Michael Flynn Turns On Q-Anon & The Exploitation Of College Athletes
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the breaking news that suddenly, having been a mouthpiece for QAnon for years, Michael Flynn is caught on tape calling it crazy and a CIA psy-op.
Also: Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Lecturing Fellow at Duke University, discusses the exploitation of college athletes and how it relates to a bigger picture of what's wrong with our society and the value it places on sports, entertainment, and how we're failing the educational system.
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I think it's a disinformation campaign that the CIA created.
That's what I believe.
I don't know that for a fact.
I find it total nonsense.
And I think it's a disinformation campaign created by the left, and the types of people that can create something like that are the kinds of people that we train for certain skills in the CIA.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the McRae Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Saxton here, as always, with Nick Halseman.
We've got a really good show for you today.
We had a great interview with Nathan Coleman-Lam of the End of Sport Podcast.
I know not all of you out there are sports fans, but you're going to want to listen to this interview.
We talk a lot about capitalism, exploitation, and a lot of what's going on that you need to know about.
So stick around for that interview with Nathan.
But before we get there, Nick, there is drama a-brewin' among the far right.
You hate to see it.
Couldn't happen to nicer people.
You hate to see it.
It feels a little bit... You know those ads that are out right now for like the Spider-Man No Way Home movie?
Yeah, can't wait.
Where it's basically every Spider-Man movie just sort of put in a blender.
You've got all kinds of people interacting.
This is a who's who of the far right at the current moment.
It's always fascinating to see what triggers these moments of infighting.
It's not even infighting.
It's when the zombies turn on each other and start to eat their own brains.
Has that ever happened in a movie?
Probably.
It probably has, but I think in this case, the zombies eating each other's brains.
It's actually them trying to make money.
I think at the end of it, it's bullshit and greed.
I think that's pretty much what we're dealing with here.
Well, sure.
I mean, especially when you see a guy like Michael Flynn, who's been the poster child for QAnon conspiracies.
And it's not like he's dabbling or curious.
It's full on.
He's not QAnon curious.
That's true.
Right, he's full on, you know, saying the actual oath and everything.
But then to catch him... So here's the real question, is when you catch him on a phone call, private phone call... Well, let's set the scene for people.
Like we talked about before we started, only people who pay way too much attention to this shit have heard this story.
So we're going to break it down, we're going to get into it, the ramifications.
So, I'm trying to think of the proper term here.
Psychotic lawyer Lin Wood.
Is he even a lawyer anymore?
Has he been disbarred?
I've lost track.
I have not heard of being disbarred, so I'm assuming he can still practice law.
Okay, probably soon to be disbarred psychotic lawyer Lin Wood, who those of you listening might recognize from such incidents as Screaming about satanic cabals, talking about the election being stolen, advising Donald Trump, talking about coups, talking about murdering people.
Lin Wood, who is as QAnon-pilled to the gills as any human being on the face of the planet Earth, has decided to basically burn everybody to a crisp.
And the reason Is because Kyle Rittenhouse, who was, and I'm telling you, this involves everybody, this is an all-star jamboree of bullshit.
Kyle Rittenhouse, who was Lin Wood's client for a little while, did an interview on Fox News in which Rittenhouse said that he believed that Lin Wood kept him in jail in order to raise money and did not represent him properly so that he could raise money.
Which, by the way, I never thought I would say this, I kind of agree with Ritt now.
That might be true, yeah.
So Linwood lost his ever-loving mind and went after Tucker Carlson, saying that the two of them were besties.
And that he has since been ghosted.
Tucker lost his number.
And then he drops a bombshell.
This is really, really incredible.
Lin Wood drops a recording of a conversation that he had with former General Mike Flynn, who of course, like you said, has sworn allegiance to QAnon and has spread the gospel of QAnon all over the country.
He drops this recording.
And in the recording, Mike Flynn tells him that he has come to believe that QAnon was actually a psychological operation probably carried out by the CIA, which I hate to say it, but Mike Flynn, he might have a point there.
And at which point has proven that Mike Flynn does not, no longer believes in the QAnon idea.
But here's what he does believe in, Nick, is he believes in a philosophy espoused now by a guy, by a white supremacist radio host who is a Holocaust denier who has written such articles.
Here's a catchy title for you, Nick.
Attacking Jew newspapers.
That's short and succinct.
And this guy, by the way, this article that he is sharing around, that Mike Flynn is now sharing around, was criticizing the QAnon members who went to Dallas in order to greet JFK Jr.
and Senior, saying that they are, quote unquote, too cowardly to stand up, pick up guns, and go kill people.
So, now that we're all up to speed, Mike Flynn is woke Jared who would have thought he has become woke I mean but here's the thing what did it because here the other thing is did he always believe that it was he always this skeptic of Q but then did it to I don't know raise money or to somehow be part of a crowd that only would have him as a member it's interesting because I kind of feel like
I thought he was sincere up until now that the QAnon thing was real for him and that he was part of it.
Do you feel that way?
Well, okay, so real fast I'm going to go ahead and shill something.
If you all haven't heard the Weekender episode from last week in which Nick and I get in-depth on the JFK assassination, conspiracy theories, ideas behind it, you need to go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and become a patron in order to listen because I'm sorry, we kicked that episode's ass.
But on that note, I want to posit a theory.
Are you ready?
Yeah, I'm ready.
I'm gonna lay my marker down on the Mike Flynn QAnon, whether he believed in it or whether he didn't.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
My theory is that Mike Flynn is a dollard.
My theory is that Mike Flynn is an absolute, unrepentant idiot.
And will literally believe anything that's handed to him, told to him, or whatever.
He has gone from being actually Q-pilled to now believing that it wasn't.
And by the way, the entire time, his idea and state of mind has been completely predicated on where the money is and where the power is.
And he would be more than willing to create, as we covered, in order to carry out a military coup based on this idea.
But Mike Flynn is an idiot and he will believe almost anything you tell him.
So do you think that the utterly embarrassing images of Dealey Plaza with all of these, and by the way, it kind of looked like the JFK assassination with that many people lined up along Elm Street.
Do you believe that that was it?
That that's what caused this break where he suddenly realized it wasn't real?
So Mike Flynn has been doing this thing recently.
I don't know if you followed it or the people listening have followed it.
He has started peppering a lot of his speeches and public appearances with, um,
With passages that are plagiarized or altered from a cult called I Am, which is an apocalyptic, super patriotic, fascistic cult, I think that his conversion from being Q-pilled to being Q is a Psy-op has followed his movement from that now into this new phase where he's found his new favorite sort of
Okay, fair enough.
It's hard to imagine that this is a movement and almost a political party, if you will, that could have any kind of effect on modern society.
And yet, here we are, because it does bleed into Even this notion of like with the new variant that's coming out and Omicron, do you want to lay on us this new conspiracy they have about Omicron as well and what that means?
So because this requires constant baking, conspiracy theorizing or whatever, they've come to actually believe that Omicron, which of course is a letter, that it has – it was made up because it's an anagram of moronic, which that it has – it was made up because it's an anagram of moronic, which it's the deep state just laughing at them and But you're right.
