couple of years ago, my mother-in-law gave us a kid, like Ruby Bridges wrote a kid's book. And she wrote on the inside about how she lived in Louisiana when it happened. She lived in Monroe, I think. Anyways, she was like, we're the same age. And I was like, wait, what? And that's when it hit me.

37:24It's like, oh, yeah, these things, and you talk about this in the book, we think of these historical events as being historical events, which obscures the fact that they happened to real people. And then also because it's history, it feels like it was a long time ago. And it's like, I mean, what's that one someone pointed out to me that Martin Luther King and Anne Frank were born the same year? Dude, it's like one of the farmers at the center of all this is a guy named Clint Sheridan. Yeah. Because one of the witnesses worked on Clint's farm. And Clint sort of went out of his way to try to protect the witness.

37:58And ultimately, even though he had some power, couldn't. Yeah. Failed. but and like some of his family wonder if sort of he has was shunned because of that yeah but what's interesting is his son who passed away recently uh whose name was sydney sydney was obsessed with this because all of the early newspaper reporting reports put the murder in the sheridan barn when really it was the milan barn and then they corrected the mistake but nobody ever sees the correction so that's been repeated over and over so sydney sheridan would write letters to book publishers asking them to correct it. And it didn't, I didn't know years into reporting this, that Sidney and Emmett were the exact same age.

38:41Don't you say the thing that his dad was born during the civil war and died like after Pearl Harbor? Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah. It's fucking nuts. So you like, this is not that ancient history. And like, these are people who saw the civil war and Pearl Harbor. Yeah. Like I think about my mother's father was born in 1900. he was born before airplanes and lived to see men walk on the moon yeah yeah and it's bananas it's totally bananas like the the the dizzying change i mean one of the things that like this is we could have a whole side conversation but like one of the things i think people miss most about faulkner is that the animating energy to me of faulkner is that he's writing about the Mississippi Delta, which was a almost uninhabitable hardwood swamp until 1890, 1900.

39:32And then a swath of land that would have taken a thousand years to clear in old Europe was cleared and drained in 20 years and turned from an uninhabitable malarial hardwood swamp into the world's largest cotton plantation. And it happened like that. And so the dizzyingness of civilization, like I love to go read every Faulkner reference to a locomotive. Do you know what I mean? Like it's clear that like the good and bad of civilization was the tension that was really eating him up. One of the ways to sort of bring that home is you like, you think about someone who's old now, and then you think about like who the old people were when they were young.

40:18or like you pick a historical figure and you think about like, who was the oldest person that they met? And really you go, oh, okay. So this person is touching. It gets real old, real fast. So my grandfather shared the earth for a year with Queen Victoria. And, uh, you know, in here, Gloria Dickerson, who is one of, if not the hero of the story and her parents were sharecroppers who integrated the Drew Mississippi public school system. um, Gloria knew an enslaved ancestor. Yeah. Like talked to her. Yeah. Her stories, not like read a book. Yeah. Like talk to her great grandmother. Yeah. Who had been born enslaved.

41:03Yeah. Or you tell Nathan Bedford Forrest, who is a psychopath, his son or grandson died in World War II. His grandson was the first general officer killed in combat in World War II. Yeah. And like, not that long ago. No. And you know, you start realizing like, none of it is ancient history. And like when you follow, one of the things the book does is it tracks the families of everybody who ended up in that barn on that night, how they got there. Yeah. And it's a lot closer than you think. Yeah. I mean, one of the many new revelations in there is that the deep connections between the jurors and the killers.

41:46Yeah. Because they were all part of this same weird little tribe almost living in a mountain holler. And a lot of these people are still alive, man. I mean, Jimmy Carter's still alive. Jimmy Carter grew up without electricity. Jimmy Carter remembers when they got electricity. Yeah, I know. And I remember when they came and installed cable because I could get MTV. Yeah, yeah. No, it's just like, I mean, And I think about that all the time. I mean, one of the really incredible things in this book was these two old men who lived on the Druder Rule of a Road, one white and one black, who had grown up there.

