Episode 15: Failure is an Option, South Korea Deep Dive, and John Takes a Magical Bus Ride

00:00:06
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Way End.

00:00:07
Speaker 2: I'm Danielle Alercon and.

00:00:09
Speaker 3: I'm John Green.

00:00:10
Speaker 2: John, you look tired, man. What's going on?

00:00:12
Speaker 3: I got back from Sierra Leone this morning at about two am, so I am a little tired, but I'm very, very happy to be with you. I have two wonderful football stories to share with you from Sierra Leone. Will save that for the third seven of the podcast, But first, I think you want to talk to me about a little bit of exclusive reporting you've been doing.

00:00:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, the Crack investigative reporting team at the Oaend stumbled upon this memo which it was leaked to us by a source. It's called FIFA pricing structure to maximize game day revenue. Weirdly, it has brought to you by Franz Kofko, which I didn't understand until I read what's on it. John, you won't believe this. Yeah, there are so many fees. There's a seat access fee, there's a bathroom access service charge, security fee, cup holder usage to usher mandatory gratuities. You have to sit on shows either seat, you have to tip them sure, there's a selfie surcharge, and there's in addition, you have to pay if any like brands come out in the background of your selfie. You also have to pay for that JumboTron appearance fee, which is quite see. I've always thought they should have one of those. Actually, I think there should be a jumbo tron appearance fee for a club like AFC Wimbledon that's looking to raise some revenue. A jumbo tron appearance fee feels like a I mean obvious, how jumbo is the jumbo tron at Wimbledon Stadium If you don't mind my asking.

00:01:32
Speaker 3: Well'll be honest with you and thank you for asking. We don't have one. Well, just you know, just duct tape together a couple of large screen TVs and just just hold it out a couple of big flat screens. There's a crowd waving tax, John, This one will really I'm in favor of that. I'm in favor of that. This one's difficult for the Spanish, whom, as we mentioned in the last episode, don't actually have any lyrics to their national lands them. But there's a national anthem singing fee. Wow, that actually gives Spain a slight advantage in the World Cup.

00:02:06
Speaker 1: Well, it would accept that.

00:02:07
Speaker 2: There's also a penalty if you don't sing the national anthem, so they kind of yeah, it's weird, they get you. Yeah, I'm starting to see why this was brought to you by Franz Kafka. It was just the interesting there's a banter tax if you want to, you know, sort of like exchange a friendly repartee with the whoever's sitting next to you child on shoulders surcharge John. That one's tough as parents. I feel like that one's really, you know, designed to take money out of my pocket. And then this one is really a kind of a long shot. I don't know if they're gonna get much money off this. But if you've seen done those those games where people send like in the upper tiers, float a paper airplane down to the field and see how far they can get it into the field. Have you ever seen that?

00:02:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's one of my favorite genres of TikTok videos.

00:02:57
Speaker 1: Paper airplane flight permit tariff.

00:03:00
Speaker 3: Hmmm, So well, listen, if you're going to use the friendly skies, you're going to have to participate in governance, and governance is apparently determined by FIFA.

00:03:12
Speaker 2: Yes, now, this memo, tongue in cheek memo, I should say, it's really been making it comes because I've just been thinking about this stuff a lot and about how much I hate PIFA, and I just want to report some facts to you that I read in the Guardian, and these are not fake, These are real. Yes, John, thank you for clarifying. Everything that I've set up until now is fake, but it is of a piece with these actual facts which are actually real. FIFA's resale site currently has four tickets on sale for the World Cup Final that are just under two point three million dollars each.

00:03:49
Speaker 3: Each, John, I mean, I don't doubt that someone will pay that because people with infinite resources. And I was reminded this week as I traveled through Sierra Leone that lots of us have functionally infinite resources and hoard them and use them terribly. But people with even more infinite resources than I have simply don't care how much things cost because it doesn't matter to them, and it does matter to FIFA, and that is is is the.

00:04:26
Speaker 1: Root of all evil.

00:04:27
Speaker 2: Yes, I agree, that's a tragedy, and I'm glad you brought that point up, because You're right, in our privilege, we sometimes forget sort of the you know, the relative scale of our privilege is easy to forget if you're stuck in your own bubble. So I'm glad you brought that up.

00:04:44
Speaker 3: What's the cheapest ticket available?

00:04:46
Speaker 2: Well, let's see. The lowest priced tickets for the final are three dollars eighty five cents.

00:04:53
Speaker 1: Sheeeese Louise.

00:04:56
Speaker 2: For four seats four rows from the top of the upper deck.

00:05:00
Speaker 1: Behind the goal.

00:05:05
Speaker 3: I mean, you could own a not insignificant portion of AFC Wimbledon for that investment.

00:05:10
Speaker 2: Wow, that is a lot of money. Oh my god.

00:05:13
Speaker 3: Okay, so you could have you could have your name on the on the JumboTron if we had a jump votron, for sure.

