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A
Foreign.
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B
It's Tuesday, January 20, 2026, from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Now, we've all heard the advice, and it's good advice to pay attention to what Donald Trump does, not what he says. Okay, here's a great example, because today he said this.
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A
So what, what ICE does, and Border Patrol is incredible. I mean, they're Paul Perez, and that group is incredible. Mostly Hispanic, by the way. They're like 60% Hispanic. You know, they talk about Hispanic. They're mostly Hispanic, right? And they're unbelievable people. And then they say, oh, we discriminate against. I love Hispanic. They are unbelievable entrepreneurial. They have everything. I did great. I did the highest. Nobody ever got numbers like I got.
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B
He loves Hispanic. But on Thursday, and you may have heard of this one, but you may not have because there's been a lot else going on. He did this. He commuted the sentence of one Adriana Cambreros. Adriana Cambrados. I don't know. I don't know how Latina pronounces the name. And I like Hispanic, but, you know, I'm not maybe good at it. So let's say Combaros was convicted in 2016 of quite an elaborate scheme. She was selling five hour energy drinks in America as counterfeits. They involved millions of bottles mixed under unsanitary conditions. They say, I have read in the news, because when you're dealing with a shot of liquid cocaine, you want someone working the pipettes to have scrubbed beforehand. Anyway, what she did was she took these bottles that were meant to be sold in Mexico, relabeled them in Spanish and sold them in America. You could sell these five hour energy drinks for more money in the U.S. according to this, not millions, but 350,000 bottles sold from late 2009 through 2011 were sold at 15% below normal retail prices. Anyway, it was a scam. She went to jail. And if you're doing the math on the 350,000 bottles, we're talking about 1.75 million hours of energy. That is a lot of energy. She was convicted. So much energy. You can't just supply that much energy. She went to jail, but then she was parting. Technically, I think, granted clemency by Trump. She's a free woman. I'm unsure why Donald Trump found favor and cast his beneficence upon her. There is something about what she was doing that maybe appealed to Trump. I mean, nothing Trump fears more than an energetic Mexican by denying Mexico those either millions or Hundreds of thousands of bottles. I think it probably positively affected the trade deficit which Donald Trump pays a lot of attention to. Right. That would have helped the Mexican economy, possibly hur the American economy to give all those Mexicans five hours of more energy. And you add that energy to the San Diegans now and you know, this is pretty much fitting in with Donald Trump's idea of mercantilism. In any case, she was pardoned, so it's a nice story. She now has a second lease on life and is practically vibrating with the opportunity. Well, recently in a separate case that involved lying to manufacturers to purchase wholesale groceries, she instacarted them back to the United States. She said they were for sale in Mexico, they were going to prisoner or rehab facilities. Now they then and her, she and her brother sold the products at higher prices to U.S. distributors. But she was caught and she was tried and she was jailed and she was pardoned again or given clemency. I think actually pardoned this time. Trump believes in second passes for a second time. We don't know why, we don't know why she's getting all these favors. He has not really been asked or pressed on it. I, I believe Adriana Cambreros is Hispanic and he loves Hispanic. We heard he loves Hispanic. And I'm not sure if she has given up a life of crime at this point. Evidence suggests that she's not successful at the crimes she tries or at least a couple big ones. But she does seem to escape punishment via the well established under Trump fraud to clemency pipeline. And it doesn't seem like there's much disincentive for her to refrain from from crime. And Lord knows the woman has a motor though that may be the off label energy shots doing the talking on the show today. Yes. So if you haven't heard about that, it's because all else that's been going on and we're asking questions, serious, deep societal questions. What is law? What is justice? What is fascism? Also, what's a catch? Did you watch any of the NFL games this weekend? What's a catch? Does the, does the runner have to go to the ground? What about bobbling? Well, Chuck Klosterman is by and I got to say we don't talk about the specifics. We talk very much the generalities, the culturally dominant activity that is football. Closerman is out with a great book called Football and in part one of a two parter, part two tomorrow, part ones today, Chuck Klosterman on football.
