Ta-Nehisi Coates Has a Message to Deliver. Can We Hear It?

Few writers have examined the tension between history and morality more urgently than Ta-Nehisi Coates. Last fall, on the heels of his new book The Message https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/653438/the-message-by-ta-nehisi-coates/, Coates joined Sam for a conversation live in Los Angeles. At the top, they discuss how his Atlantic piece The Case for Reparations https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ guided these three new essays (6:10), Coates’ early education growing up in West Baltimore (14:57), and his powerful dispatches from South Carolina (22:00) and the Middle East (29:30). On the back-half, Coates unpacks why he believes the mainstream media prioritizes “factual complexity over self-evident morality” (37:47), his advocacy for Palestinian journalists (39:20), and his reflections about the U. S. election (47:28). To close, a formative passage from James Baldwin's The Lost Generation (52:38) and a story about love and writing (57:45). Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, my conversation with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. He's the author of The Beautiful Struggle, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award back in 2015. He's also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and is currently the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair at Howard University. Coates first came to prominence as a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he wrote seminal pieces on mass incarceration, the Obama era, and, most notably, the case for reparations. His work has always had a way of making readers reconsider how the past informs the present, a present that he believes is not only shaped by the stories

• 1:19Sam Fragoso?

  we tell, but the ones we don't. And it's that friction that's at the heart of his 2024 book, The Message, a triptych of essays set in Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine. And it's in that last section of the book that Coates writes about the conditions he witnessed on his 10-day trip to the Middle East. You may remember that we spoke last fall in front of a pretty animated audience here in Los Angeles. At the time, his reflections on Gaza had already garnered some pushback, most visibly in a contentious CBS interview where he was accused of harboring, quote, "extremist views." His reply to that accusation was fairly straightforward.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Either apartheid is right or it's wrong. It's really, really simple. Either what I saw was right or it's wrong.

• 2:08Sam Fragoso?

  Hearing that again, away from the fervor of that moment, it's hard to reconcile those words, his message, with the events that have unfolded in the West Bank in the intervening year. Even as news broke over the weekend of Hamas's potential willingness to accept a new US-backed proposal to release Israeli hostages and to explore a broader peace deal, the bombing did not abate. Airstrikes and ground operations continued amid the tenuous negotiations. This is the backdrop of Coats's work and to our conversation, how to speak clearly when the stakes are literally life and death, and why, in his words, journalism must resist,

• 2:50Sam Fragoso?

  quote, "elevating factual complexity over self-evident morality." We also talk about his beginnings in West Baltimore, his formative years writing at The Atlantic, and how he's thinking about this moment in American politics. And while, as I mentioned, this conversation was recorded in the fall of 2024, there's almost no part of this exchange that doesn't feel achingly relevant to the fall of 2025, to now. And so if you're listening to this in the future, I hope that my introduction, that parts of this conversation feel like a relic from an unrecognizable past. But if you're listening to it in our present,

• 3:36Sam Fragoso?

  I suspect you'll find this exchange to be more timely than ever. I wish that wasn't the case. And so with that, here's our conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coats, live from Los Angeles.

• 4:05Sam Fragoso?

  Welcome, everyone. Ta-Nehisi, thank you for being here. Welcome to Los Angeles.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 4:10Sam Fragoso?

  How are you feeling?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Tired. Very tired.

• 4:14Sam Fragoso?

  Best way to start a conversation.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 4:17Sam Fragoso?

  I want to start with this new book. And to do that, I think we have to go back a little bit because this book really starts with "Case for Reparations."

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:27Sam Fragoso?

  It was a 16,000-word piece that connected the unbroken line between slavery and your former editor of The Atlantic called "The systemic deprivation of the ability of Black Americans to accumulate wealth across generations." In the aftermath of that story, you did an event in 2014 at the Sixth and I synagogue in Washington, DC. What happened that night that put you on the path to writing "The Message"?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Got heckled. No, you know, that was actually...

• 5:01Sam Fragoso?

  Do you have a date on that? What was that date? It was in June of 2014, maybe June 7th.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Okay, all right. So by the time I got to Sixth and I, which was important, I had already heard the critique. Like, it had already started the bubble. "The Case for Reparations," when it came out, I was... First of all, thank you guys for having me. Thank you.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  I always tell my writing students that no one is owed an audience. And so to be here and to actually have one, in fact, to have gone around the country and had one is beautiful. And I see my Howard people right here. So there we go. You know. You know.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Can't go anywhere.

• 5:45Sam Fragoso?

  So in 2014, it wasn't that kind of heckling, right?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  No, no, no, it wasn't that at all. "Case for Reparations" came out, which I had worked on at that point for like two years. And was this sort of...

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Whatever the public reaction was, which was tremendous, for me, it unlocked something in my brain. Because when you're black in America, it is not just that you live in a state of oppression, it is that people lied to you about why it's going on. And a lot of energy is spent lying. And so, Case for Reparations was like a kind of aha moment for me. It was like, I got you. You know what I mean? I felt like I understood the lie, you know, I understood the outlines of it, and I felt like I had an explanation for it. And I felt so good about that, and I saw the cover of The Atlantic, and I was like, wow, this, you know, big historic magazine is gonna make the Case for Reparations, and this is gonna be incredible.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  And I was feeling great for about two days. And that was when I first heard, when I heard the first critique.

• 6:50Sam Fragoso?

  Which was what?

