Chuck Klosterman: Football Isn't a Game—It's the Last American Monoculture
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 January 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Author Chuck Klosterman joins the show to discuss his new book, Football, and how football's strange mechanics, from hidden labor to stop-start pacing,and its resistance to casual play, have helped turn it into the last true monoculture. He also makes the case that future critics will misread football as decadence, missing what it actually revealed about the era that embraced it. Also, the double pardon of the same woman convicted twice for fraud, including a scheme selling counterfeit 5-Hour Energy drinks. Plus a Spiel on how Donald Trump and Stephen Miller make reckless promises of protection that can get supporters hurt or killed.
Produced by Corey Wara
Coordinated by Lya Yanne
Video and Social Media by Geoff Craig
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Tuesday, January 20th, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions. |
| 0:08.1 | It's the gist. |
| 0:08.9 | I'm Mike Peska. |
| 0:10.1 | Now, we've all heard the advice, and it's good advice, to pay attention to what Donald |
| 0:14.7 | Trump does, not what he says, okay? |
| 0:17.7 | Here's a great example, because today he said this. |
| 0:21.6 | So what what ice does and Border Patrol is incredible too. I mean they're Paul Perez |
| 0:28.6 | in that group is incredible. Mostly Hispanic, by the way, they're like 60% Hispanic. You |
| 0:34.6 | know, they talk about Hispanic. They're mostly Hispanic, right? And they're |
| 0:39.5 | unbelievable people. And then they say, oh, we discriminate against. I love Hispanic. They are |
| 0:44.8 | unbelievable, entrepreneurial. They have everything. I did great. I did the highest. Nobody ever got |
| 0:50.5 | numbers like I got. He loves Hispanic. |
| 0:55.0 | But on Thursday, and you may have heard of this one, but you may not have, because there's |
| 0:59.7 | been a lot else going on, he did this. |
| 1:02.4 | He commuted the sentence of one, Adriana Cambreros. |
| 1:09.6 | Adriana Cambreros, I don't know, I don't know how Latina pronounces the name. |
| 1:14.2 | And I like Hispanic, but, you know, I'm not maybe good at it. |
| 1:17.9 | So let's say Camberos was convicted in 2016 of quite an elaborate scheme. |
| 1:24.4 | She was selling five-hour energy drinks in America as counterfeits. |
| 1:31.3 | They involved millions of bottles mixed under unsanitary conditions. They say, I have read in the |
| 1:38.1 | news because when you're dealing with a shot of liquid cocaine, you want someone working the pipettes to have scrubbed beforehand. |
| 1:47.8 | Anyway, what she did was she took these bottles that were meant to be sold in Mexico, |
... |
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