The Daily Stoic - Wright Thompson on Reckoning with the South’s Buried Secrets

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Junior were born in the same year. The last known widow of a Civil War veteran lived to see Barack Obama become the first African-American President. Emmett Till would be the same age as Neil Diamond, Martha Stewart, and Bob Dylan in 2024 if he was not brutally tortured and murdered in 1955. Facts like these remind us that history is not as far away as we think it is. Wright Thompson, is a Senior Writer at ESPN and author of The Cost of These Dreams, Pappyland, and most recently, The Barn, which uncovers the real story of Emmett Till’s murder in the Mississippi Delta. Wright joins Ryan to talk about the impact of cognitive dissonance, how political rhetoric has shaped racial violence, why history is closer than we think, the rise and fall of the cotton boom, and what it was like for Wright to learn the truth about Emmett Till’s story. You can get signed copies of The Barn and Wright’s other books, The Cost of These Dreams, Pappyland, at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/You can follow him on Instagram @wrightthompsonbooks or head to his website, https://wrightthompson.com/🎙️Listen to Wright Thompson’s first interview on the Daily Stoic Podcast | Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch it on YouTube!🎥 Subscribe to the Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing Right Now on Audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30 day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You can get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a loving wife and mother.

But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her, and she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is the Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders. He turns to a journalist for help.

That's me, Carmilla. Kill List is a true story of how one writer uncovers a global conspiracy, taking matters into his own hands to warn those whose lives are in danger. And it turns out, convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow Kill List on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Kill List early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry+. Welcome 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. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Hey, 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 of 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 pieces 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. It 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. That's a collection of his amazing sports writing. There's another book called Pappyland 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 gonna 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. It 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 Pappyland 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 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, it's the murder of Emmett Till. It feels like it was forever ago, a brutal race, murder, hate crime that feels so inhuman, so depraved, so pointless that it must haveraved, 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, 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 transcendent and rose above it in a fascinating way. And 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 Wright Thompson. In fact, I didn't expect anything else. I was so excited to read this book since I read the first ESPN piece about it not too long ago. So 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 Papulant at the Painted Porch. I'll link to those in today's show notes. You can follow Right Thompson.com.

It's funny. There's a like Churchill was an author. Like people don't know. And like a good one. Yeah. I mean, he made like a fortune as an author. He made his living as an author. Yeah. And, and he has this thing about how like, at some point't think. Oh, and like a good one. Yeah, I mean, he made like a fortune as an author. He made his living as an author. And he has this thing about how like,

at some point you have to just like fling it to the public. You have to kill the thing and fling it to the public. Like 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, 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. You want to say, I'm trying to move the ball an inch. Yeah. You know, like you won't like, and it, it should be the worlds. 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 to, 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 a Easter egg for future researchers is like, they're going to be writing books about this murder for the next 200 years. And I love the idea of somebody coming along and mining and like stripping this for parts and fixing the mistakes and pushing the ball forward. And like, if there's such a community of people writing about this specific murder and about the Mississippi Delta that I read every word of it. And so

you do feel like you're just a link in a, you know, 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, like, it is 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 like creatively yours. But you have no ownership of the source material. And 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 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 want to mean?

An obligation. But like really like, like, am I prepared to stand by this forever? Yeah. And you know, I mean, I, 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. Perfect. Like, so when I read, I fold the pages and then 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 and it's a little like, what is your thing? How do you like read a book? So, uh, 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, I'll just write, oh, fuck you in the margins. It should be an argument. Like I feel like, yeah. Yeah. Like I'll circle stuff and just be like, what? That's not true. And then, and then what will end up happening often is you realize that the thing you thought very often, the book is right and you're wrong. But you had an immediate,

immediate like, well, that's not right. And then, 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 when there's really good writing and I'm 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, it depends. I mean, like for the last four years, I have read only a few things that weren't for this book. Like I just read this book I loved called 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. And like halfway through it, I'm underlining it. And so it's sort of even when you don't want to do it. Yeah. No, I look it's funny

You mentioned highlights. 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 Like, you know, we were eating in a restaurant. I was like I need that crayon. I love it Let's get in the weeds, man. I was thinking about this though, because I was writing upstairs, 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 accumulate these skills, this knowledge, the book's about wisdom, but I was thinking like how many people actually use what they have for good? Like how many of 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 trying to, 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 or somebody who's like, you's like, how are you a billionaire and a nice guy? Cause like every billionaire, someone who had $500 million and was like, you know what, this isn't enough.