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Which was that, in order to make the practical case, which is to say, here's an example, you know, of how reparations can work, I had used reparations from the state of West Germany to the state of Israel. It's very important that I say it that way. Because it was not from the state of West Germany to Jewish people, it was not from the state of West Germany to victims or survivors of the Holocaust, it was to a state project. And that's really, really important, because what I had failed to do was to investigate the nature of that state. And that part is even more important, because at the heart of the Case for Reparations was not just the notion of a financial payoff for what I characterized as plunder, but

• 7:35Speaker 01

  an effort to make the world safe from that particular kind of plunder. So there was a moral argument running through the core of it. And so if there's a moral argument running through the core, then you have to investigate the morality of the thing that you were holding up as a prototype. And that did not happen. That did not happen. So by the time I got to Six and I, And I gotta say, this was really, really brave. I mean, we were at a synagogue. And, you know, it was like, everybody was very happy with the story and there was a lot of praise for the story and a lot of, you know, good energy. And this young lady got up and she asked a question and, you know, she went on about the story and about Palestine and how it erased Palestine.

• 8:16Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  And actually, I was dumb. I overstated when I say I was heckled. She was actually heckled. Um, and she was booed. And, you know, if I'm honest, it took a certain kind of person in that audience to make that critique.

• 8:29Sam Fragoso?

  How did you make sense of it in that moment?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  I was like, I kinda understood it, but didn't quite. You know what I mean? Like, the way I can articulate it now, I didn't. But I, I grew up in a community of fairly radical politics. So when I first heard the critique, I was not like, that's preposterous.

• 8:46Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  You know, I was more like, oh. You know, I, I'm the type of person that I'm actually a relatively slow thinker. I'm not, I'm not a fast thinker, you know, in terms of being able to put things together. So I probably could feel the era before I could really, really articulate it in the language that, that I needed to. And once I could do that, um, I was pretty much on the road to this book.

• 9:07Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm. It's been nearly a decade since your last book of nonfiction. And in 2017, after the incredible success of Between the World and Me, you said, "I'm not as scared as I used to be. I don't feel challenged in the same way. When I was writing The Case for Reparations, I was definitely scared." Traveling and, and reporting, as you did, from, from Senegal, South Carolina, Palestine, did you find this new book to be sufficiently challenging? And, and if so, what were you scared of?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yes, it was very challenging. That was a dumb thing to say.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  This was a scary book. She's, you know, you

• 9:48Sam Fragoso?

  I'm gonna have a lot of quotes here tonight.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, all right. Well, you'll find me huffing my own fumes a lot then. That was not, that was not

• 9:56Sam Fragoso?

  Present Ta-Nehisi can be critical of past Ta-Nehisi.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, he can. Yes, he can. So Between the World and Me came out. It sold a lot of books. And there are

• 10:06Sam Fragoso?

  I think that's an understatement. Yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  And there are people in this world, when they have a book that is successful, they take that as a mandate to basically do variations of the same thing. You know, so, you know, I could have done Between the World and She, Between the World and We, Between the World and They, Between Mars and Me, you know what I mean? Like

• 10:29Sam Fragoso?

  I heard that was the title of your next book, actually. Yeah.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Right, right. But I have a great editor, Chris Jackson, at the imprint where I publish, One World. You can clap for Chris.

• 10:42Sam Fragoso?

  You met him very early, in your early twenties.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  I did. I did. I did. I met him when I was

• 10:47Sam Fragoso?

  You had just become a father?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  I had. I had.

• 10:49Sam Fragoso?

  You were doing freelance writing?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Boy, you do your research.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that is true.

• 10:55Sam Fragoso?

  I showed up for you.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yes, you did. But he, he always pushes, you know what I mean? He's always pushing, and he has this idea that a book is a form, that a book is a work of art. And so, you know, every time you go back, you really should be seeking something else. And this was, so this was different. So Between the World and Me, you know, and some of the writing I've done since that helped me develop as a writer, but it couldn't really prepare me for this book. Which was the first time I wrote something, anything, really, not even a book, at length, that took place out of this country. There's a part of that in Between the World and Me, but it's relatively small. Jesus, probably about eighty percent of this book is not in America.

• 11:35Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  So that was different, because you don't have the same vocabulary, you don't have the same touchstones, you don't have the same metaphors that you can fall back on. That was hard. The fact of those three sites and making sure that the book still felt like a book, that it felt coherent, all of that made for, you know, a real challenge. The act of leaving this country and going to Palestine, actually getting on the plane, was challenging. Once I got

• 11:59Sam Fragoso?

  How do you mean?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  I mean, so that was 2023, right? So I first heard the critique in 2014. So by then, you know, it'd been about nine years, right?

• 12:07Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  So I knew a lot more then. I didn't know as much as I knew when I sat down to write, but I knew a lot more. And I just had this vague feeling That I was going to see something really, really bad. And I didn't know what the nature of that was. But I knew that if I saw something bad, I was gonna have to come back and tell people I saw something bad. Like I, um.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  And I knew enough to know that that particular bad has a political resonance in America that is unlike anything else. And so I kinda was aware of that. The funny thing is, it was much more scarier in the abstract. Once I saw it, you know, I couldn't wait to get back, you know, and tell. Like I was, you know, the fear kinda went away once I saw it, you know?

• 12:57Sam Fragoso?

  In the epigraph of the book, you cite George Orwell, that essay, Why I Write? And in that essay, Orwell insists that "A reader can only truly assess a writer's motives if he knows something of his early development." And I wanna talk all about Israel, Palestine, South Carolina, Senegal. But I do wanna hold that and that ask that Orwell is making, that to know motives when you know something about your childhood. And to do that, I wanna talk about the education you had outside of the classroom.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's not talk about the one inside the classroom at all.

• 13:35Sam Fragoso?