42:20And I had both of them drive me down the – I'll do a real quick geography lesson. So the barn is set in – land is divided into a grid. And the invention of that grid and how land is priced is sort of the animating act that created the United States of America. And the fight over the smallest and largest purchase size and the price was an existential fight between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson over how many acres someone could buy and what it would cost. And would that benefit sort of capital heavy land speculators or small yeoman farmers? I mean, it's a gross oversimplification. But so the land grid was created to be able to take the wilderness and turn it into a commodity.

43:05And so Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian, is the 36 square miles of land around the barn where Emmett Till was killed. And so in that square, you have a Native American city where Harvard has been doing archaeology since 1941. You have land owned by one of, if not the central architect of the Mississippi Jim Crow laws, which became America's Jim Crow laws. You have the family of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general, and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. You have the Sunflower Plantation, which was owned by big New York industrialists where Teddy Roosevelt spent the night, where he gave as a housewarming gift to the woman who owned the plantation house, two ginkgo trees, one of which is still there.

43:56The house is gone, but the ginkgo tree is there. Dockery Farms, which where every sort of serious music scholar says the blues were invented, you could see it. I mean, like, and so like the square of land where the barn is, it's also the exact geographic center of the Mississippi Delta. Yeah. So there is a case to be made that, you know, this place was wilderness long after they'd caught Geronimo. Yeah. And so like there's a world in which if manifest destiny is the sort of civic religion of the United States of America that drives a lot of the cognitive dissonance you were talking about. And, you know, I love that Greg Grandin book, The End of the Myth.

44:37But like if there's a, you know, there's a case to be made that the land where Mattill was killed is where America was finally settled. Yes. And like. Yeah, like it was settled, you say, in the book after the gunfight at O.K. Corral. That's right. Yeah, that's insane. And so like you start to realize. Which itself, by the way, was not. I think people think cowboys and Indians, they think early 1800s. That 1888, that's when the gunfight at OK Corral happened. So even that is later than you would think. No. And like, I mean, was Mussolini alive when the gunfight at the OK? Probably, yeah. So you start thinking about.

45:13Churchill was. Like that's bananas. Yeah. That, you know, in Winston Churchill, one of my favorite things in this book is he makes a legitimate appearance as a legitimate character. Yeah. And like, you know, like I went, I read all of the, I read a lot of Parliament and was able to identify what I think is the day the Industrial Revolution ended. Yeah. And it's, you know, it ended in 10 Downing Street with Winston Churchill basically pulling the plug out from the British cotton manufacturers and just saying we can't, like, we have to look to the future. And, like, the commodity that runs the world now is oil and not cotton.

45:52Well, there's something, yeah, you saying that brings up something I've been thinking about, which is, okay, we tend to think of history as chronological. but really it's this kind of concurrent backwards and forwards. So it's like, on the one hand, it seems crazy. You're like, okay, the, basically the American South was propped up by the British textile industry for generations up until, as you said, like Churchill's, uh, Churchill's time. And yet like the anti-slavery movement begins in Britain before America is, is a country. So the two following things I love, this is, so the largest plantation in the Mississippi Delta was owned for a very long time by the uh it's called dealt and it's one of the central characters in this book it's called the delta pond and land planning company yeah and it's now owned by bear and it was owned by monsanto and uh but what's nuts is that uh it was owned for very very long time by the manchester fine doublers and spinners association which was the largest manufacturing conglomerate in the world which by the way still exists yeah there you know if you've bought lingerie from victoria's secret.

