The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Kim Kelly:

We are here, Power of the People. First festival sold out immediately. People are excited about it. What kind of power are we bringing? When you’re an artist, you talk about politics. A lot of folks here are not shy about sharing their political opinions. Sure. We’re dealing with fascism. It’s here.

Tom Morello:

Yes.

Kim Kelly:

What can an event like this do? What potential does an event like this do?

Tom Morello:

Yeah. I think the first thing I can do is prove something that I know to be true, which is that courage is contagious. And without even speaking hyperbolically, this is a festival of peace, love, justice, and music. It is a festival of peace in a time where war is celebrated. It is a festival of love and solidarity in a time where hatred and division are rife. It is a festival of justice in a time where injustice is the norm, both on our city streets and abroad. And in a time where artists are censoring themselves or being censored on this stage today, the artists are going to play exactly what they want to play and they’re going to say exactly what they want to say.

Kim Kelly:

Now, for someone who saw this line and was like, “Oh, cool. It’s all my favorite bands, but I don’t really care about politics. I’m not a politics person. Somehow they’ve managed to get to 2026.” What do you want them to take away from this? What’s the ask?

Tom Morello:

Well, first of all, the first thing we have to do is put on a great fucking show and people can enjoy that and take away my experience over the course of doing shows like this and making music. Compelling music with a political message for decades is that people sometimes are drawn to the experience. They’re drawn to the spectacle. They’re drawn to the rock. And then they’re exposed to a different set of ideas than they have been otherwise. Some of them will, and sometimes you’re preaching to the choir. The choir needs preaching to. The choir needs their spines strengthened, steeled, and wind in their sails. Sometimes you’re talking to people who now finally recognize their own anger and their suspicions about what they think about the world reflected back to them. And then sometimes people are just there for a good time. But you know what?

This is one more piece on their chessboard they’re going to have to contend with.

Kim Kelly:

Little Trojan horse situation. Now the artists here, I guess people are kind of coming from all over the place, but clearly there’s not a lot of people on stage who are going to be… They’d probably be happy to play with Macklemore.

Tom Morello:

Some stuff might happen today you might be surprised by on that front.

Kim Kelly:

Why do you think so many big artists are still so scared to speak out for what’s right? They just saw this unfold.

Tom Morello:

Yeah, yeah. I would not say, first of all, I don’t think it’s fair to sort of ghettoize artists as different from any other category of worker. People are scared to speak out as students. They’re scared to speak out as journalists. They’re scared to speak out as carpenters, et cetera, et cetera. Artists also are sometimes afraid to speak out. A concert like this, I got to say that one of the things, the real turning point in booking the show was sometimes it’s hard when you’re making your way through managers. This is a show where people are not being paid money. This is a show where it’s inconvenient. Oh, now you can’t play the DC market because you’ve done this already. But it was the ice murders of Alex Pretty and Renee Good that really turned the tide and artists started calling me and going, “I heard you’re doing a fest.

Can I be involved in some way?” Where I think there was a real feeling that their preconceived notions of stuff they could take for granted, their own safety, their family safety, democracy were really being threatened in a significant way. They’re like, “We want to do what we can with what we’ve got.” The good news is what we’ve got is a lot of great rock and roll, a lot of great hip hop, a lot of great folk music, and a lot of great heavy metal.

Kim Kelly:

Man. Okay. So I was looking through the lineup. I was like, “This is all the bands that Tom likes to hang out with.”

Tom Morello:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You try to

Kim Kelly:

Hang out with your

Tom Morello:

Buddies. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah. Over the course of time, these are the people that say yes when you ask them to play a charity show, yes when you ask them to play at the barricades or some sort of protest. So those are the ones that raised their hand. We’re happy and honored to have them here.

Kim Kelly:

And for folks who were maybe a little bit more on the hardcore, heavy metal, a few more decibels. Who’s more familiar with your other work?

Tom Morello:

Sure, sure, sure, sure. Plenty of that today. I mean, don’t worry. Yeah, don’t worry.

Kim Kelly:

I’m here for a reason.

Tom Morello:

For

Kim Kelly:

Folks who are involved in those scenes and maybe didn’t get tickets to this or didn’t speak to them, but they’re still, they’re down. What do you want to see people in the broader music

Tom Morello:

Space? Yeah. Well, first of all, we have a global free live stream that people can watch everywhere right on. It’s not 10 hours of free for you to watch it. You can tune in and out as you choose. But for people in those scenes, again, I wouldn’t get wise. I’d say the people who own and control this world do not deserve to. And the only way that change happens is average ordinary everyday people who have had enough standing up in their place and time. Sometimes music can remind you of that, and that’s what we’re hoping to do on a day like Power of the People. I

Kim Kelly:

Have never felt safer at a concert in my life because there are 40,000 people here who think the same way I do.

Concert goer:

Power to the People. We don’t like Donald Trump. He can kiss my ass and their asses as well. And we love Bruce and we love Tom Morello and we love good music and we’re thrilled to be here.

Tom Morello:

Another thing we’re doing today, which I try to do at my own shows too, is on this day and on this night, creating a little bit of the world that we’d like to one day see. A world of joy and solidarity and celebrating resistance and fun and people from 15 years old to 85 years old, having a communal experience that makes you glad that you’re alive and feel that this is worth fighting for.

Kim Kelly:

Why does it feel important to you as someone who’s been on the left in the progressive world for a long time to focus on joy? Because we don’t always have a lot of fun. Sure. We’re not known

Tom Morello:

For – Lord knows we don’t have a lot of fun. We’ve all been to. Well, I mean every inch of the Power of the People Festival, we’ve emphasized that there are no long dreary speeches. I’ve had to turn away hundreds of dreary speakers, well-intentioned, but dreary speakers. And even the Freedom Village, we’ve tailored it in a way with some incredible local organizations and national organizations. There’s also free ice cream. There’s also Shepherd Fairy DJing. We want that to be a place that feels welcome and awesome and realizing these are the people who are doing the real work, but there’s community in that and it’s a welcome place. And like I said, the reason we concentrate on joy and fun and rock and roll and kick ass music, because that’s the world that we want to make. We want to make it so it can be like that beyond the confines of this concert.

Kim Kelly:

And to you, what does a successful result look like? Do you want a specific amount of people registered to vote? Do you want a specific amount of people buying stuff from Red Emmos? You got to shout them

Tom Morello:

Out. I think that whether or not the concert’s successful, first of all, let’s hope nobody falls off the stage. Really look at the basics. There’s 17 members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame playing on the stage today. It’s a concert. It is a once in forever lineup. It is a once and forever lineup. So one thing I’m hoping is that people have a fulfilling artistic experience, whether you’re on the stage or you’re off the stage. And then if you’re not careful, you just might learn something. If you’re not careful, you just might be motivated to do something tomorrow. If you’re not careful, you might be motivated to do something more than just vote in three weeks. As my dear departed mom, Mary Morello, who passed away at 102 years old lately, she said, “You got to fight the fascist every which way you can.” She voted at a hundred.

She voted at 102, but she was like, “Voting is just one day and that’s easy enough to do. The real work starts the next day where you begin organizing and acting in concert with like-minded people to create the world that you’d like to one day see.”

Kim Kelly:

She was a union woman, you’re a union man. We’re all union folks here. What would you like to see the labor movement doing right now as we’re dealing with… I mean, I’m getting every email in the world, “Go knock doors, go vote, go vote. Okay, sure.”

Tom Morello:

Yes.

Kim Kelly:

And then what?

Tom Morello:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, I think that there still is a lot of hope in the labor movement because the thing that we can do in the labor movement is stop the world. I think that people don’t realize what a powerful, powerful tool solidarity is. And you can create any kind of world you want when people just stop working, when the gears stop, when the university stop, when the carpenters stop, whatever, when the truck drivers stop, all of a sudden your demands really, really matter because you can stop the economy, you can cost shareholders millions and billions of dollars by withholding your labor, a radical labor movement. I still think there’s a room for that to be something that can be very, very important in creating a better world.

Kim Kelly:

So is this Tom Morello officially coming out in favor of the 2028 general strike?

Tom Morello:

Coming out in favor, please. How about the 2026 general strike, the 2027 general strike, the tomorrow afternoon general strike?

Kim Kelly:

No, I got to let you get out of here, get back to rocking, but just mentioning this great local co-op we got here, Red Emmos, what are you reading right now that keeps you excited, keeps you hopeful?

Tom Morello:

That’s a good question. I’ve got two books back at the hotel. One of them is that I’ve been reading with my son. It’s comprehensive, like the ideas of human beings. So from chardism to a narcosyndicalism, et cetera. It’s like a paragraph on each, which we read together and sometimes he’s bored and sometimes he’s more enthusiastic about it, but that’s what I’ve got brought to the hotel with the family now.

Kim Kelly:

Really? All right. I was not fishing for you to mention my book. It’s fine.

Tom Morello:

Yes. Your book features prominently in his library.

Kim Kelly:

Well, thank you so much, Robert.

Tom Morello:

It’s always great to have you. Thank you for your service and I appreciate you. This

Kim Kelly:

Has been Kim Kelly.

Tom Morello:

Tom Morello.

Kim Kelly:

For the Real News Network.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Howard Zinn:

Protest will always be useful. Protest will always be important. Protest always looks futile at the time that it takes place, but protest mounts up. If they though protest was futile, they wouldn’t send the police out every time. There’s a demonstration. Have you noticed that you set up a picket line of somewhere of seven people and 12 policemen show up? They must worry about protest because they know that small protests lead to large ones.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Well, thank you all. It is such an honor to be here with y’all tonight in Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore and coffee house in our great city of Baltimore. Give it up. And I am really, really honored and excited that we get to chat to the man, the myth, legendary sports writer, book author, documentary maker, political thinker, a true love warrior and a true role model for so many of us of what it means to just be a good-hearted person and to fight for good. Dave Zirin, give it up for Dave, everybody. Now, brother Dave.

Dave Zirin:

Yes. Yes, sir.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’ve gotten to work together over at The Real News on your kick ass show, Edge of Sports TV, right?

Dave Zirin:

Yes, sir.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And so many of us know you through your sports writing and your analysis and commentary on sports, but we’re here tonight to talk about your new book, which is decidedly not about sports. And it is The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. So Dave, I want to start off this way. Who was Howard Zinn? Who is he to you? Why did you write a whole book about him and why was now the time to write that book?

Dave Zirin:

Wow. So great to be here. Such a terrific question. Just the quickest of side notes, that last clip of Howard that you saw, that was his last mass meeting that he ever did before he passed away in January 2010. And it was at the convention of the campaign to end the death penalty. And I just wanted to say we have someone here tonight who is as responsible as anybody for the fact that we don’t have the death penalty in Maryland right now. And that’s Kenny Collins. And I just want to – Yes.

A hard big enough to crush injustice sitting right over there. So for me, I got to know Howard at the end of his life. I got to travel with him to different places and interview him on stage because he was sharp as a tack at age like 86, 87 years old, but standing and doing a 45 minute lecture was just something he couldn’t do any longer. I’d gotten to know him by writing a book in the People’s History series called The People’s History of Sports in the United States. And so I would sit with Howard on stage in 2008, 2009, and he was just the easiest interview in the history of the world. You would just say, “Civil rights, your thoughts.” And then 30 minutes later, he’s interrupted five times by applause. And everybody’s standing up at the end cheering for him. And afterwards, people would come up to me and say, “Yo, you did a great interview.” And I’d be like, “I said 12 words.

It was awesome.” And I got to sort of bask in the refracted glow. And the thing about Howard is that when he would speak about himself, it’s so interesting thinking back to the pronouns he would use. It was always we, it was always us, it was always they. And sometimes he would say you, but it was always, “What do you think? What are you doing?” It was never about I or me. But backstage, of course, he would tell these incredible stories and it’s like out of nowhere. Oh, that time I marched with James Baldwin in Selma. And it’s like, oh sure, as one does. And so I said to him once, “What we need is a people’s history of Howard Zinn.”

And he laughed at that. And that was actually my first proposal for the title of the book. And my publisher said, “Well, that’s too inside baseball.” Which kind of insulted me because I’m a sports writer, so they thought the only way I’d understand it is if they said it was too inside baseball. I was like, “Oh, I get it. Okay, now I understand.” And then the second title I wanted was when I was going through Howard Zinn’s FBI files and they had this sheet that was sent to J. Edgar Hoover in 1950 about Howard Zinn, where they said he was 28 years old and they said, “We are convinced he is a subversive who wants to overthrow the United States. He is a spy maybe for the Soviets. And the proof of this is that he has an alias.” And so you look closely and you’re like, “What’s the alias?” And it’s listed right there and it’s Howie.

So I wanted to call the book Codename Howie: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. And I never thought I would write a book about Howard Zinn when he passed away in 2010. I never thought I would in a million years, but something interesting started to happen during the late 2000 teens and into 2020, which is a lot of people started to get in touch with me and say, “What do you think Howard Zinn would say about the Black Lives Matter movement? What do you think Howard Zinn would say about the rise of Trumpism? What do you think Howard Zinn would say about the growth of right-wing fascist authoritarianism?” And they would ask this question kind of gingerly and even a little bit scared. Was Howard Zinn wrong that struggle is how the world changes? Because we’ve struggled and look where we are. Donald Trump is in charge.

So what if struggle just doesn’t work? And they asked this with fear as if somebody has the God failed was almost with the question, that kind of sadness. And I was thinking about some of the stories that Howard told me who threw his life and thought to myself, you know what? I’m not going to try to write anything or even say something that tries to answer that question for somebody who’s no longer with us. That’s not a job of any journalist or author to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves. But he left behind so many breadcrumbs from his life about how to fight right wing tyranny, about how to maintain in difficult times, about how to ride through movements when they’re at their most perilous, that it’s just like his life is an example for us about how to survive the 2020s. And the fact that somebody born in 1922 who died 16 years ago could generate a crowd like this in Baltimore and generate crowds like this or bigger in cities that I’ve been to, it just speaks to the fact not only of his influence, but the fact that we’re all trying to wrestle with these questions right now of hope, optimism, and how change can happen in very difficult times.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well, beautifully and powerfully put as always, brother. And I think one of the many things I love about this book is not just that I get to enjoy more of your writing, which is really chicken soup for my weary radical soul these days. And I know I speak for a lot of us when I say that, but there’s so much of Howie in this book. You did find so many quotes that feel so perfectly and gently and gingerly and rightly placed in the book. And I wanted to actually have you read one without giving us context up front, but the one there on page 21, read that passage from Howard Zinn and then I’ll throw a question at you about it.

Dave Zirin:

Absolutely. You want just the red part, right, that he read? Okay. This is from when Howard was – No context. No context. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Exactly at 10, banners unfurled. People started chanting. It was fantastic. So my friend and I relieved two women holding a banner and then we heard sirens. And before I knew it, cops with clubs began beating the demonstrators. I was spun around and got hit on the side of my head. I was out. I woke up in a doorway. The demonstration was being scattered and it was an absolute shocking experience because I had no idea the police would react like this to an innocent demonstration, that an innocent group of people could be perceived as that menacing. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country, not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black and brown people, but something rotten at the root.

Since then, I’ve come to understand we need not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society, cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. So first give it up for Howie on that one. Okay. Now, if you please give us the context of that story that Zinn is telling us and what it means for him to make that journey from being what he calls a liberal to being a radical.

Dave Zirin:

Absolutely. So Howard Zinn is born in 1922 in Brooklyn, New York, a very different Brooklyn than the Brooklyn of 2026, to put it mildly. And his childhood was a childhood of poverty, of going from tenement to tenement of outrunning landlords as a young child with his immigrant parents and his three brothers just going from apartment to apartment. And he’d written, and I spoke to him about how he still had this fear of rats to this day because of how they would appear in the apartment and how they would cuddle up in their blankets because they were so scared of getting rat bites. And it’s one of the things about Howard Zinn that I always so respected is that he would thunder and he would rarely get mad, but he would thunder angrily about people who were poor, who became wealthier, who would romanticize their poverty.