  We'll get into some of that.

• 13:37Sam Fragoso?

  It's the 1980s. You grow up in a row house in the slope of Tioga Parkway in West Baltimore. Your room, the smallest one, is scattered with volumes of World Book, Childcraft, Dragonlance, and Narnia. Some of those things, I admit, I did not know what they were until today.

• 13:55Sam Fragoso?

  During the week, your father, who was a former Black Panther, worked as a research librarian at Howard University. But whenever he could, he would quote, "Violate your weekends with his latest pet lesson."

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was constant.

• 14:11Sam Fragoso?

  And I thought we could hear a little of what that sounded like from your first book, The Beautiful Struggle.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  God.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Can't get away from this dude.

• 14:23Sam Fragoso?

  Is that me or your father you're talking about?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  The funny thing about reading stuff like this is like, I don't like, I like, this is, it's almost embarrassing to read your old work. And I understand, I'm glad it's not embarrassing for you guys. Yeah. Hopefully it's not hot. But I promise we're coming from a place of love today, not embarrassment. Alright, alright, okay. So this starts in my father's voice. Ugh.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Dad.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Ta-nahasi, cut off the cartoons, you're coming with me. Me, can I have another hour? Dad, the look of not playing.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Me, cutting off the TV. Okay, I'm getting my jacket. And then we were off in the brown minivan across the city, public radio, our soundtrack. My father telling me again the story of black folks slide to ruin. He would drive down North Avenue and survey the carryouts, the wig shops, the liquor stores, and note that not one of them was owned by anybody black. We would stop at Brother Kenya's printing shop, and Dad would sit down and talk that brother nation black talk. When we got home, I'd go upstairs and flop on the bed, but Dad never knew when to quit. Instead, he'd call me down to the basement and assign me another book, another history

• 15:52Speaker 01

  that traced our days from the Nile Valley to the Zulu's last stand. When I turned the pages, I could feel the something more, like a smoldering fire across the room. Days later, Dad would ask for a report, but try as I might, I could only half remember what I had read, and what I remembered, I could not really recite. My dad's response, a sudden shining in his eyes at the sound of certain words, or at my stuttering approximation of some crucial idea, suggested to me that even the little I retained had gold in it. But none of it made sense. I was young, and could not see the weaponry my ancestors had left for me.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  The shield in the tall brown grass, the axe lying right across, right next to the tree. That's not bad.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  That's okay. That's alright. That's alright.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  I wrote that like 20 years ago, so that's why it's a little...

• 16:53Sam Fragoso?

  Where did it land with you? Thinking about the lessons your father was imparting outside the classroom?

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, I was joking about never escaping them. I just won't. I mean, I was in Oakland on Friday and probably for the first time since I was in Palestine, I had a majority Palestinian audience. And so it was like 700 people there. And, you know, it was a certain spirit that fills a room. And it's funny because I've only ever had that with like majority black audiences. But that fills a room when you have the work that is intended for the audience and the audience is right there, right? There's a kind of truth, a collective truth that was right there. And I was there and among the few black people who were there was a gentleman by the name of Emory Douglas.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  And he was there, y'all clap for Brother Emory. You know, I shouted him out and he was in the party with my dad. You know what I mean? And my father had all of these stories about being in the Panther Party in Oakland. And it's just, you know, I was telling my wife that it was amazing to come back. You know, they had to be at that place and have this revolutionary moment, you know, in a place that was, you know, so significant to him. He is, in terms of my intellectual influence as a writer, there's my mom who gave me the tools who actually taught me how to read.

• 18:23Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  And spent a lot of time, you know, early on teaching me how to write. And then, you know, there's my father who, you know, I think spent a lot of time in terms of my political development, who I have been arguing with since I was seven. You know, I mean, to this very day, still.

• 18:38Sam Fragoso?

  I want to give time to your mother as well because it's my understanding that when you got in trouble, she would make you write essays and reflect on what you did.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  This is correct.

• 18:50Sam Fragoso?

  Do you remember, what were those essays like?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  She had this big thing about taking responsibility. It's funny, I mean, you can probably draw a line from there to the message. And so I would get in trouble in school and I'd be like, well, since I did this, and then I just said, no, no, no, no. Start with what you did.

• 19:05Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  What'd you do? Like, I don't want to hear, yes, but what did you do? Like, the story begins with what you did.

• 19:11Sam Fragoso?

  And what would be an example of something you did?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I did all sorts of stuff. I mean, mostly it was talking when I shouldn't have been. I talked a lot. I was like bored as hell in school. You know, I didn't pay attention. I would have homework I wouldn't do. I mean, there's a part in the book where I, you know, go back and literally, my mom had these notes that these teachers, these awful notes these teachers used to write on me. You know, in my notebook.

• 19:34Sam Fragoso?

  Ta-Nehisi is restless.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Ta-Nehisi was restless today. Ta-Nehisi didn't complete his homework. And it was very frustrating because I think in their minds, I struck them as a really, really intelligent child. And nothing about what I did in a classroom probably reflected that.

• 19:55Sam Fragoso?