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Football, it is a game played by men who dream of their boyhoods and offered to boys so that they can one day become men. It is the crucible and the cauldron. Football explains us, yet renders us inscrutable. Too much of the world. Football. It is the most dominant force in the culture and somehow out of step with our ideals. Football. It barely involves the foot. Football. It is a new book by Chuck Closerman, who once again enters the hollow turf of the Gist Municipal Stadium. Hello, Chuck. Welcome back.
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D
Hey, great to be back.
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C
So I love the book because I love football.
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And I think. I think about it not as much, or specifically three downs versus four, NFL versus Canadian Football League, but I think of it on a deep level. Uh, my question is since you. My first question is since you detail growing up and how much you thought of it and how you were one day and how much you played with your brothers and just the reverie you still have about football hypotheticals, did you start thinking about it in this deep philosophical way when you were a high school player on the fourth string as the quarterback on your nine man team?
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D
Well, I mean, compared to my teammates, yes. I don't think, I mean, not, not in this direct way that you're talking about. I feel like that started about maybe 20 years ago for me. Like my whole life I've thought about football and I've cared about it and I've played it and I, you know, it. There were periods in my life where it kind of temporarily disappeared and always came back. And, and then, you know, as I sort of moved into an adulthood, you know, and I started becoming a writer, you know, and I'm mostly writing about rock music and film and stuff like that, and occasionally would write about sports. Like it was always. I always felt like there was as much to do in terms of like, I guess, criticism in terms of talking about football or, or basketball or any of these sports as there was in all these things that are kind of classically the arts or whatever. And when I think about football, its importance seems so outsized compared to not just, you know, rival games, but almost all other games in the United States. And it seems particularly to me to be a way to understand the last half of the 20th century, perhaps in a way that will not continue going forward. But I've been thinking about doing a book like this for about 20 years. And initially there was like, my publisher, I think, was not super interested in me doing this. I think that I don't know what they imagined the book was gonna be, but certainly not what the book ended up being. So it's like. So I have been thinking about this for a long time. You know, I mean, the only other book that I've done comparable to this was like the first book I wrote about heavy metal, where that's something I've been unconsciously thinking about my thought. Thinking about my whole life. I mean, this book is kind of like that.
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B
It's a cultural critique of a genre, but the genre isn't an arts genre, it's a sport. And as you write in the book that even though they say history is written by the victors, it does turn out when it comes to culture, that it's usually written by the critics. It's usually written by someone who is objecting to the dominant culture of the time. Now, I don't think you were doing that, but that's a fascinating insight. And so what was. What was our society saying about football? And what were you seeing that didn't fit in with that?
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D
Are you saying in a general sense, like, how does society view football?
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Sort of, if history is written by the victors, but cultural criticism is written by the critics, people who had a problem with that apply that to football?
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D
Well, yeah. The thing I'm sort of getting at is that, okay, so if history were written by the victors, and in some distant future, if football has completely receded from the culture or become this niche thing, you would think, well, nothing could have been more successful than that. Right. And yet my suspicion is that the future perception of football, when it's no longer sort of the last vestige of the kind of monoculture, I mean, really, it's just football and Taylor Swift, those are really the only things that are.
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C
In the monoculture who got a big boost because of football.
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B
Well, not so much the other one.
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D
It's not. I don't think it's less than coincidental. They kind of became intertwined. But I think that the perception of football, when it starts to fade and eventually it will, or even perhaps collapse. I guess at some point it's not going to be tomorrow, but at some point it's too big not to at one point sort of almost collapse upon itself. I think the perception is going to be negative and that the understanding of football in the future is going to be an attempt to understand or explain what they sort of saw as what was wrong with American society over the last half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 20th. First, I think, like, the. The analogy I kind of use is when people sort of talk about, say, Roman gladiators Now, I am very skeptical that the way we perceive that period of history is actually reflective of what that it was like to live through that time. So I thought to myself, I'm gonna write this book. And even though, you know, it's kind of a gimmick in the sense when I say that I'm actually writing it for people who haven't been born, there is truth in that. Like, I do think that this. It will be hopefully something that in a future time people will be able to read this book and say, like, well, so that's what people were actually thinking about when it was happening. Or maybe they weren't consciously thinking about it, but sort of the. The subtext of what was happening was more than just an entertaining, violent distraction. Right. There will be.