Yes. Yeah. I need to, I need to go take more from someone else or I need to go dominate this industry. Like, yeah, the, the, 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, Nicolay 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 like, and this is Hay, like the Hay Adams Hotel? John Hay. I don't know if it's the Hay Adams Hotel, but John Hay, the, you know, a splendid little war, that guy.

You know, it's the, I think it's the Hay Adams Hotel. But John Hay, the you know, we a splendid little war that guy. That no, it's the I think it's the hey Adams Hotel. That's a that's a great bar. Yeah, the off the record is it's either on the record or off the right. It should be off the record if it's on. Yeah, it's where all the reporters hang out. Right? Yeah. But you're just like, so anyways, he has this line because they so they they were obsessed. Lincoln was like their hero like they because they're like 20 years old 25 years, working for this great man and biggest moment of the country's history. And he had this line that they wrote, they wrote the first biography of Lincoln, like the first sort of history of Lincoln, because they had all the papers. Anyways, he said, Lincoln was a great man in, you know, 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 you're just like, oh yeah, like Washington, 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? Oh, there's not many people that. It's the first line of the obituary thing. Like I love the question.

Like will Monica Lewinsky be in the first line of Bill Clinton's New York Times obituary? Probably. Yeah. Or there's certainly the impeachment. Like William Jefferson Clinton comma, you know, like who presided over a period of, of, uh, you know, financial prosperity and whose career was troubled by, like, I just wonder, like, that's an interesting game is like, you know, 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. And 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'd lived a good life. And then he, there was a decision point and he made as wrong a decision as you can. Well, and, and is, and, and we'll 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, 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.

And I used to just be like, how could he cook hamburgers and drink Miller light? Yeah. And then, so the, the, that was very early after I learned that the barn existed. And I was, uh, I started wondering, well, how, how could he live so close? And then the, and then the next question is, well, how far is far enough? And so one of the, one of the many things I wanted the book to do as it deals with the forces and systems that were, 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. So like, like one of the things is like I tried to every inflection point where someone in the last thousand years could have stopped this. Yeah. I wanted to make sure that I stopped and pointed. Well, don't you think one of the reasons that sort of great driven that the person who says $500 million isn't enough, one championship, one Super Bowl is not enough, one best seller is not like that, whatever drives the person to do.

I think Evan Thomas said like, wrote a, wrote a bunch of biographies, a bunch of different presidents. He's like, how many presidents would you say were honestly self-aware? And, and so the lack of self-awareness is probably what allows for the, 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, uh, 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. And he's basically like, yeah, 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. 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 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 a couple days and I understand this person better than they understand themselves. And they spent their whole life in their thing. They didn't see that they were so obviously, the rosebud moments that are so obvious to any third party, the person had zero awareness of. So what's so interesting is, 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 ruleful. And so I got just obsessed with that. And 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 had 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. Yeah, 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.

Like our inability to know things that we don't wanna 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. 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. Yeah. 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 and 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 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. 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. And so the question then becomes, did they know they were carrying the water? Or did they actually believe it? And I think the answer is they actually believed it. I think those 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. You 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 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 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 in there that were so crazy that I started trying to, I was like, man, could this possibly be? So there were a couple of things I sent to her and I was like, I love this so much. I need you to like red team the shit out. Like I need you to try to argue against it. And so like 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 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. 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. Sure. And I think that like, because it did this thing where I didn't know about this barn. And now what it does is, cause it's a profile of 36 square miles and one barn, but really it turns into the history, the entire history of the United States of America.