  I want to talk about a section of the new book because both of your parents were foundational in you becoming a writer. And it's that education and lived experience that you put into a book like Between the World and Me, which is, like many others right now, in jeopardy of being banned in states like South Carolina, Colorado, and Tennessee. So tell me about this fight as you see it being played out across the education system. And then why did you decide to sit in on these school board meetings in South Carolina?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I can answer the first one pretty easily. I was asked to. You know, I generally, from time to time, if I see a teacher that's in trouble, I try to make some sort of contact so that they don't think like they're alone, like, and that their struggle is not being seen because they are in danger in a way that I'm not. And so I want them to know that this is not for naught. And Mary Wood, who was the teacher in South Carolina, asked me, you know, basically to come down. The second part of your question is a thing that I think people who are trying to ban books understand really well. And I think people who actually love books understand less well. You'll have to forgive me because I have to just go into a little bit of detail. So we're, you know, obviously in Hollywood, you know, we specialize in a particular type

• 21:14Speaker 01

  of storytelling technology. And that storytelling technology is often consumed in groups. And so people talk about like the experience of being in a theater and seeing a movie with a group of other people projected on the big screen and having this kind of singular experience together in community. And television, you know, often works the same way. But books are different. Books are a much, much more intimate form. A writer like myself writes something down, it's published in a book, it goes out into the world, somebody picks up that book and usually consumes it if not alone. They need other people to stop talking. You know what I mean? It's just them in the book. It's a one-on-one connection.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  And it's a very intimate connection because if the writer has done their job, they've spilled like their blood onto the page, right? Like they've written it with all of their heart and all of their intimacy and all of their vulnerability. And the reader is bringing to that their own lens, their experiences, their feelings, their sentiments, their perceptions of the world. And so you get a kind of mind meld. But that mind meld is unique. It can only happen between that book and that reader. And every single other reader has another unique mind meld. That is an extraordinarily powerful tool if you are interested in developing the imagination of children. If you are interested in using your children, though, to maintain hierarchy, it is a very dangerous tool.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Because if this is the child and that's the book, you can't get between this. It's the child and the book. And you don't really know what the child is actually seeing or how they're perceiving it or how it's altering their thinking or... Because it's them. It's a one-to-one connection. Inside the mind meld. Inside the mind meld. And you can't get inside it. You can't actually get inside the... Even if you tried to read the book yourself, what you would see would be totally different. Not completely, I'm sorry, not totally, but it would be different. It would not be exactly what that child is seeing because that child is developing their own private inner self. That is a very, very unique thing that happens with reading. And so...

• 23:26Speaker 01

  People who want to maintain hierarchy have to control values. They have to control outlooks. They have to control how their children see the world if they want to perpetuate it into the future. And so books are very dangerous in that world. And I think sometimes we, on the one hand, say, what is wrong with these people? It's just books. And then on the other side of our mouth, we say, books are very powerful. Well, which is it? Which is it? You know what I mean? And for me, it's that they're very powerful. And since they're very powerful, it makes sense that certain people who don't want their children developing independent notions and ideas about the world would therefore try to ban books.

• 24:11Sam Fragoso?

  You write about this beautifully in the message, and I thought we could read a section from that.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  It's a little better.

• 24:19Sam Fragoso?

  This is new writing, so you really can't be mad at me.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  I can't weasel out of this. But you know, even like with new writing, it's like, damn, I should have done this. I should have done that. You're always seeing your errors, as I'm seeing them right now, actually.

• 24:30Sam Fragoso?

  We can talk about those after if you want.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  All right. "We have lived under a class of people who ruled American culture with a flaming cross for so long that we regularly cease to notice the import of being ruled at all. But they have not. And so the redeemers of this age look out and see their kingdoms besieged by trans Barbies, Muslim mutants, daughters dating daughters, sons trick-or-treating as Wakandan kings. The fear instilled by this rising culture is not for what it does today, but what it augurs for tomorrow. A different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  In this context, the mom for liberty shrieking, think of the children, must be taken seriously. What she is saying is that her right to the America she knows, her right to the biggest and greenest of lawns, to the most hulking and sturdiest of SUVs, to an arsenal of infinite AR-15s, rests on a hierarchy, on an order, helpfully explained and sanctified by her country's ideas, art, and methods of education."

• 25:48Speaker 01

  That is the heart of it. It is not a mistake that Mary teaches writing at its most advanced level and has found herself a target. Much of the current hoopla about book bans and censorship gets it wrong. This is not about me or any writer of the moment. It is about the writers to come. The boundaries of their imagination, the angle of their thinking, the depth of their questions. I can't say I knew it back then, the first day, walking into Lawton Prison. But in my time teaching, it soon became clear that becoming a good writer would not be enough. We needed more writers. And I had a responsibility to help them as a reader, to be an active audience for the stories they wanted to tell.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Or as a teacher, so that they could learn to tell them better, to reach deeper into their own truth in the same way that brought me euphoria. And reach into the hearts of readers and set them on fire, as Mary had been set on fire since college by Words on a Page.

• 26:51Sam Fragoso?

  That's better. Yeah. Twenty years later. Yes, sir. You know, that line you talked about between your mother and the message, clearly in that passage, but I have to say, reading the book and then rereading the book again this week, she is in so many of the pages. I can sense that she is there. This idea of accountability that she instilled in you, and I think a kind of moral standard. And I have to say, like, around the fourth chapter, around Israel-Palestine, which you

• 27:35Sam Fragoso?

  write, is a story not of redemption, but of reparation. I want to talk about that. In reporting this section, was atonement the driving force? And if so, what do you feel you're atoning for?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Either writing or books are powerful or they're not. And if they are, and I've argued that they are, then the error made in Case for Reparations had great power and it was meaningful. I didn't know this at the time, but it legitimized forces.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  That for reasons of pure ancestry, for reasons of political tradition, I have to oppose. I have no choice but to oppose. That deserves atonement.

• 28:19Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  You have to make that right. I want to distinguish that from guilt.