And this is the important thing of all of this.
All of this is absurdity and it's, it's the stuff of internet tabloids.
It's very, very funny, but let's point something out.
This QAnon idea that even Mike Flynn now believes is preposterous.
It has infected the Republican Party.
The Republican Party now believes several tenants of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
They don't call it QAnon.
They never say Q. They never say QAnon.
They don't ever say, where we go one, we go all.
But it has infected it, much like the John Birch Society infected the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s and led to that iteration of this madness.
So at this point, what we're actually watching is QAnon did its job.
It prepared the Republican Party to believe these things, and it prepared their base to be prepared for violence and anti-democratic actions.
I mean, they don't need Q anymore.
They now have their own mainstream variant of it.
Right, and we talked about how this connects to religion as well, and how you're primed from a young age.
I mean, listen, if you want to believe in the strict, you know, scriptures that are taught in the Bible, then, you know, you probably are a little bit more apt to believe These conspiracy theories too.
And then they've morphed it even, you know, and it's the thing that Republicans will wash it a little bit, make it a little bit more mainstream by saying things like, oh, this new variant is simply to force us all to have mail-in ballots again, and that's how the Democrats are going to cheat in November 2022.
And that's a serious thing that people are trying to like, you know, Ted Cruz is trying to espouse.
It's really, really, There's no going back from that.
This is only going to get worse.
So what's the next version of that?
They're going to blame something else on the Democrats for cheating.
Fill in the blank, Jared.
You might be better at that than I am.
There's a nonstop ratcheting up of the insanity of this.
And I don't see an end to it.
That's the problem.
So it has to either hopefully implode and go away, or it just is going to eat the entire country up and spit it out.
Yeah, I wish that we were talking about this as if it were some sort of a schism that would, like, end it.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, a moment that would, like, bring this bullshit to an end.
But what this is actually doing, it's a sloughing off.
It's almost like a molting.
And the Republican Party and those around them, including Mike Flynn, who is still in the periphery of power, they have to shed this.
You know what I mean?
Because we were joking about it before we started recording.
Lin Wood just today came out and said that Mike Flynn is part of a satanic, pedophile cabal.
As one does.
As you do on a Monday.
And the problem here is that somebody like Lin Wood, as we've covered, is batshit crazy.
And you cannot allow him to be out there, and so as a result, this thing has to slough off.
There's a reason why Tucker Carlson ghosted him.
There's a reason Mike Flynn moved away from him.
And that is because they recognized that people like him had already served their purpose, and that their project can go on.
That stuff is already in there.
It's baked into the bread.
Q never has to post again.
Probably never will post again.
Right?
And the PSYOP has probably carried out its total fruition, but I mean, it's not the end of this thing.
It is the end of the beginning of this thing, unfortunately.
Oh, and by the way, a judge did refer Lin Wood for disbarment.
It hasn't happened yet, but it was referred, and apparently Lin Wood also, he might have voted illegally in November.
So um you know it's he's the the they're the ones who tried to do the illegal voting them that would then see see there's illegal voting um you gotta love it that's the one thing that I have I mean I guess I'm impressed with these people is that you would imagine okay it's now a year after the election and like all that stuff's been disproved And it would just kind of go away.
We'd forget about it.
Like most things in society these days, we kind of forget and move on to the next thing.
I got to hand it to them.
They've been able to keep this thing going longer than I ever thought they would and obviously into the next cycle.
So that must be their superpower, I suppose, is that they can somehow drag these things out and continue to keep them on people's minds and convert more people, which is really – I mean, we keep seeing these.
I sort of understand, in a different way, how this was possible.
that the 2020 election was stolen.
And I don't think they're going down. - Yeah, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and again, I wanna encourage people to stick around for this conversation we're getting ready to have with Nathan Coleman Lamb.
I sort of understand in a different way how this was possible.
And the entire thing is, the populations are primed and ready to believe it.
If John McCain in 2008, after he lost to Barack Obama, Would have come out and said, the election was stolen from me, foreign powers were involved.
Oh my God, if the New World Order did it.
I mean, my God, you can make up any number of things.
With Obama, if a Republican would have come out and done that, if John McCain would have come out and done that, their base would have accepted it.
You know what I mean?
This has lain dormant, and one of the reasons why all of this is so powerful is because it's kind of a game of confirming what people want to believe.
You know what I mean?
They have their own stories about how the world works, and when they lose an election, particularly this subset of the country, Whoever tells them what they want to hear, they're going to believe it because it confirms the problem here is that we now have a new generation of Republicans and grifters and demagogues who they have no shame.
As you always point out, it's the loss of shame.
There's no consequence for it.
They have all the money in the world to gain from it and all the power in the world to gain from it, and we have a group of people at this point who have absolutely no scruples whatsoever.
The phrase that you used, with Obama, is doing a lot of work there, because I think what you're really saying is simply, a black man.
Losing to a black man in a presidential race can't happen.
It had to be stolen.
That would have been so powerful.
That would have tore the country apart.
And let's have a quick thing, and we need to be careful not to get too deep in the weeds, because this is actually something to talk about later.
What ended up happening was that the Republican Party accepted the defeat.
McCain didn't go out and say that it got robbed from him, which I think that their base would have believed.
So what happened?
What happened was an alternative story got told.
And the alternative story was that a lot of Americans who actually are inherently racist or have racist prejudices, they said, you know what?
Racism's over.
It's done.
It's taken care of.
Look, a black man got elected.
There's no racism left in America.
You know what?
I'm even going to give him a quote unquote chance.
And they gave him a chance for like, you know, an hour.
And then they immediately said he failed.
It's obvious that he can't do this job.
So what ends up happening is that that story, that mythology, the things that we tell ourselves ends up winning out one way or another.
It just so happens that these people have figured out how to weaponize it like to a degree that you're exactly right.
It's not going to go away.
All right, so now we're going to go to our talk with Nathan Coleman-Lam from the End of Sport podcast.
Again, even if you don't watch sports, even if you don't give a shit about sports, I'm encouraging you, please listen to this interview.
We get into some really, really important stuff, and I think this is a really telling sort of a conversation that gets into capitalism, American politics, American society.
So we'll be right back with Nathan Coleman-Lam.
Hey everybody, we are back, and I gotta tell you, I've been looking forward to this conversation we're getting ready to have for a very, very long time.
You're gonna want to stick around, listen to this.
Even if you don't care about collegiate athletics, we're gonna be talking about capitalism, exploitation, and some really gnarly shit.
And to do so, Nick and I are happy to welcome Nathan Coleman Lamb, who is a lecturing fellow in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University, where he teaches on labor, inequality, and sport.
And the co-host of the End of Sport podcast, one of my favorite shows out there.
You should absolutely subscribe and listen.
He's the author of the book Game Misconduct, Injury, Fandom and the Business of Sport and co-author of Out of Left Field, Social Inequality and Sports.
He's currently working on a new book under contract with UNC Press and co-authored with Derek Silva entitled The End of College Football Exploitation in the Ivory Tower and on the Gridiron.
Nathan, thanks so much for being here.