And he would say, “We must never romanticize poverty. Poverty is violence and I will never romanticize my own upbringing.” And he became this incredible reader growing up and finding books on the street and reading them, things like Charles Dickens was his first love. And then his parents, they had very little money, but they signed him up for an encyclopedia chapter of the month club through the newspaper. So he’s just reading encyclopedias and whatever he could get his hands on. And the Brooklyn of, now we’re into the 1930s, was also just this absolute hotbed of political activism. I mean, as one person said, who I interviewed, if you weren’t some kind of communist, anarchist or socialist, we really thought you were just dead from the neck up in the 1930s of Brooklyn. And Howard Zinn was somebody who just loved arguing with people on street corners, loved talking politics.

He was very radicalized, not just by the poverty and the racism and the segregation of Brooklyn of the 1930s, but also radicalized by the anti-fascist movement in Europe at that time. I mean, imagine being a working class kid in Brooklyn in the 30s and you see a poster of somebody from your neighborhood who you knew who’s returning from Spain because they were over there with what were called the Abraham Lincoln Brigades fighting Franco’s fascism. So you’re a working class kid in Brooklyn and you’re seeing a kid just like you who’s back from Spain where he was on the anti-fascist front lines. So an incredibly sort of radicalizing experience for him, but he still wasn’t somebody with a clear kind of set of politics in terms of this system actually needs to be uprooted and changed. And that changed for him dramatically as a teenager when one of the street corner radicals invited him to that demonstration that you talked about.

And that was in Union Square, New York over on 14th Street. Again, Union Square, very different today than it was in the late 1930s. And it was there where he got knocked upside the head by the police and actually generations of radicals certainly I think share this experience is that when you come into direct contact with the state,

It changes you forever and very fundamentally.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and say a little more about what would continue to change Howard Zinn fundamentally when he entered military service during a World War.

Dave Zirin:

Well, first I got to say, how many people have seen the movie Forrest Gump, out of curiosity? Imagine if Forrest Gump was directed by John Sayles,

Like radical working class filmmaker. That’s like Howard Zinn’s life. And imagine if instead of Forrest Gump, you have this learned historian and he’s just at these incredible junctures of US history bearing witness. That’s why the subheading of the book is The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, because he wasn’t just this historian who was trying to make history. He wasn’t just somebody going to demonstrations. He’s in these cinematic landscapes. We just talked about Brooklyn, the Depression, the 1930s. Then he becomes a bombardier during World War II because he wants to fight fascism. He becomes a bombardier even though he’d never been on a plane. That’s how much he hated fascism. He’s like, “I’m going to get on a plane and fight fascism.” But he leaves World War II, committed at this time, he called himself a pacifist and somebody who was anti-war for the rest of his life.

That was one of the results of his experience after being asked and told and ordered to bomb civilians in a French resort town called Royan, a place he later visited in 1966. But then early years of the civil rights movement, he’s at Spelman College, a woman’s HBCU, teaching this incredible generation of students like Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman and many more, Bernice Johnson Regan, who was part of the SNCC Freedom Singers. And so he’s there at ground zero of the start of the civil rights movement. And then he becomes the adult advisor along with someone you might have heard of named Ella Baker of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. And then he’s at the center of the anti-war movement against the war on the people of Vietnam in the ’60s. And so he’s just at these moments where he’s able to play this role in helping make history, but also playing a role that I think we have a lot to learn from, particularly as I say in one chapter, as a white guy in the Black freedom struggle, his behaviors as a white person I think are actually a model for how white people need to approach anti-racist struggle.

And the fact that he was doing that decades before we started even having those conversations seriously is really interesting to me. Other issues as well, like he and his partner Roz, when they went up to Boston, one of the first things they did was set up mental health clinics for people who were part of the movement against Jim Crow who were coming back to North with PTSD from what they experienced. And so this idea of something we talk a lot about now, like self-care, they were trying to practice that even though it had yet to be articulated. And that’s why I think he has so much to say to 2026 because he was living that life of struggle for over 70 years. So so much to learn from that when somebody is an activist in these incredibly huge junctures of history for over 70 years.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and you and I have joked about this at The Real News that I feel the same way about Mark Steiner, right? Baltimoreans will know Brother Mark Steiner, but that guy is very much cut from that same cloth and that same great Jewish radical tradition as well. But speaking of which, I wanted – The Jewish

Dave Zirin:

Part’s important, but we can talk about that later. Well,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And maybe we can weave it into this question because I wanted to circle back to that passage that I had you read, where Howie is talking about that moment when he no longer identified as a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country, not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black and brown people, but something rotten at the root. I wanted to ask you, Dave Zyran, if you had a moment like that in your life.

Dave Zirin:

Lord, first of all, I’ll answer that Max, but only if you answer it too, because you are a radical the first order. So your story demands to be heard. Is that a deal?

Howard Zinn:

Deal. All

Dave Zirin:

Right. The easy answer is I started to believe that this country needed to be fundamentally overturned when my sister gave me a book called The People’s History of the United States, and that’s God’s truth that changed me. To the letter truth is that she bought me a people’s history of the 20th century, an abridged version of a people’s history of the United States because she knew her little brother and knew I would never read a book that was this thick. It would’ve ended up a doorstop in my house or my dorm. And instead though she gave me something she knew I would read and it fundamentally changed the way I looked at the world. It changed the way I looked at sports, which was my obsession. So that’s the easy answer to say I read this book and it changed me. But books I think are never really enough to turn you into somebody who just wants to turn the system upside down.

And my answer to that where I was just like,

Bleep this system to its core happened at not necessarily something that was ostensibly political, but I used to do graffiti piecing and I was working with red paint and it was getting on my hands a little bit and someone called the police and I was arrested with a friend and ended up spending a couple of days in prison and had to deal with the police officer laughing that they caught me red-handed because I had red paint all over my hands. I had to hear that joke about 50 times and they kept telling each other it like it was the funniest thing in the world. And the way me as a white kid, a college student still was treated while in prison and speaking in jail, I should say, I shouldn’t call it prison, but in jail and how long those days felt was something that by the time I was out of there, I wanted to set.

I don’t know if I should say this too. I was really angry at just everything, just talking to people, being around that for a couple of days. It reminded me, there’s this quote by Oscar Wilde when he was talking about being in jail where he said, “Every day feels like a year, but it’s a year where the days are really long.”

And it’s just that idea. And I don’t for one second want to make it in any way sound. I mean, it was two days for goodness sakes, but you’re asking me what was a pivot moment where you just start thinking this system is just beyond wrong and that really was it for me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s an experience that so many people don’t have but have such strong opinions about. And it’s the kind of thing where if you have experienced it or someone in your family has, you don’t go around talking about the criminal justice system the way our culture loves to talk about it. I mean, I work with Mansamusa who was locked up for 48 years, you know him

Howard Zinn:

Well,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Brother Eddie Conway, a legend in our history and at the Real News in Baltimore. He was in there for 44 years. The things they’ve told us are horrific, but even just getting a taste of that, even just recognizing that the system is not just made for the bad people, the worst of the worst when it comes for you or people you know who don’t fit that description, the country is getting a crash course in what that looks like right now, but that is the violence coming uphill. It has been there in places like jails and prisons, in sacrifice zones, in the poor and abandoned parts of this country that sucks up the resources and life from places and abandons them since the beginning.

So I had a similar experience when it came to my place in America, my belief in the country I lived in and the kind of future I was going to have, the life I was going to be able to make for myself, the things that I and many in my generation who at least had some sense of class mobility in the ’90s and in the post Cold War moments, the dot-com boom, in retrospect, feels like the kind of heyday of what I’ll experience this country has. But so many things that felt possible then don’t anymore. And what really made me and my family learn that was the crash

Howard Zinn:

In

Maximillian Alvarez:

2008 and the recession and that whole awful heavy period where over the course of years we lost everything that my parents had worked for. We were the American dream. We were a mixed immigrant family, middle class, Orange County. It was great. And then it all went away. We lost the house I grew up in. We lost so much of ourselves and the family we were before that. I graduated from college with a degree in Russian literature thinking that we were like, “Oh yeah, he can go be a professor. They make good money, they’re respected.” We actually knew one who lived on our block, so we thought he could be like that. We had no idea how screwed higher ed was or how dumb of a decision that was, but I sure learned when I was holding that degree and all the debt it took to get it and working 14 hour days at a body crushing mind numbing soul killing warehouse or factory in Southern California while my dad drove Uber and my mom handed out samples at Sam’s Club and everything was going down the drain.

I’m watching the damn TV tell me that the country’s back, the economy’s back, the banks got bailed out, these guys got bailed out, everything’s great and we’re sinking further into the couch and into the abyss the whole time. And that period taught me a lot. I wasn’t radical by any means. I was conservative. I grew up very conservative. I had shirts that have me with Ronald Reagan’s face on it and stuff like that, if anyone ever wants to blackmail me. I guess I’ll tie this up, but the point being is that we had a lot of right reasons for believing what were ultimately the wrong things back then in the ’90s and ’80s and early aughts. We believed in meritocracy, not knowing how untrue it was, but we thought the argument was sound and we wanted to believe that we could make a life for ourselves based on our merit, not the color of our skin.

That’s why that spoke to us. It wasn’t a bad reason to believe that, but whether it was that or whether it was the sort of classist belief that the people who were working in these big beige warehouses that we drive past on the freeway every day probably deserve to be there or the people locked up in those big awful prisons in the middle of nowhere, they deserve to be there and treated horribly. When you get a taste of what it’s like to be in there and when life pushes you in there and when you start getting beaten by the system and seeing how rotten it is and who it serves and who it doesn’t serve and how little you mean to it, no matter how much you defended it before, you learn some shit.

Dave Zirin:

Changes you. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Now I want to shut up and go back to you because this is your book top.

Dave Zirin:

So true though. No, well said, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, so I want to talk about the radical Zinn and how he was treated in his day. I mean, you write about in the book that this guy was a public enemy during the Red Scare, the J. Edgar Hoover hated him. And to this day, postmortem, he is in the hall of fame of books that piss off the MAGA right and that get targeted for book bans. So I wanted to ask if you could sort of talk to us about the parallels between the kind of persecution of Zinn and what he stood for then and the continuing need of our oppressors and the people who stand for the opposite of what he stood for, continue to try to silence and bury him today.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah. Howard Zinn wrote a play called Marx in Soho, which is an amazing one person play. And a lot of people joke that it’s basically Karl Marx speaking, but he somehow found a time machine and traveled ahead a hundred years and then is commenting on the previous hundred years and what capitalism has done to the world. And it’s very funny, much funnier than I think Karl Marx ever was. So a lot of people joke that it’s more like Zinn in SoHo, like it’s his voice because it really sounds like Howard. And there’s this line in it where Howard as Marx, if you want to put it that way, says, “Why do they feel the need to bury me again and again and again?” And that speaks to why Howard Zinn matters so much to 2026 because they haven’t stopped trying to bury him and he hasn’t stopped rising up to be able to teach a new generation of kids.

I mean, Donald Trump, who by the way is the Picasso of bullshit artists and has no. I guarantee you, he has no idea who Howard Zinn is. Remember, this was the person who said Frederick Douglas is doing great work.

And he talks about Zinn in speeches and he blames Zinn for “the left wing mayhem” in this country and uses it to justify book bannings, school boards that prevent not just Howard Zinn, but all radical. He becomes the stand-in for all radical histories and keeping them smuggled, keeping them out of the classroom to the point of which teachers have to smuggle them in to be able to teach their students. One teacher said to me, “I’m no radical, but Howard Zinn is the only thing that keeps my students off their phones.” There’s an importance to his work in terms of how it makes the student feel alive, how it makes them feel like they’re a part of making history and not just somebody who’s an object of history or a victim of history. I can be somebody who fights back. I can be someone who makes history.

Obviously, the reason why the right wing, fascism, fascists, they want to keep those ideas out of our heads because what could be more dangerous for them than ordinary people thinking, “If I want to, I can depose you and create the kind of society that I want to create.” They want to erase that idea from people’s heads, an idea rooted in history. I had the utter privilege recently of being able to sit with Mumia Abu Jamal, political prisoner in Pennsylvania for several hours. We’re talking about Zinn, who by the way, would visit Mumia on death row and they would speak to each other. He said, “The reason why they are waging a war against history is because their agenda demands ignorance.” Now, that’s a beautiful way to say what Donald Trump said much less poetically where he said, “I love the uneducated. They’re my favorite people.” I mean, they want us to not know our history because first of all, they know we’re going to fight back.

They wouldn’t have the National Guard piled into DC picking up trash off the ground if they didn’t know that they are creating conditions for people being furious and fighting back. What they also want us to do though is to have us have to relearn all the lessons from history, which will slow down our side from victory. They don’t want us to know our history. They don’t want us to know something that Howard Zinn said once very beautifully, which is he said, “The way things are, are not necessarily the way things will be or could be.” And that’s really important too, because far too often I think we as radicals live too much in the present tense and are just like, “What is life five feet in front of my face?” And that’s what politics are. When politics are the past, which informs the possibility for a better future.

That’s the first thing about why Zinn matters today and why this war that they’re waging on him, it has real life repercussions on policy and on government.

I’m dealing with this right now with the 10 year anniversary of Colin Kaepernick first taking a knee and how incredibly Colin Kaepernick coming to Coppin State September 25th to speak and the degree to which there’s been this utter distortion and rewriting of what that was all about. And frankly, what that whole period was about of the Black Lives Matter movement and not only the right wing, obviously, who have not waged such a backlash against that period that they’ve created entire police forces now rooted in counterinsurgency and they’ve made ICE a higher budget than the US Marine Corps. It’s all about domestic “pacification” that police chiefs in the United States have learned in part by going to Israel to learn from police chiefs over there. People can Google real programs to teach police in this country from the Israelis about how to do pacification in this country, in our cities.

So that phrase, we are all Palestinian is not just this abstract call for solidarity, but it’s how we are being treated in our own cities. And so that’s very real. I’m sorry to go off on that tangent, but it’s just – Brother,

Maximillian Alvarez:

It ain’t no tangent. We all came out to hear you

Dave Zirin:

Talk about this.

So you’ve got the backlash on the right. The Black Lives Matter movement scared the holy shit out of them. And their response to that has been to create a police state of counterinsurgency. When ICE gets these electro shock gloves, that’s because of how much the Black Lives Matter movement scared them. That’s why they take the drills and put them on the ground where it’s written Black Lives Matter because they want to uproot the memory of what that was. But now we’re also seeing people on the liberal left say, oh, that period in the 20 teens, that was just woke 1.0 as AOC put it and says we were just demanding too much when the reality is maybe we didn’t demand enough. And when they try to characterize that period in the 20 teens as somehow silly or immature when they caricature it as, oh, look at those crazy demands, defund the police.

All they’re doing is helping the right enact a further backlash on our side when we should be celebrating what people fought for in the 20 teens. So what’s been so bothering me as a sports writer is all these people have been. There’s several writers have been like Colin Kaepernick. It was quite a moment, but I guess it wasn’t a movement. And it wasn’t a movement. It was a movement that in the modern sense, first of all, it goes back hundreds of years if we’re talking about the struggle for black liberation, but in the more recent sense, it started the day George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin in 2012. It extended through Ferguson, Missouri. Colin Kaepernick became a sports amplifier of that movement because of the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. And then that grew out into hundreds of high school athletes around the country taking a knee when that anthem would play.

That is a movement. Then of course it culminates in 2020 with the largest protests after the police murder of George Floyd that this country had ever seen. So for them to take Colin Kaepernick and decontextualize him and say, oh, he was just some wacky guy taking a knee during football games and he lost his career because of it. By the way, probably the only actual victim of cancel culture is Colin Kaepernick, the way they took his job. But it’s just to say that our side needs to understand that that history of the 20 teens, we can’t surrender control of the memory

Of that decade because in a bipartisan sense, they are trying to rewrite. Oh my God, saying this in Baltimore is so poignant because it was in Baltimore after the police murder of Freddie Gray, that the bravery of people on the ground in this city, in the face of so much state oppression as the Real News Network documented assiduously is one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever borne witness to, for goodness sakes. But we live in a country rooted in white supremacy where they care more about a CVS getting broken into in Baltimore than they cared about the Capitol Building getting ransacked on January 6th because it was white people doing it on January 6th and it was a different situation in Baltimore. So it says something about they cared more. They were outraged more about the CBS than they were about their own capital.

