Trump Weaves His Way Through Davos

Summary

The Gist: "Trump Weaves His Way Through Davos"

Date: January 21, 2026
Host: Mike Pesca (Peach Fish Productions)
Guests: Chuck Klosterman, Todd Blanche (Deputy Attorney General)

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Episode Overview

Mike Pesca kicks off this episode with a sharp look at President Trump's appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, highlighting the president’s signature style—what Pesca dubs "the weave." Trump’s varied speech topics and performance on the international stage set the tone for this mix of political and cultural critique. The episode then segues into a deep, thematic conversation with author Chuck Klosterman about his new book "Football". Their discussion explores the cultural dominance of football in America, the changes facing both college and professional sports, and the broader social lessons drawn from football’s recent history. Pesca concludes the episode with a critical analysis of governmental procedures around police accountability, focusing on current controversies involving ICE shootings, and the administration’s defiant approach to investigation and transparency.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. President Trump at Davos: "The Weave"

• Pesca’s Take on Trump’s Speech (00:03 – 03:06)
  • Trump’s World Economic Forum speech veered wildly from standard topics. Pesca highlights Trump’s blend of American cultural references (e.g., "Green New Scam") and boasts about U.S. energy independence.
  • Trump claims credit for averting an American "energy collapse" due to rejecting green initiatives, calling them "the Green New Scam" (00:24).
  • Trump asserts, “When I went in a landslide…won all seven swing states, won the popular vote, won everything. And they only get negative press.” (01:34)
  • Pesca notes the mismatch between Trump’s culture-war rhetoric and the international Davos audience, observing moments where even the Swiss seemed bewildered.
  • Trump refers vaguely to Greenland, remarking, “It’s the United States alone that can protect this giant mass of land, this giant piece of ice.” (02:59)
  • Memorable Pesca Line: "It was less loom than loon." (02:39), highlighting Trump’s idiosyncratic, free-associative style.

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2. Chuck Klosterman on "Football" and American Identity

Segment Start: (03:13)

a) The Branding and Cultural Power of Football

• The Raiders example: Pesca and Klosterman reflect on why even struggling teams retain cultural heft.
  • "Every sports team wants to be a brand... But 15 of the 20 [most meaningful sports brands] would be football teams." (04:33)
• Klosterman:
  • “What a college athlete can make now or what a college coach can make now...the financial upside in the short term is so great...they are willing to change something that will probably cause it to be considerably less significant in 40 or 50 years.” (06:59–08:30)

b) College Football’s Identity Crisis & Realignment

• Klosterman bemoans the collapse of old regional identities due to expansion and realignment:
  • "No one thinks Oregon should be in the Big Ten. No one thinks USC should be in the big. It seems like an idiotic thing..." (06:59)
• They joke about absurdities like UCLA playing Rutgers in a Big Ten game.
  • "We just kind of keep changing...moving the goalposts until it almost becomes obvious that UCLA is going to be playing Rutgers in a Big Ten game. I mean, it’s just stupid." (08:56)

c) The Impact of Gambling and Commercialization on the NFL

• Klosterman warns about the marriage of gambling and the NFL:
  • “...the only way to compensate for that is to have some kind of secondary kind of path of revenue. And that seems to be what gambling will eventually be.” (10:35)
  • "Football is a notoriously difficult sport to fix...You basically have to involve the officiating crew. That’s really the only way it would work..." (11:59)
  • Pesca: “Our biggest hobby is really forensic videography as opposed to the actual football itself.” (13:45)

d) Football’s Concussion Crisis as a Mirror for Broader Social Issues

• Pesca's Theory: The NFL's concussion crisis was a "trial run" for broader societal debates around safety, justice, and reform (13:45–14:59).
  • "It was in fact a trial run for all of the...panics...societal to and fro-ing as it played out in that..." (13:45)
• Klosterman:
  • "Does that mean that players did change the way they tackled? To my surprise, to some degree they did. One thing I thought was...there’s no way you can reduce concussions without completely altering the way the game is played. And guys did adjust." (15:34)
• They liken the normalization of new safety measures—like extra helmet padding—to COVID masks, as "constant reminders" of the issue's persistence (17:06).
• Reflection on changes in football culture regarding toughness and hydration as a lens for understanding broader adaptability and institutional response (18:56).