46:58A lot of these things are still around. It's all still around. And so the plantation where this happened was, it was, so it was owned by a British manufacturing conglomerate. The president of the plantation was the main person, uh, in the Roosevelt administration for cotton policy, which means that the person directing the United States government's cotton policy in the 1930s was an employee of a Manchester based manufacturing company. And so you have this idea that like uh manchester so you had worker irish workers in manchester who are living in these cholera slums yeah you go read these stories about angels meadow it's as bad as it i mean they are they don't make any money yeah the reason there's such a thing as sunday school is these kids were 12 years old being forced to work in factories orphans yeah and somebody was like they got to go to school one day a week that's what sunday school is started in manchester during the Industrial Revolution.

47:55And they are donating money to send to the newly freed, former enslaved people. Yeah. While the factory owners are flying Confederate flags from on top of the factory. Yeah. Like race in America has always been tied to global class struggles and capitalism in a way that I didn't fully realize. Yeah. Or like my ranch is like maybe 30 minutes from here. and you know like people make all these weird decisions so someone had cut out like a three acre parcel yeah at some point or whatever so i was finally buying it back and um as i got the survey i'm looking at the survey and there's this name on i don't understand some weird european name and i can't figure out what it is and i assume it's oh this must be the person who owned the land before whatever finally i googled the name and i realized i'm looking around it's it's like all over all and i realized oh this is the name of the person who got the land grant from Mexico.

48:53That's right. And you're like, that name is still affecting my life today, all these years later. Let me tell you, I got into the land records here. Yeah, I know. And so the first land patent granted by the United States government for land in Township 22 North, Range 4 West, was Section 8, given to a guy named John Clark, who founded the town where I grew up, whose house was next door to me. His daughter was named Blanche Clark. She married a lawyer from Clarksdale named Mr. Couture. He built her this huge mansion next door to the house where she grew up. The playwright Tennessee Williams grew up in my neighborhood.

49:32So all these characters are real people. Like my mom's friend John, John's mother's baby doll. And Blanche Clark Couture is Blanche. And so these are all real people. And I grew up next to the last Clarks who lived in that house. It's a bed and breakfast now. When I was there, this was the last generation and it was all slipping through their fingers and they ended up losing it. And I mean, I remember like the house was dark and I only went in it once. There was a kid my age who we didn't see that much. And I just, my memory of it is that it was like, it was this grand, empty, dark house. Yeah.

50:10And you could like, I grew up so surrounded by fading, fading grandeur and mythology and didn't realize that one, everybody didn't. Yeah. And two, didn't really understand what it was I was seeing, just that like the shit was everywhere. Yeah. And I start doing this book and like, sometimes you have like an outline above your desk when you're writing. I had a huge post-it note. I meant to bring it to you. Actually, I thought about this and then didn't. But it just said everything is everything. Yeah. You know, was it Malcolm X was like everything south of Canada is the south or everything south of Canada is Mississippi.

50:45Yeah. Like, I feel like you can't write the history of America, but I can write the history of 36 square miles of it. Yeah. And start to sort of, there's this sort of backbeat of Howard Zinn, like, this is the real history of America. I'm always amazed, too, when you're reading history and you think some of these conclusions that we've come to, like, the interconnectedness or the globalized impact of slavery, like, we think we're just, like, unearthing it now because, like, these myths took over. But it's like when you read like Lincoln's speeches, he fucking knew this. The reason he was so lenient on the South was that he understood that – first off, he understood that the North had had slavery not that long ago and then was economically as complicit or guilty as everyone else.

51:31They might not be whipping the slaves, but they were the reason why the slaves were being whipped. Well, you know, if cotton was oil, then Mississippi was Saudi Arabia. Yeah. And like those people want their 10%. You know, the bankers in New York and London and Manchester and Liverpool, by the way, start pulling on old banks. Yeah. Like take Barclays and start digging back through it. Yeah. Like they're all connected. Everything goes back to Liverpool. You can mortgage a slave. No, no. Not could, but like that was the whole. Right, right. And then, yeah, the financial crisis, you realize how assets are interconnected with each other.