But it’s just to say, if I could, I’m sorry to go on. No, go on. So long with this stuff. I’m sorry. Go on

Maximillian Alvarez:

Baby.

Dave Zirin:

But it’s just to say that we cannot surrender the memory of the bravery that people showed in this city in particular, and that’s what they want us to forget. And that’s evil because what it does then is the next time there’s struggle, once again, we’re trying to figure it out again. We’re not carrying the lessons forward. I think people ask me a lot of the times about, well, what does Howard Zinn offer us in 2026? Because optimism, whatever, pie in the sky is fine. He was an optimist, but he wasn’t just an optimist. He was somebody who dealt with facts and dealt with history. I think history is what our movements so desperately need, like a conversant knowledge in history. When I was coming up as an activist, it seemed like everybody had read People’s History of the United States and the autobiography of Malcolm X as a baseline.

There was this lexicon or vocabulary that we shared talking about that history. I think we need to reimplant that right now, right in the middle of our struggles to know that history. That what Howard Zinn brings to the table today in 2026.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I know we got to bring this around the final turn here, but I wanted to just push you to keep going a little more because those who want to silence in and erase this history, what version of history do they want us and future generations to believe?

Dave Zirin:

They want us to believe one of two things. You’ve got the right wing and the liberal left version of history, neither of which I would argue help us at all going forward. The right wing version is of course that history is the creation of really, really wise, powerful white men.

Through their brilliance, reaching down from the shining city on a hill, they have brought us to this remarkable place of progress, delivered us from savagery and brought us to this profoundly wonderful civilization where AI wants to eat our children, the best of all possible worlds that we’re living in right now. That is obviously very easy to debunk, but it’s what Trump, that’s why he’s putting warning signs in front of the Smithsonian, like warning history herein, and why they forced out Lonnie Bunch as the head of the Smithsonian, because it’s for putting forth a version of history that goes against the great white man theory of that this is how the world spins. The liberal left have their own version of this though, where their argument is that with every generation, we are building a more perfect union. Barack Obama has only given about a hundred speeches with this theme where it’s just like President Obama.

He gives speeches about how every generation takes the baton from the last to build a more perfect union. We keep improving. Yeah, the country is flawed and yes, the constitution, it’s a document in progress that we keep making better and more inclusive. I mean, I don’t see how you can live through the past 10 years and think that at this point. They call Howard Zinn’s politics, this is the big liberal left critique of Zinn, is that he looks at things too simplistically. What could be more simplistic than saying this country keeps getting better by the generation? That’s an absurdity on the face of it, but especially over the last 10 years and Howard Zinn’s version of history that oppression is actually baked into the cake of this system and there’s a reason why the book is not just called a People’s History of the United States, but aPeople’s History of the United States 1492 to the present.

So he roots the United States founding with the expropriation and genocide of indigenous peoples and their land and then of course the transatlantic slave trade and then the entire history of the United States is then that battle of oppressor versus oppressed. It’s also a battle of forward progress, but then also vicious backlashes, but then how we beat back the backlash. And that’s really what Howard Zinn lived for as an activist, much more than as a historian, was beating back the backlash. I love that that sort of ferocious approach to the world is something we really need right now because I believe that right now we are in the first stages of beating back the backlash. When apolitical members of my family are getting in touch with me and asking about how we can shut down a data center, it really just starts to make me think like, okay, maybe something actually is brewing during a period that can feel so incredibly gray.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and to really kind of end on that note of family, I love this book and all the ways you’ve helped me and us understand the many people and things and experiences that made Howard Zinn who he was. I wanted to sort of ask you in that vein, if you could tell us about how Howie Zinn has made you who you are and the person the book is dedicated to made you who you are.

Dave Zirin:

Oh Lord. Let’s just keep the. All right. My mom passed away during the writing of the book. It took six years to write and about year three she passed. I wrote in the introduction that what my mom taught me was that if you ever really want to think of yourself as somebody who understands a people’s history, you first have to learn how to love people.

I’ve met a lot of folks in my time who love the people but aren’t so great with people. It was what my mom taught me to the core of my being. Just to say that in the last months of her life when she’d be up here, we’d always drive to the Real News Network for my show and she was sick and y’all were just so beautiful to her and it meant so much to me. I really want to thank you for that, Max, so much. Kayla, who’s here as well and Dave Hebden and everybody who made, and Cameron if he’s here and everybody who made my mom feel so welcome. She just loved y’all.

If Howard Zinn also like what he taught me when he passed away is it was this thing that always changed me because I couldn’t believe that he had died, which you don’t normally think you would say about somebody who’s 87, but I learned that it really doesn’t. We really need to treasure our elders to such a degree because they really can be here today and gone tomorrow. I also interviewed several. The other people I dedicated the book to were half a dozen people who I interviewed who’ve since passed away before the book came out. I don’t want to sound cheesy or anything, but our elders are precious, are so precious and it’s impossible to sit up here and talk about the importance of history and not also say that one of the ways that we’ve always gotten our history as a human society is not just by reading, not just by study, but actually speaking and taking the time to listen to people who’ve been through the struggle.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for Dave’s Zirin, everybody.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez.

Jules Taylor:

And I’m Jules Taylor.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So you guys all know Jules as the producer of this podcast, but let me tell you something about brother Jules here. Jules is a renaissance man. He is a podcaster himself, as many of you know. He’s a writer, a music producer, a poet, and a brilliant musician in his own right. And he does all the music for working people as well. And that’s why I really, really wanted us to host this episode together because today we’re actually going to be talking about the work that goes into being a professional musician and the realities of working and trying to make a living in the music industry today. And that industry looks a lot different than the music industry that we grew up with. Those 20th century days of vinyl records and tape decks and CDs and tower records and MTV, man, those have gone away and given way to this 21st century age of MP3s and music streaming, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, Ticketmaster, et cetera, et cetera.

You guys know what I’m talking about. And I love music just about every single kind, and I always have. And I need music to live. And life itself would be so much less, I don’t know, magical to me if I lived in a world without music. And my playlists and my mix tapes are, and have always been, I think of Frankenstein’s mix of just the cheesiest pop, the hardest hip hop and gangster rap, the most classic Motown, the rock and roll, indie, ’80s, ’90s, early aughts, Broadway soundtracks, movie soundtracks. Just like me, my playlists contain multitudes, baby, but I can’t read music for shit and I can’t play an instrument to save my life. So my understanding can really only go so far here, but I’ve always been and continue to be in just total awe of musical people. And Jules, you are a very musical person.

You live this, you breathe this. And we’re going to dig into this more with our guests today, but by way of, I guess, introducing the conversation, if you had two minutes, how would you sum up your entry into the world of music and the good, bad, and ugly parts of your life as a working musician today?

Jules Taylor:

So hey Max, glad to see you, buddy. Man, thank you so much for the invite to co-host this conversation I’m really excited to be a part of. And I guess the short and simple of why I decided to make Go Music is that I consider myself to be, to a certain extent, largely unemployable. And I sort of just dreaded the thought of having to maintain a consistent nine to five, but I knew music was something that I could wake up early if I needed to, but something I would wake up for anytime I could be a part of it. And so in some ways it’s the only thing that I can do, but in other ways it’s also led me to everything else that I do, whether that’s studio work or live sound and eventually things like photography and shooting music videos and podcasting, flying drones and everything that it all kind of just comes back to the central urge of wanting to figure out how to make a living out of taking a guitar on stage and just playing original and covers and seeing how to make a go of that.

Somewhere in there I decided to challenge myself, see if I could actually make a living out of it. And that’s ended up why I produced podcasts too. So many gigs come out of needing other gigs to support the music.

It’s something that benefits you to help support it in some ways. I mean, it’s like a dream, hope and a prayer, but somehow you’re like, “Hey, but I ended up with seven career paths.” So anyway, but that’s how I got into this stuff, man.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about this more, right? Because I know I have so many questions and I’m sure our listeners have so many questions. What is it actually like and what does it actually take to make a living as a working musician today? What does the music industry as it exists today take from musicians and take from the rest of us? And what are we getting in return? Is that bargain worth it anymore? And how do the working and living conditions of music makers and all these moneymaking schemes of the music industry, how do all those shape the actual music that we make and consume and listen to and dance to and think to and live to? How do they shape the ways that we relate to music itself? So this is what we’re going to be talking about today, and I am just beyond excited and really, really grateful to be talking with all four members of Veteran Chicago Rock Band, The Empty Pockets.

So they’re here with us now to dig into all this. And thank you all so much for joining us on the show today. And Jules, thank you so much for co-hosting this man. So let’s go around the table and have y’all introduce yourselves and your band to our listeners.

Josh Solomon:

Max, Jules, thank you so much for having us. That was so many insightful things you guys said already. I’m Josh. I’m the guitar player of the Empty Pockets and I started this band with Nate 20 years ago. Our singer and keyboard player, Erica, is my wife, and I have made a full-time living humbly, a humble full-time living in music and the arts for well over 20 years.

Adam Balasco:

Hi, I’m Adam. I play drums with the Empty Pockets, but also as a working band, I do a lot. We all do a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with music. So I do customer service and shipping and we do warehousing. We load our own gear. We do a lot of work outside of just our instruments somewhat, unfortunately. I think we’ll get into that at some point probably, but yes, drums.

Erika Brett:

Yes, we are all Renaissance people, as you said early in this broadcast. I’m Erika. I play keyboards, so Oregon, roads, piano. And yeah, I’ve been a full-time musician for almost 20 years, maybe longer than 20 years. And my big role with the band is graphic design, merchandise development, and social media promotions and marketing. We all have a lot of hats.

Nate Bellon:

Hey, I’m Nate. I play the bass. This is one of my hats. We have a lot of roles and one of my roles is physical maintenance. And so Josh and I actually built the studio room that we’re in, and we have built this room out over 15 years or 16 years quite physically. We literally have done all of the work or very close to all of the work. And it’s just one of the things that you end up doing to become and maintain your status as a professional musician.

Erika Brett:

You’re also the vehicle guy.

Nate Bellon:

Well, that’s true. Yeah. It’s

Josh Solomon:

A physical thing. Yeah,

Nate Bellon:

Physical

Josh Solomon:

Stuff. Nate’s very mechanical.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, let’s not sell him short. We call that the getaway guy.

Erika Brett:

Nate’s perfect for that.

Jules Taylor:

Well, Josh, Erica, Nate and Adam, Matt, it’s so cool to be talking with y’all. And I think it’s funny how immediately in this conversation, there’s a sort of vibe of anything we have to do to keep doing what we’re doing. I mean, that’s kind of the credo around that I think of from time to time. But I guess I have a very broad question and in that broadness, I’d like to invite you to get as specific as you’d like, but said very plainly, how are y’all making this work today in today’s touring climate? So rarely do we get to speak to a band that has been together as long as y’all have. And so in this shared experience of performing, how are y’all contending with this changing landscape? Where have you had to pivot? Not just in rising gas prices and inflation and the evermore difficult task of convincing folks to put pants on and leave the house, but also in the merch game.

I mean, selling your music and physical media at shows has morphed into this sort of t-shirt and trinket hustle at times. So basically the odds of an independent band being successful in air quotes, however we define that, if I’m going to use the word successful in terms of carving out a meter existence, those odds are ever more stacked against us. And so what are you doing differently today compared to say maybe 2005 and where are y’all finding the most success?

Josh Solomon:

It’s Josh here and I’m 41, so 2005, 2006, I’m 20, 21 years old, totally delusional with no perspective on. How do I totally put it? Every time we go to a town, a fan says to me, “Oh, you got to come play in this place.” We’re in a 200 seat venue. Every time a fan is like, “You got to come play this little place in my town.” I look it up. That place he’s talking about every time is 2000 seats. People have zero concept. We’re like a 200 seat theater band. People have zero concept of the amount of things between us and the eras tour. And I think from my perspective, and I’d love to hear what you guys have to say too, to answer even just a part of that question is we’ve doubled down on physical media so hard and we talk to and collect, and this is working increasingly better, I think as a portion of the population feels more and more left out by the commoditization of music.

When you put music on a streaming platform and it’s the same every single song ever made on every streaming platform, which is different than movies and TV, that becomes a water tap and it’s just a price race to the bottom. So we basically, while we put our music on those services from our perspective, that’s like a token.

Erika Brett:

Yeah. We used to kind of be waiting for our prints to come, as some people say.

Josh Solomon:

Attracting an

Erika Brett:

A&R ride. Yeah. We had a song that some radio people were like, “This could be a hit.” And then you’re waiting for that to be the case. Now that wasn’t the case for us, but we were able to, over the course of the last 20 years, but really over the last kind of how you described 10 years, diversify our income streams. We went from playing whatever gig we could get to becoming a backing band for artists with large followings and then opening for those artists to gain awareness and gain more fans and also prioritizing an e-commerce strategy, which is what Josh was talking about, our physical products. And so we’ve moved away from streaming. Streaming is great and we also listen to music there, but for our business, we are directing people to physical products and shows.

Josh Solomon:

Jules, you had mentioned one of the reasons we all get into this is because I just don’t want to go to a nine to five every day. I want to do something different every day. So a couple of years ago, this studio needed repainted. And one of the ways you stay a full-time musician is you don’t hire a painter. You buy some paint and you paint the studio. So I found myself and Adam and Nate here. And Adam, do you remember what you said as we were painting it?

Adam Balasco:

Yeah. I always say I like any job, manual labor, whatever the hardest thing you’re imagining is weefing today, right now. I like that for one day, three days. I’m outside, I’m up on a roof, it’s cool.

A week. Turning anything into a career is so daunting. But yeah, that is how we save money and kind of stay afloat is like we painted that. You were talking about building this studio and then I was like, oh yeah. And then it’s white now because we painted. We painted it and stuff like that is how we’ve kind of taken. And we’re not waiting for that lottery ticket. We would love our song to go crazy on the radio or streaming or whatever. We’re not waiting for that lottery ticket. We’re acquiring fans one at a time and we’re doing all the work or we like to think we’re doing all the work ourselves and we’re desperate in a sense. And

Josh Solomon:

We’re doing it all. Jewels had the same attitude as us in terms of, I don’t want to be a painter for a living. I don’t want to look down the barrel of that. I’m impressed with somebody who can do that. I know some amazing house painters, but I’m not above painting. I’m not above doing some electric.

Erika Brett:

Well, and the thing with owning an arts business of any kind too is that you are going to inevitably become a Renaissance person. You’re going to have to learn about lighting so that you can make videos that resonate. You’re going to have to learn about editing. You’re going to have to learn all of these things about vehicle repair.

Josh Solomon:

The myth goes that when the Rolling Stones got to Chess Records here in Chicago, Muddy Waters was painting the wall. That’s the myth that when the Rolling Stones got to chess in the early ’60s that Muddy Waters was painting. So it’s not new at all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s interesting to me too, because so much of what you guys are saying, even as a self-professed non-musical person or non-musician, so much of what you’re talking about resonates with my own experience as a creative and a creator in media spaces and just that need to kind of adapt to an ecosystem that’s always changing. And there’s always opportunity in that as well as a whole host of new threats and stressors to deal with. It’s wild, man. We’re talking on a podcast I made because I was like, people aren’t reading my articles anymore. And that kind of process has sort of led me to get into audio reporting and now video reporting and any and all of the above I love to do, but there also comes a price with being able to make a living doing what you love. And I wanted to kind of talk about that too, because I can’t speak from your guys’ and Jules’ vantage point.

That is your art. That is still different from the reporting that I do. The two very much intersect. I bring a lot of my artistic heart and spirit into the work that I do, but I know just by being privileged enough to get paid to do that for a living, that it really changes my relationship to the thing I’m doing, to the ways I feel about doing it. And the love when it becomes a job takes on all of that baggage from all the unloving parts of life. So how does that affect you guys as musicians and the music that you make?

Josh Solomon:

Man, what a great question. There’s so many pieces of that. One that comes right to mind to me, and I want Nate to speak on this and Adam as well, is they both had children and we’re on the road and our dreams are kind of coming true. We’re at the London Palladium, it’s sold out, but a month into a tour doing something you love too, there’s an element of, do I love this the same amount today? And I don’t know, Nate, what do you think about, you had to leave your son at home for the first time pretty recently.