e) The Limits of Reform and Societal Complicity

• Klosterman:
  • Discusses the NFL’s strategy of hiring critics to neutralize controversy: "If someone doesn’t like you, make them your employee." (19:50)
• They ponder why concerns about football’s dangers or controversies only dent but never derail its popularity.
  • “We do many things in society that are incredibly dangerous that we just sort of allow...Football is seen as something that we are socially complicit in." (21:09)

f) Regional and Social Divides Over Football’s Future

• Discussion about parent attitudes toward youth football, with regional divides (urban Northeast avoiding football, heartland states embracing it) (22:52–24:09).
• Klosterman: "There is going to be a real bifurcation as time moves on where people in the Northeast, especially in urban areas, people in the Pacific Northwest, it’s going to become surprising to find out that they let their kid play football." (22:52)

g) Football as a Revealer of Deep American Values

• Pesca: "Football is an ethnocentric game, beloved in only one country...football is violent and its violence is sometimes praised...All these things where football, and this is what I said in the intro, runs up against our ideals. And you also anticipate some of the things that I was thinking, like, actually, aren’t those our ideals?" (24:33)
• Klosterman: "A lot of the things about football that sort of make it what it is are things that we know if you’re sort of an enlightened person, you’re supposed to be against in the abstract, but in this specific example, we allow it." (25:43)
• Concerns about the "expiration date" of football’s cultural centrality as younger generations become detached (27:45).

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3. The Spiel: ICE Shootings, Trump Administration, and Accountability

Segment Start: (28:46)

a) Todd Blanche's Stance on DOJ Investigations (29:35)

• Blanche (DOJ): Defends the department’s decision not to investigate the killing of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, arguing that not every shooting justifies a federal investigation, despite public and political pressure (29:35).
  • "We never do. That has nothing to do with what happened in Minneapolis...If circumstances change and there's something that we do need to investigate around that shooting or any other shooting, we will. But we are not going to bow to pressure from the media." (29:35)

b) Pesca’s Analysis and Critique

• Pesca: Denounces the administration’s position as "procedurally wrong and appalling ethically" (30:35).
  • "It is not in the interests of even the Trump administration...The usual playbook is...signal to the public that, hey, we're taking this seriously...I'm arguing he's making a mistake, even out of self interest." (30:35)
• Pesca walks listeners through standard practice—"fig leaf" investigations that confer legitimacy even when police are rarely convicted.
• Observes the Trump strategy as explicitly defiant, playing solely to a base that supports maximum enforcement and resists calls for police accountability.
• Notes the administration seems to provoke outrage as a means of solidifying its core supporters:
  • "To generate shock in people like me and maybe people like you now seems to very much be the tactic and strategy of the administration." (30:35–end)

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Notable Quotes

• Trump:

  • "The Green New Scam. Windmills all over the place. Destroy your land...Every time that goes around, you lose $1,000." (00:24)
  • "When I went in a landslide…won all seven swing states, won the popular vote, won everything. And they only get negative press." (01:34)
  • "It’s the United States alone that can protect this giant mass of land, this giant piece of ice." (02:59)

• Pesca:

  • "[The weave] means the president can go wherever he wants and say anything he wants. And it’s always brilliant, and, of course, it’s always captivating to the audience. I looked at the audience. They didn’t really seem captivated." (00:59)
  • "It was less loom than loon." (02:39)
  • "Our biggest hobby is really forensic videography as opposed to the actual football itself." (13:45)
  • "[Football] runs up against our ideals. And…aren’t those our ideals?" (24:33)
  • "To generate shock in people like me and maybe people like you now seems to very much be the tactic and strategy of the administration." (30:35–end)

• Chuck Klosterman:

  • "What a college athlete can make now …the financial upside in the short term is so great...they are willing to change something that will probably cause it to be considerably less significant in 40 or 50 years." (06:59–08:30)
  • "We just kind of keep changing...moving the goalposts until it almost becomes obvious that UCLA is going to be playing Rutgers in a Big Ten game. I mean, it’s just stupid." (08:56)
  • "Football is seen as something that we are socially complicit in. We build our whole society around Sundays and the super bowl and that. And that’s kind of what troubles people..." (21:09)
  • "A lot of the things about football that make it what it is are things that we know, if you’re sort of an enlightened person, you’re supposed to be against in the abstract, but in this specific example, we allow it." (25:43)

• Todd Blanche:

  • "The Department of Justice just doesn't just stand up and investigate because some congressman thinks we should, because some governor thinks that we should. We investigate when it's appropriate to investigate. And that is not the case here." (29:35)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Trump’s Davos Speech & Commentary: 00:03–03:06
• Klosterman Interview Begins ("Football" Discussion): 03:13
  • Branding & Cultural Power: 04:33
  • College Sports & Realignment: 06:59–10:02
  • Gambling & Commercialization: 10:35–13:45
  • Concussion Era & Social Parallels: 13:45–16:22
  • Regional Football Culture: 22:52–24:09
  • Football & Revealed Values: 24:33–28:26
• Pesca’s Spiel / DOJ & ICE Shooting Segment: 28:46–end
  • Blanche Interview: 29:35
  • Pesca’s Critique & Analysis: 30:35–end

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Summary and Takeaways

This episode of The Gist demonstrates Mike Pesca’s trademark blend of humor, cultural criticism, and political analysis. Trump’s performance in Davos is dissected for its rhetorical bravado and international awkwardness. Chuck Klosterman’s interview becomes an expansive meditation on football’s place in American society: as brand, as battleground for cultural values, and as a bellwether for how tradition, commerce, and social reform intersect. The show’s close delivers a pointed critique of procedural ethics in the Trump administration, showing how even the optics of accountability are being abandoned for overt defiance in the face of controversy.