• 28:23Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Right, which is like pandering to people. You know, telling them, you know, being weepy-eyed and telling them, you know what I mean, exactly what they want to hear and not really speaking from your heart, but more trying to predict where they're going.

• 28:37Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  And get there. This is like, you know, you really have to understand, I think, I really had to understand what happened and then find my way back. And so that was what much of the reporting was, you know, and I couldn't know in advance like what it was, even what I told you just now. I would not have been able to, obviously, to articulate it that way before I went.

• 28:57Sam Fragoso?

  So coming back, what did you come to understand?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Oh, man, so much. That this is a country that tells itself on its holidays and its rituals and tells the world that it has improved itself through its struggles against slavery, against segregation, against Jim Crow, against American apartheid, but that at best it has actually outsourced apartheid.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  I think it's very important that I be specific about that. I was shocked at how open the discrimination was. I literally could not believe it. The New York Times ran a story about two or three weeks ago, and it was about how the roads in the West Bank are quite literally segregated. Roads for Palestinians, which are circuitous, not well taken care of, not well mannered, checked by checkpoints, and then roads for Israelis, which are obviously, Israeli settlers specifically, which are obviously, you know, of different quality, of different speed, et cetera. I was on both. I'd never seen that story in my life in the New York Times. Why was I just seeing it two or three weeks ago?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  The segregated roads have long been there. They've long, like, this is not a new feature. This was not news in a traditional sense. And the segregation of the roads emanates out to everything else about the entire society. It emanates out to the justice system, which obviously is very, very acute for African Americans. It is more acute there. If you are an Israeli citizen or a settler on the West Bank, and you have some sort of problem with the law, you go through, you know, a normal process of justice that would be very familiar to us here in America. If you are a Palestinian on the West Bank, you are subject to, and you want to follow the law, you are subject to a military justice system. What does that mean?

• 31:01Speaker 01

  That means that no one has to inform you of the charges. No one has to tell your loved ones where you are. Should you somehow wind up dead while you're in the custody of those who have come to arrest you, they have no obligation to even return your body to your family. And in fact, often keep it. I didn't know that. The water system is segregated. The occupying forces in the West Bank, by policy and by law, claim the right to regulate the aquifers in the ground. And the water up in the clouds. I'd never heard anything like that.

• 31:35Sam Fragoso?

  Before you went in May of 2023, you had never heard any of that?

• 31:38Speaker 01

  No, no, no. What I had heard was it's apartheid, like, in the most general sense, right? I had not seen it in major newspapers. But I knew enough activists who said that to me, you know, and incredible. And so it's not like I didn't believe them. I just did not understand the details of it. And I have been in enough interviews now where I've laid out the details in terms of how water is distributed, in terms of how the justice system works, in terms of how the roads work, in terms of the fact that I have been in settlements that have sprawling pools and country clubs, and then been in villages that, where they don't know when the water is going to be cut off at all. I've talked to Palestinian citizens of Israel,

• 32:19Speaker 01

  who people will lie and tell you are equal by law to every other citizen. They are not. They are not. There are laws, for instance, that allow discrimination against them in housing. There are laws that allow if someone from here and is of a particular ancestry and moves to Israel and wants to become a citizen, they can do that relatively quickly. While those who are citizens in Israel, should they fall in love with somebody who happens to live on the West Bank? God helped them in trying to extend those citizenship rights, even though that person's ancestors have lived there for centuries or for however long it is. The discrimination is complete, total, not hard to see.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  And it says something, I'm sorry for going on about this, but it says something that it is that easy to see. And yet you would read your major newspapers and not know.

• 33:17Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, more from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

• 33:34Sam Fragoso?

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• 34:18Sam Fragoso?

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• 36:36Sam Fragoso?

  In thinking about these institutions, how do you think this chapter in particular would have changed or been reported if it was conceived as a cover story for The Atlantic?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  That's a great question.

• 36:50Sam Fragoso?

  As the case for reparations was?

• 36:52Speaker 01

  It just wouldn't have happened. And I don't mean any disrespect to them, you know what I mean? Look, I, um...

• 36:59Sam Fragoso?

  Wouldn't it happen under the current editor, Jeffrey Goldberg?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  No, no, no, that's not what I mean. Because I think these critiques that I have of media extend long past that. I don't like the idea of putting it on a singular person. These are structures.

• 37:15Sam Fragoso?

  But a structure that you were part of and that you benefited from and made the success that it is today?

• 37:26Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 37:27Sam Fragoso?

  And one that you fell in love with and supported and defended for over a decade.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  And I would say it probably wouldn't have happened because the space I needed and the support I needed would not have been there. And it's not just that it would not have been at The Atlantic, it would not have been anywhere. What do I mean by that? It's my name on that essay, right? But behind it are any number of Palestinian scholars, any number of Palestinians who helped me fact-check it, any number of anti-Zionist Israeli citizens who helped me out. All of that was there in order for me to write what was necessary in order for me to write that essay. I have never in my life, and I've worked a few places now, encountered a Palestinian-American

• 38:18Speaker 01

  journalist or a Palestinian journalist with any real power in any newsroom I've ever been in. So...

• 38:29Sam Fragoso?

  And you think the absence of someone like that makes writing it for this magazine

• 38:34Speaker 01

  It's impossible.

• 38:35Sam Fragoso?

  Impossible.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  It's totally impossible, because I mean, writers, their names are on it.

• 38:38Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  But there is a structure behind, anytime you have something that is, I don't know, 20,000 words or however long that essay is in the message, it is, it's just impossible to do by yourself.