00:05:21
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I just think there's a lot of ways to spend that money. It would be better than that. It just makes me so angry, John, and I've been thinking about this, and here's what I've come up with. I think that FIFA and all the layers of greedy corporate trolls that dominate the world's most popular sport are actively weaponizing our love for the game against us, and they're extracting every dollar from our collective passion for the sport. They need to understand that there's a point at which we, the fans, without whom the sport and the spectacle means little or nothing, will not tolerate as much abuse. And this will only happen if the game's so. I'm saying that for the good of soccer, for the good of football, for the good of the sport that we love so much, this World Cup should fail. I don't mean in footballing terms. I mean in h I don't mean sporting terms. I mean in economic terms.

00:06:20
Speaker 3: Do you think that there will be empty seats as a result of all of this? Like at some point, I mean I if I absolutely agree with you. I mean I remember like being a Chicago Cubs fan as a Major League Baseball team in the nineteen nineties, and every time you'd go to Wrigleyfield, Wrigleyfield would be full, and it didn't matter that the Cubs were always bad, because there were always plenty of Cubs fans who were making their first trip to Chicago, or plenty of Cubs fans who had season tickets who were going to go and fill that stadium up. And there was no incentive for the Cubs to be good other than whatever money you get for winning the World Series and there is absolutely no incentive for FIFA to do anything else than what they're doing as long as people will pay, and like people will pay, people will travel it because there's there's so much I kept thinking this too this week. There's so much money in this world, Like there's so much money. Forget, we always talk about the billionaires, but there are so many millionaires there are so that you know, there are so many people who have lifetimes and lifetimes worth of money who can afford to go and spend a few thousand dollars to see a football game and that will be a lifelong wonderful memory, Like going to the World Cup in nineteen ninety four is a lifelong wonderful memory for you and I so like, I don't want you and me sorry, it's really embarrassing to do that in front of you, but it's a lifetime memory for people, and I understand, you know, like just like people will pay an absurd amount of money to go to Disney World once in their lives, not just for tickets, but for travel, for accommodations. I mean, you didn't even get into the costs of hotels. I was looking at a hotel in Kansas City for something else, or like an event that I'm doing that happened to be during one of the Kansas City World Cup Games, and I was like, I guess I'm not doing the event, like it's not worth but it's not worth it. Yeah, there's nowhere to stay, you know, the airbnbs are full, everything's jacked up ten x and but people will pay that. And so, you know, I think it was Ursula Legwin who said that in the days of absolute monarchy, people could not imagine a system other than absolute monarchy, and yet it ended anyway. And today people cannot imagine a system other than the system, and yet it will end anyway.

00:08:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not a radical socialist or anything like that, but I do think that this particular brand of mercenary capitalism is is terrible and extortionate, and you're right, it exists with its own logic, and it's a logic that is hard to deny. Once you're in it, You're like, oh, of course, you know, you jack up the price until people stop buying it, and then you adjust. And I just feel like that people need to stop buying it. But you're right, there's so much money that people won't.

00:09:22
Speaker 3: One of the things that you lose when you do this, and this is something Liverpool fans are arguing about right now with Liverpool ownership, because I think one of the things you lose when you do this, when you maximize game day revenue, is you actually lose part of what makes it such a good TV product to make a capitalist argument for it, you lose part of the magic, the magic of fifty thousand fans of a country's team in the stadium, because you end up with the people who can afford to pay those extortion at prices, who are not the people who are going to sing because they don't know all the songs because they haven't spent thirty years on the road with England or is Bekistan or whatever team and you know they haven't. They don't have that level of investment. So you're you're you're gonna pan to the crowd when who's Bekistan scores a goal and you're or even when England scores a goal, and you're not going to see the average English soccer fan. You're going to see, you know, everybody who had ten thousand dollars you said to put on the game. And then you're gonna have to go up to the fourth row from top. It's a camera man.

00:10:36
Speaker 2: Sure England won't be in the final? Note sorry, oh fair enough, fair enough? Yeah, sorry, because the ten thousand, nine hundred dollars was for the final.

00:10:45
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I don't know.

00:10:47
Speaker 2: It just don't. I don't know what the solution is and I don't know that if empty seats at Columbia's Bekkistan will persuade FIFA that they've gone too far? Are you know? I don't know.

00:11:01
Speaker 3: I don't think it will because I don't I think they're about I think that they've carefully calculated how to maximize revenue and they're going to do that. I think the issue from my perspective is that for the you know, eight billion or so people who can't attend a game, what makes the game magical is not just what happens on the field, but the interaction between what happens on the field and the thousands or tens of thousands of people watching it. And when you lose that over time, you're going to lose the game. So like you're not going to see a single World Cup fail, what you're going to see is declining interest in the world Cup in a sense of a distance between the World Cup and the people who love it.

00:11:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, John, I don't know.

00:11:44
Speaker 2: I find it. I find it.