52:07So the whole banking system is built on the backs of this thing. And Lincoln sort of understood that, I think, in a way that we don't give—we think of these things as these just moral issues as right or wrong. He understood it was a moral issue that was right or wrong, but he understood the sort of the through line of it and then had this—that's why what Lincoln—to me, the fundamental break in Lincoln's sort of passivity towards slavery comes with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, because he realizes, oh, slavery was this institution in decline. And then one person or a group of people made a choice that said, hey, actually, it's more politically expedient if we just let people choose.

52:46And it becomes a sort of political issue now with billions of dollars of money on the line if it can be allowed to expand. One of the things that's incredible is – and by the way, of course that this existed. Yeah. That big modern trade organizations dedicated to the textile industry. Yeah, sure. So when American slavery ended, they needed to figure out how to keep this land. Like the global commodity markets needed to keep this land in huge chunks. Yeah. And like you can read the minutes of conferences. They were inventing sharecropping. Yeah. Like it didn't just happen. Yeah. Like people – like there was a conference in Brussels.

53:30Like people sat in rooms together. Yeah. In Marriott, whatever a Marriott was then. Yeah. And they wore really nice clothes. Yeah. And they probably all thought they were really good people. Yeah. And they all were deacons in their church. And they sat around in, you know, rooms with crown molding, drinking tea, inventing sharecropping. Yeah. Because that kept things more or less the same. And a change might be disruptive or bad for business. And it's like, it's the way I think about like, and like, I hate to say this, like, but like, I always want to tell people when they come to work for ESPN, young people like HR is not your friend.

54:06Sure. The only reason HR exists is so they could fire you in a sophisticated enough way that you can't sue them. So like, you know, or somebody who works in healthcare, like I just had to fight Cigna on something, scumbags. And like the people who work there have made a moral choice. Yeah. But if you ask them, they'd be like, well, I'm just a good German or whatever. That's a terrible analogy to compare Cigna to the Nazis. You just think, well, this is just how it is. Yeah. But somebody made it that way. But shareholder value is a modern, is a relatively modern construct. Yes. And all it does is excuse people from having any sort of moral code.

54:46You don't ever have to make a decision because it's been made for you. Yes. And like, you know, I mean, enslavement, sharecropping, all of it is shareholder value. It's the Manchester Fine Doublers and Spinners Association vertically integrating their supply chain in 1915. We need it this way. Yeah. And we don't care who. We don't care. We don't care who gets hurt. You know, money's only ethic is to reproduce itself. Yeah. And so we've invented an entire modern. You know, it's interesting because you write so much about stoicism, which is a ethical framework for being a human being. I mean, I needed to get tickets once for a World Series game in the bleachers when it was at Wrigley Field.

55:31And I didn't want to ask Major League Baseball or the Cubs for tickets because like it felt super unethical. OK. Because like I'm writing about the Cubs. Yeah. And so I went on StubHub and bought them. Yeah. And we ran into a problem with the expense accounts because there was some person at ESPN, again some you know one of the endless vice presidents who said our policy is you have to go through my office which goes through major league baseball and i'm like but that i'm like yeah but that's unethical yeah he's like well it's not unethical because it's company policy and so that's what like yeah that happens over and over and over company policy which only exists to maximize shareholder value is the new ethical code.

56:15Yeah. And it excuses everyone doing shitty things to other people. Yeah. And so you talk about cognitive dissonance. Yeah. Like that's it. Like all of this is, I mean, that whole book, when you start reading it is people who wanted 10 % instead of six. Yeah. And like all of this suffering and, you know, can I say this real quick? Yeah. Yeah. So this blows my mind because, you know, the Mississippi Delta cotton boom was really 20 years. We did all of this for 20 years. Yeah. And then and then the consequences and the legacy of those decisions last for 100 plus years. The great Mississippi Delta cotton boom lasted 20 years.