A huge pleasure.
Can't wait to talk.
Alright, so one of the things we wanted to talk about is this thing that has picked up some momentum.
I feel, Nathan, like for years, I know I certainly graded my fair share of first year writing essays about whether or not college football players should be paid.
It has been sort of a hot button thing that shows up, used to show up in the back of Sports Illustrated issues that really just kind of got left behind.
Meanwhile, Collegiate Athletics has become a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
All of a sudden now, there is room for us to actually talk about the fact that within the United States of America, this is one of the most exploitive systems, basically a modern-day slavery of sorts.
An absolutely repulsive thing that I think displays the worst parts of America and capitalism.
And I was wondering if you could go ahead and just give a general sort of introduction to people who maybe haven't paid as much attention as they should be.
Because I think this thing has larger implications that go on way beyond the NCAA and college sports.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I'm right there with you.
Beyond the prison industrial complex itself, college sports is right up there for the most exploitative sites of labor in the United States.
We are talking about an $18.9 billion industry.
That's the NCAA's figure, not mine.
You know, that's what they report to us.
It's $18.9 billion.
$8.3 billion of that is in the Power Five conferences alone.
OK, so we're talking only about 65 universities in that case that are raking in that much of the money.
We have to understand, so there's a lot of different angles, and I want to give you an overview, but the first thing, you started with it, and I think we have to center this.
We are talking about a system that is predicated on plantation dynamics, okay?
Like, we're talking here about a racial transfer of wealth.
The economists Ted Tatos and Hal Singer have found that in the last 20 years or so, 1.2 to 1.4 billion dollars per year have essentially been stolen from black athletes at these universities, okay?
And when we talk about the plantation dynamics, what we're looking at here, 5.7% of the students at Power 5 schools are black overall.
But when we're talking about the highest revenue sports, men's basketball, we're talking 55.9% black athletes.
Men's football, 55.7% black athletes.
Women's basketball, 48.1%.
Think about a school like Texas A&M, one of the highest revenue earning schools in the country.
3.1% black population overall at Texas A&M.
75% of the football team is black.
92.9% of the women's basketball team is black, right?
So what I'm trying to get at here, the athletes are earning this revenue.
People don't tune in to watch me play.
They wouldn't tune in if I was eligible.
They wouldn't tune in to watch me play.
They're tuning in to watch these exceptionally gifted athletes, right?
But the money isn't going to the athletes.
The money is going to, well, let's look at who it's going to.
It's going to in the Power 5 conferences.
Presidents and chancellors, 84.4% of whom are white in the Power Five conferences, it's going to athletic directors.
75% of those athletic directors are white.
And by the way, those athletic directors, some of them are earning over $2 million a year.
We got 51 athletic directors right now in the Power Five conferences that are earning, get this, $700,000 plus per year, okay?
The athletic directors.
And then of course we got the coaches, right?
The Power 5 head men's basketball coaches.
80.6% of those are white.
81.5% of women's basketball coaches are white.
And 80% of Power 5 head football coaches are white, right?
So again, this is money that's going from black athletes to white people.
White people in positions of power.
And it's, I mean, it is, it's the reason why we use the term plantation dynamics.
That's just one part of it.
Go ahead, Nick.
Yeah. - Well, I have to imagine that even if the ADs were black or mostly were black or the other coaches, we'd still have a big problem with the structure of this, right, and that I wanna make sure that we get that clear.
And I'm actually, could be the devil's advocate here.
Full disclosure, I was a basketball manager at Wisconsin Like, I was in an athletic department at a, you know, Division 1 school and saw the benefits of, you know, student-athletes and all that kind of stuff.
Because obviously, what someone's going to say is, there needs to be a value put on the scholarship itself, right?
Like, you know, even though they're not getting paid from their work, they are getting something.
So, what's the reaction to that point when it's being, when it's made to you?
Sure, sure.
There are a couple of sides to that.
I mean, one of them is we have to think about, we always have to think about these questions within these larger structural contexts, right?
Like, which is to say higher education in the United States is profoundly inaccessible as a rule, right?
In Canada, where I'm from, it costs me about $5,000 a year of tuition to go to one of the most prestigious universities in the country, University of Toronto.
If we were looking at tuition that was comparable to that in the United States, then these universities would have no argument to make whatsoever.
They wouldn't be able to make these claims that they're offering at Duke University, let's say $70,000 or $80,000 or whatever it is.
The other thing is, you've got to remember, how does the money actually flow in these institutions?
You just got the athletic department paying the rest of the university when they're paying a scholarship, right?
So that money isn't actually leaving the institution.
It doesn't really cost the institution anything.
The residences are already built.
The food services are already being provided.
The actual costs to the institution are miniscule, right, compared to the amount of money that they're raking in.
So I think it's really important to underline that fact.
But the other thing that you said, Let's go back to it.
You're absolutely right.
Do I actually want to see black football players subsidizing black athletic directors or black university presidents?
No.
That's not the real point here, right?
The real point is that the people who are sacrificing their bodies to produce this ridiculous amount of value, they're not receiving the return that they deserve to receive.
And that's what makes this so fundamentally exploitative.
Another thing about it, though, let's talk about the educational dynamic.
Right.
Because we always hear student athlete, student athlete.
That term is clearly has been historically designed to buttress this principle of amateurism, which is essentially the form of theft.
Right.
Because we're calling it amateur work as opposed to professional.
That means we don't we can't ostensibly pay players.
Right.
We know that that's the reason for the term student athlete.
But if let's just for a moment accept that premise on its face.
This means that as you were saying, Nick, that the compensation athletes receive is the education, right?
Well, what does that education look like?
Here's the sad reality.
And it's not, I want to be really clear about this.
It's not because in my view, we have massive widespread corruption in academic, like in these institutions of higher education with respect to athletics, i.e.
what we saw at UNC, right?
Paper classes and that sort of thing, which people like to highlight.
It happens in some cases, My position is that the academic dimensions of college sport are fundamentally exploitative because it is literally not possible to work 40 hours a week as an athletic worker and get the educational experience that is promised to you, especially if you're a football player.
Right.
And that's leading aside the fact that these athletic departments are steering players into classes they perceive to be easier classes.
Like I'm not cheating.
They're just saying, don't be an engineering major.
Don't be a STEM major of any kind, because we perceive some other kind of, you know, I mean, again, someone who comes from like the humanities, social sciences.
I'm not actually trying to disparage those fields, but that's the perspective here.
There's gonna be less of a time commitment and therefore that's where you're going to take your classes.
You're certainly not going to schedule classes during practice time because practice always comes first.
Right.
You definitely don't get a chance to have that internship on Wall Street.
Right.
Because that's going to conflict with your practice schedule.
You don't get to go on a year abroad or a summer abroad.
You essentially don't get to do any of the things that say $70,000 at a school like Duke is supposed to be buying for you.
Right.
Because you're spending that time doing your athletic work.
And let's finally let's let's put it this way.
If I am working 40 plus hours a week at football, when I show up in a classroom, I am exhausted.
It is hard to keep my eyes open.