Nate Bellon:

Yeah. So my kid had just been born and then we went on tour in the UK for a month and we were in Amsterdam and all over the UK. We took the Chunnel twice. So there was a bunch of stuff where I was like, this is cool. I should be ever present in this moment. And also it’s hard because I wasn’t seeing my newborn kid and my wife and you try and balance that emotionally and then you get to play shows. So I get that sweet juice that I need in order to make it through the next couple of days.

Josh Solomon:

Jules definitely knows this feeling too. When you’re on tour, there’s the same amount of time in every day when you’re at home, except the part that you’re leading towards is like an hour and a half and the rest of the day is leading towards that moment or coming away from that moment. And it is an exhilarating but strange experience.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. And then you get to figure out that an hour is just a completely useless denomination of time. It’s just not enough to dig into anything. It’s not enough to really relax if you need to, but you have an hour before this one critical thing happens before you have another hour or something. But yeah, I totally understand that, man. Being away from home, it’s difficult to, especially with the sort of constraints that a lean and mean tour might have on its subjects, being away from home, being somewhat restricted in that sense, and being torn between these beautiful things you’re experiencing on tour while also having the regret of having to leave. I got a buddy of mine who plays guitar with Playboy Cardy. The guy is on tour with that guy playing arenas. And even he the other day texted me, he’s like, “My wife’s due in 12 weeks and I leave for tour in 13 weeks or something crazy like that.” But I wonder also, you guys also seem like you’re very chummy, right?

You’ve been together a long time, but I would say that touring and these moments also kind of create friction amongst band members and inevitably you end up with some comical story at some point. Do you guys have a singular story you could pick out of some sort of tense moment that resulted in something hilarious?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And remember, this is a worker and labor focused show. So we’re really talking about, give us a worker’s eye view into the labor of having to go on tour with each other and deal with everything you’re dealing with.

Adam Balasco:

Well, I don’t know. No funny stories immediately come to mind. I’m sure they exist, but being in a band is like doing a group project with your immediate family, which is horrible at times and also amazing. And it’s hard to communicate the band dynamic because it’s like I deeply love these people and we live in a van and sometimes an Airbnb or a hotel. So it’s like –

Josh Solomon:

There’s an interesting balance there too, and I think a lot of small businesses have this balance, like where to put your office, how nice of a neighborhood to put it in, that type of thing. For us, it’s like how much to spend on a hotel, how much to spend because there’s a balance between sustainability, vibe, morale. Man, we’ve cheaped out a couple times and checked into a hotel and you’re only there for 12 hours and it’s just crushing your spirit.

Erika Brett:

Bloody hand prints. Oh my God. Oh my God, you guys.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, what motels are you guys staying at?

Nate Bellon:

Was that the Bay Bries Inn?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I was going to say the Bates Motel, man.

Josh Solomon:

Yeah.

Erika Brett:

We’ve got some horror stories for

Josh Solomon:

Sure. And in terms of from a worker perspective, there’s nothing reasonable or OSHA friendly about how a band operates at our level at all, right? It’s like in the band at 7:00 AM, maybe stop for a lunch. We have a tour manager who does most of our driving. Then before that, it must have been really unsafe.

Adam Balasco:

Definitely.

Josh Solomon:

It

Adam Balasco:

Was just us.

Josh Solomon:

It was just us. And you go to an interview, you load in. The days are 14 and 15 hours. I always call on tour a processing deficit. You can’t even go through what you did today before you get tomorrow. And we’ve learned a lot about how to plan better, about how to demand more. I like to say a gig is legitimate when they offer you a meal. Sometimes you go to a gig and you’re there from 4:00 PM to 1:0 AM and you’re like, “Is there anything to eat around here?” And they’re not like, “Not within two miles.” Who

Erika Brett:

Wants to help with that? Why?

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. Yeah. Or the green room plate of mac and cheese. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a testament every time I talk to musicians, you can tell who’s really giving it a go because they have all of the ingredients for the recipe. They have all the social media, all the marketing. They actually have the website, the domain, the EPK, the video, the bio written by a third party that you probably paid someone for. All of these different things, this elaborate recipe that just equates out to a starting point, right? Yeah. It’s

Josh Solomon:

So depressing. It’s a starting point.

Jules Taylor:

It’s all a starting point. Yeah. Tell me. You

Josh Solomon:

Were using it as a metaphor, but just to exemplify, we’re the empty pockets. We take that seriously. We write about labor issues. Our next album is called Dear Billionaires. And to that effect, especially when we open for someone on a tour, back them up, there’s an elaborate rider in that deli tray and chips, whatever, all this food, fruit. We have permanent coolers. We never leave a venue without as much food and ingredients. We have banned salt and pepper. We literally stop at a picnic table on the side of the road and unpack our coolers, and that’s mostly lunch. And we’ve really embraced that. And

Erika Brett:

We really have to be thrifty in every part of what we do. Not only have the margins gotten worse, like you were saying everywhere, in hotels, gas, food, all the things that make our engine run, but I was watching the Today Show this morning. It happened to be on, and they’re giving financial advice. And without a steady paycheck, none of those things work for us. We can’t go to a financial planner in the same way somebody with a 401k or just even a regular paycheck can. We really have to take saving money and spending it carefully very seriously.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. It’s just a testament in so many ways whenever I talk to any musician who’s making this go and making it work is that you don’t really need the bosses because the workers can do anything under any conditions with any circumstances that come up on the road with unsure pay and just questionable sleeping conditions. It’s like where there is determination and this deep written desire to create music and to do this as a main vocation, as a focus, as a primary way of living your life. It’s just a testament to the incredible sort of willpower that comes from artists who will do anything to continue being able to create art. And so I’m not worried about a dictatorship of the proletariat at all because have you seen some of the musicians we talk to people?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, that’s what I wanted to ask about actually, is because music, as far as any of us, and I say us as musical and non-musical people, but living in America, having the culture industry that we have, music was as much a potential career path as being a famous actor or a famous athlete. I mean, there is a sort of level of super stardom that was selectively occupied by people like us, it seemed, growing up. And it was possible to play music that was so good that reached so many people that you could make not just a living, but a superstar’s living. And you could have all the security you could ever need and the fight from your humble beginnings and insecurities would all be worth it if you made it to that star echelon. I mean, same thing goes for the way I thought about being a professional basketball player with my brothers for many years growing up, or even people now who are in the media and see the media as the only path for success in journalism or in the media is the superstar path where you’re getting paid so much and you have such a far reach that you’re Joe Rogan and you can kind of have that echelon that none of us are ever going to ever reach.

But I say that all to say, obviously there’s always going to be a lot of folks who still look at these industries and vocations and arts and sports this way, but I think the veil’s been lifted for a lot of us and we’re like, “That ain’t happening. I ain’t making it and no one else is making it in today’s economy in that kind of direction.” And there is a lot to be mourned about that, but I think there’s also something that’s very liberating when we are not pursuing our passions out of a place of desperation or out of desires for lavish, luxurious, ridiculous wealth. And that struck me in something that I’d heard y’all, Josh and everyone with the empty pockets is not something that you’ve been aiming for, but you want to make a good middle class living. And so I wanted to kind of meditate on that.

Once we sort of recalibrate our visions, our imaginations and our hopes for what we want to do with this, what does that give you back that a career trying to make it in a Spotify age as a superstar would take from you otherwise?

Josh Solomon:

Yeah, totally agree, man. I like to think of it also, it’s like becoming an astronaut to say, “Oh, I’m going to go have John Mayer’s career or I’m going to go have Taylor Swift’s career.” It’s absurd. More than ever, and I think it’s good, the niche-ification of taste has made it so there are even fewer superstars than there used to be. There are very, very few superstars. Like I said, when I was in my 20s, I had these delusions and I let those go and I discovered about myself. And I think you guys would agree that more than the massive success, because for the most part there are exceptions, that comes with chains, with you were successful in this lane and now you have to deliver this thing. Brilliant people like that guy Larry, the cable guy, his persona, you’re stuck there. You have to deliver your thing.

What I want more than anything else, which we have a lot of, is freedom. We make enough money to get by, but we can do whatever we want. Our biggest constraint artistically is ourselves. That’s what keeps me going.

Nate Bellon:

Jules, you had mentioned it previously, the changing landscape of the music industry. And I think one of the things, because we started as a band in 2006, so the music industry was literally falling apart or had already fallen apart and some of the gatekeepers or higher ups hadn’t admitted it to themselves. The nature of the landscape was changing. And so we found that certain people that we would hire in positions, that’s their mindset. Let’s get you to superstardom level. And I feel like going through that cycle a couple of two, three times, we were able to not only learn, but then solidify both in our minds and then out wow later, here’s what we consider success.

Josh Solomon:

It’s such a good point.

Nate Bellon:

If we can just do that, we’re a success.

Josh Solomon:

And philosophically, when Eric and I met before we got married, one of our first dates, we went on and on to each other about scale. And Adam feels passionately about this as well. There are certain things in the world that need scale, right? We shouldn’t do small businesses to get to the moon. I get that. We need a certain amount of scale to make computer chips, but that doesn’t mean every burger joint and coffee shop and bookstore needs to be scaled. And there’s an element, okay, we have economies of scale on one side, but there’s an element of massive inefficiency. And what we found, and we keep finding in entertainment in general, is that the basic strategy to make someone a superstar is brutal Millions on raw awareness. Blanket,

Erika Brett:

Blanket marketing.

Josh Solomon:

That’s why people get annoyed about hit songs because they’re hearing a song over and over again that’s not even meant for them. Nobody wrote Espresso for me. There was, but why did I hear it a hundred times? I wasn’t interested. I gave zero indication of the choices I made in my life.

Erika Brett:

Sabrina, it’s for me. It’s for me.

Josh Solomon:

And we have the ability with technology to target so accurately now. So the major labels, including big movies, Marvel movies and stuff, they’re all still doing this super inefficient. And we’ve decided the opposite. We want to build our small business and keep building it, getting razor focused. We get new fans every day and we’re trying to maximize their fandom of us and their value to us, but without worrying about getting to 10 million people a year.

Erika Brett:

What I think you guys will appreciate is that we are a band and yes, we’re making music, but we took e-commerce strategies that are not based on music, that were based on books or smaller items. And we kind of did our own authentic application of that for our career. And that has allowed us to expand our audience and find our audience through advertising, targeted ads and word of mouth.

Josh Solomon:

Touring is about 40% of our revenue. It’s something like that. A lot of our revenue is physical music and a lot of that is shipped from here. I’m talking about vinyl, talking about CDs. Not as many for us. It’s a different type of band, not as many t-shirts for us. So I’d love to do more shirts. And that’s all about just using classic commerce, e-commerce and marketing logic to build a fan base in the same way that a book company or a razor company would build their fan base.

Jules Taylor:

I love that y’all brought up Sabrina Carpenter because she was not on my radar. And then this last album dropped and her marketing was all over the place. And I just slowly got initiated into the house tour track and the one where talks about maybe it’s slow or whatever, but now I know her lyrics. I know her visual signature. And it’s funny. Come on,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man. Manchild is a bop. The

Jules Taylor:

Whole album is great.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Manchild is such a bop. It’s such a bop. Men today need to hear it. It is an anthem for the ages. That and Olivia Dean’s Man I Need are two of the most essential songs that every fucking man who is alive today needs to hear. And I don’t think it’s an accident that our zeitgeist is producing such desperate, beautiful please from women for men to fucking be better. And I think it’s through music where a lot of men learn that kind of thing. And I think that’s a good thing. I don’t mean to stand on a soapbox here, but I didn’t realize I was going to defend Sabrina Carpenter so virulently, but you guys stirred me up, baby.

Josh Solomon:

And this newer album is fantastic and there are all these, you’re right, that thread is all around music. Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo has that same vibe. Maybe men will listen. I don’t know.

Maximillian Alvarez:

They will. And I think there’s honestly, and I’m just speaking personally here and then we’ll kind of bring things around the final turn here because I can’t keep you guys for too long, although I could talk to you for hours. I think I had reached a state of exhaustion recently and it felt like almost a decade long period of cultural exhaustion. And I don’t think I’m alone. I think a lot of us felt that and we receded into it, especially with COVID. We watched the same series that we already had seen, movies we already knew, songs we already had on our playlist. I know for myself as a lifelong lover of art and culture and new things, I really retreated. And I think part of it, not all of it, was fueled by the sort of feeling that it’s like nothing’s good anymore or the quality of everything is sucking just a little bit more each time and I’m not participating in it damn. I’m going to hang on to the things I know are good and just listen to those for the rest of my life. So that’s the kind of petulant place that I was in as a modern music listener. And again, I feel like I’ve talked to a lot of people who felt that same way. And I think that actually the Spotify algorithms and stuff sort of reinforce that sense of just playing the hits or trapping us in these silos, these cultural silos, instead of getting to explore and experience and find bands like yours that we would like but have no idea exist.

And I know that people are looking for that, they’re hungry for that. And I am so goddamn grateful when I hear it coming out of my speakers. And I guess to just tie a bow on the point, I’ve been hearing that of late with some songs that have given me some hope in pop culture of late. And I think a lot of it goes back to Olivia Dean, Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter and the somber. I think there’s a lot of necessary cultural discussion that is happening in and through those songs that needs to be had and isn’t happening in enough places. So I thank music for that. And I wanted to sort of bring us back around to that sort of beautiful, necessary part of what music is for all of us and what we look to music for. And I wanted to ask y’all, all of you, Jules, you’re included in this.

I’m roping you into our final round, but let’s start with what is your least favorite part about being a working musician and what is your favorite part that makes that and everything else worth it?

Adam Balasco:

I’ll start and say my least favorite part of being a working musician is that it made music work. And this was alluded to earlier, but I leave here a lot of times and I put a baseball game on or sports talk radio on or something like that because this saps a little bit of my musical energy. And so anyone who has a nine to five job and you get a pizza and some beer on a Friday night, you play music with your friends, know that I am so jealous of that. And the magic in that is a little bit lost, I will say. We’re

Josh Solomon:

Almost chasing that vibe.

Adam Balasco:

Yes. And paradoxically, and I love paradoxes, again, the strength, the weakness, the pro, the con. I always say we are band. We’re arts kids. We all committed to being artists. We’re artists. And the irony is we ran headfirst into running our own small business. And I was playing around with spreadsheets and exporting CSVs this morning as Ari was doing her design work as Nate is patching a hole in the- The

Erika Brett:

Asphalt.

Adam Balasco:

In the asphalt in the parking lot. And Josh literally has his hands on all of that stuff. And to me, it’s both. I like that. I like doing the spreadsheets, but also we do this, we do the drums and stuff so, so much less. It’s like a fraction of what we do is play music. Mostly we’re running a small business.

Josh Solomon:

What a great answer. I think my least favorite part or one of my least favorite parts is feeling like I’m getting in the way or looking down on or condescending in any way to the hobby musician. So it’s a similar thing to you and while not getting invited into the hobby musician world anymore, both the combinations. So it’s really similar to what you’re saying. You know what I mean? And when I do get invited to the dudes who didn’t great musicians who now do other stuff, maybe it’s just in my head, but I feel a little bit like I’m intruding. I don’t love to do. Erica is such a great singer and she doesn’t love to do karaoke and everybody goes crazy, but it feels like, am I intruding on this space? The paradox.

Nate Bellon:

Yeah. The least favorite part for me I think is early mornings, late nights while you’re chugging it out on tour. And sometimes those can become never ending based on the schedule. I don’t deal well with life without my, I don’t know, 10 hours of beauty sleep. You don’t get this good looking without a lot of sleep is what I’m saying. And so everybody out in audio land, I’m gorgeous.

Adam Balasco:

Very attractive mate’s very good.

Nate Bellon:

I’ve been compared to the Greek gods of old. And so the early mornings, late nights, it just kills you after a while. Every one of us, if we’re out for long enough, you get sick. And then you’re spreading sickness around the van because you’re all just sitting in a dumb van for hours. I don’t like that part, but it all pays off because while you’re on the road, you get the purest of the sweet juice, which is you’re playing music live and you all enter this flow state together and you’re creating art that may never exist again in this moment. Worth all of that early morning, late night stuff.

