Welcome to The Last Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Robbie Gupta. And today I talk to somebody I've wanted to talk to for a very, very long time. I'm talking to William Finnegan, Bill Finnegan, who has been a contributor to the New Yorker since 1984 and a staff writer since 1987. He has reported on everything from, you know, current events in Africa, Central America,

South America, Europe, the Balkans, Mexico, Australia, even the U.S. He twice received the John

Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism and twice has been a National

Magazine Award finalist. He is probably most well known these days for a book he wrote in 2016 called Barbarian Days,

for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

And that book is all about Bill's journey as a surfer growing up many, many years ago,

back when there were a lot of breaks that are famous now, that he was

just, quote, unquote, discovering. I don't want to over, like, you know, that word can mean a lot of

different things. But, you know, he was one of the first Americans, if not the first Americans,

to surf certain waves all around the world. In some cases, probably the first person to surf those

waves that are now world's famous.

He has written about the interplay between his surfing and his journalism, and he has profiled some of the biggest names in surfing, including names that we'll talk about here, like

Kyle Lenny, Jock Sutherland, and Kelly Slater.

We talk about mostly surfing.

So if you're not interested in hearing people

geek out on surfing, you might want to skip this one. But what you will hear is me as a,

you know, relatively newbie to the sport, you know, maybe six years running now to somebody who's

been doing it for, you know, way, way longer than I've lived, almost twice as long as I've lived.

And I just ask them a lot of questions that, like, a lot of people I know who are interested in surfing would

ask. And then at the end, I start to open up and ask more about journalism generally, because I think

Bill represents a generation of journalists at places like the New Yorker that I and I and a lot of people in my generation

really look up to and try to model ourselves off of. So yeah, heavy, heavy on the surfing.

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