Listeners are left with thought-provoking parallels between sports, politics, and social change, and plenty of memorable, often acerbic, lines. Whether interested in football, Trump, or American society at large, this episode offers rich material for reflection.

Transcript

[Donald Trump]

Foreign.

[Mike Pesca]

It's Wednesday, January 21, 2026. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. President Trump was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. There you're supposed to talk about interest rates and debt ratios. And the President touched on that, but a whole lot more. Yes, he gave him the weave.

[Donald Trump]

Because of my landslide election victory, the United States avoided the catastrophic energy collapse which befell every European nation that pursued the Green New Scam, perhaps the greatest hoax in history. The Green New Scam. Windmills all over the place. Destroy your land. Destroy your land. Every time that goes around, you lose $1,000.

[Mike Pesca]

Okay, that was a riff on a riff about an FDR initiative, the New Deal, which became the Green New Deal. And then there is the Green New Scam. Very American, kind of inside baseball, also American, I guess the Europeans followed along. They might have been more perplexed when Trump told the crowd in Switzerland that if the US hadn't won World War II, they'd all be speaking German. In Switzerland, they pretty much all speak German. The weave, what a. What a permission structure. It means the president can go wherever he wants and say anything he wants. And it's always brilliant, and, of course, it's always captivating to the audience. I looked at the audience. They didn't really seem captivated. He did speak to them, these leaders of finance and the world, like they were a crowd who had been warmed up by Kid Rock in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

[Donald Trump]

It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It's probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election. Can't have rigged elections. You need strong borders, strong elections, and ideally, a good press. I always say it. Strong, strong borders, strong elections. Free, fair elections and a fair media. The media is terrible. It's very crooked, it's very biased, terrible. But someday it'll straighten out because it's losing all credibility. Think of it. When I went in a landslide, a giant landslide, won all seven swing states, won the popular vote, won everything. And they only get negative press.

[Mike Pesca]

Swing states in Switzerland are actually known as contested cantons. He went on to insult the president of Switzerland, the leader of Switzerland, as boring. He couldn't remember her name. He remembered she was boring. The weave meant it worked, though. It always means it works. That's the quality of the weave. The Swiss, whose weaving technology goes back centuries. Oh. As you know, hosiery and knitting were structured according to the Verlag system was which produced finished garments effectively and efficiently. But it was less loom than loon. As the president couldn't help but bragging about his ice initiatives that are working so well domestically, he figured he'd bring them out onto the world stage.

[Donald Trump]

It's the United States alone that can protect this giant mass of land, this giant piece of ice.

[Mike Pesca]

That, of course, that piece of ice was Greenland, which he did vow or weave his way into, mentioning that he has no intention of using military force to acquire. Nevertheless, the question of hostile acquisition of a foreign territory, much like the description of the primary element of the Verlag system, looms large on the show today. I spiel about not prosecuting or really even thinking terribly hard about ice in Minnesota. So announces the administration's Todd Blanche. But first, Chuck Klosterman is back to talk. His book, literally its name is one word, football. And so too does it seem that description applies to America itself. Chuck Klosterman, up next. We're back with Chuck Klosterman talking football, the sport and his book. And I was thinking about the importance brands in football. Take the Raiders. If you depended on the actual Raiders, the Raiders as they played last year and exist now, they'd be nothing. They'd be terrible. They'd be literally the worst team in the NFL. They play in the newest and therefore least important or meaningful stadium in a city that's new. They're in Las Vegas these days, so inhospitable to sport outdoor sport. They have the worst quarterback or at the worst quarterback in the league. And they also have an owner who has the worst haircut in America. Football, non football. Football, just civilians walking around. But since they are this entity called the Raiders, it's meaningful. And the silver and black means something. And people, I suppose, are still intimidated by them. Every sports team wants to be a brand. But if you were to list the 20 most meaningful brands in sports, I would say you'd have the Yankees and maybe the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Lakers. But 15 of the 20 would be be football teams.

[Chuck Klosterman]

I mean, that and that was even, I think, more true at the college level. And it is, you know, a little bit troubling how that does seem to be something that's going to kind of collapse now, the way college sports have changed and the way direction really the professionalizing of college sports. But you know what, the identity of Alabama or Notre Dame or USC or even schools like, you know, Utah and BYU and like those things stretch back so long and seemed oddly static, like, you know, the offensives change, the coaches changed, obviously the players changed. But the, the kind of person who liked Michigan in the 1970s still perceives Michigan in a similar kind of fashion. Like what? Like what they mean sort of within the, the world of football and that. I hate seeing that go, but I kind of see, I can tell it probably is. Yeah.