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B
It will be. It will be remembered as an example of excess and decadence. And it will be told that decadence is what killed football and maybe concomitantly, America. But as you point out over and over again, there are so many layers to football that is not the case. And if nothing else, I mean, first of all, I know that you love to cast ahead and think about how we'll be remembered. And you did that with your book about culture and said Chuck Berry will be the thing that survives. And then I also. I don't know if you've gotten into effective altruism, but I can't help thinking about the. What we owe the future argument about the future generations and how that layers upon this book. But yeah, it's also an interesting. Isn't it? It's an interesting reason. It's an interesting assignment to yourself to argue against. Sure, you concocted a little bit, but argue against what we think is going to be the incorrect story of.
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D
Yeah, I mean, I suppose somebody could say, like, well, it's really easy to be right about something nobody even knows the question to yet. Like. But I. That my. My belief is that sort of. That there's just a. Whenever we look back on anything culturally, it is so rare that the retroactive perception is that, oh, that was a positive thing that made people happy or that helped us understand that time. Sometimes it'll be. It helped us understand that time, but very often in a pejorative way. Like, you know, if it's. It seems as though, like I say, like, you know, we think of reality sort of being dictated by those in control, but there's also the intellectual reality, you know, sort of like what someone who's a professor at a college talking about, say, the late 20th century and using football as an example, it's hard to imagine that example being, you know, evidence of prosperity or happiness or insight or any of these things. It's usually negative. And you know, I, and I understand that. I mean, it's like it's not as though this is book is like a love letter to football. I suppose if we broke out every sentence in this book and said which ones kind of promote the game, which ones seem to be a critique of the game and which one is neutral? I mean, I think it'd probably be a third, a third and a third. But my overall takeaway is that it probably is socially positive. And even though it wasn't necessarily positive for me at all times, I think for the world at large, it's, at least for America, it's been a good thing.
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C
Yeah.
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B
So other fascinating aspects of football, one you write about, one you don't, is it can't really, it almost never is really played as a pickup game as closely analogous to not just the professional but the high school level as compared to any other sport. Sure, people don't really play fast pitch baseball, but you know, everyone plays softball and that's something like 90% of playing baseball. But when we play football, even if we play tackle football, there's almost no running backs aren't involved, you know, and we usually don't play tackle football. And there's no, there's none of the complexities of it. And it's weird for a national sport to not really be played except in the official arena. So that's one thing that you do talk about. And I thought it was a really good point.
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D
I mean, I think it is one of the things that separates football from other sports the most in terms of, you know, these kind of large scale spectator things. I mean, like, okay, the most popular sport in the world is soccer. And a real key to that is it is the simplest game to play. Like all you need is basically is a kickable object and you can set up two teams, you can define goals any way you want. Is it is like the most sort of, you know, truly populous thing, you know.
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Right. Basketball. Which is why even in America when we were young and it was always sold as the sport of the future, young kids were funneled into it because it's just so easy to teach young kids. You don't even have to pick anything up.
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D
Yeah. Oh no, it's, it's in some ways like, you know, a great sport for kids in a way that say baseball is not. Which is something that we, you Know, when I was a kid and when you were a kid, that was the first sport kids usually played in an organized way. Even though there was tons of just standing around and, you know, the game stopping to, to see you strike out and see you fail. The idea that errors is like one of the key statistics is like, it's not really made for a nine year old kid or whatever. Football is very interesting in the sense that it is not just, you know, kind of difficult to simulate. It's actually impossible. Shooting a basketball by yourself in a gym is much closer to shooting a basketball in a game than any activity in football you would do, say, like throwing a ball around on the beach or on your college campus or whatever. The level of organization and hierarchy and control is so built into football that it kind of becomes something else. It, you know, you would think that the inability to access a game and just sort of play it recreationally would hurt it, but it probably has helped football.