How am I going to get the full educational experience when my brain is being battered every single day?
It's just not possible.
It's not the fault of athletes.
It's not because the athletes don't want to get an education.
It's because structurally that education is impossible when they are full time athletic workers.
So I want to get into, eventually, how this has absolutely corrupted the academic model of the United States of America, because that is, I think, something everybody should be concerned with.
But I wanted to bring something up.
I thought of you this weekend, and it came after the fact of a moment.
For those, and we have a lot of listeners undoubtedly who don't follow sports, and they're wondering sort of why we're having this conversation.
And I want to go ahead and I want to open it up like this.
On Saturday, there was a major sporting event as the University of Michigan beat Ohio State for the first time in years.
It turned into a rapturous celebration.
You had tens of thousands of fans coming down to celebrate with the players.
It was undoubtedly a moment that these student-athletes or whatever or the students themselves are going to remember for forever.
I had a moment watching it.
And I know all of this.
I've studied it.
I've read the books.
I've read the literature.
I had a moment where I got caught up in it, right?
It gave me a feeling watching this.
It felt inspiring.
And then there was a moment in the midst of it where I thought of you.
And I thought of you because of how complicit we are in this stuff and how it just becomes this normalized thing.
Meanwhile, by the way, the entire process Michigan, it has just come out that one of their former coaches, Bo Schembachler, covered up rapes of his players.
The coach who was being celebrated more or less got carried off on the shoulders of his players and the entire state of Michigan has apologized for this and has thrown his support behind it.
There were numerous packages about this coach that completely glazed over all of this.
I was wondering if you could talk about the complicity in all of this, how even people who know about this stuff can get caught up in it, and how this sort of culture perpetuates itself both in the media and just in our culture in general.
Yeah, I mean, the word I thought of as you were talking is it's seductive, right?
It's really seductive.
It's seductive in the way, frankly, like as someone who kind of has always had a level of cynicism about these sort of institutions, you know, when I was an undergrad, I actually commuted from home, like I wasn't in residence.
So I didn't have that full experience of being kind of interpolated into being a part of the university community.
But when I arrived at Duke, you know, they had all first year faculty.
They wanted us to be it was in the chapel.
They had like a kind of commencement ceremony for, you know, all the incoming freshman students.
And they wanted new faculty to kind of be in there and experience that with them a little bit.
So we were kind of in the choir of the chapel experiencing it.
And I have to say, despite everything I knew and thought about it in the way that you just described, Jared, I was taken into.
Like it was overwhelming emotionally to be in that space, right, to hear those speeches.
And I cannot imagine being an 18-year-old, a 19-year-old, right, in that kind of environment.
We are being invited to participate and become complicit in this system, right?
There's no question about it.
And whether that's whether you're in the big stadium in Ann Arbor, right, at the game or in the chapel at Duke, it's almost impossible to resist that kind of emotional allure.
I mean, I want to talk about the Michigan situation.
I wrote a piece, I co-authored a piece in June about what happened at Michigan.
We are, you know, half a year later, no one is talking about this in the mainstream media.
This was the perfect opportunity.
As you say, this is like the redemptive moment for Michigan football.
This was the chance for media to dig into it.
And there's nothing, it's crickets, right?
No one is talking about.
Well, I just want to say real fast, and this is one of the reasons that I wanted to bring this up in the first place.
Can I add?
And at both of these institutions, we're talking about very similar situations.
Go on.
Well, I just want to say real fast, and this is one of the reasons that I wanted to bring this up in the first place.
I grew up in southern Indiana.
I grew up lionizing Bobby Knight, Coach Knight of Indiana, who beat his players, was guilty of incredible racism and abuses, one after another.
And I have to tell you, one of the reasons that I came to understand the allure of Donald Trump Is because I was a Bobby Knight apologist.
If Bobby Knight would have ran for president, I would have voted for him.
I would have defended him if it came out that he had abused people or whatever.
I'm sure there are Michigan fans who are saying, no, Bo never would have done this.
There's no way he won football games.
There's no way he would let his players be abused.
That seduction is really dangerous, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly dangerous.
And I think the other thing that you were getting at is, We have to recognize the way in which the media is complicit in this, right?
I like to talk about it as the college sports media complex, because we began with the question of like, what are universities earning, right?
These positions, supposedly these universities are non-profit institutions, but you can see how this money flows to individuals in these institutions, right?
I mean, like the money is going somewhere.
It has to be spent and it is spent.
But the thing is, ESPN.
Sports Illustrated, The Athletic, CBS, right?
All of the different tentacles of the college sport media complex, right?
The college sport media companies.
What are they selling?
They are selling games and the games that they are selling The labor that produces that commodity spectacle, that's the labor being produced by the very same college athletes who are being exploited by the universities, right?
If you took away that labor, they'd have nothing to sell.
And it's just talking heads.
And the only thing that the talking heads have to talk about are the games.
That's the point, right?
That's what it keeps coming back to.
So actually, ESPN is exploiting those campus athletic workers in exactly the same way that the University of Michigan is exploiting them.
And also ESPN is in a perfect alliance with the University of Michigan, right?
They're on the same side of this.
Neither one has any incentive whatsoever to expose the corruption, the exploitation, the abuse, Because that's going to affect the bottom line in each of these cases.
So what do we do?
We tell the story of Jim Harbaugh's redemption.
We tell the story of like the rag, the rags to riches story we've heard like a gazillion times in the context of sport, right?
Because that makes everyone feel good.
And frankly, it legitimizes, I wanna say is like, it justifies the American dream, right?
It justifies the rapacious elements of neoliberal capitalism.
That's what the richest story does in sports.
No one wants to hear about the exploitation.
No one wants to hear about the player who came from poverty, had their brain battered and went back to poverty, right?
And no one wants to hear about the coaches who knew the players were being sexually abused and did nothing about it.
Well, that is one of the details that really alarmed me in the Michigan story because the assistant coaches would threaten football players by sending them to the doctor because everybody knew what that meant.
That would have meant sexual abuse by this doctor.
So they knew it and they used it as a threat.
Now we can talk about the actual coaching in a second because that's what comes into my realm as well.
Uh, you know, there is reporting.
I mean, obviously, we saw an article or two about it.
I think it's what they can do is sort of just do the very bare minimum to touch upon it to say, hey, we did report it.
We, you know, you can look at this one day where this article came out and then nothing else happened.
So at the very least, we should at least acknowledge, I suppose, that, you know, these do think these things do come out and that we were forgetting Michigan State because we have the massive abuse there with the women's Gymnastics, right?
For years and years and years.
And by the way, this goes beyond just like even sexual exploitation and abuse on that end.
We're talking also about, you know, I'll just give you a quick story.
I was at a really big coaches clinic for basketball and a buddy of mine was an assistant at a really big high school program, a national program where D1 players go every year, multiple.
And he said to me, and by the way, every major coach was there from every major program.
He said, Nick, which guy do you want me to point out that leaves the bag of money for these kids when they were recruiting them to go to these schools?
And I'm like, I don't even want to know, but it was pretty much all of them.
