So I did a marathon livestream as a guest on media analyst James Brown’s All of the Above podcast. Obsessed with media since childhood, Brown has worked in newspaper, radio, TV, and online settings in a variety of roles including reporter, political correspondent, marketing, etc. I refer to him as an analyst, but he’s more like a media scholar, as you’ll see from the clip above.
James and I met almost 20 years ago, when we were introduced by a mutual friend at a party for two other friends who’d just returned from a trip to Venezuela to do some guerilla documentary work in an attempt to provide an inside glimpse into life under Chavez from a perspective other than the presentation we were getting in American media at the time.
At one point, I was listening as one of the returnees was kind of holding court describing what Hugo Chavez’s press conferences were like: “The state runs the TV stations down there, so he’ll just get on-air whenever he wants, and he’ll talk for, like, twelve hours.” I was like, “Wow, that’s long… even for me.”
James—from the other room, mind you—answered “You could totally do it” in a dry, deadpan that sounded oddly certain coming from someone I’d only just been introduced to about a half-hour beforehand. I mean, I hadn’t said more than “hello” to this guy—and I wasn’t even saying much to our friend!—yet here he was calling a spade a spade. “Come on,” his tone seemed to say, “who are you kiddin’?”
Well… I don’t know if I could talk for that long, but I can’t say James was wrong. I mean, somehow he had me pegged. He and I have corresponded quite a bit over the years, but especially much since March of 2020. Our conversations typically go at least as long as the one above. In fact, if I know I don’t have four hours to block off, I know I can’t pick up the phone. The stream above is a quintessential example of what it’s like every time we talk. This time, we figured we might as well stream it…
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I’ve been fascinated by sportstalk since childhood, when my brother, a sports fanatic four years older than me, would fall asleep in his bottom bunk to the nighttime broadcast of NYC-area radio station WFAN’s overnight call-in show, the first of its kind in the country.
I was never interested in sports as a kid and, unlike my brother, never had an athletic streak (at least not in obvious ways or ways that I properly nurtured or developed). But somehow, I found myself mesmerized by the sound of people talking about sports. I didn’t understand a word, but I would stay awake as long as I could before drifting-off with the sound of this arcane, foreign language serenading my ears from my brother’s little radio below.
These days, sportstalk is a daily feature of my routine during the NFL football season, and I require a certain minimum dose of it to feel at-peace. That’s important for understanding the context of the discussion with James, where he and I explore some of the stories making big waves in the sports-media universe.
some highlights:
<3 SRK