• 38:47Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  You know, you need a, a structure behind you, and so in order to do that, you know, I had to kind of cobble one together. I mean, there were plenty of people waiting for me and waiting to help, but I don't know that that structure exists at any mainstream publication to do what I, to do what I was trying to do. And that's a structural indictment, you know?

• 39:06Sam Fragoso?

  How do you hold that now, with, with the publication you love so much, where you came of age?

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Pretty easily. Um, look, I mean, I, I don't, I, I think you have to say what you have to say with great force, without losing sight of people's humanity. I don't have to hate people to say that this is apartheid.

• 39:28Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? I don't, it's not personal. You know, it's not, um, I loved working at The Atlantic. I, I really, really did. I mean, I, I don't even know that I would have gotten, for whatever, you know, however perverse this is, to the space of the message if not, you know, for my time there. I learnt a lot about writing, I had plenty of time to, you know what I mean, read and pursue my own studies and do, you know, all of the things I needed to do to develop myself as a reporter and a writer. At the same time, like every other mainstream, you know, a, a publication, it's part of it. It's part of the problem.

• 40:07Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  You know, and it's not part of the problem because there is a particular, specific sin in that organization, or in the people who run that organization, but because our business is suffused with the sin.

• 40:20Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  It's suffused, it's, it's, it's all over. You know, it's systemic, and so, I don't, I don't know, it, it's pretty, easy for me to recognize what happened while I was there, and at the same time, you know, recognize what I need to say and, you know, the great difficulties of saying it.

• 40:35Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm. The message's book ended with this call to action, for young writers and new messengers tasked with, quote, "Nothing less than doing their part to save the world." As a writer, in terms of thinking about who's involved and who do you include in this narrative, do you think the most effective way to save the world, to do that narratively, is to not include voices from the PLO or the PA? How do you think about who you include and who you don't?

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Well, I think about what the book is supposed to do. If I am writing a political history of the Palestinian struggle, and I don't talk to officials from the PA or the PLO, that probably is a problem. If I am writing a book that explores the power of narrative and storytelling and writing, and a chapter in that book is about the story we tell about a particular place, and how wrong that story is, I really don't have any problem with choosing, you know what I mean, who I want to talk to and who I don't. What do you do when you feel that the people who would dictate, or who you would trust to tell you who to talk to,

• 41:48Speaker 01

  what do you do when you know they have manifestly gotten it wrong? How do you, like, take advice and methodology from them? Like, I just went through this whole thing about apartheid, right? That was not in the publications that trained me. It is a massive omission. And so, how do I go back to them and say, "Who should I talk to", when they clearly are not talking to people? How do I go and take advice on, you know, how I should bracket, you know, my essay and what voices should get prominence, when these people don't even have Palestinian writers on their masthead? Like, they don't even have them, forget who they talk to. They don't even have them talking at all.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  You know, and so, at that point, you're on your own. You know, and so, maybe 10 years from now, 15 years from now, you know, I'll say, "Man, I really should have talked to somebody from the PLO, or somebody from the PA, or somebody from Fatah. I should have found Hamas, or maybe I should have interviewed more settlers."

• 42:50Sam Fragoso?

  You think 15 years from now, you'll think that?

• 42:52Speaker 01

  I don't know. But the point is, the point is, the people who, and I'm gonna say this as nice as I can.

• 43:00Sam Fragoso?

  You don't have to be nice.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  No, I like being nice. I'm a nice guy. The people who would have told me to do that now, I don't trust anymore. And that's just...

• 43:15Sam Fragoso?

  These are the same publications that have criticized the book for not grappling with or naming Hamas, right? This is what you're talking about.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:24Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think there are readers out there who would stand to benefit from your book that will see that omission and go, "Okay, I can dismiss this book easier"?

• 43:35Speaker 01

  I mean, it's probably not for them, then. If you want to read a 250-page book with, I don't know, 100-word essay on Israel and Palestine and expect to get everything out of it, like, I have questions about you as a reader. I have questions about whether you're coming to the book, like, in a fair-minded fashion. If you have, like, the minute you dictate to me, "If this is not in here, I'm not reading that," is that how you judge your coverage of Palestine? Do you ask yourself? Because, as I've said, these publications don't, like, they feel perfectly fine eliminating Palestinians.

• 44:19Sam Fragoso?

  You think your colleagues, your past colleagues at The Atlantic feel that way? They're comfortable with that?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  I really have no idea. But what I, all I can do is judge the coverage, right? And, again, I don't want to personalize this, but across the board, I mean, I just, I started this conversation out with the fact that the roads have been segregated forever, and y'all just started covering it. I'm just one writer. You're the New York Times. What are you leaving out? You know, like...

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Like, I just started covering this last year. Like, what writer are you to, I mean, like, you're leaving out a whole universe. You are not covering 50% of the population, you know, in this place that you claim to, you know, to be rooted in, in a way that they themselves feel and see themselves. And so, you got to go back to the coritus. When I say it was an act of reparation, I mean it. And so, who I am concerned with, and whose, like, opinions and ideas and notions, and who sees themselves in it?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? It's probably not the people I used to work for.

• 45:33Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  I'm probably less concerned about that, you know? Frederick Douglass, I mean, you know, this is like an animated quote for me. You know, he says, and I'm sorry if I'm gonna mangle this. You know, he said, "My part is to tell the story of the slave. The slave master has never, ever wanted for narrators. And if they are..." And if they stand condemned, they have not been condemned unheard. And so knowing that, it's like, look, if you, everything that people might would want from this book, you can get it somewhere else.

• 46:07Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  But can you get this? Can you get this? And that's the thing that I think, you know, was missing that I focused on.

• 46:14Sam Fragoso?