So I think the other underlying thing here that we don't, no one wants to acknowledge either, which would be a Pulitzer Prize winning series, would be to finally expose once and for all, like just the recruitment process, which begins this whole thing with the athletes themselves You know, they asked LeBron at some point about this and he was very sheepishly quiet and didn't say anything about, you know, how much money he was offered to go to school.
They don't often ask him about China as well, because certainly the right loves to skewer the NBA for not criticizing China as if, you know, that's their big litmus test for them.
So I do think that there is some sort of handshake that begins the whole process with high school seniors going into these major programs that taints the whole thing to begin with.
And nobody seems to want to address that either.
And that's why, for me, the only solution to this problem, fundamentally, we need to see the organization of college athletes, right?
We need to see unionization so that they can actually defend their rights and then we can bring everything above board, right?
That's the issue because unless it's like a black market for all of this, it's prohibition.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And people are going to get hurt under those conditions, but there's no reason why it has to be that way.
And I actually want people to be clear because this is a really crucial moment right now.
Joe Biden appointed a new general counsel to the NLRB, Jennifer Abruzzo.
Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memo in late September She's basically begging college athletes to unionize.
She says very clearly in that memo that college athletes, and we're talking in every sport, scholarship or not.
And she made this very clear.
We had her on our podcast and she broke that down for us.
She said very clearly, it does not matter if they're receiving a scholarship or not because they are providing a service to the institution.
And that's the test of employment status.
And so what she says basically is that the universities have been using the language of student athlete and amateurism and everything else to deny employment rights for decades.
But those rights should exist according to U.S. law.
And if players test by bringing forth complaints, right, I mean, she was strongly kind of suggesting that there are going to be rulings in favor of athletes in that sense.
Right.
And that can change everything, because if we if we have unions for athletes, that means we can negotiate for at least, I would say, 50 percent of the revenue.
Right.
Which is what we see in a professional sport.
That's the kind of money we should be talking about going to the players in this context at a minimum.
We can look at much more serious protections against abuse, much more serious health and safety protections.
I mean, the NCAA literally does nothing when it comes to any kind of question of abuse.
They have no rules about abuse.
So I think you can have as much abuse as you want, but there's actually no way in which that translates into any kind of NCAA violation because the NCAA leaves that to universities, right?
And that means that players, again, are basically at the whim of these schools to protect them or not to protect them.
And it goes back to what you're saying about recruiting, Nick.
I mean, if we have very clear regulations that are negotiated with players, then schools are actually going to abide by them.
If players can be paid to come to X institution, there'll be a bag of money, but we'll all know about it.
Right.
And so that money is not going to be taken by an agent instead of the player.
It's not going to be split in all these different directions.
The FBI is not going to be involved.
The player can just get the money they deserve to get.
Well, let me ask real quickly, because here's the biggest problem I have with this.
And ironically, I am I am on the side of the players without question.
And I'm really glad to see that we've inched along a little bit more in terms of NIL and things like that.
But but like I'm also sympathetic to schools that are not part of the power five who do not make anywhere near any of this money, who would then all of a sudden be expected to then actually.
And I would imagine the laws would be such that, like, it has to be even across all the D1 schools, for instance.
And it has to be even, maybe, across all the sports.
So, I can't figure out how all but, like, you know, 20 schools in the country could even afford it.
And then also, even some of the other, those schools who don't make the absolute top, you know, how do they cover, you know, the swimming program, or fencing, or other programs that don't make any money at all for them, revenue-wise?
You know, How would they stretch all that money?
And if you want to negotiate with seniors in high school, you probably need like a whole in-house council, a whole law firm.
I just can't quite figure out how all but like 10 or 12 schools in the country would be able to actually afford to do that.
They, Nathan, and tell me if I'm wrong here, they wouldn't.
Like, and here's the thing, I absolutely think that all college athletes should unionize.
I think that would be a watershed moment for the United States of America.
I think that would be a really, really huge moment.
But I want to point something out here, and Nick, you and I have talked about this a little bit off the program.
The only reason that collegiate athletics functions the way it does is because the National Football League and the NBA does not want to pay for their own minor league system the way that baseball does.
And so if we did move to a point where there was unionization, there would be a massive rift between the haves and the have nots.
The have nots would basically have real student athletes, people who didn't have an opportunity to go on and play any sort of professional sports whatsoever.
You'd have the major schools who would practically become the triple A clubs of these places.
And to be honest, I think it would be good both for the athletes, but it would also be good for the nation, This is hurting our college system, and we're going to talk about that in just a minute, but I think it would more or less break the back of this monopolistic exploitive system.
Am I right, Nathan?
Yeah, I think that's a great point.
One, I do see the Power Five breaking off ultimately as a very, very likely scenario because that, as you're pointing out, that's where most of the money is.
That's where most of the exploitation is happening.
And by the way, how do these schools pay for it?
You don't have to pay the athletic director $2 million a year.
You don't have to pay the coach $10 million a year.
You pay the coach $10 million a year because it's the only way you can gain a competitive advantage.
You do well, Nick, you know this, you do well in sports when you have good players.
Good players actually have a lot to do with the winning, as much as coaches might like to say that it's about the X's and O's, right?
But if you can't pay to have the best players, you're better off paying to get the coach who can get you the best players, right?
Like that's a logical way of approaching a system that doesn't allow you to pay for players.
But in a system where the players can get paid, suddenly the coaches don't need to make nearly the share that they're making, right?
So that's where some of the money goes.
Then the other question is, what happens in the sort of the rest?
If the Power 5 breaks off, what happens to everything else?
I think we have to look at, let's say, Division 2 as a template here.
Division 2 does not make the same kind of revenue that we're talking about, but they still have sports and they still have scholarships currently.
These universities have some kind of calculus in mind where they've decided that it is worth it to them, whether it's boosting their brand, right?
Or however, that's the thing we never see quantified, right?
But I think it's a really key point.
The sports are doing something for the brand in terms of how many students are applying to the school because they are familiar with it via sports and the tuition dollars they're paying, etc.
Right?
That's part of the equation here, too.
And I think Division 2 tells us that maybe if the Power 5 breaks away, there's less money in college sport, but there's still a way in which we can have a form of college sport that I think is much more in line with this so-called student-athlete experience that we've been sold by the NCAA.
And I can illustrate that by my own personal experience at Wisconsin.
So I started there in 1990 when the football team was 1-10 and the entire athletic department was terrible.
The basketball team was terrible too for years and years.
And that was the year they hired Barry Alvarez who completely revamped the football program.
By my senior year they won the Rose Bowl.
And ever since then, they've been a national program.
And by the way, there's a direct connection between that and all of a sudden, the basketball team becoming really good as well.
And then it turns out that there are years now where it's harder to get into Wisconsin than it is to get into Michigan, which is historically ridiculous.
That's like, you know, saying it's harder to get into, you know, NC State versus Duke.
I don't know.
I'm not sure if NC State is how great they are.
But, you know, that's the thing.
Michigan was always, you know, the Harvard of the Midwest.
And so suddenly, by direct implication that the football team got better and the basketball team got better, suddenly the rating of the school academically gets better For no other reason than, yes, the branding and people sort of want to go there.