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. I'm Afua Hirsch. And I'm Peter Frankenbaum.

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ad-free on Wondry Plus on Apple podcasts or the Wondry app. As 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 of the street that was built in the like 1919. So not that old 1915. 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 a 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? And 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. It's a very nice house. And he goes, so the the the man and wife who funny, crazy, so the guy who bought this house, he builds this 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's Fair. Yeah, that's great. But so I go what's what's with the outhouse? And he's like, okay, so the man and wife who lived here, they never had kids, she 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, okay, and other people had told me

about this outhouse and I go, what an interesting story. And then I remember 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. That'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. So it's, you're sort of taught to believe that they're good people and bad people. Yeah. And what, 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. And almost everyone is a coward. 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, cause like it makes me nervous cause people say really mean stuff

Yeah, and it makes me want to first of all go fight them. Yeah, cuz I'm be like I will come like yeah Fuck you. Yeah. Yeah, leave my mom 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. And she's like, so I was there for all of it. 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 and that I would never do it again. Well, that's the, 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. And like- There's obviously the really dark fictions also and the lies and the misinformation,

but there's just these kinds of things. And it's just like, don't challenge it, don'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 about it. It's like you call Tulsa a riot. Yes, exactly. It's not a riot. Yeah. It was 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 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, who don't wanna have to face certain things will go towards the narrative that, and that's what I was trying to write in that thing. It's like, 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,

and I didn't realize this about Emm until, until I started researching this, which was so 1954 is Brown v board. Yeah. 1955 they had Brown v board too. 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, uh, so in 1955 there was a, uh, 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, but this is, this might be the worst. And like, it was a race for the bottom. Ryan, people were saying crazy shit at these rallies and like, you go back and read it and you're like, Oh my God. And every, 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. 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 walk just played

with hand grenades with the pen pulled. And like you start reading what they're doing and you could just see, I was just joking. You know, no, 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 do what? To win an election? To get rich? 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. Yeah. And like, in that way, the book is both a history and there is a Predictive element of it. I mean we talked 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 there the play fictions are interesting to stories we tell ourselves, because I have 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'd she go to high school? And 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. 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, no, no, it wasn't. And I was like, What do you mean it wasn't? And they

were like, Oh, there are no black people in our town. And 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 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. And I still did not know Emmett Till's name until I left the state to go to college. And it never occurred to me, frankly, I mean, for a long time about how hard it must have been hard it must have been to curate a nearly completely white life in such a black place. It never occurred to me, like, well, this shit doesn't just happen.

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 put me in the position to write this and try to understand this place that I know, thought I knew really well, and this place that I love and still love by the way, 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 this very true for your book. And like, I remember a couple of years ago,

my mother-in-law gave us a kit, like Ruby Bridges wrote a kid's book. And she wrote in the inside about how she remember, 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.

It'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 stat,

that one someone pointed out to me that Martin Luther King and Anne Frank were born the same year. It's like the one of the farmers at the center of all this is a guy named Clint Sheridan. Cause one of the witnesses worked on Clint's farm and Clint sort of went out of his way to try to protect the witness. And ultimately, even though he had some power, couldn't, failed.

But, and like some of his family wonder if sort of he was shunned because of that. But what's interesting is his son, who passed away recently, his name was Sidney. Sidney was obsessed with this because all of the early newspaper reports put the murder in the Sheridan barn when really it

was the Milam 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 Sydney and Emmett were the exact same age. Don't you say the thing that his dad was born during the civil war and died like after Pearl Harbor? Yeah, yeah. That's fucking nuts.