[Mike Pesca]

Isn't that stupid from their perspective, given that we just talked about the cultural dominance of football and 90 something of the top hundred shows being football and the other ones being college football? If they could pump the brakes on that, shouldn't they?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, but, but they won't because the short term game is great and the long term situation is the problem. You can't ever expect people, especially in football, to sort of think about that, to think about like what will happen in 40 years. But here's what I mean by this. It's like, so all these college kids, now, you can't blame them for trying to get as much money as they can.

[Mike Pesca]

No, not the kids. But just like you wouldn't blame the, you wouldn't blame NFL players for always wanting guaranteed contracts, but keeping that from them is one of the things that bolstered the game.

[Chuck Klosterman]

But I mean, it's sort of like, you know, what I'm just saying is that what a college athlete can make now or what a college coach can make now, or, you know, the, the, the benefit to say, oh, you know, the teams, the teams from the Pac 12 who move to the Big Ten, for example, like, no one likes that. No one thinks Oregon should be in the Big Ten. No one thinks USC should be in the big. It seems like an idiotic thing, right? I mean, across. I, I have never, in fact, I don't think I've ever had a conversation with somebody who is like, it's really great that this happened now. Occasionally you'll hear someone say, like, oh, there's going to be so many good games on every Saturday. And I guess that's true. We all understand it to be bad. But the financial upside in the short term is so great and I think from their view, so essential that they are willing to change something that will probably cause it to be considerably less significant in 40 or 50 years. Like, there's like, but, but who can. You just can't blame those people in a way. It's like they're, of course they're going to do it. There was a situation a couple years ago where it was like SMU was trying to figure out if they could go, or maybe it was Cal about going to the acc and, and it was an interesting deal. Because it was like, you can go there and kind of screw everything up and, you know, make a huge windfall, or you can stay where you're at and potentially not exist. Well, it's. Course, it's an easy question for them to do that. You know, it doesn't matter that it makes, you know, it just seems really weird to have, you know, a team in Dallas, being on the Atlantic Coast. I mean, it's like, you know, just a weird deal.

[Mike Pesca]

Well, you know, Big Ten has how many teams now?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, yes. You know, one time it's like Boise was going to join the Big east, and that never happened. But I remember thinking, it's like the east is truly big if it includes Boise. I mean, it's like that's, you know, but. And everyone. You know, it just like, you kind of go through these steps where it was like, you know, there was a time when the idea of. Of. Of, say, a team from California joining the Big Ten, we would have just said, well, that's illogical. And then it was like, well, actually, it's actually impractical. And then that was like, well, it's possible, but it's. You know, it's like we just kind of keep changing. I guess the analogy is moving the goalposts until it almost becomes obvious that UCLA is going to be playing Rutgers in a Big Ten game. I mean, it's just. It's just. It's stupid. But, you know, I mean. I mean, right now, the product on the field for these college games is still great. Everything else is sort of eroding, but the game itself. I mean, there was. This was a great year to watch college football, but at the same time, it's like, I don't even know what the comparison is. It's like to be consuming something and enjoying something, knowing that everything that is sort of foundational about it is, you know, crumbling.

[Mike Pesca]

Well, I guess it's everyone who first gets into meth or Coke, that's probably their experience.

[Chuck Klosterman]

I mean, a little bit, I guess. Yeah.

[Mike Pesca]

I guess my favorite. My favorite thing in college football is every once in a while I'll look at the PAC 10 standings. There are two teams. It's Oregon State and Washington State, and one is one and. Oh, and one is Owen. One. And that's it. Do you think the NFL is doing essentially the same thing with the legalization of gambling that college is doing with its paying players and switching conferences and destroying tradition?

[Chuck Klosterman]

My suspicion about that is that they have this fear that at some point, what they need to be paid from television networks and the platforms that show these games is going to become so great that it's going to outstrip what those entities make from advertising. So suddenly it won't make sense for Fox or CBS or Netflix or any of these places to pay that much for these events for these games. And the only way to compensate for that is to have some kind of secondary kind of path of revenue. And that seems to be what gambling will eventually be. Because I think what will happen is that they, that those two things will eventually merge and they'll merge out of the claim. It's out of concern of impropriety. I think this might happen with the NBA first that they'll actually sort of, they'll be like in order to stop, you know, the possibility of like a terror situation or like the only thing we can really do is we need to have complete control over this. So we're going to make gambling and the sport, you know, just married, you know. And will that cause a problem? I guess to a certain extent it does. I mean it's, football is a notoriously difficult sport to fix. I mean even for point. It's just, it's very difficult. There's so many people on the field. You basically have to involve the officiating crew. That's really the only way it would work or coach, I guess because you would be, it would be very difficult.

[Mike Pesca]

I mean the officiating crew would have to be it. They're the least paid, you could get to them. They're not full time employees and greatly affect the outcome of plays.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Yes, that would be kind of the only way to do it. And there's been skepticism about officiation, officiating for, you know, there's no time when there wasn't right. I mean not, not necessarily that they were involved in gambling. But you go back to it, you know, the Oilers and the Steelers playing in the AFC Championship in 1979 and there was a missed call in that.