00:11:45
Speaker 3: Bleak, but it's representative of a larger bleakness.

00:11:50
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:11:50
Speaker 2: It's the same thing that happened to you know, like burning men in Coachella and you know, Bali and I don't know, Pancun. You know, like the presence of something special is degraded by the world's sudden awareness that it is special, and then everyone flocks and in the process of loving it destroyed.

00:12:10
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:12:10
Speaker 3: But I actually think that we can love the World Cup together without FIFA. I think that there is a way to do that. You know, FIFA is ostensibly a non governmental organization that does not exist to make money. It exists to make football tournaments, and it does not exist to maximize revenue. It exists to maximize the joy and wonder and connection of football. And in so far as that's the truth, FIFA can change. I just don't know that it will.

00:12:45
Speaker 2: Well, you're right, I think support to change, you would have to be president of FIFA.

00:12:51
Speaker 3: That would be a cool job, but I would immediately start taking bribes.

00:12:57
Speaker 1: It's an intractable problem.

00:12:58
Speaker 2: If even John Green would immediately succumb to the temptation of the bribes.

00:13:07
Speaker 3: I don't hate that job because there's so much interpersonal drama. People want, people want conflicting things from me. You have to send on unpleasant emails.

00:13:15
Speaker 2: I would hate that. M No, of course not.

00:13:20
Speaker 3: I'd be terrible at it. But I wouldn't take bribes. I obviously wouldn't take bribes you. No, of course I know that.

00:13:27
Speaker 2: I know that. Don we know that your listeners know that. Here's what I think, Uh, when I think of the World Cup, I think of the games that I've watched with friends on television, these parties, these these gatherings that really mean a lot to me and have really special memories. That's what I think about. And that's to me loving the World Cup without loving FIFA. You know, yeah, absolutely, that's that's what it means. So anyway, I'll be out in front of the television most likely. John, Let's take a quick break and we come back. I'm gonna tell you about South Korea.

00:14:04
Speaker 3: I can't wait. I love me some South Korean national team.

00:14:08
Speaker 2: You're gonna be perplexed by this story. But anyway, on we go back soon. We're back at the away end. On the away end. With the away end, I'm donil John. I'm here to tell you about South Korea, and I want to start with the obvious. South Korea is one of Asia's best teams. They've qualified for eleven straight tournaments. That's every World Cup since Italy nineteen ninety. And I know that sounds like a lot, but I don't think I understand just how elite this is. So for context, these are the teams with current streaks for consecutive World Cup qualifications longer than South Korea's Brazil with twenty three, which is like all of them, Germany with nineteen, Argentina with fourteen, and Spain with thirteen. So I don't need to tell you this, but in footballing terms, that is extraordinary company to be in, right, I mean these are every one of those teams has won a World Cup. Now. South Korea's best ever finished was two thousand and two, when they co hosted the tournament with Japan. That year they were SEMMI finalists, they finished fourth. And my deep dive is gonna be a little different today, John, because it's gonna veer off into this personal story that intersects obliquely with that tournament. Okay, I'm not sure if you know this, John, but I was supposed to go to that World Cup.

00:15:37
Speaker 3: I did not know that.

00:15:38
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I had a friend back then, and I'll call him Hung. Hun is our age. She's Korean American born in Seoul. He moved to an La when he was eight. When I knew Hun, he was a brilliant and funny, super handsome, very charismatic guy. We met working at this community center in East Harlem, and we got to be really close friends, like really really close. He told the incredible stories, and I remember this image that he shared with me from his childhood and soul. How in the summer, these like oppressively hot Korean summers, these like big trucks would drive down the street, spraying these like deliciously cooling clouds of mists in the air, and all the neighborhood children would come out and run alongside the trucks, just delighting in this sweet relief of this fog. And it was only later as an adult that he realized that what those trucks were actually spraying were pesticides like DDT. Yeah, and he was like joyfully inhaling poison, as if it were some like life giving elixir, like these deep hungry breaths. And he used this, i should say, parenthetically to justify his smoking. It was like, I've already done enough. I've already done damage from my Lungs's what's the city here there? Yeah? Anyway, we were both employed at this pretty chaotic after school program and a community center at George Washington Houses and he's Harlem on Third Avenue. But during the day, while our students were ostensibly attending classes that they're under funded local public schools, Han and I we had all this free time and really very little supervision. So we spend our days just kind of walking around East Harlem and talking about life, about books and film and music and art. And here's the thing. We both wanted to be artists. He wanted to be an actor and a playwright. I wanted to be a writer. And John, as you know, when you're like young, admitting that you have this kind of slightly embarrassing ambition, it's a little bit scary. Every message you get in the world is like, go start a career, get a job, plan for the future. And admitting that really in your heart of hearts, all you really care about, all you really believe in, is like truth and beauty and the ineffable value of art. That's like a really scary thing to admit to yourself, and then to admit to another person is even harder. It's not easy to confess this when you're young and you're kind of like finding your place in a really cynical world, right, So that's so true.