56:58The suffering and killing and decay that would follow for the next century were the price of three great years and a dozen good ones. Those two decades also marked the peak of the lost cause Confederate mythology. Consider when all these Confederate statues went up around the state. Consider the history of cotton in the Delta. The land clearing finished around 1900. The price of cotton collapsed for good in 1923. And what happened in between? Port Gibson and Aberdeen raised statues in 1900. Macon in 1901. Fayette in 1904. Carrollton and Beulah and Ocalona in 1905. Tupelo and Ole Miss in 1906. Brandon and Oxford and West Point in 1907.

57:42Cleveland and Lexington and Raymond and Duck Hill in 1908. Greenville and Winona in 1909. Hattiesburg twice and Grenada in 1910. Gulfport and Kosciuszko and Quitman and Ripley and Brooksville and Heidelberg in 1911. Columbus and Laurel and Meridian and Philadelphia and Vaden in 1912. Greenwood and Sumner in 1913, Greenwood again in 1915, Hazlehurst in 1917, Louisville in 1921. Many of these were placed quite intentionally on the lawn of the local courthouses, sending a message about the law and whom it was designed to protect. Most of the monuments around the state were built during the brief but emotionally powerful cotton boom.

58:25Not a single courthouse statue in the state of Mississippi was erected after 1923. the lost cause was always about cotton and money. Let the record show I marked that page. You did. I saw that. That was very pleasing. No, no. I think it, yeah, it's fascinating. That's what we're talking about. Yeah.

58:50We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

59:27Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

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1:00:52I have a book in there I want to give you about the cattle boom. The exact same economics. It's actually internationally financed. Most like Theodore Roosevelt's neighbor in the Badlands was a French marquee, you know, like who had like he was the fifth, you know, in line. So his dad, you're not going to inherit. So he has to go make his fortune overseas. he uses aristocratic money to start to start a cattle ranch which kicks off a cattle boom from the south to get the cattle up it's it's fascinating well you just i mean over and like so the money planning the store where emmett till whistled was in famously in money mississippi yeah the money planning company was owned by charles merrill of merrill lynch okay you start realizing the degree to which Manchester and Liverpool and London and New York, you know, there's a reason that Vanderbilt and Duke.

1:01:47Well, we think of, yeah, we think of British colonialism as being, but we were a colony and we, they continued to colonize America, just not owning the government. It was just more the modern version of colonialism. It's like they couldn't remove the Native Americans until after George Washington died. because George Washington, he was fundamentally British. And so like the government of England, he philosophically thought of the tribes as sovereign nations. And so the real founding father of America is probably Andrew Jackson. Yeah, the vicious part of what America is. And he, like, well, I mean, all the founding fathers were enslavers.

1:02:32So like, let's not. But in terms of modern populist America, and I think somebody will fact check me on this, but they had to wait until George Washington died. He died in 1799, and I think the first Indian Removal Act was 1804. They couldn't do it until those guys were gone. But the minute they were gone, it's interesting. I sort of feel like the real complexity and moral ambiguity and deep discomfort with their own choices of the founding fathers, we should have more of them, not less. And I sort of feel like the purge of Jefferson and Madison and Washington, like we're missing a really golden opportunity to fight the cognitive dissonance.

1:03:24dissonance. I mean, if anything, this book is about the existential American battle between memory and erasure. It's a fascinating psychological thing, right? Because most of the early founders were conflicted about slavery and articulated often privately all the problems with it. And got less and less so. By 1820s, 1830s, slavery not only goes from this noxious thing we inherited from the British to a positive good. And that's the definition of cognitive. And in 1850, it really gets, you know, and so you think about, and it's all tied to the global cotton markets. You know, the price of cotton, I checked it this morning, it's 67 cents a pound.

1:04:08You know, it's below production. Like the degree to which the speculation in land and cotton markets is driving when you read narratives written by enslaved people the way they talk about how aware they were of the liverpool price of cotton because how directly related that was to violence yeah when the price got too low the violence went up but when the price got too high it went up too because they had too much money too much money and and it's just like, you know, uh, our farm manager was telling me one time that he was complaining and this, it occurred, I never thought about this in the context of, of, of this until he said it, I wrote about it in the book, but talking about how, uh, can't control the weather.