[Mike Pesca]

Game that people the Mike Renfro catch.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Yeah, exactly. There you go. Now, of course they've added also instant replay and they're going to add, I mean like you know, booth reviews. I would guess within five to ten years there's going to be an AI component to that. Now this, to me, of course it seems bad to me. Like I, I, I'm against like booth reviews in all sports. I mean I just, it's crazy to me, it's crazy to me to that the, the evidence needed to overTurn A questionable first down in the second quarter of a random AFC north game is greater than the amount of evidence you need to send someone to prison. I mean, you can send people to the electric chair and it's like, we don't gotta have video evidence that's indisputable. They did this. And yet, so like, we have these guys, we have people playing the sport and we're like, but we have players playing, but we need robots. I mean, fucking crazy to me.

[Mike Pesca]

Well, I sometimes wonder if our biggest hobby is really forensic videography as opposed to the actual football itself. You know, I want to get to. I want to get to the concussion era. And I have a theory about this, which is that it exactly presaged our social justice, if you'd want to call it the great Awokening. It was in fact a trial run for all of the, I'm not going to say panics, because there's a lot of legitimacy to it, but all of the societal to and fro ing as it played out in that, that there was a real under attended to problem. The critics of the underlying institution tried to use it and they were totally sincere to say something like, we have to end this whole thing. The very powerful forces that ran the institutions, in this case football, or maybe want to call the police, they countered with, no, no, no, we can change it. And I'm not sure they offered some cosmetic but also some real solutions. And I'm not sure if really anything changed. It's just that society decided, well, those complaints were kind of a bummer. So that would be my analysis of both. Do you think that's being fair?

[Chuck Klosterman]

I don't think it's unfair. I do think that you're right in one sense in that this is like a. It's like a nuanced thing that isn't necessarily connected to what seems like the obvious thing that like, it's not just like, oh yeah, there was an awareness suddenly that concussions were happening all the time. Potentially on every play you started recognizing this, that the players were recognizing this. Because you can see footage from the 1970s, any NFL Films footage, you see things that are just absolutely insane happening. And you know, Terry Bradshaw gets kicked in the head or whatever, you know, by, you know, and he rolls over and he gets up and he goes back to the huddle and it just kind of keeps going on. I think a modern player would not do that. A modern player would stay down. And there was a real height of that, I would say about 10 years ago now. It seemed like there was a ton of stoppage of plays because of Concussions slightly less now, which is interesting. Does that mean that players did change the way they tackled? To my surprise, to some degree they did. One thing I thought would have been, I was like, for a long time, I always argued there's no way that you can reduce concussions without completely altering the way the game is played as a defender. There's just no way around it. And the guys did adjust. It did change the game, but not as much as I had thought.

[Mike Pesca]

This is, I mean, to me, this is exactly like policing and body cams and training. It's the same.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, I mean, body cameras are interesting because that ended up having the exact opposite effect that they thought. I think they thought they put body cameras on cops. It would constantly show cops doing like malfeasance or whatever. And more often people see the body camera footage. You go like, oh, I get it now. I see why that happened.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, like that. Well, a lot of, a lot of advocates pointed that out. Right. Maybe they hoped it, but they said things like, well, you know, most of policing is extremely hard and split second decisions. And if you see that and could be there with them and rode along with them, and that's what body cameras, when turned on, reveal. I always thought what you're.

[Chuck Klosterman]

I just wanted to say though, but you now you see like some of the places players, they wear those cushioned kind of around their helmet. That's kind of the cushioned outer.

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah, like a second condom for a helmet. Yeah.

[Chuck Klosterman]

And what's interesting about that is that's almost in some ways like the NFL's Covid mask. If you still see someone wearing a Covid mask, it just sort of reminds you that Covid happened. And it sort of reminds you that like some people are still like, you know, that's how whenever I see a guy with that, because it kind of gives him like a bobblehead look. Like you don't see it from a distance, but you see it in a close up. And it's always this weird thing. It's like reminding us that concussions are part of this, you know?

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. But it also reminds me that since those guys do it, and apparently there is not too much social sanction against. Convinces me that a lot of what we were saying about concussions and it being a potential death knell of the game was way too dire. And I always thought of it like when I was young there was. I think, I think this had totally changed. Maybe it didn't get to Fargo, but when I played football on a hot day, we were encouraged to Drink water. It wasn't the era of don't drink water, it'll toughen you up. And then when kids were dying because they weren't given hydration, there was a lot of consternation about that. And coaches really, because they don't want their children to die, their players or their children to die, gave them a lot of water. There was a mobilization to address the actual problem. And I said to myself, you know, this concussion thing, there's a lot of good fine or just normal. A normal people in football who see the incentives, they didn't know much about concussions. And once you tell them about it, they'll more or less not even do the right thing. They'll just do the self interested thing, which is try to avoid concussions.