00:17:54
Speaker 3: Man, Like I remember being twenty three and wanting to be a writer more than any anything, but also like constantly thinking of the other things I wanted to be, to try to want to be something else, you know, in that sense, it is it is really kind of a calling, because, yeah, it's a hard thing to acknowledge to yourself, let alone to a friend.

00:18:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Hum and I shared this bond because we both wanted it and we admitted it to each other, and it was like it was a big deal, you know. We shared. Something else is that we both kind of had this immigrants longing for rootedness, for identity, and one of the places we found this identity was through soccer, which in the US was and remains, I think an immigrant sport, one of those spaces where our status is outsiders kind of made us feel like insiders and made us feel better about ourselves, more deserving, truer and human. Was really good, like really good man, like silky first touch, good finisher, better than me by a mile. We played the same team. Oh my god, he's really good man. Wow. And despite smoking, he could run for days all the DDT he had Inhaled as a youth in Soul, Korea. He could still you know, hustle up and down the field. We played on the same team in this league in Chinatown, run by this Chinese peruving guy. We even won a couple of trophies there. Okay, so I'm gonna bring this back to soccer, I promise, or did the World Cup? I mean eventually, all this kind of internal and typically young male agonizing over a sense of self took me back to Peru. And when I left New York, which was just before nine to eleven, to move to Lima, where I was born, I gave Hugh and my soccer ball and the plan was that I would meet him in Seoul in June of that year. It was going to be his first time going back to Korea since he'd left as a boy, and we were going to watch the tournament together. We had tickets for like six games. I'd meet his family, and I.

00:19:47
Speaker 3: Was going to be not a ten thousand dollars a game turn.

00:19:52
Speaker 2: And it must be noted, no, these were simpler times. These were much simpler times. It was I don't remember what it was cost, but if I could afford it on my you know, after school program at a public housing project in New York City salary, then it could have. It must have been doable, you know, right. So I was going to be like witnessed to his return, his like emotional support Peruvian, and he was going to be visiting these places where his first memories were going to be had been constructed, and we were metaphorically going to run through those clouds of DDT together, John. None of this happened, hmm, none of it. And it didn't happen for a really specific reason, which I think you'll understand. I got to Lima. I met a girl. Hmmm, that is the best reason, a girl who would later break my heart. But the fact is that I met her, and once I did, as often happens when one falls in love, everything else, every other commitment or spoken promise or relationship. It seems suddenly preposterously unimportant. And the cool fact of the matter was that once I met her, I did not want to leave Peru to go to Korea to hang out while he and reconnected with his culture in past. This was selfish, I recognize that, but I wanted to be near this girl, and I knew at the moment I met her. And I put off telling Hun because I was nervous to tell him, and I was right to be nervous, because when I did finally tell him, it did not go well. He was furious and he basically broke up with me. Like we literally never spoken again. We have not spoken again. It's been twenty five years.

00:21:21
Speaker 3: Oh man, I'm sorry. That sucks.

00:21:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. And the last indirect interaction I had with Huan was in two thousand and five. I'd published a book by then, my first book, and I came to New York to give a reading. And when I got to the venue, the organizer told me that someone had stop by a few hours earlier to drop off something for me, and I was super confused. I had no idea. She hands me this like, you know, brown paper grocery bag, and inside is the soccer ball that I'd given Hun when I left town.

00:21:46
Speaker 3: Whoa, yeah, yies right, I mean that's some hurt feelings that extended through the decades.

00:21:54
Speaker 2: Yeah no, I mean, well, at that point it had been three years since I, you know, not dissed him and not gone the World Cup. But yeah, yeah, it was. It was it felt like very pointed. You know.

00:22:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's hard.

00:22:06
Speaker 1: So did I do the right thing?

00:22:09
Speaker 2: I mean I think I did, because, like, young love is so special and I definitely wouldn't be the person I am to day if I had not met that girl. And also, like getting your heart eviscerated is like an important part of growing up.

00:22:21
Speaker 3: But it is a critical thing. But I gotta say, you gotta I almost pushed back against that and say, I think you could have had an amazing summer in Korea that you just don't know about now I just don't know about. Yeah, I could have met a Korean girl like who knows sliding doors man sliding door.

00:22:43
Speaker 2: Sliding doors. I realized that this was super disappointing to human and I want to emphasize again, this was not like a middling friends, Like we were super close friends and I miss him to this day, like one of the smartest and funnest people I've ever met, and I let him down for whatever reasons that I may have had. It may have felt just about the time, but I can see now that it must have felt like a betrayal. So now as concerns the listeners of your way and the sailing, fact here is that I was not of the two thousand and two World Cup, and I did not with witness South Korea's glorious run to the semis. I did not see them beat Italy in the quarterfinals, which is what I mean.