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B
There are all these other things that have helped football that, as you point out, they're not by design, but how well it plays on tv, how paced, I'm not going to say slow, but that famous Wall Street Journal story that there's only 11 minutes of actual game time, usually derided as a flaw of football. Obviously it's this great but accidental feature of football that makes it the ultimate television sport.
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D
Well, I mean, that is the thing. If we were inventing football as a new product today and the people pitching it were like, okay, it's going to last about three hours on television, but there's only going to be 11 minutes of action, people would say like, well, that's insane. No one's going to want that, you know. But as it turns out, the way those 11 minutes are distributed over those three hours is ideal. I mean, if there's one of like the. I would say if there's one key thing about this book that I was really trying to get across is that football is the perfect television product. And television was unknowingly, ideally designed to be the vessel for this game. So football starts, you know, 1800s, 1896 or whatever, when you want to look at it, has all these years to kind of evolve and change. And then it kind of intersects with television in the 1950s. And the importance of football and the importance of television are sort of just, just intertwined in a way that, that kind of pushed, I think, both forward, you know, and made both things that you're the dominant sort of entertainment medium and the dominant game of the last 75 years, you know.
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B
Yeah. And another fascinating thing with football is that on offense, almost half of the players are inscrutable. The linemen, you can't even see the interior of the line. And unless you know to look, um, your eye isn't naturally drawn there. And then on defense, the defensive backs aren't even in the frame and they're unbelievably important. So you have this game going on where a gigantic percentage of the actual participants you either can't see or are not meant to see. And that's not like that with any other sport. I'm not talking about baseball, where you don't always see the right fielder on every play, but when the ball is hit there, you do. It's crazy. It's kind of crazy. It's another thing, if someone said, tell me, give me predict the chances of this being successful, you would definitely say this is a formula for failure.
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D
I mean, what's interesting about what you just said is not only is it surprising, it's not a problem. I think it's actually a huge benefit. I mean, in the sense that like so you watch a football game and in some ways you're watching these almost like faceless, almost robotic automatons. Right? Like if it wasn't for their numbers, we would have. It would be very difficult for us to know who anyone is to identify. Only the most famous players would possible. You're almost in some ways rooting for colors, like these colors colliding on the field. But that means if someone is drawn to football, actually drawn to the sport they're experiencing and not the personalities that they produce. One thing you hear a lot now about people who are really specially into social media is they will say like, well, there's so many guys in the NBA who are personalities who are definable. And you know, what baseball needs is, is you know, some of these guys, you know, Ohtani or whatever, need to be more of a presence in our lives or whatever. But because football doesn't work that way, because football is anti individual, it is against individualism. It is against the idea of personal identity being meaningful. People who like it are actually liking the thing, like they're actually liking the game. It goes beyond personality. That's why every attempt to make something more successful by amplifying the characters in it is a mistake. Like, you know, it's like you don't want to amplify the individual, you want to amplify the entity. And that's what football has done without even trying. I'm sure that you know, in the offices of the NFL, they would love to find ways to make, you know, Josh Allen more of a public figure or like, you know, it's like, we need Caleb Williams. We need to understand him better and be like, have a higher profile. In truth, the success comes from the fact that the players don't matter, the teams do.