  Well, let's go back to this, because this book is written as a letter to your students at Howard University, which is where you went to school in the mid-'90s. It's also where, a decade before you, Vice President Harris attended and graduated.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Woo!

• 46:27Sam Fragoso?

  So we have alums here tonight. But in thinking about this election and the political tradition, in part born out of Howard, you told New York Magazine, quote, "I have a deep-seated fear that the black struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow black interests." What did you mean by that?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  I don't really like that quote. I mean, I said it, they didn't misquote me, but there was something I was really trying to get at, and that is that, see, like, the era of Zionism, for me, was that it was an idea that was conceived to free a people that accepted its oppressors' priors. It accepted the notions of what freedom had to look like, as opposed to questioning them at a very root level. That's my great fear for black people, that we will not question the systems that oppress us. Look, I want to say a couple of things. I think we're in a bind.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  On the one hand, you have a community of people, black folks, who have never, ever had the ability to realize their hopes and dreams through presidential elections. We just... We just have never had those freedoms. What do I mean by that? I mean that you take the most, I guess, important quote-unquote president in black history, Abraham Lincoln, who ended slavery. In 1864, he is running for president. Two years, or maybe it was three years earlier, he stands before his country and says, "If I can end the Civil War without ending slavery, I will do it." Tells us this. A year before the election, he gathers a group of black leaders and brings them into the White House

• 48:15Speaker 01

  and says, "Y'all need to leave. You'll never be safe here. You need to leave." And then actually sends some of them away, actually, to Haiti, where they find little more than actually actual slavery itself. It was just a moral catastrophe. So here we are. We got this man, on the one hand, who would end the war, if he could, by leaving us enslaved. So what do we say? Well, it'd be nice if we had a choice, right? Somebody says, "I'm gonna fight for your freedom." But no, our choice is actually George McClellan. And McClellan's answer is, "If I win, I will definitely end the war. And I will send, I will not just reestablish slavery. All these people that escaped, I will send them back into slavery." So we have two options.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  And neither of these options regard us as equal human beings.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  This recurs, I mean, basically, all through American history. You know, I think about, especially in a state like this, in California, in the 90s, right? Where, you know, nowhere was mass incarceration thicker than it was in California. When we were voting for president in the 90s, there was no non-mass incarceration option. You know what I mean? It was mass incarceration or masser incarceration. That was it. That was, I mean, people were running on sending black people to jail. So we, like, this, like, we have always been captive. You know, and I think that actually gives me great empathy for Palestinian-Americans right now. Because, um...

• 49:56Speaker 01

  It's hard, man. It's hard. I was in Oakland and I sat next to this dude. And he was American, but born in Gaza. He's a doctor. He said one-sixth of his family is dead. You know, and I have my ideas about what will happen under a Harris presidency and what will happen under a Trump presidency. I personally am not one of these people who believes it can't get worse. I believe it can. I believe it can. I believe in 1968, when Nixon narrowly won, it got worse. And I believe we are still recovering from that worse. But I don't know how to fix my face to look this man in the eye and tell him he should go vote for somebody who,

• 50:41Speaker 01

  I can't really tell him, will end a genocide that is in service of apartheid.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  You asked earlier about the difficulty of holding things. That is probably, that is much harder to hold. That is much, much, much harder to hold. And I just think, look, I was out at the DNC. I was there. I watched them claim the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer as they didn't even let Palestinian Americans speak.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  And there was just enormous dissonance there. You know, I think we can do better. I think we can do better.

• 51:28Sam Fragoso?

  I hope so.

• 51:34Sam Fragoso?

  After one last break, the end of my conversation, live from Los Angeles with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

• 51:50Sam Fragoso?

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• 52:32Sam Fragoso?

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• 53:17Sam Fragoso?

  Talking about legacy. I've heard you say that the writing I do exists largely thanks to other writers, that you carry them with you as you move through your work. And around the publication of Between the World and Me, the late, great Toni Morrison said, "I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died."

• 53:41Sam Fragoso?

  Clearly, it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.

• 53:54Sam Fragoso?

  And so I thought, in part because I've made you read your own work a whole bunch tonight, we could read a piece from James Baldwin. This comes from an Esquire essay called "The Lost Generation", from 1961, detailing his time in Paris and how he eventually had to come back home to America.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  "In my own case, I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably confirms something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting, which is simply this: A man is not a man until he's able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others. When I say 'vision', I do not mean 'dream'. There are long moments when this country resembles nothing so much as the grimace of popularity contests. The best thing that happened to the new expatriates was their liberation, finally, from any need to be smothered by what is really nothing more, though it may be something less, than mother love.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  It need scarcely, I hope, be said that I have no interest in hurling gratuitous insults at American mothers. They are certainly helpless, if not entirely blameless, and my point has nothing to do with them. My point is involved with the great emphasis placed on public approval here, and the resulting and quite insane system of penalties and rewards. It puts a premium on mediocrity and has all but slaughtered any concept of excellence. This corruption begins in the private life, and unfailingly, flowers in the public life. Europeans refer to Americans as children in the same way that American Negroes refer

• 55:40Speaker 01

  to them as children, and for the same reason: They mean that Americans have so little experience, experience referring not to what happens, but to who, that they have no key to the experience of others. Our current relations with the world forcibly suggest that there is more than a little truth to this. What Europe still gives an American, or gave us, is to sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself." No artist can survive without this acceptance. But rare indeed is the American artist who achieved this without first becoming a wanderer and then, upon his return to his own country, the loneliest and most blackly of distrusted men.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  So you want to know what I think of that? Is that what that is?