[Chuck Klosterman]

That's. It's a. I don't. You bring up a lot of interesting things in there because I'm 53. I don't know how old you are. So when I. So when I played, there was one water break at practice. Outside of that, you would just shoot on ice. So even when like we had two days in August, it was like, chew on ice. Chew on ice.

[Donald Trump]

That's you.

[Chuck Klosterman]

What you did. And they gave us water. And everybody wanted, of course, and we. There was a knowledge that you needed it, but it was seen as something of a weakness that if that, that if you were to. You need water too much, that was a problem. Now, no one would think that now, now nobody, nobody would ever say that. Nobody would ever be accused of that. So I suppose that's like, that's just like kind of maybe a natural evolution of things. I was there. Like, I mean, one thing that I have heard, I don't have hard evidence of this, but I've heard many people have told me this, that one thing the NFL did during this concussion issue is if they would often see, say a doctor or a specialist or a researcher who would come forward with like concussion information, they would just hire the guy. Yeah, the NFL just hired every guy who's like a critic of concussions and.

[Mike Pesca]

Was like Google with their competitors. Yes.

[Chuck Klosterman]

You know, and, you know, if. So I suppose you could say, well, that's diabolical. It's also brilliant. I mean, that's the smartest thing to do if someone doesn't like you, to make them your employee. Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Pesca]

But I also. Can you remember, you do remember, right? Around 2015 or thereabouts, it's fascinating to go. And if we went and looked at the coverage, and I know because I was reporting on this for npr. I was told, hey, I. I heard that signups in Texas youth football are down. And for two years, they were, you know, they went from whatever 100,000 to 97,000. There was a great clamoring for evidence of football's decline, and you can find it if you looked. But I also think there was this great mistaking of if that was ever possible and what the. What the appetite for that was. So there are all these relics of. Of Malcolm Gladwell giving a speech excoriating the Upenn graduating class for having a football team or that movie that did horribly, Concussions starring Will Smith before he went back when he had a good reputation. And to me, that says some of our cultural gatekeepers were really mistaking the moment, and we're really mistaking the popularity of football as opposed to this one. What turned out to be correctable problem?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, that's a. It's a tricky thing. I mean, I don't know. It's like, because I would. Somebody. Some would say that, like, well, the reason that Will Smith movie failed is because the only people interested in it are the same people who don't want to be told that concussions are a problem. You know, it's. It isn't. It's just a. It's kind of a fast. I mean, because the big thing is that, like, it's. It's that we do many things in society that are incredibly dangerous that we just sort of allow. We let people climb Everest. Okay, obviously, climbing Everest is much more dangerous than playing football. The difference is football is seen as something that we are socially complicit in. We build our whole society around Sundays and the super bowl and that. And that's kind of what troubles people, the idea that, like, well, if, you know, if somebody rides a bull and they die, well, I never even saw it happen. I know it's going out there, but if somebody dies in this Packer game, like, I'm part of it in some way. One thing that I find fascinating is, of course, I talk to lots of parents now, and I often will talk to them, like, would you or will you let your kid play football? And, you know, there's, you know, some people say yes immediately, some people say no immediately. And both those people act as though the answer is obvious. A lot of guys will kind of imply they would, but their wife is against it. That's a very common out for a lot of guys. But the most common thing I hear is that parents saying, well, you know, I would prefer he not play football. If it's really meaningful to him, of course I would support him. If he loves it, of course I would let it. Yeah, but there's so many other things. Why does it have to be this like, you know, why can't, you know, he get into lacrosse or why can't he get into archery or why can't he get into speech and debate? Why does it got to be this collision sport? I think that's how a lot of people feel. And I do think that there is going to be a real bifurcation as time moves on where people in the Northeast, especially in urban areas, people in the Pacific Northwest, it's going to become surprising to find out that they let their kid play football.

[Mike Pesca]

Well, when you ask that question to people in your cohort, when you were living in Brooklyn versus when you live in the Pacific Northwest, did you get different answers?

[Chuck Klosterman]

Well, when I was living in Brooklyn, my kids were smaller, so it came up less. Yeah. And you know how it is. I mean, do you have kids? I'm guessing you do.

[Mike Pesca]

Yes.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Yes.

[Todd Blanch]

Yeah.

[Chuck Klosterman]

You know, it's like you're always dealing with parents who have kids. Exactly. Your kids age. So when I was in Brooklyn, I was talking to parents about issues regarding a three year old and a four year old when I got here and my kids got older. That's, you know, because when the decision actually comes up, it's very easy to have these ideas about what you're going to let your kid do and not do when they're little. You know, you, I wonder how many people out there were like, my kid will never play video games and what percentage of those parents ended up succeeding in that goal, you know?

[Mike Pesca]

Yeah. I would also say that New York City public schools are unlikely to have a football team. The private schools too. You got a huge exception in the country.