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B
And we'll be back with more of Chuck KLOSTER Tomorrow, the second half, if you will. If Caleb Williams is around, we'll probably be going to overtime. And now the spiel. Donald Trump and his administration is brazen, wanton, irresponsible. I'm not. I'm just going to stop with all the adjectives. But mostly his lack of care, caution and humanity adds up to so what if it gets his enemies killed? However, lately, his words and the words of Stephen Miller might in fact get his friends killed. Okay, let's put a asterisk on that. Donald Trump obviously doesn't have friends. He's extremely transactional. But I'm talking about people he ostensibly wants to help. So I have two very recent statements, one from Miller, one from Trump, that are more similar than you may have realized. And you probably heard of both statements to the Iran protesters. Trump truthed. If Iran violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, it is good that he's sensitive to the local mores and customs. Anyway, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. So this would mean militarily locked and loaded. Now, the problem with that is if the people of Iran were able to see it, which due to massive Internet outages is unlikely, and they didn't know the track record of Donald Trump, or they thought the track record of Donald Trump was just what the regime had said, that he's a gigantic liar, then they might think, oh, the regime we're protesting against, they're always wrong. They never tell the truth. Donald Trump is a guy who can be trusted. That would add up to carnage. And who knows, maybe it did. We might never know the death toll of the protesters, but that truth may have, in truth, let hundreds, thousands of people to believe him to go out to protest more and to get killed. Similar thing reminiscent of a Stephen Miller comment here he was recently on, of course, Fox News.
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To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the cond of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties. And no one, no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.
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B
No, they don't. They don't have full immunity. That is just wrong and irresponsible to say so. And it's an obvious danger. It's an obvious danger to civilians. But I'm here making the case that it is dangerous for the people they ostensibly want to help. It's dangerous for actual ICE agents. They maybe will feel they could act more violently. And so that's the part where it's bad for civilians, but if they do and if they commit crimes, it will be bad for them. I mean, it will be bad for them cosmically and psychologically and morally. But also, you know, there's no statute of limitations on murder, as you probably have heard in every film noir you've ever seen, but under the general statute of limitations for federal crimes, there's five years for federal offenses. Yes, of course, it's 18 USC 3282. There is also an opportunity for state agents to bring charges against a federal agent in a federal court, but without the federal executive branch having a say, it's federal judges and lawyers who might say that that would be appropriate. But what I'm saying is there a lot of exposure for the ICE agent in this scenario, the ICE agent who believes wrongly in the streets of Minneapolis, who believes that he or she is acting with immunity. They're wrong under a reasonable interpretation that perhaps the next attorney general or whatever version of Stephen Miller comes along, although it's very hard to find any other versions of Stephen Miller unless you dredge some of the deepest swamps in our land. So fascist is it fascism? It's not good. I think it's more aptly described as the cacocracy ruled by the worst, least competent people were definitely dragging the country down. Donald Trump wanted this fight in L. A, he wanted this fight in Chicago. Didn't get it there. Chicago acted pretty well with Midway Blitz. L A was just kind of a couple square block concoction. But in Minnesota, this is the fight Trump wants, or what Trump thinks he wants. He has reacted to some of the images because he's sensitive to this and not an idiot. He has reacted to some of the images with the instinct, oh, this might be bad for us in the administration. The protesters are standing up to ICE and no doubt they're violating here and there the letter of the law and probably getting in the way of ICE activity. Protesters are by definition a bit chaotic. And so you're not going to have every protest be a peaceful expression of First Amendment rights, as Mayor Fry and Governor Walsh always frame it. But it doesn't matter. They're mostly doing a constitutionally protected thing, and Stephen Miller is advising them, incorrectly, that their adversaries ice have constitutional protections they don't have. Should the city survive and should the death toll remain low, maybe we will extract ourselves as we have in a couple of the other instances I just mentioned, and we will do so above the unbelievably backward and dangerous and intentionally misleading words of our officials. This is where we are. I hope we can step down. I don't have a lot of faith in this administration, whose every word, utterance indeed, is an attempt to destroy that faith. Not just mine, but ours in the system and legitimacy thereof. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara, who I shall name as the producer of the Gist. Then there's Kathleen Sykes. Nope, not her real name, but close, close to her real name. She does the Gist list. And there is a guy named either Craig Jeff or Jeff Craig. I'm gonna leave it ambiguous. He runs everything that moves on the Gist's feed. And of course, Leah Yanni, if that is indeed her name. Here's a hint. It's not. Michelle Pesca is in fact the coo, but I'm never going to tell you what that stands for of Peach Fish Productions. And thanks for listening.