1:04:58Yeah. Can't control the price of the seed or the chemicals. Uh, you can't control the price of the equipment. Yeah. And then you can't control, you don't set your own prices. Right. So you're getting squeezed both ways. The only input, the only X in the equation of a farm budget that a farmer has ever had any control over is the price of labor. Yes. And like when he said that to me, I was just like Well, that struck me because I worked in American Apparel And Dove started in South Carolina knitting, you know, with a knitting place Because they used to make all the clothes in the American South too When they stopped shipping overseas They're a big garment industry in the sort of upper South It was the mills Yeah, and what he was saying, he was like The problem with fashion has always been like that people decided that But because the competition for price at the store was always suppressing prices, the only way you could make money was by paying the people who make the clothes less and less and less.

1:06:02So that was all the exploitation in South. And then that's what sets off the sweatshop boom all over the US. And he was like, if I can just be a better brander and make a product that I can charge more money for, I don't have to fuck people over. And just like the idea that no one had thought of that was so fascinating to me because what's fascinating is like fashion is expensive. Like clothes are like the gap pays this not very much for its labor, but it's so inefficient everywhere else that it still has to suppress labor. So, yeah, the incentive to try to squeeze more money from the human beings making your shit is responsible for all this evil instead of just deciding to be more creative or make a product that's worth more money where you can have good market.

1:06:47Well, it's like somebody explained to me why the shareholders of Walmart don't have to pay back the United States government for all of the - Their employees are on food stamps. Yeah. So like as a taxpayer, I want to be made whole before a shareholder gets a penny. Yeah. And like, you know, you talk about cognitive dissonance. Nobody is weaker than the people at the bottom of a commodity chain. Yeah. And because of their localized power, no one is less self-aware about their weakness. So one of the crazy things about this is, one, when you just realize that everybody talks about, oh, the South had great generals.

1:07:20Not really. Like the South had a bunch of three-star generals who wanted to, they wanted the fancy uniforms. But they didn't have the sort of major colonel class who were just about logistics. The Confederate Army, the South wouldn't let Jefferson Davis nationalize the railroads. they were so fighting about their own shit that they wouldn't let the president there they like so the the confederate army couldn't get eight pounds of hay a day yeah to its horses yeah the very first thing lincoln did yeah was nationalize the railroads and all those west point number crunchers i mean they had those trains rolling up yeah there was a reenactment cosplay thing happening in real time yeah yeah and then the other thing is that they started this war and then like arrogant idiots they decided we're going to show the europe we're going to withhold our cotton crop yeah and the thing they didn't realize is the i know this and like the most important thing in the price of cotton is what's called the carryover yeah how many bales from the year before the year before that how many bales are still in the system yeah that have not been turned into clothes.

1:08:37And the 1860 and 1861 carryover was so great that the world textile industry didn't really need any cotton for two years. And what's so infuriating about all these statues and all these people who talk about - No, they led the people down the garden path. They killed these people. You know what it was? These were all like Lindsey Graham's. They were politicians who just liked to say crazy shit and never actually had to do anything. And then they're the dog that caught the car. Yeah, yeah. And they were just totally, they just wanted to give crazy speeches and be populist assholes. And then all of a sudden they talked so much shit that they actually had to go do it.

1:09:18Well, they realized that the people a couple levels below them actually believed what they were saying. And then when - And then they began to believe. It started out, I mean, it's the cycle. It's cynical politicians saying stuff they know isn't true. And then it's believed by huge swaths of the population. And from those swaths, new politicians arise to replace these guys. So as opposed to cynical people, you now have true believers. And then events start to happen, and the cynical ones realize, okay, we can't actually go off this ledge. So let me go try to negotiate with my people. And they can't.