So 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. 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. And then a swath of land that would have taken a thousand years to clear at old Europe was cleared and drained in 30, 20 years and turned from a uninhabitable, uninhabitable, malarial hardwood swamp into the world's largest cotton plantation. And it happened like that. And so the dizzying this of civilization, like I love to go read every, 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 or like you pick a historical figure and you think about like who was the oldest person that they were young. Or 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, 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. Gloria knew and enslaved ancestor. Yeah. Like talked to her. Yeah. Heard stories.

Not like read a book. Yeah. Like talked to her great grandmother. Yeah. Who had been born enslaved. Yeah. Not like read a book, like talk to her great grandmother who had been born enslaved. Yeah, or 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. And like not that long ago. No. And you start realizing like none of it is ancient history. And like, when you fought, 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. And it's a lot closer than you think. Yeah. I mean,

one of the many new revelations in there is that the The deep connections between the jurors and the killers yeah, because they were all part of this same weird little tribe almost living in a mountain holler and Like a lot of these people are like people are still alive, man I mean Jimmy Carter still alive Jimmy Carter grew up without electricity like Jimmy Carter remembers when they got electricity Jimmy Carter grew up without electricity. Like Jimmy Carter remembers when they got electricity. Yeah, I know. And like, I remember when they came and installed cable, because I could get MTV.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's just like, I mean, you know, I think about that all the time. I mean, one of the really incredible things in this book was, there were these two old men who lived on the Druda rule of the road, one white and one black, who had grown up there. And 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. But so the land grid was created to be able to take

the wilderness and turn it into a commodity. And so township 22 North range for 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 archeology 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 industrialist 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. The 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 this, where the barn is, it's also the exact geographic center of the Mississippi Delta. So there is a case to be made

that the, that, you know, this place was wilderness long after they'd caught Geronimo. 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, but like if there's a, you know, there's a case to be made that the land where Amit Thiel 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 OK 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 okay. Corral happened. So even that is later than you would think. No. And like, I mean, was, was Mussolini alive when the gunfight at the, like, I just, like, so you start thinking about like that's bananas that, you know, and Winston Churchill, one of my favorite things in this book is he makes a legitimate appearance as a legitimate character. 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. And it's, you know, it ended in Winston and 10 Downing street with Winston Churchill, basically pulling the plug out from the British cotton manufacturers and just saying we can't. We have to look to the future. The commodity that runs the world now is oil and not cotton. You're 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 forwardsness 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 time and yet like the anti-slavery movement begins in Britain before America is a country. So the two following things. So the largest plantation in the Mississippi Delta was owned for a very long time by the ... It's called Delta, and it's one of the central characters in this book. It's called the Delta Pine and Land Planning Company. And it's now owned by Bayer, and it was owned by Monsanto. But what's nuts is

that it was owned for a 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. If you've bought lingerie from Victoria's Secret... A lot of these things are still around. No, it's all still around. And so the plantation where this happened was, it was who was owned by a British manufacturing conglomerate. The president of the plantation was the main person 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 Manchester, so you had Irish workers in Manchester who are living in these cholera slums. You go read these stories about Angel's Meadow. It's as bad as, I mean, they are,

they don't make any money. The reason there's such a thing as Sunday school is these kids were 12 years old being forced to work in factories, orphans. 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. And they are donating money to send to the newly freed former enslaved people. they are donating money to send to the newly freed,

former enslaved people, while the factory owners are flying Confederate flags from on top of the factory. 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 the people make all these weird decisions. So someone had cut out like a three acre parcel Yeah, some point and whatever so I was finally buying it back and

As I got the survey I'm looking at the survey and there's this name on I don't understand I've heard 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 Google the name and I realize I'm looking around. It's it's like all over all this. And I realize, oh, this is the name of the person who got the land grant from Mexico. That'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 and township 22 North range for West was section eight given to a guy named John Clark, who founded the town where I grew up, whose house was next door to me. Yeah. That had his daughter was named Blanche Clark. She married a lawyer from Clark's Delany, Mr. Kutrer. They moved.