[Chuck Klosterman]

I mean, like, New Jersey is the only place in the Northeast that I see that football is still a big, unless you count Pennsylvania as part of the Northeast. But I mean, I was like, I mean, and it's played, you know, I'm sure in upstate New York and all these things, but Right. In New York itself, it did seem like. I just, I just, I never heard, I never heard anyone saying like, I can't go out tonight, I gotta go to my kids football game. I remember that happening one time, you.

[Mike Pesca]

Know, so towards the end of the book, actually, I want to shout this out just as this is a non sequitur, but at one point you write, let me state for the record, which is technically this book that, you know, that's great. They're just great. But here you write, football is an ethnocentric game, beloved in only one country. That is not what we want. Football is violent and its violence is sometimes praise. That is not what we want. Football is an exclusionary activity exclusively played by men. That's not what we want. Football doesn't reject toxic masculinity, celebrates the ability to ignore injury and accept pain, rewards domination of the weak, shuns individualism and identity, authoritarian and militaristic. All these things where football, and this is what I said in the intro, runs up against their ideals. And you also anticipate some of the things that I was thinking, like, actually, aren't those our ideals? But, but to some extent, do you think that what football does, because it is so popular, it's, it's, it's, it's sodium pentothal. It really actually tells us what we actually want through what the economists would call revealed preference.

[Chuck Klosterman]

I would agree with that. I would also agree that its normalization allows it to be sort of a separate respite from everything else in society. That all the ideas that you're not supposed to sort of believe about personhood or how the world works or what really matters or how things get done. The. The idea that, like, you know, it's a situation where, like, yelling is still, like, central to everything in a way that would not be acceptable not only in other walks of life, but even in other walks of a high school kid's life. It would be, you know, like, it would be very disturbing if you actually had a kid who was like a drummer and he was treated like the kids are in whiplash. Like, you would think that's impossible, but in football it'd be like, well, I knew I was getting into this. But what your earlier point is. Absolutely. I mean, it's. It's like in this book where, you know, part you were reading, I mentioned, like, these are all things we don't want. And what I'm really saying is these are all things we know. We are supposed to say we, we don't want that. A lot of the things about football that sort of make it what it is are things that we know. If you're sort of a enlightened person, you're supposed to be against in the abstract, but in this specific example, we allow it. And I mean, this is, this is also kind of my fear about the future in the sense that the gap between the person who watches football and the sport itself is going to become so Wide and so distant that if there is a situation where there's a work stoppage in football, which right now would be a huge catastrophe, people would lose their mind. If there wasn't a football season next year, they'd go like, what am I going to do on weekends? What am I going to bet on? How can you. When there were work stoppages in the 80s, that was happening already then, it would be even five times that now. But in a distant future, when it's a whole different generation or maybe two generations removed, I think the idea of football will just be like, well, that's kind of an entertaining distraction. And if it disappears or gets in trouble, they won't care the way we would now. I mean, that's why I think that there is sort of an unknown expiration date to football being what it is that, you know, besides its mass and its magnitude and its size, there's going to be a period where the, the, the interpersonal relationship people have with football is going to become less and less. Like it won't even be something their dad played or their dad liked. It'll be something their grandfather liked, you know?

[Mike Pesca]

Well, the name of the book is Football and the topic was Football and America kind of is football. Chuck Klosterman, thank you.

[Chuck Klosterman]

Thanks for having me on, man.

[Mike Pesca]

And now the spiel. Over the weekend, Todd Blanch was on one of the Sunday shows. It was, of course, the Fox Sunday show because Blanche is, as a deputy attorney general, not the kind of person who regularly does interviews and wouldn't be comfortable doing hostile interviews. So he went on Fox and wasn't given a softball, was given time to explain what the Department of Justice is doing in terms of investigation into Jonathan Ross and the shooting and killing of Renee. Good. It is a somewhat long Q and A. I will play the entire minute or so response and then on the other end we'll come back and discuss.

[Chuck Klosterman]

So is the FBI convey conducting investigation into that agent, into the shooting? What can you tell us about that?

[Mike Pesca]

Will it be made public?

[Todd Blanch]

Look, what happened on that day has been reviewed by millions and millions of Americans because it was recorded on phones when it happened. The civil rights, the Department of Justice, our civil rights unit, we don't just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody or putting his life in danger. We never do. That has nothing to do with what happened in Minneapolis. There are over a thousand shootings every year where law enforcement are put in danger by individuals and they have to protect themselves and they have a lawful right to do so. The Department of Justice just doesn't just stand up and investigate because some congressman thinks we should, because some governor thinks that we should. We investigate when it's appropriate to investigate. And that is not the case here. It wasn't the case when it happened and it's not the case today. If circumstances change and there's something that we do need to investigate around that shooting or any other shooting, we will. But. But we are not going to bow to pressure from the media.