• 56:39Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, mainly because as you were reading it, I could tell it was stirring something inside of you.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  I probably agree with the general sentiment and maybe think he credits Europe a little too much.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  You know, but you know, I don't say that. You know, I say that with a measured critique. I mean, you know, it's very difficult to write that much and to be right, you know, all the time. You know what I mean? Or be on all the time. And writers are always in process, you know? Like, that's what he probably thought at a moment. You know, 20 years later, who knows?

• 57:11Sam Fragoso?

  He talks about vision, not dream.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that.

• 57:14Sam Fragoso?

  And I wonder, given your time in Senegal and South Carolina and Palestine, and now returning back home in this especially fraught moment, how have you come to understand your vision of the world?

• 57:30Speaker 01

  It's still developing. It's really, I mean, that Palestine trip was just like, there's what you learn and then is what it exposes you to how little you know. The problem with somebody lying and with something that huge being hid from you is that you like start wondering about what else is being hidden? Like, you wonder, well, if something this big is, you know, and I consider myself like, I thought I was a relatively well-read, politically astute human being. I was not. As it turned out, I probably, you know, gave too much credibility to things and to people that and institutions that really had not earned them.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  And it just, it makes you wonder a lot, you know, about, about what you're missing. You know what I mean? What you're not seeing. I don't know. I, I, it probably made me a lot less certain, you know, about what, what that vision was.

• 58:24Sam Fragoso?

  Last question for us. Twenty years ago, you said you couldn't have written this book. It was around that time, 2007, seventeen years, I'm not great at math, but it's around that time, 2007, where you had serious doubts about whether you would continue on the proverbial battlefield, as you said. And you're about 31 years old, you're a father sitting in an unemployment office on 125th Street in Harlem.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  It's all facts.

• 58:57Sam Fragoso?

  And it is your partner, now wife, Kenyatta, who saw something in you like David Carr did, that you could not see in yourself. And I want to hold that moment because you talk about things that people can't see. I don't think people can see the journey that you have taken, that you've been on, long before The MacArthur, long before The Bestsellers, long before Toni Morrison said what she said. It was you, 31, walking out of this unemployment office. I thought we could read from that. I'm sorry again for making-

• 59:31Speaker 01

  No, no, it's all right. It's a little better than A Beautiful Struggle. Kenyatta and I had been together for nine years, and during that time, I had never been able to consistently contribute a significant income. I was a writer and felt myself part of a tradition stretching back to a time when reading and writing were, for black people, the marks of rebellion. I believed, somewhat absurdly, that they still were. And so I derived great meaning from the work of writing. But I could not pay rent with great meaning. I could not buy groceries with great meaning. With great meaning, I over drew bank accounts. With great meaning, I burned through credit cards and summoned the IRS.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Wild and unlikely schemes often appeared before me. Maybe I should go to culinary school. I could have done that.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Maybe I should be a bartender. I could not have done that. I'd considered driving a cab. Can y'all have had a more linear solution? I think you should spend more time writing. At that moment, in that classroom, going through all the mandated motions, I could not see it. I could not see anything. And like almost every other lesson administered to me in a classroom, I don't remember a single thing said that day. And as with all the other buried traumas accumulated in the classrooms, I did not allow myself to feel the ache of failure. Instead, I fell back on the old habits and logic of the street, where it was so often necessary to deny humiliation and transmute pain into rage.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  So I took the agony of that era, like a collection notice, and hid it away in the upper dresser of the mind, resolved to return to it when I had means to pay. I think now, today, I have settled almost all of those old accounts. But the ache and aftershock of failure remain long after the drawer is bare. I can somehow remember all that I did not allow myself to feel walking from the unemployment office and through the Harlem streets that day, just as I remember all that I did not let myself feel in those young years trapped between the schools and the streets. And I know that there are black boys and black girls

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  out there, lost in a Bermuda Triangle of the mind, or stranded in the doldrums of America, some of them treading, some of them drowning, never feeling and never forgetting. The most precious thing I had then is the most precious thing I have now: my own curiosity. That is the thing I knew, even in the classroom, that they could not take from me. That is the thing that buoyed me and eventually plucked me from the sea.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Thank y'all.

• 1:02:33Sam Fragoso?

  That was pretty good.

• 1:02:44Sam Fragoso?

  Ta-Nehisi Coates. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

• 1:03:52Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode with Ta-Nehisi Coates, be sure to share the program on social media. We're at Talk Easy Pod across most platforms. You can also leave us five stars on Spotify, reviews on Apple. If you want to watch this episode, you can find it on YouTube. Just type in Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. I want to give a special thanks to speak to the teams at Random House and Live Talks. I also want to thank my friends Josh Beerman and Brian Savelson. And of course, our guest today, Ta-Nehisi Coates. His book from 2024, The Message, is available wherever you do your reading. For more episodes with other fantastic writers, I'd recommend David Remnick, Zadie Smith, and Jelani Cobb.

• 1:04:38Sam Fragoso?

  To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can subscribe to Lemonada Premium for exclusive bonus content and ad-free listening. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple or head to lemonadapremium.com. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Matt Sasaki with assistance from Lindsay Ellis. It was mixed by the inimitable Andrew Vastola. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris Shannoy. Photographs today come from Ethan Newmeyer with research assistance from Ben Eisen. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank

• 1:05:21Sam Fragoso?

  you for listening to Talk Easy. We'll be back on Wednesday with a very special bonus episode featuring filmmaker Benny Safdie. Until then, stay safe and so long.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  your worldview." So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S.com/rz for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:07:13Speaker 04

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  That's it.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.