And by the way, it does also open up the notion of they have more money pouring in so they can improve the cafeterias and they can improve all those things, which is an arms race now in college.
But here's the thing, Nick, when that money, and I'm going to go ahead and bring this in for people who don't care about sports, because this is the larger picture of this whole thing.
The moment that you're talking about where the money starts pouring in, I know our regular listeners are going to be shocked to hear this, it kind of coincides with the rise of neoliberalism.
And all of a sudden as this money and branding and the contracts and all of this starts pouring in, All of a sudden at these universities, and for anybody who doesn't know this, universities for a large period of time, their presidents and the people who ran them were academics.
They were people who taught.
They were people who enjoyed the life of the mind, right?
They cared about the academy.
All of a sudden, you start having a lot of for-profit corporate minds who start coming into these colleges.
And not only do they start pushing all the influence and the money towards these athletics as branding, right, as a way to bring people in.
All of a sudden, they start creating austerity all across the country.
And we end up in an educational crisis where we are now, which no one wants to talk about because they're schools where people can go in and get a hell of a cafeteria meal.
They have a lazy river that they can ride on to class.
They have a rock wall that they can spend all their time on.
But they're being ladled with debt.
And the educational system is being stripped bare.
Right, Nathan?
That's exactly it. - Yeah.
About five or six years ago, the fear that a lot of us had was the zoomification.
I mean, we didn't have the word zoom at the time, but it was like the zoomification of higher education.
We were afraid that all the universities were going to try to go online and basically make faculty redundant as a consequence, right?
And like lower all their labor costs, etc.
That was the direction that higher education was going.
COVID has really proven But that was not entirely true.
I think that that's true at more regional institutions, smaller institutions.
But when we are talking about the kinds of schools that we're seeing in the Power Five, right, that is to say large public institutions, Ivy type institutions, institutions like Duke that would want to call themselves Ivy type institutions, right?
What are they selling?
They are selling the campus experience.
You can't have the campus experience on Zoom.
In fact, a class at Duke and a class at Regional University in North Carolina are exactly the same if they're on Zoom.
So you can't justify $70,000 of tuition, right, if all the classes are on Zoom.
So you do, you need to have the lazy river, you need to have the food court that's like the most posh, you know, shopping mall food court you can imagine.
And you need sports, right?
The sports are such, you need to have that $120,000, 120,000 person football stadium where you can tailgate before the game.
You need to have Cameron Indoor Stadium, right?
Like these are the things that make it worth spending $70,000 on your education.
And the reason why we have to spend $70,000 or at the public schools, you know, tens of thousands now, Because we've seen a systematic under- this is where neoliberalism comes in- the systematic underfunding of higher education, right?
So the schools are now forced to rely on user fees, essentially, to pay for what was otherwise subsidized.
And how do you get people to pay these user fees?
Through the campus experience, right?
So the cost just keeps going up, up, up.
But you cannot do away with sports.
You can't do away with the amenities.
They're a necessary part of the political economy of higher education as we know it today.
And I want to piggyback on that because here's the thing.
I would imagine that professors on campuses might view college coaches as sort of professors.
They're educators.
They're teachers.
But they certainly don't abide... No.
No.
Do not.
You don't?
Okay.
No.
Not even a little bit.
Okay.
No.
Because... You look at me with disdain.
I'm sorry.
But we do.
Alright, well, here's why you look at it with the sadists, because they are not bound by the same kind of behavioral codes that you guys are in the classroom.
And so, here's what I get frustrated with as far as the college and the college basketball landscape goes.
College coaches, and I hate to generalize too much, but I just hear it too much in very specific areas all the way across the country.
They're terrible.
They're not good coaches.
They're behind 20 years in their methods.
And they're these control freaks that want to control every single aspect of the program, and they can treat their players any way they want to without any consequences.
So, okay, Bobby Knight grabs the guy or he punches him and they get rid of him.
Finally, they do that.
30 years, right?
And maybe you can't get away with that now.
But I would say it's just as abusive when they're forcing these players to learn these archaic fundamentals that don't even exist or play these X's and O's that are completely against what we now know with modern analytics and information.
I have players from D1 crying on my shoulder all the all the time about what they made them do, like shooting-wise and skill-wise.
So this is another problem that nobody really wants to talk about either as far as quality. - And Nick, for those who are listening who don't know this, I'm gonna tell you a statistic that is widely, widely known in certain circles, but most people do not know this.
At my last count, 34 of the 50 states, college coaches are the top paid public official in the state.
Let me say that again.
In 34 of the 50 states, college coaches are the top paid public official by far, by leaps and bounds.
This is a fascinating point, Nick, that I actually do want to get more into, but just just to kind of to contextualize it even further, because I mean, what you're saying about The actual caliber of the coaching is really interesting, but just to focus on that abusive dimension, because you're right that one thing that faculty get really worked up about is the fact that there is a completely different standard, right?
Ostensibly, we all know it's a lie, but still, ostensibly, the coach is educator in a university context, which means you would imagine that there's like some pedagogical mandate there.
And that pedagogical mandate in 2021 does not include, like, obvious forms of corporal punishment on national television, you would think.
And yet, for instance, at the University of Washington, Jimmy Lake assaulted a player.
I mean, he struck a player on national television.
He was suspended for a week.
And then later, he was fired.
He was fired without cause.
He was fired for losing too many football games.
And because of that, The university owed him 10 million free dollars not to work.
Because if they fired him with cause, he doesn't get his buyout.
If they fired him for abusing a student, he doesn't get his buyout.
But they didn't!
They fired him for losing football games, so that means the taxpayers of Washington get to pay that man 10 million dollars not to work.
That's the political economy of college sports that we're talking about right now.
But it's also the power that these entrenched coaches have all the way from, I mean, you didn't mention Syracuse's complete ridiculous scandal and that was swept under the rug.
Or even the fact that all these assistant coaches got the FBI targeted them and arrested them.
Not a peep since then.
We don't know anything about that.
Mike Krzyzewski's grandson Who was just arrested the other day.
What was the eventual charge, Nathan?
Because it moved around a little bit.
I don't actually know.
I mean, the last I saw was that there was like it was a DWI situation.
He was driving while intoxicated.
He was also in the car was the top freshman basketball player in the country, Ben Charo, who I don't think missed a game.
And Krzyzewski, of course, who is more or less a living god, Nothing happened.
Absolutely nothing happened.
Nobody said boo.
It was barely on the ESPN News ticker.
I mean, you're exactly right.
They're entrenched power.
They're unquestioned.
And this is why, you know, Jared and I are podcast partners, because he got me right where I was.
Coach K was the next point I was going to make, because there was a moment when the Blue Devil newspaper, the student newspaper, had been critical of the team.
This is years ago now.
He calls the editors in and just berates them with the most ridiculous, cuss-filled screed you'd ever hear.
And these guys were smart enough to record it and then report it again.
But it shows you the kind of control he thinks he certainly has and demands and how they should be reporting this team, what kind of access they may or may not get, which is not like the NBA threatening a reporter from The Athletic or anything like that.