00:23:18
Speaker 3: You should have. You should have left that girl. Man, Now that you're talking about it, and it's clear to me you made the wrong call.

00:23:25
Speaker 2: I was not there, John, I was in Lima, Peru. I was puppy dogging after this girl. Yeah, I was not in Soul. Just for the record, before you start hallucinating, you were not there either.

00:23:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I was. I saw that game. I saw that that quarter final. It was incredible. No, I was in Chicago. I woke up at three o'clock in the morning to watch it.

00:23:44
Speaker 2: I watched the game. I just didn't watch it in Korea.

00:23:47
Speaker 3: Yeah. Here here, you missed out you really made a big mistake. There's only one thing more important than young love, and that is the young love of football.

00:23:56
Speaker 2: Exactly. Okay, so this deep dive has taken a real time run away from football. But I really do hope for Hun and for all other South Koreans that they will do well this tournament. They have a challenging group South Africa, Mexico host country obviously, and Checchia. I just want to plan on a couple of players to watch, or a few Sun Hung min erstwhile of the sad side of North London, South Korea's captain, all time leading scorer, Asian leading scorer in European football, one hundred and forty one caps, three World Cups, Premier League, Golden Boot winner in twenty twenty one twenty two, arguably the greatest South Korean player of all time. He's now playing his trade in MLS at LAFC And by the time you listen to this, two great Korean players will have met in the Champions League semifinals. That's Kim and Jay, central defender for Bayern Munich and Lee Kung In, an attacking midfielder for a plucky little side known as PSG. Neither is necessarily a nailed on starter, but the fact that they're both playing at this level says a lot about the strength of South Korea. And lastly, as you know, when I don't have a real rooting interest, I turned to writing, and so I don't know a ton about Korean literature, but I do have real love for a novelist that I want to mention here, Chang Rai Lee. I don't know if you ever read him, John, I have read him.

00:25:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've read what is that book called.

00:25:16
Speaker 1: A Gesture Life? Maybe a Gesture Life. Oh, great book.

00:25:20
Speaker 3: Great book which is recommended to me by a young kid who was living with stage four cancer. Actually that's why I read.

00:25:26
Speaker 2: It, oh Man, beautiful book. So, when I was a public school teacher in Harlem, about a year after my sad breakup with Hun, I prepare a whole unit on Chang Relei's first novel, Made a Speaker, which included a class trip out of Flushing, Queens. It's kind of a scavenger hunt there along Main Street, and I had my students. I took my students to a Korean restaurant exactly. None of my students had ever eaten Korean food before, so it was really exciting. And I think that might be like my greatest accomplishment as a teacher perhaps, And I think that's reason enough to support care in this tournament, and I hope they go very far and naturally, John, I want to dedicate this deep dive to my old friend Hun. That's not his real name, but he knows who he is, and if he's listening, though I'm sure he's not, please write to us or to me at Away endpod at gmail dot com.

00:26:15
Speaker 3: Well, if this podcast leads to a reunion of that friendship, I think it will have been a great success.

00:26:19
Speaker 2: I think so too. I think so too, John. Let's take a break and we'll do that.

00:26:40
Speaker 3: Welcome back to the Away and So I actually have two stories for you, Daniel, because just too much happened in Sierra Leone for me to only have one story. It was a very football drenched trip, as we mentioned earlier. I just got back this morning, and football is everywhere in Sierra Leone as it is throughout West Africa. The fandom is profound and it runs deep. Like I spoke to this one teenage footballer who was being treated for multi drug resistant tuberculosis in Lecau Government Hospital in Freetown, outside of Freetown, and he told me that he was a midfielder. I was like, what do you do? You know, like, what are you looking forward to getting back to when you get out of the hospital. As for MDRTV, you know, if you're healthy ish and this this young man was, you know, hopefully you can go home after you know, as little as two weeks maybe a month of daily treatment because you'll no longer be super infectious. So I was asking him what he was excited about, what he wanted to go home to, and he said what, I'm a footballer and I said, well, what position do you play? And he said, I'm a midfielder and then he said, I'm not declan rice, I'm ode guard. And it turns out, Wow, it turns out that like many Sierra Leonians, like the majority of football fans I spoke to, he is like you an arsenal support. In fact, when I turned on my phone camera to make an Instagram video with him, he looked right into the lens and immediately shouted through his mask, North London Forever, Oh love it. That is not a story. That's just a prelude to a story. My first story is about Kissy Psychiatric Hospital, which is the only psychiatric hospital in sier Leone. So Kissy is the oldest psychiatric hospital in West Africa. It's been around for almost two hundred years. It has a very long and extremely complex history, most of which of course, occurred during colonialism, when anti colonialism itself was a form of madness. But to give you a quick taste of how difficult life was at Kissy four patients just not long ago, as recently as twenty eighteen, more than one hundred patients were literally chained to their beds twenty four hours a day because there were no medications or other treatments to keep them safe and to keep others safe at the hospital. So this was a site of tremendous, unimaginable suffering and a place that's close to my heart because I also live with serious mental illness like a lot of the patients at Kissy Psychiatric Hospital. And you know, I've also been a patient at a psychiatric hospital and I've benefited tremendously, I mean, you know, on an unprecedented scale really from psychiatric intervention, from you know, therapy and medication and other forms of psychiatric treatment. So when I first visited Kesey in twenty nineteen, much of the hospital was still in intense disrepair, very thin mattresses where there were mattresses at all, for instance, no twenty four hour electricity, And while they're as a functioning pharmacy, by then, it was still quite limited. Today it's a very different place in ways that are mostly encouraging. It's still crowded, but now not primarily with what we would traditionally think of as psychiatric patients, because most of them are treated on an outpatient basis, like I am, like most people living with mental illness are so like I might have been hospitalized for my OCD there ten years ago. Now I would receive my medication through the hospital monthly and be able to live at home. These days, almost all of the patients are being treated for substance use disorder because addiction to a smoked opiate called Kush has become an absolute epidemic in Sierra Leone, as indeed opiate addiction is in the United States and in.