He built her this huge mansion next door to the house where she grew up. The playwright Tennessee Williams grew up in my neighborhood. So all these characters are real people. Like my mom's friend, John, John's mother's baby doll and Blanche Clark Coutreau 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. Yeah. 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. And you could like, I grew up so surrounded by fading, fading grand door and mythology and didn't realize that one, everybody didn't and two didn't really understand what it was. I was seeing just that like this shit was everywhere. Yeah. And I started 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. Uh, I meant to bring it to you. I actually, I thought about this and then didn't, but it just said, everything is everything. Yeah. You know, I was at Malcolm X was like everything south of Canada's the south or everything south of Canada's Mississippi Yeah, like I thought 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 the sort of backbeat of Howard's in 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, you know, 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. They might not be whipping the slaves, but they were the reason why the slaves were being whipped. Well, if cotton was oiled, then Mississippi was Saudi Arabia. Well, it, 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. Like they're all connect. Everything goes back to Liverpool. You could mortgage a slave. No, no. And so all these.

Not could, but like that was, that was the whole, right. Right. And then yeah, the financial crisis, you realize how assets are interconnected with each other. So 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 it, like we think of these things as these just moral issues is right or wrong. He understood it was a moral issue that was right or wrong, but he understood this 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. And it becomes a sort of political, uh,

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, that big modern trade organizations dedicated to the textile industry. 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. And like you can read the minutes of conferences.

They were inventing sharecropping. Like, it didn't just happen. Like, there was a conference in Brussels. Like, people sat in rooms together, in Marriott, whatever a Marriott was then, and they wore really nice clothes, and they probably all thought they were really good people, and they all were deacons in their church

and they sat around in 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 them. And it's like, it's the way I think about, and I hate to say this, like, but like, like I always want to tell people when they come to work for ESPN, young people, like HR is not your friend. Sure.

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 worked there have made a moral choice. Yeah. But if you asked them, they'd be like,

well, I'm just a good German. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. And all it does is excuse people from having any sort of moral code. You don't ever have to make a decision because it's been made for you. 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.

And we need it this way. Yeah. And we don't care who. We don't care. We don't care who gets hurt. 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. And I didn't want to ask major league baseball or the cubs for tickets because like it felt super unethical because like I'm writing about the cubs. And so I went on stub hub and bought them. because like it felt super unethical because like I'm writing about the Cubs.

And so I went on stub hub and bought them. And we ran into a problem with the expense accounts because there was some person at ESPN, 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. He's like, well, it's not unethical because it's company policy. And so that's what they like, that's happens over and over and over company policy, which only exists to maximize shareholder value is the new ethical code.

And it excuses everyone doing shitty things to other people. And so you talk about cognitive dissonance. 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. And like all of this suffering and you know, one, can I say this real quick? So this blows my mind. Cause you know, the, the, the Mississippi Delta cotton boom was really 20 years.

We did all of this for 20 years. Yeah, and then the consequences and the legacy of those decisions last for a hundred plus years. The great Mississippi Delta cotton boom lasted 20 years. The 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, 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 in Okolona in 1905.

Tupelo and Ole Miss in 1906. Brandon and Oxford and West Point in 1907, Cleveland and Lexington and Raymond and Duck Hill in 1908, Greenville and Winona in 1909, Hattiesburg twice and Grenada in 1910, Golf Board and Kosciusko and Quipman 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, Hazelhurst 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. Not 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, yeah, it's fascinating. Look, that's what we're talking about. Yeah. Being a part of a royal family might seem enticing,