Adam Balasco:

And let me just cut off Erica really quick because we’ll get to Erica. Nate went there. So let me just say in case my wife listens to this, I miss my wife and children when I’m on a road. It’s the real answer. Sorry, Erica, go ahead.

Erika Brett:

Good job band. Good job. Mine is similar to dates whereas he was talking about late night, early mornings. What we do, the travel and the carrying of equipment and gear and bags that we do is hard on the body. And we went in age order in this wrap up and I’m the oldest. And as we get older, taking care of your body has become much bigger of a priority. And it turns out it serves the music part a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. You need to be in good health. You need to be in good shape. That’s

Josh Solomon:

Such a labor issue across the board.

Erika Brett:

You

Josh Solomon:

Have to take care of your body to keep being whatever profession it is you are.

Erika Brett:

And I had to do a lot of doctoring personally. I have a lot of chronic health stuff, so it’s been a lot to navigate. You come home from tour and you’re rushing appointments in and you’re trying to do things that you can apply on the road. So it is really difficult. But that being said, it’s led me on a path to be stronger physically, mentally. And the best part is being on stage, connecting to my best friends up there, the new friends in the audience, and feeling this cosmic moment that we share and no one can take away from us no matter what happens. It’s a radical act of joy and in a time where there’s fascism coming our direction in many ways, what we can do is create and give and be with one another and love one another.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well said.

Jules Taylor:

Excellent. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Beautifully, beautifully put.

Jules Taylor:

Man, well, to follow all that up, man, I guess my least favorite thing about being a professional musician is that everyone sees the work as play and then. So one instance of this is that I think of myself somewhat like a carpenter in the sense that I have a truck and I have all of my tools in it. And I drive around and it’s a beat up vehicle that takes me from contract to contract where I unload my stuff and I plug in and I do what I do. Right. But if I get pulled over, I’m not a worker all of a sudden. I’m a long-haired guy that probably has some weed in the car and I ain’t out doing shit. I’m out playing is what I’m doing, not working. And the whole small business thing behind stuff, man, it gets rolled real fast being the envy of every married guy being like, “Oh, you have so much freedom and you just go play music.” And it’s like, “No, man, I have bills, dude.

This is work.” But not only that, it’s like, “You must have so much fun doing this.” I was like, “Oh, you think I have fun trying to write heartfelt poetry?” I take this work more seriously than anything else in my life to where this pen and paper has ruined me. Putting pen to paper to put down some sort of heartfelt poetry that can also be abide by attaching melody to where I can go out and project that into the world for that singular cosmic moment that I live for, that is work. And people somehow think I’m enjoying the process at times. So yeah, it’s a weird paradox, man, because it’s like you’ll always be a disappointment to your parents who wanted you to become a doctor, but somehow you have to hold the knowledge of a doctor and train yourself physically to get to this apex of performance and you’re 40 now.

And you do this and somehow there’s still people that look at you and they’re like, “I don’t really understand what this guy does.”

Josh Solomon:

So spot on, Jules.

Erika Brett:

Someone said that to me in a mall once. You’re still doing that?

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. But it goes like, “Oh, you’re still doing the photography thing?” “What do you mean I’m still doing the photography thing? “That’s a vocation. It’s a career path. It’s a form of art. Yeah, I don’t know, man. But when you do have a choice in this world of pouring over Excel sheets or breathing in toxic chemicals, it’s like I’d rather the Excel sheets be my Excel sheets. I’d rather all this stuff be for me and that’s where I’ll work 80 hours for myself so I don’t have to work 40 for somebody else. Yes.

Adam Balasco:

Give me some toxic chemicals with those excels.

Josh Solomon:

I want to do it for myself.

Erika Brett:

You could talk about the baseball card gum that he ate that was like 10 years old.

Josh Solomon:

Great point, Jules.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Amen. Sadly, if you listen to a lot of the interviews we do on this show now, you’ll realize that we’re all getting blasted with toxic chemicals, whether we ask for it or not, but we’re all going to be part of the fight to stop it. And we all got to be part of the, I think, solution to our own critiques of the culture industry and the music industry especially. And I would say the same is true for media and journalism. You are right to not like a lot of the things that are unlikable, but if you want the things you like to continue to exist and flourish and give you what you get out of them, you got to support them. I mean, that’s true whether you’re talking about this podcast, The Real News Network, Jewels’ musical work, The Empty Pockets is musical work, independent creators everywhere.

If we don’t have your guys’ support, there is a very real chance that we’ll go away or stop being able to do what we do, even though we love what we do and we love doing it for you and for anyone who will ever hear it, see it, learn from it, get something from it. We’re in it to win it, baby, but we need you guys to be part of it. We do it for you, but we can’t do it without you. And so ending on that note, I wanted to just say that for any journalists and media makers and people who are interested in making a career out of that, since it’s the one part of this discussion I can speak on, the advice I tend to give people is that don’t commit yourself to doing this for a living, commit yourself to doing it to fight for life and follow where that leads you.

And in fact, it may be right and good and better for you to have multiple sources of income so that you don’t have to make the object of your devotion and your skill serve all these other ends, which means you’re not going to be able to do it the way that you want to. The work is going to suffer, you are going to suffer, but there are still some pathways available to come join me at the table of the suffering and do this work professionally. But they are so few and far between and the ecosystem is changing so much. So I can’t in good conscience advise anyone or coach anyone on that. I can just tell you that I am what I did to get where I am, what I think we all need to do to do the work that needs to be done, but the future is never assured and we don’t know what the landscape is going to look like in the coming years.

So that would be my central advice is you got to make a living however you can. And if you’re committed to this, do it, but don’t make it all dependent on your ability to make a living from it because that may actually be more of a devil’s bargain than you’re looking for, and it may take the love of this from you. So just be very mindful of that. And now to all the musicians, the artists, the creators who have been listening to you brilliant people talk about your working lives for the past hour, I wanted to kind of give y’all the last word on that, like any sort of advice you would give to other working artists out there or other folks who want to make a living making art. And also please tell our good listeners where they can find more of you and your art.

Jules Taylor:

And the new album.

Josh Solomon:

We’re the empty pockets everywhere at theemptypockets on Instagram, theemptypockets.com. And we have a new album out on Friday, October 23rd called Dear Billionaires. It’s our musical letter to the 3,600 billionaires in the world. I would say to all musicians aspiring of any kind, I increasingly agree with you, Max, and I have met more musicians, younger people that are saying, “I’m going to commit my life to music, but not commit my financial earning to that.” And I think there’s a lot to be said there. And I think it’s worth saying from our perspective, we are a very middle class band and yet still, I can think of dozens of times where we were so lucky where I look back and I think, oh my God, that happened and that happened. And then we toured the UK three times or that one thing got us 200 gigs.

So you got to be there. You can make your own luck, but still nobody’s getting anywhere on their own. A ton of people have helped us and we’ve gotten very lucky.

Adam Balasco:

I would tell artists, anyone trying to make it have realistic expectations. And I think for a lot of people that means coming to grips with you’re going to make $20,000 or something like that. You’re going to have to live on that if you want to be an artist for a good amount of time. And the harsh reality is, well, I think it’s kind of, again, paradox is uplifting and it’s harsh. A lot of people, I would say your art is fine. There’s great art everywhere that you’ve never heard of or seen. There’s great artists everywhere. A lot of people, if you really want to make it work, if you’re committed, you need to kind of treat it like a small business or something and treat yourself as an artist like a small business. And we don’t want to do that. We hate pricing of our artwork out.

It’s hard, it’s tough. But that’s the reality is good art’s everywhere. If you really want to make it a business, make it a business. Good luck. Stuff.

Erika Brett:

Yeah. I would say to piggyback off that, that balance is really important. Commercialize what you can so that you can keep making art, but don’t lose the joy if you can’t.

Josh Solomon:

Or find the perfect balance.

Erika Brett:

Or find the perfect balance. And I also agree that artists need support and that could change the world.

Nate Bellon:

And let’s not forget, the album comes out October 23rd.

Erika Brett:

You can reorder it now.

Nate Bellon:

If you want to pre-order from us, you can go to our website, pre-order it there. I have also been telling people to go to their local record store that they like to go to and request the album, pre-order it through them. Keeps the local economy going. We love local record stores. We want to build relationships with them. And we also want you to spend your money at a local record store.

Josh Solomon:

And we can say exclusively here, we haven’t said this publicly at all, we are going to be releasing a special variant pricing. So I want to make it clear, the physical CD is exactly the same. It’s not signed, it’s not deluxe, but we’re going to sell it to billionaires. If you are a billionaire, you can get our album, which we’re selling for $20 for $285,000. So that’s going to be on our website next month, and I’m pretty sure some billionaires are going to want that. They know they’re superior, and so they know they need a superior version, which is actually the same, but costs $285,000.

Nate Bellon:

I would welcome billionaires of all stripes to go ahead and take advantage of that billionaire pricing. And we handle all the packages. So if we see any billionaires buying the regular, we’re going to see that and we’re billing you. I’m not sending that

Josh Solomon:

To you, Elon Musk.

Nate Bellon:

No way. Jamie Pritzker, come on, man. What are you doing? The right version. We have a billionaire version for a reason. And to all the musicians out there, I would say continue to practice your dream, go after it, but also diversify your skillset as much as you can because you never know, A, what skill is going to become handy at a gig, on the road, dealing with merchandise or recording people, dealing with people inside the business. Diversify your skillset as much as you can and get ready to make a lot of bean recipes for 10 or 15 years. You can live on a lot of beans. It’s going to be fine. You’re going to make it just beans.

Erika Brett:

Yeah, be a learner. Be a learner and eat your beans.

Nate Bellon:

Eat your beans.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank all of our guests from the great Chicago rock band, The Empty Pockets, Josh Solomon, Nate Bellin, Adam Belasco, and Erica Brett. You can go learn more about the Empty Pockets and you can check out more of their music. Just use the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you guys for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network, and it’s brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by the one, the only, the great Jules Taylor. And man, Jules, thank you so much for doing this episode with me, brother.

I though that was awesome.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. I always love talking to musicians in the sense that they have their ear to the ground for alternatives to wage slavery in this cursed system, man. And so however they can gain traction, however they can get ahead, however they can make things work, it’s not so much a picking of the brain of music theory or what music you’re listening to that happens within conversations with musicians. It’s more like, “How are you doing this? What are you doing? What’s working for you?” So it was really great to hear that from a band that 20 years, that’s a long time to be together. So definitely some cool advice in there and some really cool moments as well. I really appreciated being a part of this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, man. It was great. We got to do more like this. And before we wrap this thing up, I wanted to ask where can people find more of your music?

Jules Taylor:

You can search my name on any of the streaming things or you just go to my website, which is julestaylormusic.com.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our different podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this district rather than your host Mansa Musa. Today we are joined by Mopreme Shakur, the son of the late great political prison with Tulu Shakur and the older stepbrother of the legendary rapper Tupac Shakur. Mopreme has recently published a memoir titled This Thug Life: A Poet Narrative Spanning the Rise of the Black Liberation Movement, The Birth of Hip-Hop in New York, and its expansion to the West Coast. Mopreme, thank you for joining

Mopreme Shakur:

Us. What’s happened, Kevin?

Mansa Musa:

Appreciate you though. I know they got you on Hustle and Bustle, and this is a good thing. What compelled you to write this particular memoir?

Mopreme Shakur:

Well, I am Mopreme Shakur, Thug Life Outlaw, Immortal. I am the son of Dr. Matou Shakur, stepson of Afeni Shakur, brother of Tupac Shakur, nephew of Asada Shakur. That’s my fam, as well as my sister Setua. A lot of people are familiar with the struggles and the triumphs of our family and the movement. A lot of sacrifices made, but a lot of comments is made too. And that’s often overlooked because it’s hard to ignore the struggle. My father was a political prisoner, served 37 years in federal prison. We fought hard to bring him home, but we were able to finally bring him home, but he was ill with cancer, and he passed away in 2023.

Mansa Musa:

Now you say Motulu Shakur ancestor served an astronomical amount of time, a political prisoner. But we just hold Shakur. When you say Shakul, that claim in and of itself is political in and of itself. Panther 21, organizing New York chapter, heavily organizing around goals, the aspirations, and the vision of the Black Panther Party. So let’s talk about the process of bringing this book to life. When did you first begin writing it one? Did you speak to other family members and close friends to piece together the memoir, the memories rather, or were you just drawing strictly on your own experience in growing up?

Mopreme Shakur:

I didn’t ask too many people much first because it’s my story. It ain’t their story, it’s my story. And a lot of times a lot of other people weren’t even there. But the process began after we lost pot and had me reflecting on a lot of things you did. And along with the loss of my brother, I was thinking about our accomplishments. I was locked up for a skid bid. I was doing something stupid, sitting there thinking about myself. And I also though about the rest of the family, the accomplishments we all have made, sacrifices. We all have made border movement, border family.

And so that’s when the process started, got my first 80 pages, and then life be life ain’t. Stop, start, stop, start. Eventually got my co-writer, Talia Shakur, she and I finally got a poser together because we didn’t want to self-publish. We felt like the story was important and it needed to have a farther reach. And so I wanted a book deal. So you got to have certain things in order to get that book deal. So that’s what we did. And as time went on, it became more urgent for me to get this done because I was becoming one of the last ones left Between family and crew, family and crew. It’s been painful, a lot of sacrifices. We just had the homegoing ceremony for Auntie Astata up in Harlem a few weeks ago. Pops past 2023. Been 10 years since The Lost of Fainting. Akti Falani, Baba Balao, Baba Saku.

And it’s like once they’re gone, you can’t ask them no questions no more. And I was like, oh, I started panicking on the music side too. Shaq G just passed away. Young Noble just passed away. Along with Pac, Fatal, Big Psych. Come on, man. Yeah. Come

Mansa Musa:

On, man. And you know what? And as you unpacking that, how important, and this just came about this space right here, how important is it for you to be able to control that narrative about your legacy? It is.

Mopreme Shakur:

Because

Mansa Musa:

You just outlined, okay, we hear pop. We hear a lot of things associated with the Shakur clan. We hear a lot of things associated with the movement. But then when you get in a space where you hear somebody say something that you know is misinformation, or if you not in a position to refute it, then it takes on life. So how is it important? Why do you think it’s important for you to be able to refute for safe? Because you give auticity to the information, whether a person agree with it or disagree with it, whether they like it or don’t like it, it’s coming out the baby’s mouth. It ain’t coming secondhand.

Mopreme Shakur:

Once you become a public figure, anybody could write about you. And that’s what a lot of people don’t know. Pac and I are public figures, of course, because of entertainment game, but our actual relatives are public figures because they end up in the damn news. And you got to preserve your own stories. You know what I mean? Because as Black and brown people disenfranchised poor people, what we are is rich and experience. Maybe poor and finance is what we are rich in life and life experience and pain. There’s a value to that. You got to turn pain to profit. Turn your pain to profit. And we’ve been enduring the pain and while other people here make the profit on it. You dig. So I’m out there in LA, I’m in Hollywood and all that, so I’ve learned the game. And it’s the power of the parent.

We had to get this down because I felt like my story is important because it’s at the crossroads of Black history and Black music history. Okay.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Mopreme Shakur:

Black history and Black music history. We touch on both sides. And we’re disappearing. So we as my generation, the Obafamis, the Sunni Alis, our family, our connected family and the struggle and the revolution, we have the kids of it because it’s our elders that did a whole bunch of the work and sacrifice. So oh, the best we could do is preserve it and tell the story to our people because these stories are important. Members of our family and other brothers and sisters in a struggle are heroes, folk heroes, icons. But if no one knows the stories, they won’t see it that way.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. And this mark is the 60th year anniversary of the Black Panther Party and they dub most of the children of party members club. Panther

Mopreme Shakur:

Clubs.