00:30:46
Speaker 2: Much of the world.

00:30:48
Speaker 3: Now, even today, Kissy is a really challenging place. There's twenty four hour electricity now but there's still no consistent running water. The wards are very crowded. There are not nearly enough beds there to treat the national substance of use epidemic, which of course is also the case in the US. But there is this big recreation area that was empty when I last visited it. You know, people were just like laying in bed, And this time it was alive. It was It was so, to use a word that urban space designers sometimes use, activated as a space, there's a flat surface, there is a rectangular expanse of concrete, which of course means that there is a football pitch, and the patients were playing seven aside in flip flops with a tattered ball. But they were playing and they were having a great time. Now I'm not a psychiatrist or a drug addict counselor, but I know that social connection is a key to any form of recovery. And as those guys passed this old ball around, I kept thinking, here is a little bit of hope, a little game that brings us together, a language we all share that FIFA simply cannot touch.

00:32:05
Speaker 2: Beautiful.

00:32:07
Speaker 3: And then there is the second story about the third tier English soccer team. I support Daniel, So I mean I passed so many that who we both support.

00:32:17
Speaker 2: That's right.

00:32:17
Speaker 3: You have a third tier English soccer team now and it's AFC Wimbledon. So I don't even need to tell you this story because you already know what happens. Yes, but go on for no, no, no, no, you you finish, so I'll.

00:32:34
Speaker 2: Let you tell it.

00:32:35
Speaker 1: I'll let you tell it.

00:32:36
Speaker 3: Thanks, I appreciate it.

00:32:37
Speaker 2: Man.

00:32:37
Speaker 3: So AFC Wimbledon have not won any of their last ten games. They've been on it. They've been properly spursy, they've been on a proper Tottenham style run down there in the third tier of English football and have lost six straight and find themselves with two games left on the edge of relegation. So for context, we were in Sierra Leone to visit the Maternal Center of Excellence, this truly transformational addition to Coyu Government Hospital in the Kono district that brings one hundred and twenty maternal beds to the region, the first NICKU in the history of Sierra Leone. The you know, just a truly world class hospital in a place that has often been denied access to world class health services. And it was an amazing visit. I wept, you know, I mean to walk into the first NICKU and think that our little Internet community had a hand in making this possible, and everything was just just amazing. It was just the gift of a lifetime. And then we had to drive from Kono to Freetown where we were flying back home through Casablanca, and that's a six hour drive. And on that six hour drive AFC Wimbledon we're playing against Wigan Athletic. We have two games left. That is the game we are much more likely to win, even though it's an away game, because it's against a team that's maybe like five or six spots above us in the table, and we had to win at least one of these last two games. Having lost six in a row and not ten for ten games, we had to win one of these last two games to stay up unless the team below us, Exeter City, also lost their last two games. So we're in this car and to say that the Internet on this drive was inconsistent would be a significant understatement. I'm in this car with my friends Lauren, Ryan and Chris and Marina and my wife Sarah, all of whom, in addition to making huge investments in the Maternal Center of Excellence, have made small investments with me in AFC Wimbledon. My friends love of John Green boondoggle. You'll have the opportunity to invest soon, don't you worry. And so I'm on the road with these people I love tremendously who have helped tremendously to build this neonatal and maternal care center and also helped AFC Wimbledon this in every season. And we're trying to stream the game on Ryan's phone and I would say about thirty percent of the time it worked and the other seventy percent of the time Chris and Marina are updating us on the score based on what Google says if we have at least three G Internet and if we don't, then we're just sort of sitting in silence wondering what's happening. Forty five minutes in AFC Wimbledon have slipped into the relegation zone because Exeter City have scored. They're winning one nothing. AFC Wimbledon are tied neil nil. It looks like we will never score a goal again. Like Tottenham. We have nine injured players, including our top four choice strikers. It looks impossible that we can score. I mean, there's a guy out there and I say this with love who And I know that I'm overly generous about your football talents, Daniel, but you could have made it in the team on Saturday. And so we're watching it looks like we're never going to score. It looks like Exeter's gonna win. And then about then there's then it's halftime. Then about sixty five minutes in we get a solid five minutes of getting to watch the game, and we just look terrible. We have twenty three percent possession. It's wave after wave of attacking. It's like watching the Alamo be defended.

