This is the Unregistered Podcast, and I'm Thaddeus Russell.

This is a show about ideas, people, and behaviors that are considered inappropriate, out of bounds, or beyond the pale.

The things you're not supposed to talk about if you're a schoolteacher, a college professor, a businessman, a politician, a parent, a neighbor, or even a podcast host. These are the things you're not supposed to say or even think if you're a good liberal, a good conservative, or a good citizen. Each week, I'll interview a person who has something bad to say.

They might be a journalist or a professor, they might be a porn star or a drug dealer.

They might just be an ordinary person with an ordinary job who doesn't care about the rules of

polite society. I'm not interested in breaking the rules just to be a troublemaker.

I'm interested in people who break the rules of conventional thought

and to expand the scope of what is possible to say in our society.

I'm interested in people who make me think.

I recently sat in a beautiful apartment, overlooking Lake Michigan in Chicago.

I was there to interview who I consider to be one of the greatest social historians in my profession.

Elliot Goren has inspired me in many ways.

His books ask questions that I have sought to answer for much of my career,

and he very bravely and seamlessly integrates his own personal stories, his own narratives,

the stories of his childhood and his family, with the histories he tells. I began the interview

by reading the first three paragraphs of his very influential book,

The Manly Art, Bare Knuckle Prize Fighting in America.

Here's what Elliot Gorn writes.

My father was a boxing fan.

Before he married, he attended weekly fights with his buddies in New York City.

I suspect that his interest in the ring originated during his youth. Although he never formally

boxed, Montreal's anti-Semitism in the 1920s drew him and his brothers into countless fistfights.

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