Mansa Musa:

Panther club. So as a Panther club, and actually witnessed the struggle and see firsthand the repression that was being inflicted, seeing firsthand the torment your father went through because of his political view, seeing the fact that your aunt was forced in the exile for no reason of political views. Talk about what does the legacy mean to you? The party, your family’s legacy, but more important, how do you feel that the party made a contribution to social justice? If you can speak on that.

Mopreme Shakur:

The party made a significant impact to social justice. My father, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, Lincoln Detox, Detoxification Clinic – A Lagun. And the Bronx. That work that they did was established patients’ rights as a human right. For that incident up in the Bronx is the reason why this country has patients’ rights to this day. You know what I’m saying? But no one will know that story unless we tell it because we’ve already been suppressed to a great degree as it is. So they want to suppress our stories. As we see what’s going on in this administration right here, you know what I’m saying? They’re messing with Harriet Tubman. Jack, what the hell Harry Tubman did to you? Why y’all leave Jackie Robinson look? You know what I’m saying? I’m like, whoa. So it is very important and significant that we try to do our best we can to preserve our stories because we help make this motherfucker too.

I don’t know. Can I curse on almost Man, you can

Mansa Musa:

Do what you do.

Mopreme Shakur:

Oh, shit. Okay. All right. I ain’t want to be rude. You know what I’m saying?

Mansa Musa:

No, no. Like I told you before, we don’t give you a voice. We turn the volume up on your voice. However you want to express your voice, we turn the volume up. Let’s talk about, because you made mention of this, and this is something I think that you can unpack as much as you want.Because you made an observation that you’re dealing with the struggle and the music. And so you dealing with two things issue. And most people, when they think of Shakur, they think of Tupac. They think of you. But now we at a crossroad where what role do this music play, hip-hop music play in raising people’s consciousness, elevating people’s perspective about struggle. But more importantly, how do you see the landscape, man?

Mopreme Shakur:

We truly cared about the people. In the midst of the entertainment was a vehicle to be able to reach the people. But people know Pac fans know he really cared about the people. Keep your head up. Brenda’s Got a Baby. Pop a song. Dear Mama. We’re addressing issues in our communities. You know what I mean? And people be feeling, they tell me all the time. They tell me all the time, man, thank you for making this song. Thank you for making that song. And because we were trying to talk about something. Us being popular in the general market helped because we were able to reach with more and more people. Being a movie star helped. We were able to reach more and more people with some of the messages that we were trying to deliver. Thug life, you know what I’m saying? That was our shit.

That was our contribution because it was actually, a lot of people got the message, a lot of people didn’t. My pops helped us by creating a thug code so it wasn’t just some ignorant shit. The hate you gave little infants fucks everyone. Because if you don’t take care of them babies, they will go into the monsters you fear today. That

Mansa Musa:

Was the acronym.

Mopreme Shakur:

The hate you gave little infants, fuck everyone. All these jackets they’d be wanting to put on us, we taking them and flipping them. We was taking them and flipping Pac’s second album stripping for my nigga. People have an issue with the word nigga. We flipped it, put an A on it. Never ignorant getting goals accomplished. Yeah,

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, yeah. You

Mopreme Shakur:

Did?

Mansa Musa:

Yeah,

Mopreme Shakur:

Man.

Mansa Musa:

Jon, you don’t hear that though, right? No, you don’t. Keep on that. And it makes sense though. And when people say. And the reason why I’m asking this is why we got the opportunity for somebody to myth bust. You know what I’m saying? About your family and the myth bust about who y’all are and what y’all thinking. Because when you come out like Latulu Shaku is a giant and an ancestor and we praise him for his contribution. We honor his work. And we know that he. Ella Baker say, “We who believe in freedom must not rest.” They not rest. They not resting in power. They’re not resting in peace. They not

Mopreme Shakur:

Resting,

Mansa Musa:

Period. Exactly.

Mopreme Shakur:

So

Mansa Musa:

That’s why it’s

Mopreme Shakur:

Important to you. Pac,

Mansa Musa:

Why you acting like this? Why are you so angry?

Mopreme Shakur:

Because we are not at rest. As long as our people still struggling, the struggle continues.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, exactly. You know what I

Mopreme Shakur:

Mean?

Mansa Musa:

The

Mopreme Shakur:

Struggle continues.

Mansa Musa:

Talk about the underground railroad and third. Okay, the artistic foundation clearly influenced your musical career.

Mopreme Shakur:

We came from community organizers. You know what I’m saying? And we were trying to present our version for our generation. We started with the underground railroad because Pac was already with Digital Underground. And it made sense. Our crew be the underground railroad. We come from the underground, and for so many reasons it made sense for our ideology, it made sense. And then that morphed into 50 niggas. One good nigga, 50 representing the states, one good nigga in every state. We could accomplish anything

Mansa Musa:

And

Mopreme Shakur:

Stick together. Yeah, right there.

Mansa Musa:

You

Mopreme Shakur:

Did. That’s what Pac had too. We was real about it. And that morphed into Thug Life.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. You know

Mopreme Shakur:

What I mean? So

Mansa Musa:

It really had a political undertone.

Mopreme Shakur:

Exactly. That’s why we pulled my father in with it. He was a part. He made Thug Cole, which is we were getting some help from a sister Erica Ford up in New York. We had brothers behind the wall, comrades behind the wall pushing it, trying to explain it. But some of the people got the message and some of the people did. But then you

Mansa Musa:

Had like, well dude, you got opposition because you got the state. Exactly. You got the government. The last thing the government want is somebody that has that kind of influence to be able to speak truth to power and be able to galvanize people, galvanize people around. Because everybody was into hip hop. So this is why you have, just my belief, this is why you have the push on corporate America to create an image of gangster rap. But the more important part of the image, the more important part of the image is that it’s the image.

Mopreme Shakur:

It’s that whoever’s a leader. Whoever’s a leader in whatever kind of way, because they did it to Martin. They did it to Malcolm. They weren’t rappers. You know what I’m saying? Whoever’s a leader. Oh, they did it to Fred. They were trying to take out all our leaders using COINTELPRO. CONTELPRO, you know what I’m saying? They was doing that. They didn’t necessarily get rid of those methods as time went on. They just refined them. They’re

Mansa Musa:

Fine. Yeah, I agree.

Mopreme Shakur:

Dr. Robin DG Kelly, a historian, told me that, “Man, your father is one of the top five civil rights leaders in the country. Top five. Put him in the top five.” And that important, they wanted stifled. They wanted stifled. They didn’t want him to have the impact, so they locked him up. We were pleased. Actually, oddly enough, we were pleased when he got captured because we was hearing that he was saying he wasn’t going to be taken alive. So when he was captured, at least he was alive.

Mansa Musa:

And

Mopreme Shakur:

We could communicate through them years at Lompoc, that’s where he helped us put the thug code together. You

Mansa Musa:

Write about specific songs you and Tupac performed at concerts, but never officially released. Can you tell us about that and how your music resonated with incarcerated people?

Mopreme Shakur:

One of them that did get out is Papa Song. We got to do Papa Song because that was really about Matul. It was all a lack of a father in the household. So that’s what that was about. But there was many others that were supposed to be on the Thug Life album. Thug Life Project was a project that Pac recorded, spent the most time on almost three years recording Thug Life album. But they wouldn’t let certain songs through. They thought it was too hard at the time. They was killing crooked cops, you know what I mean? And so it almost didn’t come out. I had to tamper down the album in order for it to even come out.

Mansa Musa:

And I guess that’s the price. If you ain’t independent, that’s the price you have. If you trying to get your information out and be conversated. And

Mopreme Shakur:

It was a time where censorship was a big thing because they were doing it to live cool. They were doing it to ice tea. They were doing it to things face, facing them, doing it to us.

Mansa Musa:

Engage the public.

Mopreme Shakur:

They didn’t want that reality because we was calling it reality rap. They call it gangst rap. We call it reality rap. We the niggas that lived around that shit for real. We know somebody that happened to if it didnt happen to you. So the truth hurts. But give me one more, Musa. It’s getting hot out here, baby. No,

Mansa Musa:

This is the last one right here. What you want to tell our audience about your project, about the book, and how they can become more involved with your work.

Mopreme Shakur:

Well, thank you for that one. I’m here in lovely DC at the lovely Vice Royal Hotel. I hope you dig it. I think you will. It also has photos in it. So never before seen pics of me, my brother, my father, the family, like 24 pics in it. I try not to cheat the people. It’s that Barnes & Nobles, Amazon, thisthuglife.com, audiobook, ebook. I’m grinding, man. I’m South Side Jamaica Queens. All the way to the west side. There

Mansa Musa:

You have it. We got Mo Pre.

Mopreme Shakur:

Best Mo you’ll ever know. Best

Mansa Musa:

Mo you’ll ever know out here in the hat, son. They’ve been stomping the ground, trying to get the word out on his book. We ask that you really look at this interview because as Mo Pree put it out there. We’re in a struggle for our life and it’s only through us telling our story. He made this quote. Might not have a lot of money, but we got a lot of story. We got a lot of experience. And here go an example of someone that’s taking that experience and using it for the goodness, the betterment of mankind and humans by educating people on the struggle. Thanks, Mopree. Appreciate you, big bro. You

Mopreme Shakur:

Too, man. Power to the people. All power. Free all political

Mansa Musa:

Free.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome back to the Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. The 2026 World Cup is now officially over after Spain defeated Argentina in the final match on Sunday. And for many of us around the US and around the world, the World Cup was a very welcome distraction from the ambient awfulness and doom and the daily delugion overwhelm of relentless war, corruption, fascism and disaster. But the games were also an uncomfortable reminder that no matter how much we love sports and the global spectacle of the World Cup, no matter how much we want them to be an escape from politics and the pain of living in a broken society, there’s just no way to truly escape those things. And the manufactured illusion that sports are somehow an escape from political reality is just that, an illusion. So what do we do with that? How do we square our love for sports and all the beautiful things and experiences that we get from sports with all these gross, exploitative and societally destructive facets of sports today?

Hat does it mean to love sports in a disenchanted age of authoritarians, war and climate catastrophe? These are the kinds of questions that I got to dig into with legendary sports writers, book authors and real news contributors, Dave Zyron and Jules Boykoff at a live event that we hosted at Chilo’s Bar in Brooklyn, New York, just days before the World Cup final. And what you’re about to listen to is the audio recording of our discussion for that live event.

The name of this event is Loving Sports in an Age of Authoritarians. And we’ll get to the authoritarians by way of this first question, but it’s so much bigger than just any one authoritarian. How do we continue to love sports and the other things that we love when everything that we know is burning around us literally? We had to move this event inside because the fires in Ontario that literally wiped a First Nation off the map are making the air toxic to breathe. So how do we continue loving sports in a time like that? Dave Zirin, softball to you.

Dave Zirin:

Well, first of all, I wasn’t told there would be science at this event. Second, very quick joke my grandfather once told me that tries to answer that very heavy question. Guy goes to visit a buddy. Buddy opens the door. His buddy is naked wearing a top hat. And he said, “Dude, why are you naked?” And he said, “Nobody visits me. ” And then he says, “Then why are you wearing a top hat?” And he said, “Someone might visit.” And that’s how I feel about sports and the environment.

Let me make that leap for a second. It’s because we are in trouble. Dude is naked. Everything is out in the open. We can’t breathe outside for goodness sakes. And yet sports presents this face like everything’s okay. Look at these incredibly fit young people running around the field, loving the fresh air on the greenfield and then off the field you have environmental catastrophe. And we need to be able to reckon with that because honestly, we’re not going to have outdoor sports. We’re not going to have winter sports unless we do something about this environment. And frankly, I think that’s a way to reach sports fans is to say to them, if you really care about sports, then you’re going to care about climate change. If you really care about sports, then you should care about fossil fuels. You should care about the World Cup and the kind of footprint it puts down on our world just by the wealthiest of the wealthy flying their private planes into these different cities.

So I think it’s really important that we have one eye in the environment of all time and not just to save humanity, but actually let’s talk to sports fans and say, if you really want to save sports, you’re going to be on this side of the question too. And so that’s the top hat, that’s the naked guy. I don’t think I made the connection, but we try.

Jules Boykoff:

Love it, love it, love it. So on the topic of climate change and this World Cup, a couple quick facts. This is the most polluting World Cup in the history of men’s World Cups or women’s World Cups. And that’s because FIFA decided to hold it in three countries and include 48 teams, which is more than ever up from 32. And also because one of the countries, the United States, just doesn’t have a good train system to get people around. So everybody, if you want to get from Kansas City to your next game in San Francisco, you basically have to fly. So the lower end estimates are like nine million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent and that’s a low estimate. Meanwhile, we got Giannian Fontino out here on his private jet crisscrossing North America. Yeah, thank you. Big boo for Giannian Fontino. And he even went to Qatar for a funeral the other day and then zipped back.

So the leadership is very much not coming from the top. But to build off what Dave was saying, I’m really interested in this idea that we can be more politically effective sometimes by being less explicitly political. And we’re living in a moment where we sort of have two models of that happening simultaneously. In New York City, since we’re here, I’ll mention Zoran Mamdani. Where was he watching a football match, soccer match yesterday or the other day in a local prison? And opening up conversations about kind of what that means, what’s the life of an incarcerated person? How can we bring sports into their lives as a positive? Then you have on the other side, one of the big topics of my book, which is Donald Trump and how he is the president in the United States that has used sports to his political advantage more than any in the modern era.

So we have two models of using sports toward political aims while not necessarily being explicitly political. And the last thing I’ll just say on this question is I’m wearing a Bosnia shirt. I was in Bosnia recently. I spent more than a month in Sarajevo and it was an exciting time to be there because the team had just qualified for the World Cup for the first time in a long time. The energy was really good in the city. And when I was there, I went to the Genocide Museum. And what struck me about the place was that there were so many exhibits at the museum that talked about the importance of soccer. There was one that literally was titled Soccer Saved My Life. There was another that talked about people in Shrebanitza that were huddling around a black and white television during the 1994 World Cup watching Roberto Baggio and getting this glimmer of joy in an increasingly difficult time for them.

So if they can do it in Bosnia and stick with sports and figure out how to use sports to their political advantage, and they’re definitely doing that in Bosnia, we can surely come together to attack the issue of climate change through sport with everyday people and talk about how it affects their everyday lives.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Two quick thoughts or a thought and a question. Thought because I couldn’t agree with you more, Jules, about we can be more politically effective by being less obsessed with politics. And I really identify with what you said there because this is a question I get all the time as someone who goes around interviewing just regular working people across the political spectrum around this country every week. And people come up to me, they’re like, “How do you do it? How do you talk to people? ” I’m going to answer that question for all of you right now. Just be a person. Just don’t be weird. Just be chill. Just be interested in other people. I don’t know how to explain that. It’s just like you don’t got to beat people over the head with politics. Just talk to them as human beings, connect on what you connect on and go from there.

And for a lot of us, that is sports. I have some of the deepest political conversations with my buddies that I grew up with back home who live very different lives than I do or like the guys I worked in the warehouses and factories and restaurants with than I’ve had in academia. Because you start with sports and then you get into some real heavy shit real quick. So I couldn’t endorse that more. And to get spicy for a second, because again, this is a live bar debate. I want to push you both on the question of sports and climate because everything you said really resonated with me. But sports is also one of the most important cultural dream manufacturing or false dream manufacturing mechanisms that we have in society. And sports is where people are being trained to see that you can just build a dome and play in freezing weather or blazing heat.

So what do you say to someone who says, “Hey, we could have a World Cup in Qatar. It doesn’t matter how many brown people die to make it happen, but why don’t we just do that? “

Dave Zirin:

That’s a great question. I would say to the person, first of all, you think we’re having a sports conversation? We’re actually having a politics conversation Because you’re talking about a set of political priorities that are not in the best interest of the people in Qatar or on the world if you think that that’s the way sports is going to be sustainable. I would say to them that what you are promoting is an incredibly elitist view of sports where the only people who really get to play are the super professionals who are in this climate controlled atmosphere because they can produce profit while the rest of us just become watchers. And honestly, we have too much of that in this country right now.This is the statistic I hate the most. 60% of kids who play youth sports quit by the age of 12. And when they’re asked why they quit at the age of 12, it’s always because they’re told that they’re not good enough to keep playing when they’re 13, 14, 15.