00:36:31
Speaker 2: It is.

00:36:31
Speaker 3: It is hideous and terrifying. And then and then suddenly Exeter aren't winning because Burton Albion has scored a goal and it's one to one, and there's a little bit of hope and if we can just and if Burton can score another goal, or maybe we can somehow get a goal or at least hold on to a draw, like at least it'll come down to the final day and we'll get to we'll get to live another five days. And then in the ninetieth minute, one young substitute who's played for AFC Wimbledon since he was like eleven years old, passes the ball to a loan player who we signed on loan from a team that's in our division, because like, that's you know, that's that's how challenging a circumstance we find ourselves in financially. He passes the ball to Antoine Hackford, who's hardly played a game in the last fifteen games because of injury and because being out of favor and everything else. And Antwine Hackford scores a goal in the ninetieth minute and the stream is perfect high definition for those ten seconds. And you have never seen joy inside of a bus on the road from Cono to Freetown like this. Joy and AFC Wimbledon stay up, and AFC Wimbledon live to fight another year in League one.

00:37:54
Speaker 2: Amazing.

00:37:54
Speaker 3: I love football, Yeah, I love what football can make you feel. Oh God, it just pierces through everything. It simplifies the world, It pierces through everything. It was such a hard trip in so many ways, you know, and such a beautiful trip in so many ways. And holding those competing ideas together is the hardest thing. Like the sense of the profound, unbelievable, reprehensible injustice, and the sense of the profound, true progress, and the fact that these things can have to be held together somehow or else the wheels completely come off the bus. And so I'm trying to hold all that together and like can't make sense of anything. I still can't make sense of anything. I've only been home for a few hours and so I can't make sense of any any of it.

00:38:38
Speaker 2: But like.

00:38:40
Speaker 3: There was something about being in that bus with those people, with that football club that just reminded me that hope is correct.

00:38:49
Speaker 2: I love it. I love it. It's why I support Wimbledon for moments.

00:38:58
Speaker 3: Well you're you're joking, but you're going to get an investment portfolio Prospectus over the weekend if you don't watch it.

00:39:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I'll be looking out for it. John. It's beautiful and I want to thank you, and I want to thank the whole uh kind of amazing community you've created obviously for the work that you're doing in Sara Leone and elsewhere. It's just so inspiring man. And uh again, this is why I think you'd be a great FIFA president, because you do well.

00:39:25
Speaker 3: It's a little bar to jump over, man. I mean, yeah, I know, but you have your your your heart is in the right place at least to be the greatest FIFA president since the first FIFA president, Like you would not have to be a great FIFA president. No, no, but you're I mean, I'm joking aside. Man, I'm really proud to be your friend for this kind of thing, uh, and for the Wimbledon stuff, but really for the for the Sirira Leone stuff, that's that's amazing. Yeah. Every time I tell Sarah like, can we just maybe squeeze a little bit more money into ancy Wimbledon, She's like, do you do you really want to do that? Or maybe you should it go somewhere where it could matter a little more. And uh, that's that's why if Wimbledon almost got relegated, it Sarah's fault.

00:40:09
Speaker 2: It's Sarah's fault, right, Uh, Sean, you want to come on and read us some questions, Man.

00:40:17
Speaker 1: There is I just want to I just want to add I am proud to be both of your friends. You guys, Uh regaled us with some amazing stories today and thanks Sean, thank you man. I look forward to hearing more about your trip.

00:40:31
Speaker 3: John I know, I mostly I know, I mostly only compliment Daniel, but I have to say, you look incredible in that shirt.

00:40:38
Speaker 1: Oh god, this is pretty uh nondescript shirt that I'm wearing today.

00:40:44
Speaker 2: But I appreciate that. Maybe you should. I just want to I want to ask you something. This is not football related, but was this your like go to, like uh like flirting style when you were a young man on the market there just like just like school.

00:40:58
Speaker 3: My go to flirting style with no nearly that good. I just did. What I just did with Sean was excellent fording.

00:41:08
Speaker 2: I'll have.