1:09:55You can't. And they realize, oh, they really believe it, and they're not based in reality, and they're not aware of what they're about to do. So the South started a war. But objectively, they could never win. Their military strategy was – like Robert E. Lee is a strategic genius who had he decided to do what they would call like a Fabian strategy. If the South decided to stay in the South and make the North come beat them in the South, it probably would have either gone on for a lot longer or gone very differently. He was a bad general from top to bottom. Well, and the thing that's wild is they also – the global cotton market in 1865 was so much more global and interconnected because they had communications.

1:10:39They had the ability – They laid the transatlantic cable during the war, right? Yeah, and so that meant – the whole global commodity market changed. Yeah. And in some ways, the South has never caught up. Yeah. Like it was dominating the world at something. And. Lit that thing on fire, basically. Lit it on fire. And then Indian, Egypt, like the cotton market just kept on going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, you know, the degree to which there's a book you should read if you haven't called Empire of Cotton by a Harvard professor. I have. I marked it at the back. I read it twice. Yeah. This is not an exaggeration.

1:11:20And I marked the first one up so much that I ruined it and I had to get another one. Yeah. And he's doing a book now. We have the same editor. He's doing a book now, A History of Capitalism. Yeah. That isn't out that I've never read. But my editor every now and then sends me his text message. He's just like, this thing's unbelievable. And so that's going to be. But like. Eric Larson's book on Fort Sumter that he just put out is incredible because you basically realize, basically he sort of presents the South as this sort of generation. of snowflakes who'd created this kind of information bubble where like things that were objectively not true they believed to be true and that's sort of you can feel it just escalating and escalating and escalating and eventually culminating in them starting a war that they then told themselves was an invasion of themselves do you know what it's so like this starts the civil war and then it tells itself it's the underdog who uh is the victim of the thing and And, you know, still mythologizes the military leaders.

1:12:26And you go talk to West Point people and like, you know, I had a long conversation with a West Point historian who was a general. But he was just like, and he's really into the railroads, like what I was talking about. And he just was like, they just were not prepared to do the real work of fighting a war. like of making sure that, you know, eight pounds of hay and that bullets. Well, because the people running the Southern government didn't actually give a shit about anyone. They only cared about their own plantations and their, I mean, the vast majority of the people in the army don't own slaves.

1:13:03So you have this, what the South was, was this oligarchy that had grabbed control of the whole United States and then as a surprise, loses an election. You think about what the three-fifths compromise is. It's a way to rig the representative government against itself. So if you get to count slaves as people who determine how many representatives you get in Congress, but you don't have to allow them to vote, you've now weighted the system in your favor and you've rigged the system. So the South has rigged the system that most of the presidents are Southern. Most of the presidents have owned slaves.

1:13:45They control the Senate. They control the House, more or less. They control the Supreme Court. So they've rigged the whole system. And then what happens is, as a surprise to them, because they split the ticket in the election of 1860, Lincoln's surprise wins. And basically, the South - But then it's just, they just take their ball and go home. But they realize, oh, shit, this whole system, nobody wants the slave power. Nobody wants what we want. And they felt threatened for real for the first time. It's like with that expression now, like when you're used to privilege, equality sounds like oppression.

1:14:21Basically, they were like, oh, shit, we're going to be in a representative democracy. And that's not good for us. And so those same people just took their ball and went home and then controlled the southern government and wielded it again for their own special interest, not the totality of the south. And so, of course, they did a bad job. Well, it's also, yeah, it's a government based in conspiracy and in cognitive dissonance, which is why every time it had to interact with any sort of truth-telling market, whether the field of battle or economic. When it had to go into zero-sum, non-sentimental, objective, competitive spaces, every time got its ass kicked.

1:15:09It could only succeed in a rhetorical bubble in which the sort of basic foundations were never questioned. And when it had to go, you know, they were burning cotton in the wharves of Memphis. Yeah. It just was, it's just idiotic. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.

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