And so then they become either the watchers or they become alienated from things like exercise, community, frankly, some of the things that make life worth living. And so sports should never be the province of experts. It should never be the province of the super skilled. Sports should be for everyone as a baseline for what we’re arguing for in this country. Sports for all. And so people who make the climate controlled argument are actually arguing sports for few. So I would be calling them out. You’re actually making a political argument that is actually not only dooming humanity, but it’s dooming our kids to a life of actually being alienated from what makes life worth living.

Jules Boykoff:

Yeah. Absolutely. So I think that the sports world needs to grapple with this idea of the mega. We’re now living in the era – Not the mega.

And that too, actually. Okay. But the mega, M-E-G-A. What I mean is we’re living in this moment of the VVIP, this new thing, the very, very important person. We’re also living in the era of the mega, mega sporting event. And the truth of the matter is this is not at all. It’s like an oxymoron to call it mega event sustainable. It’s just never going to be that. And so we need to have conversations about how do you reduce the size? Gianni and Fontino talked about making the next World Cup 64 teams instead of 48 teams, which will just make worse what we’re talking about right now. And they’ll come back at us when we say, “Oh, well, how about just going back to 32 or at least just keeping it at 48?” They’ll say, “Oh, but we’re trying to include more teams.” And of course that’s true, but right behind it is bubbling their cauldron of money and that’s all to their benefit to have more teams, more games, more $30 million per game went into FIFA coffers at each one of these games just from tickets alone.

So the truth of the matter is that they’re kind of actually giving an argument that’s both weak and somewhat trying to seem like they’re not racist, but actually are racist. And here’s what I mean. They’ll point to teams like Kate Vaird who was wonderful. If you didn’t watch the World Cup, they were one of the most exciting stories. And they’re like, “Oh, do you want to not include Cape Vaird at the World Cup now after these wonderful stories of all their triumphs?” Cape Vaird finished first in their group. They were coming to the tournament, whether there was 32 teams, maybe even 24 teams. So don’t tell me Cape Verde wasn’t qualifying. They’re a legit team. A lot of soccer people weren’t at all surprised. So thinking about how do we both make it more of a public good sports, but also shrinking it and moving some of the money from the shrinkage to what you’re talking about, addressing the fact that so many kids drop outs too early because that’s a tragedy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s stick on that for a second. I love the sports for all in sports is a public good. So sticking with the bar debate theme, in the socialist utopia, what is the world of professional sports going to look like? Are sports teams going to be publicly owned utilities? What is the better version of this shit look like that can still retain the things that we love, but isn’t draped in all this awful shitty stuff that makes us hate the things we love?

Dave Zirin:

Yeah. I mean, for sports in a socialist utopia. I mean, first I’d be so happy in the socialist utopia. I’d be like, “Oh yeah, there’s sports on. Cool.” Which would be sort of like the opposite of my current life, which is, “Oh, there’s sports on. Good. The world is burning. Ah, sports is on. ” So I think it would take that and sort of stand it on its head, which would be nice, I must say. But I think more than anything, I mean, there are things that are wrong with the sports world now that I could say in even a democratic, socialist, capitalist country, we’re going to do away with the public funding of stadiums and saying like, “Look, you’re a billionaire, James Dolan. You want refurbishing a Madison Square Garden? Find the money between the cushions of your couch and take care of it.

Don’t ask the taxpayers to do it for you. ” So real demands like that. Second of all, if even $1 of public money goes into a sports team or a stadium, guess what? That team becomes $1 public. So it’s like the more public money that goes in, the more we own the teams. And if they want all the money for their stadiums, guess what? Your team has just become the most effective public utility in the city of New York. Congratulations, you’re making the city billions. Our schools are now funded. All is good. And I’m so sorry, James Dolan, you only get one yacht, but somehow I think you’ll survive. James Dolan’s son, by the way, 32 years old, is now in charge of the New York Rangers. I think that makes him the first grand Nepo baby in doing that. So horrible people. Just the worst.

And one other thing I would say is I think this idea of sports for all, we can be very specific for people right now of what that means. It’s not just about ability. It’s an anti-racist argument. It’s an anti-sexist argument. It’s an anti-anti-poor people argument who are denied sports, denied physical education in so many public schools. We would have full funding for physical education throughout the country. And I think this is very vital. We would never in any sort of just society tell our transgender family that they have no place on the playing field, which is the official position, by the way, of this government and the International Olympic Committee. So there’s so much we can do. And this could be the sort of thing where we have on a whiteboard behind me with a pen, with a dry erase, be like, “What actually do you hate about sports?

Hat makes it hard for you to love sports? And what about the corporate control do you hate? What about the bigotry do you hate? Native American mascotry, let us know. ” And those are actually the things we can begin to check off and say, “Let’s have a better sports world, sports for all, sports in the name of justice and sports in the name of fun.”

Absolutely.

Jules Boykoff:

Absolutely. And now is a perfectly opportune time to try some of these things where you have owners of football clubs, soccer clubs in places like Vancouver, Canada that it’s rare that you see an owner advertising their own lack of skills saying, “I can’t possibly run this club unless I get a huge infusion of public money.” At a time when you’ve got people like Avi Lewis in Canada, political leader talking about re-nationalizing some industries, this is a perfect moment for doing that with a football club. Why not experiment? We tried to do this in Portland, Oregon where I usually live. When the owners of the team, a guy named Henry Paulson, former treasury secretary under George W. Bush and his son, Dave loves this, his name is Merritt Paulson.

Dave Zirin:

He’s like, “That’s made up. Come on. Son of a billionaire is named Merritt. Come on now.” Yeah,

Jules Boykoff:

It’s –

Maximillian Alvarez:

Just like meritocracy’s made up.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah, that’s a great point.

Jules Boykoff:

So many years ago when Portland got a major league soccer team, they were asking for $85 million in public money to refurbish the stadium. $85 million. That was going to come out of the budget where we fill our potholes. Some of it was going to schools, homeless services, you name it. And a lot of people fought back. Actually, Dave Zyron came to town and fought back next to us. And we didn’t totally win the struggle. They didn’t get $85 million. Instead, they got $12.9 million from a special tax from the Portland Trailblazers. So it was like sport to sport. But we did have a good conversation about what a publicly owned team could look like. And I just cannot wait to get fully behind the city that decides to go for it. I think Vancouver’s a possibility, but anywhere that happens, I want to be there trying to do what we can to help.

Hell

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Hell yeah. I love this. And we’re doing good on time so far, but I did want to give everyone their mandatory. FIFA is requiring that I let you know that this is your hydration break. So please go to the bar, stay hydrated, stay safe.

We’re going to get to and zero in on the World Cup, the authoritarians and the stink of Trump on the Knicks NBA finals victory. But by way of getting there, I want to focus in on again, another aspect of the sports for all discussion that really doesn’t get talked enough about, especially in leftist spaces, but I don’t think at all. Because the only time we’re talking about youth sports these days is when a bunch of weirdos obsess over the genitals of some of our children who are playing them. And that’s not what youth sports was to me. It was my life. It was like the place where I found my motivation, where I learned to work on a team where my dad coached my brothers and then he coached me. It was like youth sports so much a part of me and will always be a part of me.

And the older I’ve gotten and especially after I blew out my knee playing basketball and I lost basketball, the thing that I had played three to four times a week every week for my whole life, like countless hours in the driveway with my dad and my brothers was gone. And I’ve realized since that a huge chunk of my life was gone after that. Where else in my life do I walk up to strangers and say, “Hey, you got next? Can I play with you? ” And then you play with people that you don’t know. You have to learn in a finite space with rules quickly what everyone’s strengths and weaknesses are accomplishing a shared goal or not. It’s such a rarefied space and experience that I think so many of us need, whether it’s in organized sports or just more play. And so I wanted to throw this to you guys because I don’t think I get to hear you talk enough about the human good of sport beyond just the professional sports world and capitalist shit show that most people see on their TVs.

Dave Zirin:

Oh man. So what I love about sports, I mean, oh man, I had to give a toast for my dad on his 80th birthday. And I was trying to think of what do I possibly say about this 80-year-old guy who’s had such an impact on my life? And the first thing that came to my head is like, when did my dad ever mean the most to me in my entire life? And it was like, when was this moment? Because my parents were divorced. I saw my dad like four days a month growing up. So it’s like where was that real spot for us? And it was game six, 1986 World Series, Mookie Wilson, Ground Ball, Bill Buckner’s legs. You’d say to a baseball fan, game six, that’s all you have to say. And they know what you’re talking about. My dad took me there and I still have the ticket stub.

It says $15 to go to the best World Series game. And he got that ticket not by getting on his phone because back then phones were these mammoth contraptions attached to walls, but he got it by waiting online at Shea Stadium. And we got to go to this game and then we got the game of all games. And when that ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs, I went from being happier than I could ever remember being to being terrified because that stadium got so loud and grownups got so crazy. And that was before they stopped selling beer after the seventh inning. And we’re in extra innings at this point. And my dad just put his arm around me and held me close. And it was a moment where I never felt both more imperiled and then more safe in a moment. And I feel like there’s something about…

And that kind of hooked me for life on sports. Playing basketball for the New York City fighting Quakers in high school is also an experience unto itself. You didn’t want to mess with the fight in Quakers. And me being a five foot 10 inch center for that team.

Maximillian Alvarez:

They called you white chocolate thunder?

Dave Zirin:

They called me, why the hell is he here? The one story I’ll tell is I was playing one game against a freshman for Rice named Felipe Lopez who went on to become the number one recruited player in the country. He was in ninth grade. I was in 11th grade. That was their JV. They were playing our varsity. And I shot the ball and Felipe blocked it to half court, literally to half court. And the whole crowd goes. And I hung my head. I was so embarrassed. And he put his arm around me and walked me to half court and was just like, “It’s okay, man. I do that to everybody. Do not take it personal.”

And I met him as a sports writer. I met him 20 years later and I said, “Yo man, you blocked my shot to half court and then you put your arm around me. It’s a memory I’ll never forget.” And he looked at me and he said, “Yeah, I don’t remember that at all. ” And I was like, “Oh.” And he said, “You got to understand, I just blocked a lot of people. ” That was kind of my move. And I was like, “Okay, all good still.” So that’s why I love sports. I chose to show rather than tell. I love it. I love it. But you give me a good moment in a rocky relationship with my dad or a great moment and you give me Felipe Lopez blocking my shot, couldn’t be happier. That’s amazing.

Jules Boykoff:

So I’m really interested in when creative people who don’t necessarily consider themselves athletes engage the space of sports, bringing their creativity to it. And one of my favorite places for this is roller derby in Portland, Oregon where I live, where from the names that people adopt that are freighted with beautiful politics and fight back in them to the very format of the event and to the very nature of its inclusion, because trans folks are always included on the skating rink in Portland, Oregon. It’s a really big part of the culture. Not only that, it’s also a great chance for fundraising for those kind of causes at the local level. So I’m always about how can we use creative people’s minds to come up with new ways of doing things? How can we have the soccer fields open in New York City all night long, which has been happening recently during the World Cup?

Maybe the World Cup is just an entry into having that be something that we do more often. We’ve heard about midnight basketball. I love this idea of midnight soccer as well. So I just think that to build off what you’re saying, this is a really fruitful area where we can all come together and think collectively and make some really magical things happen for sure.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell

Dave Zirin:

Yeah. Jules, how do you not say that you played pro soccer? I was

Maximillian Alvarez:

Going to say you’re bearing the lead, bro.

Dave Zirin:

Just give everybody your resume. I said I played basketball for the fight in Quakers. I’m not saying you can total that, but you should try.

Jules Boykoff:

No, it’s true. I did play soccer for a big part of my life. And honestly, that is one of the many reasons why I think it’s worth fighting for. I had a nice professional soccer career and I also played for the US under 23 men’s national soccer team. Although before you get too excited about that, the last international match that I played for the US national soccer team at the U23 level was literally against the Soviet Union. But yeah, I mean, I’m not proud necessarily of who I was back then because I was an absolute maniac in ways that weren’t always good for me and the people around me, but it is definitely part of my life.

Dave Zirin:

But you stuck it to Khrushchev. And for that, America, thanks you, sir.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you for your service. Well, I really appreciate you guys going with me and sharing that because I thought that was so powerful and again, made me feel closer to you in a way that our discussions about politics haven’t. And I think that’s kind of the point of why we’re all here. But I think it’s also really important to share with others out there, even those in our lives who don’t get why we love sports. And it’s not because we just are okay with ignoring all of the military jets flying over or Donald Trump’s bulletproof bullshit, a booth at the Knicks game. It’s that this thing we’ve loved for so long and have carried into our love for watching it and others do it. We’re holding onto that while it’s getting shrouded in so much crap. And that just makes it complicated for I think a lot of us.

But let’s sort of take that into the vibe and time that we’re in now where a lot of us are struggling with that, be it this great city during a game that was so special to it that Donald Trump put his stink on or folks around the world who loved the World Cup and have now know what that stink smells like and so much else. So let’s talk about the big title of the event here.First, how do we carry that love into sports today, especially the World Cup in a time like the one that we’re living in now?

Dave Zirin:

Wow. It’s a great question. I mean, the number one thing I say is like, look, the Knicks were ours long before they were the property of the Dawn family. That’s our team, not theirs. At best, they are renting it. It’s our team, not the team of somebody who got married at Mar-a-Lago, whose kid got married at Mar-a-Lago, who’s trying to change the name of Penn Station to Trump Penn Station and who’s given Trump millions of dollars throughout his political career. And even the worst indictment of all counts Donald Trump as a close personal friend. So these are all reasons to say, wait a minute, you’re not part of what we just want. And something you didn’t really get on TV during the parade, which I was at, I mean for the Knicks, by the way, Knicks in five, just throwing that out there, is that it was so raucous.

People were so incredibly pumped and enthused. And Mayor Mamdani, he gets up there and he does a sports speech that rivals like the Al Pacino speech in any given Sunday where he’s like, “Your claw for that inch.” The Pacino, your fingers plead for that inch. And here’s Mamdani up there. He’s saying like, “They gave us a 0.4% chance of winning when we were down 29. That’s what the statistician said. Well, guess what? You tell New Yorkers they have a 0.4% 10% chance they say, “Why are you giving me a head start?” I mean, I’m hearing this and I’m like, “Yeah, let me bash my head through the TV screen right now.” And then James Dolan gets up there and it was the only time of the whole day they cut this at people booed when he got up there. Here’s the Knicks winning the championship and people booed the owner.

And he gets up there and he says something completely snarky about Mamdani and it just didn’t fly. But that’s just to say it shows his alienation from the vibe and mood of the city. And if he wasn’t alienated from how this city was really feeling, he would never have invited Donald Trump to be there at game three when we finally had a home game in a finals at MSG in 27 years. That’s when you invite Donald Trump so it can be all about him and not the people themselves. Give me a break. And of course that’s the one game they lose in the last three rounds of the playoffs. But what’s so amazing about it is that people sort of get that. And then when he doubled up with the US Men’s World Cup team and tried to rig things for them, it’s that stink that he brings to the table.

My buddy calls what Trump does, he calls it athletic fracking environment. He doesn’t like sports at all. He wants to drill into it, destroy it, destroy everything around it if he can just get a drop of political benefit. So athletic fracking would not exist in a socialist utopia of a society. And frankly, in any sort of utopia, whatever you want to brand it, Donald Trump and the Trump family wouldn’t exist either. Or at the very least they’d be, shall we say, put in their place. But just one thing before I pass this to Jules, I got to tell a story about a very quick conversation I had with Lev in the back in the orange shirt, just to give you an idea about what sports could mean. If I could, he’s in the orang shirt.

And I’ll be real quick. I’ve been having a difficult year, if you will, or a decade, whatever you want to call it. And I was sitting with Lev the other day and I said to Lev, I said, “The last couple of months have actually been a lot better. I’m feeling really good. I don’t know why that is, but I’m just really doing better.” And Lev’s silent for a second and he just looks at me and he says, “The Knicks.” And I realized he was fucking right that having this run had this animating effect on so many other things in my life. And that’s, I guess in some ways that makes me just a weirdo, a diehard fan, somebody off the beam, whatever you want to call it. But I think it also kind of made me feel human for a second because it’s like I felt connected with the city in a way that I hadn’t, honestly, since nine eleven, but instead of it being this moment of abject tragedy, it was a moment of joy.