This is much more serious because Coach K does have that kind of power.
So you mentioned earlier about how nobody wants to upset the apple cart here and disrupt this money train.
It goes across the board.
Now you have intimidation by these coaches as well.
It really is frustrating.
Part of me feels like what you mentioned about the haves and have-nots, Jared, if that's really what you want to do for college athletics, where you only have the 12 teams that are going to be really good and worth watching on national TV, well that kind of destroys the NCAA Tournament.
Right?
Because now you're not going to have a 64 team where anybody can win.
And that's a whole other cash cow that's interesting.
That destroys the NCAA, but it does not destroy any of the Power 5 universities because the March Madness money is subsidizing that one organization.
That's where all the NCAA's money comes from.
But where does the money come from from the Power 5 schools?
It's football.
It's all football.
The football money is what's subsidizing those programs, so that's why they'd be glad to break away.
They don't really care if March Madness dies.
I mean, I understand.
Like, listen, you hear me complain all the time and criticize all the time when it comes to college sport.
If you look at my heart of hearts, do I love college basketball and March Madness as a spectacle?
Yes.
It's like my first love when it comes to sports, okay?
So I'm with people.
I get it.
Do I want to see the end of March Madness from the standpoint of the beauty of sport?
No!
March Madness is as fun as sport can possibly get.
And I absolutely understand that.
But realistically, these schools don't care about March Madness.
These schools care about football money.
And again, let's look at the difference there, too.
There's an ethics to this.
And I know you know this, Nick.
Basketball ultimately is not a game that requires human sacrifice.
But football is.
There's no tackle football, as we know it, without human sacrifice, right?
So there's a fundamental ethical question here about whether we should, in a humane society, even have this sport, right?
Let alone universities that are relying on this sport.
to support their entire business model. - I mean, I go on a rant every six months on Twitter, on my basketball side, about how I think that football will be extinct in 20 years.
And what frustrates me is that we now know that the CTE, all the information that we've had about that had been covered up for years and years and years.
But the other thing is, and we talked about this recently, was you know 7 to 10 high school players a year die playing football like quote-unquote the right way.
They tackle the properly, they pile up, and then they don't get up for no other reason that they were playing the game of football.
I can't understand how high school football is still permitted and hasn't been sued out of existence anyway.
And I can't understand how, you know, and at some point when that happens, like when you do that, sign that parent permission slip, it's going to have to say at some point very soon, you acknowledge, in big letters at the top, that you have a 50% chance of brain damage for your kid, and that 50% number is low, and that will continue to grow.
Every 2.6 years of participation in football doubles your chances of CTE.
And in North Carolina, they're signing those kids, in Georgia.
Five years old.
Five years old is when they're starting playing tackle football.
And this is why I think this is so important to talk about is because, first, I come from southern Indiana, where football and basketball, depending upon what year it is, are on equal footing.
The parents are going to sign those permission slips because it's part of culture.
And I think what we're talking about here, this is a very good metaphor for the larger capitalistic system that exists within the United States.
We sit here, and I'm with you, Nathan.
March Madness, to me, is maybe the highlight of my year.
I'm not kidding.
It's literally my Christmas.
I block off time.
I don't do anything.
I literally watch every game that I can possibly do.
When it went away, I was fundamentally sad and depressed because of COVID.
And I have to tell you, To sit here and say, well, I love it so much.
I don't care if people get hurt.
That is the essentials of American capitalism.
We have to keep doing it.
What we're essentially talking about is organized crime.
That's what we're talking about here.
Well, the argument also is, well, it's either it's their only way out of their situation and or that, oh, they know the risks and they're willing to take them.
They don't know the risks, because we don't know the risks all the way to get yet.
We haven't been able to figure out a way to test for CTE while you're living, and we're going to find out.
There's no question that graph continues to go up.
So that's so frustrating to me to see that.
Plus, like even a high school playbook for football, and by the way, you know, even full disclosure, I was a high school basketball coach who had major issues with the football program because They didn't want to share their athletes, and they would also treat the athletes like absolute dirt, like every other football coach in high school would do, with absolutely no respect for the athlete.
But, you know, we don't know what the full risks are for this.
And when you look at even a high school playbook, they're complicated.
There's geometry, there's angles, there's timing.
You can't convince me that a kid with enough passion for football couldn't refocus that to, like, academics in an inner-city school.
And I say that because inner-city schools, if you do well enough there, you get a boost when you're applying to colleges.
Like, that could be their other way out.
It doesn't have to be, like, this notion, which is probably what you're also saying as far as culture, right, Jared?
It's the culture of, like, I need to play football or basketball.
That's the only way.
Or be an entertainer.
That's going to get me out of my situation.
It's exploitation.
That's what we do.
What we exploit, we tell ourselves stories about why we exploit.
And it legitimizes it.
And we have to see, like, the term we started using, structural coercion.
That's what this entire system is based on.
You hear all the time, they signed up for it.
They signed up for it, right?
That's like the number one justification for this entire system of exploitation when it comes to college sport, but also other systems of exploitation.
But the bottom line is that if you're someone coming from an extremely impoverished community and you're given the opportunity to play football, go to college that would otherwise be inaccessible to you, change the life chances for other family members, it's a rational decision to sacrifice your own brain in order to play football.
I mean, it's horrifying to say that, right?
But it's not an irrational decision.
Those people are making an incredibly selfless decision to better the lives of themselves and their family members.
The problem is that we have put people in this society, right?
We've created, we have a social structure that gives people these like artificial choices that aren't real choices that forces them to make these kinds of sacrifice.
Well, Nathan, let me ask you a reaction to this because at that same clinic I was at where all these great coaches in Calipari, Kentucky was the big headliner.
He says it out loud.
The first thing he says, he goes, I'm not a basketball coach.
I am a wealth builder.
I am recruiting these guys and telling them you are going to change your entire family's wealth structure for forever.
And you're gonna be able to make so much money that everyone will be able to lift everybody up in your family and they'll all be better off because of that.
And by the way, of all the coaches that don't teach What is your reaction to when he can stand in front of hundreds of high school coaches in front of a clinic and actually say it out loud?
I mean, look, we know he's building his own wealth more than anything else, right?
That's the most predominant aspect of the exercise there.
It's really hard.
We cannot think of these questions, like these are political questions, right?
Mostly what you're doing is talking on the show about politics.
Medicare for All.
That's a college sports rights issue.
I mean, we literally, we have players who are going through football, but going through basketball, right?
If anyone sees, I would recommend people see the film Student Athlete, which was actually produced by LeBron James Company.
It was an HBO film.
Tells a story of some players, one of them Mike Shaw, right?
He doesn't have, he's a basketball player, not a football player, but he suffers such debilitating harm over his career that he has to basically try to learn how to walk again.
But is the university paying for that?
Absolutely not.
You're lucky if they pay any of the health costs you have while you're at school under scholarship, and they don't necessarily cover it, right?
But once you're done, forget about it.
Those football players whose brains are being sacrificed, their bodies being sacrificed, the schools aren't paying for that.