[Mike Pesca]

So it is wrong procedurally and appalling ethically that Blanche and the department has taken this stance. And also, and this is most of what I want to talk about, it is not in the interests of even the Trump administration, I believe, although the Trump administration probably believes that what is in their interest is jutting their jaw out, being defiant and talking to only the ever shrinking portion of the population that wants maximum border or interior enforcement. So many of the analyzes of this center on and it's proper how awful it is that Ross won't be prosecuted. They jump to prosecuted. You hear many mayors fry Mamdani, even more or less moderates like Seth Moulton come out and say that this was a murder. I don't do that just because I was raised in a journalistic tradition where you don't call something a murder until it's been adjudicated as such. But we all know what we saw. And a woman was shot who shouldn't have been shot, who didn't deserve to be shot. And certainly shots number two and three were not, and she might have been dead already, were not justified by any fear that Ross could have been feeling. So most of the analysis, and I won't fault it, jumps to this man should be in jail. But I want to go one step back from that. I want to talk about the procedure. Every single jurisdiction that I know about, and I'm even talking about very conservative, very pro police jurisdictions like Albuquerque or many towns in Texas. They would at least have the fig leaf, the patina of actual investigations. And one of the reasons that you do that is it might not be a fig leaf. I suppose there is a chance that one of these municipalities that never indicts cops would come up with an indictment. And you know, maybe it's more than a possibility, especially if there is a lot of public pressure. Elected officials are sensitive to members of their polity protesting vociferously outside their office in a way that Donald Trump isn't. You know, Donald Trump is one of the few that really likes to be opposed by a lot of people because he thinks, and I don't think he's wrong, that this deepens the passions of his minority of supporters that has gotten him elected in this far. Okay, almost every other place in America at least says they're going to look into it and maybe look into it. And the reason for that is many. You tell the public that you're taking their concerns seriously. You also tell your side. If your side is people who just want the police never to be held to account. You tell them, hey, the people who are acting in your interest, the people who we all hold up as proud defenders of safety and the American way of life, who can almost never do any wrong, hey, they were subject to scrutiny. It kind of helps everyone, just in terms of norms and psychology, but also in terms of actually possibly holding the next person to account or maybe even that person to account if some horrible details emerge or some unavoidable evidence is unearthed that could make you look very, very bad and drive you out of office or drive anyone else who's not Donald Trump out of office. Everything argues for either a real investigation or a fig leaf investigation. Signal to the public that, hey, we're taking this seriously. And then the usual playbook is, and I could be cynical about this or I could just be honest because I've seen and you've seen many investigations go that way, hey, we did our best. This guy isn't going to be indicted. Or then there's the step of you do bring it to a grand jury, but if they don't return the indictment, you're okay. And then sometimes you even bring it to court. Usually prosecutors and local officials won't want to roll the dice on that. But even when bringing a case, a police case to court, the police usually win. The couple of cases in Minnesota being the notable exceptions. Not just Derek Chauvin, but the case of Brooklyn Center Minnesota police officer Kim Potter, who was convicted of killing Dante Wright. This was the case of she went to grab what she thought was a Taser, but she but it was a gun. It's kind of unusual. I wouldn't expect most of those cases to get a guilty verdict, except maybe that time in Minnesota. But if you listen to all of the logic of this, you'd have to say that more of it should apply to Trump Ross, the current state of ice than shouldn't. What I'm arguing is he's making a mistake, even out of self interest. Now I know how Donald Trump thinks and I know how Kristi Noem thinks. And now apparently we know how Todd Blanch thinks, even though he was once a respected member of the New York Bar. Who lawyers I know, who are very, very ethical people held in very high esteem and how they think is. All we need to do is be defiant. All we need to do is play to our people who think law enforcement never does any wrong. All we need to do is to continue to signal to ICE officers to keep doing this. You know, the other day I got a message. I forgot if it was on substack or I don't think it was an email to the Gist account. And it was someone who alleged that I was covering up for fascists and advancing the cause of totalitarianism. And then he asserted, you know, all that Stephen Miller and those in the administration of his ilk want to do is to convince more ICE officers to kill people illegally, to treat it as legal and to foment the maximum amount of carnage and discontent that they can normally in any other times, I'd say, well, that's quite a fanciful story, but you don't have really evidence to back it up. That was not my initial instinct. I have been paying attention to what's going on in Minnesota and America and I have been shocked. Not just because the deaths and the insensitivity are shocking, but also because to generate shock in people like me and maybe people like you now seems to very much be the tactic and strategy of the administration. And that's it for today's show. Cory War is the producer of the Gist. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the Gist list. Great Pesca profundities piece out today. Jeff Craig is in charge of moving images. You know, he also does some audio editing. I don't like to brag too much about Jeff. Multi talented fellow Leah Yan is the production coordinator of Peach Fish Productions and Michelle Pesca is the COO in quite a coup for Peach Fish Productions in Peru. G Peru do Peru. And thanks for listening.