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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axfiles, with your host, David Axelrod.

Governor Pete Ricketts of Nebraska dropped by the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago last week.

And after the event, we sat down for a really interesting conversation. Ricketts, a solid conservative who is completing his second and final term as governor, recently created some buzz when his chosen successor prevailed over a Trump-back candidate in the Nebraska Republican primary.

We talked about his life, baseball, he's the owner with his family of my beloved Chicago Cubs, and about many of the issues that are oiling our politics in country today.

Here's that conversation.

Governor Ricketts, it's great to be with you. Thank you for being at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. You just had a great event here. We appreciate it.

That's my pleasure. It's great to be back at my alma mater.

Indeed. Not just an undergraduate, but a graduate student as well.

Absolutely. And as you said, a year in between, were you hung out?

Yeah. So in the classic way. You just hung out on the campus, right? Yeah.

Might have been more than that. I think about it, but also it really fielded up, apparently.

You know, actually, I used to have an apartment right across the street from Rickley Field. It was a ton of fun. Actually, my old apartment is now part of the sports corner bar.

It's second floor of the bar. Well, we'll get to the Ricketts family and your investment up there. But I don't know if it's as much fun when you own the place as when you were hanging out in the bleachers.

Oh, it's way more fun. I get way better seats now. I bet we do. I get to go on the field and nobody tackles me or anything like that.

It's awesome. Let me let me talk to you about first about the Ricketts family and how did where the Ricketts come from and how did they end up in Nebraska?

Yeah. So we're well, we're from well, I mean, my parents grew up in Nebraska. So I'm a fourth generation of my dad's side,

fifth generation, my mom's side in Nebraska. So our family's been there a long time.

We've been there a long time. We've been come from originally. Well, let's see. We can trace our lineage back to Maryland in the 1710s on my dad's side.

Oh, my goodness. My mom's side came over from Germany and France in the 1850s. So my dad's family has been actually in America for a long time.

We think my dad's family came from Wales, but we can't prove it. But we really start off in Maryland and then kind of his family moved his way to Ohio down to New Orleans actually for a while.

Then to Iowa and then across the river to Nebraska with my great grandfather, Roscoe, Rowland, Ricketts knowing what I do about your dad. I don't know him.

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