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and you have one of the most unforgettable legacies in royal history. Follow even the royals on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge even the royals ad free right now on Wondery Plus. I 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 mean over into 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. 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. Well, we think of British colonialism as being, but we were a colony and 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 movement,

like the real founding father of America is probably Andrew Jackson. Yeah. The vicious part of what, and he can't like, well, I mean, all the founding fathers were, were, you know, in slavers. So like, let's not, but, but like, in terms of modern populist America, and like they had, 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. Like they couldn't do it until those guys were gone. But the minute they were gone, you know, 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, we're missing a really golden opportunity to fight the cognitive dissonance. I mean, if anything, this book is like, you know, it's about the existential American battle between memory and erasure. And like, how- 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 medicine. 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. You 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. 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 and too much time. And it's just like, you know, our farm manager was telling me one time that he was complaining and it occurred, I never thought about this in the context of this until he said it. I wrote about it in the book. But talking about how you can't control the weather, can't control the price of the seed or the chemicals, you can't control the price of the equipment, and then you can't control,

you don't set your own prices. 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 or 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 because like, because of 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. So 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 marketing. It's like, if 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 wanna 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. Yeah. So one of the crazy things about this is one, when you just realize that everybody talks about, Oh,

the South had great generals. Not really. Yeah. Like the South had a bunch of three star generals who wanted to cut. They wanted the fancy uniforms, but they didn't have the sort of major Colonel class who were just about logistics. The Confederate arm, 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, they like, so the Confederate army couldn't get eight pounds of hay a day to its horses. The very first thing Lincoln did was nationalize the railroads and all those West Point number

crunchers. I mean, they had those trains rolling up. There was a reenactment cosplay thing happening in real time. 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. And the thing they didn't realize is the most, I know this. And like the most important thing in the price of cotton is what's called a

carryover. Yeah. How many bales from the year before the year before that, how many bales are still in the system that have not been turned into clothes. And 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 like- 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 like to say crazy shit and never actually had to do anything. And then they're the dog that caught the car. And they were just totally, they just wanted to give crazy speeches and be populist assholes. And then all of a sudden they talk so much shit. They actually had to go do it.

Well, they realized that the people a couple levels below them actually believed what they were saying. 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 that just, that's the, and then events start to happen in the, 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, and they can't,

and they realize, oh, they really believe it. And they're not based in reality and they don't, they're not aware of what they're about to do. So the South started a war. That objectively they could never win. Uh, but their military strategy was, uh, like Robert Lee is a strategic genius who, uh, had he decided to do sort of what they would call like a Fabian strategy, if he just, if the South decided to stay in the South and make

the North come beat them in the South, uh, it probably would have either gone on for a lot longer or gone very differently. He was a bad general, like 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 you know, like they had, they had communications like they had the ability, like the transatlantic table during the war. Right.

I think that that meant that the whole global commodity market changed. And in some ways the South has like never caught up. Yeah. Like it, it was dominating the world at something and... Lid that thing on fire, basically. Lid it on fire, and then India and 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 named Spinn Becker. I have, I marked it at the back. I read it twice. Yeah. This is not an exaggeration. 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, that isn't out, that I've never read, but my editor every now and then sends me his text message, which is like, this thing's unbelievable.

And so that's gonna 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 them. So do you know what it's like? It's so like the South starts the civil war and then it tells itself it's the underdog who is the victim of the thing. And, and, and, you know, still, all that happened was we could win an election. And still mythologizes the military leaders and you go talk to West Point people and like, you know, I had a long conversation with a, uh,

with a West Point historian who was a general, but he was just like, uh, and he's really into the railroads, like what I was talking, 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 there, I mean, the vast majority of the people in the army don't own slaves. So 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. Like 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, you 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. Most of the presidents are Southern. Most of the presidents have owned slaves. They 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 what that expression now, like when you're used to privilege, equality sounds like oppression. Basically they were like, oh shit, we're gonna 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 interests, not the totality of the South. And so of course they did a bad job. Well, it's also, yeah, it's a government. It's a government based in conspiracy and in cognitive dissonance, which is why every time it had to interact

with any sort of like truth telling market, whether the field of battle or economic or like, like when it had to, when it had to go into zero sum, non-cinamental objective competitive spaces, every time got its ass kicked, it could only succeed in a rhetorical bubble in which the sort of basic foundations were never questioned. And when it had to go, they were burning cotton in the wharves of Memphis. It's just idiotic. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes,

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