Jules Boykoff:

Wow. That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Jules, if I may, just to throw a little extra bit of sauce before you hop in, it’s not just Trump, right? It’s Kash Patel jumping around like an idiot with the men’s hockey team. As someone who you wore that jersey, does that piss you off? I mean, we don’t ever get to hear from your side of that.

Jules Boykoff:

Yeah. We often don’t get to hear from the athlete side of things despite the fact that they’ve got social media at their fingertips. There’s often a hesitancy to push back at things like ash Patel. And I think you make a good point, although the Trump curse is very real. I mean, talk to Harry Kane about it. He went golfing 18 months ago.

Dave Zirin:

And people were blaming Trump for them

Jules Boykoff:

Losing. Well, then he didn’t score after it was about the golf. I’m saying the Trump curse has many, many forms there. But yes –

Maximillian Alvarez:

Dave calls it the reverse Midas Touch. Absolutely. And that it is.

Dave Zirin:

I tried calling it the Trump Taint, but for a lot of reasons, not just… My editor at the nation was like, “No. We’re not doing that. “

Jules Boykoff:

Yeah. Very good call. Very good call. By the way. But you do make the really important point that it’s not just Trump himself and the Trump curse. It’s the Trump administration that is really doing this sort of athletic fracking that you’re talking about. The Cash Patel’s a really good example from the recent Olympics and the hockey team and sort of attaching themselves like a barnacle on the side of the ship that won that gold medal. But I mean, you’ve even seen during this World Cup a number of instances that maybe aren’t as high profile. Everyone knows about the Fuller and Balagun red card that President Trump made some phone calls to his BFF over at FIFA, Gianni and Fontino. And lo and behold, the thing gets overturned first time during a World Cup since 1962. The predecessor using that rule was Christiano Ronaldo a few months ago so that he could play in the World Cup because they wanted him even though he has credible allegations of rape in the United States against him.

So it was a horrible thing there all around. But what I’m trying to say is that it’s not just Trump, it’s also the administration. Think about the Department of Homeland Security during this very event. After the United States beat Australia, they went on Twitter, DHS did, and they posted two really interesting and terrifying tweets. One of them had three of the players on the tweet, a picture of them. And then behind them it said one homeland. It was basically short of just saying blood and soil. And it was like total pure fascism. And experts in fascism jumped up and said, “Wow, that sounds like a lot like a phrase that Nazis would’ve said.” And then they actually traced it out and it was very similar to a phrase used during World War II by Nazis. And I think it’s really interesting for a number of reasons and obviously disturbing for a number of reasons.

But if you’re going to talk about sportswashing, and I do talk about sportswashing in the book and more widely, and so maybe I should just define my term really quickly before I go into it for a sec. But sportswashing for me is when political leaders use sports to try to deflect attention from chronic social problems and human rights woes at home, to try to look important or legitimate on the world stage and to set themselves up for political, economic, sometimes diplomatic advancement. And a lot of people don’t like the term because of the way it’s been used in the past, which quite frankly has been done in an ethnocentric, if not xenophobic fashion where they say it’s those countries over there, Russia, China, Qatar that engages in sportswashing, but we are a democracy so it couldn’t possibly happen here. So part of the argument in the book is that even places that consider themselves democracies can very much engage in sportswashing.

But what is Trump doing here in terms of is he trying to… Does sportswashing work? When people talk about does sportswashing work, a lot of times they mean does it work on an international audience? And the truth is Trump has very little interest in having sportswashing work on an international audience. He makes it clear with his actions. He doesn’t care what Europe thinks, Africa thinks, Asia, Latin America. He doesn’t care what they all think. But that sometimes misses the key audience of people in this country who I think are the prime audience for Trumpian sportswashing and for the DHS tweets. And when Trump keeps the Somali referee, Omar Abdul-Kadir Artan out of the country, he doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks and they very much didn’t like it. But he likes the fact that the MAGA base sees a guy sticking it to a Somali person who, as you’ll know, he talked as trash and garbage in the past.

So when all these things are happening, if you look at it through the lens of Trump trying to cater to people here in this country ahead of a key election, everything starts to make a lot more sense through the lens of sportswashing. And so I think it also gives us this incredible opportunity to see things with clarity and to also kind of figure out how we’re going to push back against these things.

Dave Zirin:

Very nicely said.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Beautifully, powerfully put. And as we sort of make the final turn here, I want to end with looking ahead to Sunday. But by way of getting there, let’s look back on the path to this Sunday with the World Cup finals. There’s been a whole lot of… Again, the theme of the night is how do you hold onto the thing that you love when the stink is all around you and everything is corrupting it? The whole world has been asking itself that question over the past month as they’ve been dealing with the Ronaldo stuff, the bracket like stuff, and the very fact that the two teams in the finals now were like sort of, it was impossible for them to face each other until now. And that feels in retrospect like kind of shady, the Egypt game.

Jules Boykoff:

There’s

Maximillian Alvarez:

So much that people have had to sort of work through with that stink, including the Donald Trump, the infamous Donald Trump call. So let’s take a look back at that really quick. And I wanted to ask you guys your hottest takes on the hottest controversies of this World Cup that have sort of brought that stink that we’re dealing with here in the US to a full-blown international scale.

Dave Zirin:

The hottest World Cuptake that I’ll have, first of all, is rooting for Argentina because of Diego Maridona, which was 40 years ago. It’s like, come on. That can’t be your reason for rooting for Argentina, is Diego Maridona. I think I want Argentina to lose. There are rumors that Jewels is pro Argentina.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You got to save it. That’s the

Dave Zirin:

Final

Maximillian Alvarez:

Question. That’s

Dave Zirin:

The final statement. I won’t go there. Then I won’t go there. I’m just going to say I love doing that to you. I’ve known Jewels a long time. But my number one hottest take from this World Cup is anybody who says that if the US’s best athletes just played soccer, like if LeBron James played goalie, then the US would win every World Cup I think is incredibly insulting to people who actually play soccer. The reason why the US doesn’t do better straight up is that the pipeline is a country club and it costs so much money to play youth sports. In this country does it different than every other country? The reason why a country of 300 million people that has a large imigrant population that is sports obsessed can’t field a halfway decent World Cup team. It’s because the way we do it in this country is pay to play.

You want to be trained at the top clubs? You better have minimum 10 grand on the table for your kid. And Lord knows how much under the table to make sure your kid gets those positions. As long as that’s the case, this country will always suck at soccer. So the next time someone says to you, “Why doesn’t the US do better at soccer?” Y’all would just look at him and be like, “Because of the way this country practices capitalism.” And if you’re not practicing soccer as a democratic socialist exercise, your team is going to suck. And that’s why the US sucks.

Jules Boykoff:

Do you want to argue for Argentina or for Spain though? Do you want to give your argument? No, go.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No,

Jules Boykoff:

That’s

Maximillian Alvarez:

The last

Jules Boykoff:

Question. Oh, that’s the last question. So I recently had the good fortune of interviewing this man named Timu Furulhom. Timu Furlholm played for the Finnish national men’s soccer team. And the thing that’s interesting about him is that after his career, he’s now become a member of the National Parliament in Finland as a leftist. He’s part of the Left Alliance. Now you’ll know that soccer has a pretty notorious history of soccer players turned politicians that are right wingers, including your buddy Romario from Brazil who started as a socialist on the left and kind of eked his way over and finally endorsed Bolsonaro at one point.

Dave Zirin:

My dear friend.

Jules Boykoff:

Your dear friend Romario. And so I was talking to him and we were talking about sort of the system in Finland and how the soccer system there was so different and how it was bricked into society in a way that’s not the country club soccer circuit that Dave so nicely described. And I was asking him about Finland is the happiest country in the world year after year. And instantly I could tell it was a bad question. He’s like, “Oh God, I’m so sick of hearing about that. ” And he said, he goes, “The thing about Finland is that we don’t try to take the moon from the skies. We want everybody to be able to play sports at whatever level they want. We want people to be able to go to music concerts and experience culture for free and easily.” And he also added, “We also want people to be able to take a one week trip to the Canary Islands every year,” which I thought, “Okay.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

Throw that in

Jules Boykoff:

There. That’s fine. Yeah. But I’m just saying there are models out there. I mean, Finland is not at the other end of the universe. And I do think that they provide some ideas for how we could move forward and how we could just have a whole different way of thinking about life and how soccer and culture and soccer’s a big part of culture, how it all kind of fits into one bigger hole. And by the way, before I have to defend Argentina, I just want to say I’ve been backed into a corner, but I’m going to do my damnedest here in a second. Thank

Maximillian Alvarez:

You. Jewels drew the short straw because we were like, “We got to debate. You can’t both root for the same team. So yeah, give it up to Jules for defending the Argentina side of our final celebrity death match here. But we’ve all been watching the World Cup. We got the final coming up on Sunday. None of us are all that excited. It’s Spain versus Argentina. Okay, but let’s make the most of it. So in our final round, which is going to be a genuine debate and the crowd is going to decide who won.

Dave Zirin:

Oh my God.

Maximillian Alvarez:

But again, we’re recognizing that Dave’s got a 0.4 second head start. So as principled leftists or people of conscience, who is the right team to root for this Sunday?

Dave Zirin:

Well, Nixon five, of course. That’s what you say in New York. Get a good response. Look, here’s the thing. I get asked sometimes, why are you always trying to make sports political? This is our escape. This is our fun. Why are you trying to make sports political? And the answer is you can say you don’t believe in gravity when you fall out of an airplane. It doesn’t really matter whether you believe in gravity or not. You’re falling out of an airplane. Whether I say sports are political or not does not change the fact that they are political. It’s just whether we’re going to be quiet about it or not. It’s just if you’re pointing at a building and saying it’s on fire, that doesn’t make you an arsonist. And so to take it to this particular thing, and Jules is going to win this debate because this is soccer.

I’m a visitor on his field here. But to take it this, it’s like the World Cup is political whether we want it to be or not, not just because it’s like nation against nation or whatnot, but this is the last thing that we have that the whole world watches. And that gives it a tremendous amount of power if that can be steered in one direction politically or another. And every single World Cup, at least since the 34 World Cup hosted by Mussolini in Italy, has attempted to use this particular event to steer people politically in one direction or the next. And we have a particularly fraught political battle coming this Sunday because think about it like this, whether Spain wins or whether Argentina wins, the leader of that country will get a boost in the rarest commodity in all of politics in 2026. And that’s hope.

People feel better in a very difficult time. People feel hopeful in a difficult time. Ask Mamdani what it meant to him to have the Knicks win. It actually does make a difference if you have that collective sense of we’re really doing something here. The direction we’re going really matters. So if you agree with me up to that point, then let’s take a quick look at what we’re dealing with. In Spain, the leader is a guy by the name of, I believe, Pedro Sanchez. Pedro Sanchez is a social Democrat. He’s the leader of an organization called the Socialist Workers Party there. They believe in a much progressive stance on immigration. They believe in mass social spending and having a social safety net. And most importantly, they have earned the undying hatred of Donald Trump because they refuse to let their bases be used in the war on Iran.

And the leader of that country, Pedro Sanchez, has called out Israel’s genocide in Gaza and he has refused aid and fuel and military aid that were preexisting contracts to Israel. He pulled because of what was happening in Gaza. So you have to think… Oh, and also he’s in a very polarizing situation where the country loves him, the country hates him. There’s all this going on there. And so you think, okay, what will it mean to this individual if Spain wins? Then you go to Argentina who’s running that place. Good Lord. Good Lord. Someone who genuinely looks like a Muppet named… And I love the Muppet. So that’s the nicest thing I’m going to say about him. Named Javier Miley and Omilei here. If you don’t know him, he’s a good friend of Trump, billionaire. And Israel loves him so much that when Benjamin Netanyahu was asked who he was rooting for in the World Cup, he said Argentina.

And they asked him because of Messi. And he said, not because of Messi, Milei. He’s the superstar. And he is also somebody who’s in a huge corruption scandal. His popularity is plummeting. The country is very polarized. And so then you think what it would mean to Miley if Argentina wins the World Cup. If nothing else, I think if Argentina wins, you’re going to see Miley on the field with Donald Trump holding up the trophy. If Spain wins, Donald Trump will find him. It’ll be probably swimming at the bottom of that algae belching reflecting people in Washington. Have a better time there than at the World Cup if Spain wins. So I say root for Spain because I want to see a world as far away from the vision that Javier Milay has for this world as humanly possible.

Jules Boykoff:

That’s good. That’s good. Really good. Really, really convincing argument. But it could be even more convincing because I have a few other things I want to add to that. No,

Dave Zirin:

You can’t. Get him.

Jules Boykoff:

Well, for starters, there’s a guy on Spain by the name of Lamin Yamal. Magical left foot, beautiful player, and by all appearances a beautiful human being. 19 years

Dave Zirin:

Old.

Jules Boykoff:

19 years old. And his dad’s family’s from Morocco. His mom’s family’s from Equatorial Guinea. And he’s sure to represent every part of his heritage and background in creative and beautiful ways. He also recently, he’s on Barcelona Football Club as well, which recently won La Liga. And at the celebration afterwards on the team bus, he was on the top and he was waving a Palestinian flag. He’s a Muslim man who’s been very outspoken for Palestinian rights. So how do you not like Lamit Yamal? He’s just a lovely human being. On the flip side, over on the Argentina side, there’s a guy named Enzo Fernandez. You might remember him most recently for scoring the first goal against England to equalize 1-1 off an assist from Leonel Messi. That was about the best thing he’s probably done in his life. He’s done some terrible things after the Copa America Tournament recently after they beat Columbia for the title.

He was caught on the bus singing racist songs and singing anti-trans songs right there on the bus.

Dave Zirin:

This is the best debate I’ve ever had. I’m

Jules Boykoff:

Killing it right now. Sorry, go ahead. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. I’m just trying to help you. I’m just trying to help you. Keep cooking. Keep cooking. Because you need a lot of help over there. Keep cooking. Keep coking. So there are so many reasons if you start going down the roster, but there is one reason why you might want to slow down or two reasons why you might want to slow down and have a little bit of sympathy for Argentina. One is the one that Dave just preemptively nixed going after the Meridana factor. I don’t think we can just skim over the surface of that that easy. I mean, this is one of the all time legends of athlete activism in the history of football. Dave, you yourself have written wonderful work, columns about this man. So I don’t think we should just get rid of him into history.

I actually like, unlike some people, I like having history present in a contemporary moment. Diego Meridana. And the other thing is I do have some sympathy for Leo Messi. 39 years old. He’s going to set a record for the most steps walked on the field in a World Cup. He does not run that much. They do not make this man play any defense whatsoever. It’s fun to watch in a sense because he’s just like kind of walking. Then they feed him the ball. It’s not a very complex offensive structure that Argentina’s working with here, especially for a World Cup final. But he’s 39 years old and in some ways an inspiration in that regard. I know he took a bunch of Saudi Arabia money for their tourism. I’ve wrote about that plenty. But I got put in this difficult position of trying to make Argentina look good and I just can’t do it.

Okay? Fine. Those things.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for Jules Boycott and Dave Zauer and everybody.

Dave Zirin:

Yo, give it up for Max Alvarez and the Real News Network. Kayla Rivera

Maximillian Alvarez:

Too. Where’s Kayla? I don’t even see her. And last, give it up for Chelos Bar again for hosting us. Thank you so much Chelos for having us. Hell yeah. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real News Network Podcast. Thank you to everyone who came out in person for this incredible event. Thank you to the good folks at Chilos Bar for hosting us. And thank you to Dave Zyran and Jules Boycot for this incredible and incredibly fun and meaningful conversation. We are absolutely going to be doing more in – person events like this in Baltimore, Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York and more. So make sure that you are following us on social media and that you’re subscribed to our newsletter so you don’t miss the next one. And if you want to hear and be part of more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now.

Share this podcast with people in your circles, your friends, your family, your coworkers, and go to therenews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it makes all the difference. For The Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.