But if we had Medicare for All, right?
I mean, at least people would be able to get the support that they need once their careers are over.
If higher education was accessible to all, if people didn't have to fear crippling debt, maybe they could make a different kind of choice, right?
So these issues are really, I think, all fundamentally connected.
They're political questions as well as sports questions.
We have to fight them in the context of sport.
Going back to what you were saying, Jared, fans have to be in solidarity with the players, right?
That's what we have to learn.
It's not that you have to stop loving sport.
But you have to relearn how to love sport.
You're not on the same team with the general manager.
Like, fantasy sports tell us that you are.
I completely agree.
Fantasy sports pushes that so hard.
You're not on the same team as the general manager.
You're not on the same team as the coach.
You're not on the same team as the president.
You're on the same team as the players, right?
You have to look after the players' well-being.
You have to speak up if someone's being played through, you know, being sacrificed through injury.
We have to stop cheering for the fact that the team signed someone for a contract, right, that's lower than their value.
Because that's what the fans are taught to do.
You're taught to align with the wrong party.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is within sport and without, we have to, like, relearn how we understand where we should provide our solidarity.
And it's an ongoing political struggle to really see, like, people who are working and being exploited, they deserve our support.
And if we can do that, if we can actually, like, revolutionize society in these really fundamental ways, it would be possible to have a sports system that provides us with the aesthetic enjoyment and also the emotional fulfillment that we all get from sport.
And it would be ethical.
Yeah, we got to let Nathan go in a second, but I want to get your reaction, because I think what you just touched on is really important, because this era of hyper capitalism has sort of brought out in the open the more craven elements of this, uh, Fantasy sports is all about figuring out the minutiae of the economics behind it, getting value, not spending that much money.
On top of it, ESPN has even started fucking talking about the betting on college sports.
And I wanted to hear from you, like, is there any way you contain your rage when they start talking about the money line or they start talking about the spread?
Like, what's that duty?
The gambling thing is just taking it to the absolute nth degree.
And I mean, here's the thing.
Let's leave everything else out of it.
When people start literally investing their own money in massive quantities, The type of investment they have in the performance of players changes radically, right?
If the player, quote-unquote, fails, quote-unquote, a college student, right?
I mean, I object.
I'm going back to your point.
I object when people on Twitter criticize college students.
I'm like, can you come into my classroom and scream at my students?
Because you know what?
That person you're screaming on television literally is in my class.
Like that literal student is in my class.
If you're screaming at them, they're fine.
Yeah, if you're screaming at them about their topic sentences, we wouldn't think that was particularly appropriate, but apparently it's okay if they miss their free throw, right?
But that's just based on the performance piece.
When gambling comes about, EJ Liddell last year, the Ohio State basketball, he exposed to the world kind of the direct messages and whatever else he was getting.
And it was the most vile stuff imaginable.
We have seen this from tennis players who have started, this is not a college sport specifically, but tennis players have been starting to disclose this as well.
A lot of the mental, we code it as like mental health struggles players are having.
And like, yeah, people do have mental health struggles and we should take those seriously.
But like, this is actually not the same.
This is like being subjected to a nonstop torrent of abuse.
No person's mental health can withstand that.
That's just harm waving over you. - But imagine if they were being paid, how that would change the calculus if people wanted to criticize them even more And that's a whole other podcast we could do about how much you'd pay each individual athlete.
Is it the same across the board for everybody or not?
That's the other issue I always have wrapped my head around.
I could never wrap my head around to figure out what that would be, but that can only be worse once you add the element of being paid as student-athletes.
I mean, look, I hear you.
I think that although the one thing I would suggest is that I don't really think that anyone cares that they're student athletes.
I think they act almost exactly the same with the kinds of investment we see from fans, whether it is gambling or whether it's emotional investment.
Right.
I mean, it's just like they're all in.
That's what Marshmello.
They're tailgating 120,000.
We have bigger crowds, double the crowds for college football than we do for NFL football, right?
Those fans in Alabama and Louisiana, they don't give a shit about the NFL, right?
I mean, what they really care about is their college sports, and they're gonna abuse those students just as much as they want to.
Nathan Kalman-Lam, absolute pleasure having you here.
I hope you'll come back.
Will you tell the people where to find you?
Yeah, well I mean if you want to follow me on Twitter, it's at NKALAMB, N-K-A-L-A-M-B.
I'm listing that because hopefully we've got a lot of stuff coming out in the near future, some pieces we're working on about student-athlete terminology and the fact that it's being embedded in the NCAA Constitution.
We've gone out and talked to college athletes about how they feel about the use of student-athlete.
We've talked to them about how they feel about the fact that the LEAD1, which is an organization of athletic directors in the FBS, They pulled their members.
They told us this.
They said the quiet part out loud.
They said 85% of athletic directors are terrified that college athletes might get employment rights because it might give them minimum wage.
It might give them better health and safety protections.
They just told us that they were scared that might happen.
So again, we went out and talked to college athletes about how they felt about the fact that their athletic directors were saying that.
So I'd love to share that with people.
And then the other thing is, please just check us out on the End of Sport podcast.
This is what we talk about all the time.
We talk to academics.
We talk to members of the media who we feel are doing a good job.
And we talk to athletes about their experiences in sport.
And that's with my co-host Derek Silva and Johanna Nellis.
Can't recommend End of Sport enough.
Thank you so much, Nathan.
All right.
And that was Nathan Coleman Lamb.
I loved that conversation.
I thought it was fantastic.
Oh, and it's something I really wanted to have for a long time with somebody smart to throw some ideas back and forth because I think that there was a lot of illumination there and I think people might have gotten a little bit more of a sense of what's really going on behind this curtain of college athletics and just college, you know, education in general and there's no question he needs to come back on and we need to dive into some other areas that we touched upon because it reaches across every spectrum across the country.
I always, you know, I love this show so much and I just want to say thank you for doing it with me and thank you for listening to it.
But every time we talk to someone, I just want to, it's never enough.
I just want to talk to them for like three, four hours.
That happens to me all the time with basketball, by the way.
I'm at a party and it's like this is a six hour conversation and the wives are dragging us away or whatever.
But yes, it's the same thing every time we do that for sure.
Well, we hope you're not being dragged away because we enjoy having you and having your support, and we are so, so grateful for you.
We will be back on Friday with our Weekender episode, which is exclusive to our patrons.
That is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
If you haven't become a patron yet, I don't know what's holding you back.
Tons of free stuff, great community, and by the way, more and more people are joining.
We're gaining a hell of a lot of momentum.
Join us.
One of us.
One of us.
Yes.
Join us.
I feel like I'm on that, you know, the NPR or no, you know, the Colophon thing.
So I don't know.
I'm in the background on the phone right now taking calls.
Oh, if only we had totes or like a video of cats that cost like $85.
Oh, if only.
Maybe like a thousand piece puzzle.
Can we do one of those?
I can't do puzzles.
Oh, really?
Oh, I love that.
I'm terrible at puzzles.
Ugh!
Alright, you had to expose one of my weaknesses.
Alright everybody, if you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