00:41:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got me blushing. Yeah. I also think if John, if John was you know, if we're calling John the ultra of our high school soccer team, it feels like you could also argue that he is the ultra of the Away End podcast because he's just like he's like our biggest uh fan here, He's like always you know, I'm your Yeah, yeah, amazing. All right, we're gonna read a couple letters here, Yeah, hit us man, Dear John, Daniel and Sean. I love almost everything about the game. I really do accept the diving faking simulation nonsense. As we approached the World Cup, I would love to introduce some of my friends to the game, but I'm mortified by the faking diving rolling around that I know is going to happen. It's just embarrassing. What do you guys think, How do you watch grown men falling down and grasping that precious area above the ankle. Why do they always grab that area over and over again and still enjoy the game? Any ideas on how to solve this or any ideas on how to not let it bother me as much? Scott and his daughter Katie.

00:42:26
Speaker 3: So Scott and Katie. The first thing I'd say, and I defer to Daniel and to a wesser extent Sean on this, is that getting your footsteps on does really hurt. Does especially with cleats, it hurts. Yeah, getting kicked in the shin hurts, and so sometimes they go down and it really hurts. Now, in American football, it does appear that there's more hurt per role in soccer than American football. I will give you that. It appears to me from the outside like there's more niggling injury or or knocks per roll around on the ground screaming yes, So what is it? Daniel? How do you how do you solve for this?

00:43:15
Speaker 2: I don't know when I when I heard this question, my first thought was, like I was thinking about in politics like that, there's like fake outrage is a thing, you know, like where a politician will say something fairly anadyne and then the other side, because of the polarized moment that we're living through, will take the crassest bassist possible interpretation of what was said and then to be outraged by it. You know.

00:43:43
Speaker 3: Can I jump in there real quick and ask Sean to ask Daniel what anadyne means?

00:43:50
Speaker 1: Daniel, can you tell us the definition of anadyne please?

00:43:55
Speaker 2: Just like something inoffensive, something that is not okay? Yeah, Like that's what I thought for my context, but I wasn't.

00:44:04
Speaker 3: Now I have it. I've got it forever.

00:44:05
Speaker 2: It's a gift to me. You got it forever. Yeah. Yeah.

00:44:07
Speaker 1: I can also say it is the title of one of my favorite albums of all time by legendary alt country band Uncle Tupelo headed by Jeff Tweety and j Ferrar of sun Volt and Wilco. Now, but Anadne great album?

00:44:23
Speaker 2: Check it out. Uh So I forget what I was saying, But oh, Yeah. So basically people take some anodine comment and then use the worst possible interpretation of that comment in order to pretend to be outraged. That's basically what diving is. And if you ever have watched, for example, or had the misfortune of watching like a White House press conference and they'll ask, you know, Carolyn Levitt, you know, like, what is the President doing today? And she'll be like, I am appalled that you would even ask what, you know, the greatest statesman in the history of the world would be doing today of all days, And you know, are you even an American for asking?

00:44:59
Speaker 3: Like?

00:45:00
Speaker 2: That's fake outrage, that's diving. You know, it's just such a part of our culture that I think to sort of pretend that it's It's upsetting in all moments. It's more upsetting in politics, I think than in in sport. And there's a reason why people do it. One is because things things do hurt. Two, because there are times when you have to exaggerate a little bit to make sure the ref saw the contact. And then there's things that are super embarrassing, you know, where people fall down as if they'd just been you know, shot by a sniper and they weren't touched. But it's just gamesmanship, Scott and Katie, it's just gamesmanship. And I think having played, you know, you always are told if there's if you're in the box and feel contact, like, don't be afraid to go down. Yeah.

00:45:47
Speaker 1: The only thing I was going to add to this is that it's not specific to soccer football either. Like I was watching the NBA. You know, NBA playoffs are happening right now. There was a game on the other night there was they should they you know, it's a slow motion replay afterwards, an absolutely zero contact that happened, but the foul was called pivotal moment of the game. They can't overturn it, and that in that moment and you know, yeah, and if you can gain an advantage in a sporting contest from flopping or diving or whatever, it's got to be hard to resist.

00:46:28
Speaker 2: Let me just end with this for Scott and Katie, if you've ever played in the park on a Sunday in any context like sort of soccer football, that doesn't matter at all. And that's where you really can say flopping is a moral failure because if you've ever seen someone flop on a Sunday League in Riverside Park. Then you're just like, what is wrong with you? Like what are you doing? Like you're embarrassing yourself and your entire family by doing this, and that is something I really can't understand. But flopping in the World Cup, you know, it's not really flopping. It's just making sure the ref saw something that you want them to see. That's it, you know, that's it. And it's framed game. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a narrative. It's it's storytelling, John, That's what it is. So Scott and Katie, when you see someone diving and you're embarrassed to tell your friends, explain it to your frenzy, to whom you're introducing the world's most popular sport in twenty twenty six, Just tell them it's it's narrative. It's just narrative. That's all it is, all right.

00:47:36
Speaker 1: Next question, Dear John and Daniel enjoying the show. But wow, do you guys drop names on this podcast? Oh? I was traveling with Bill Gates and Ethiopia. Oh, look at me. I did fantasy football with multiple MacArthur geniuses. Here's some free advice. Friends More Stoutschkov less Bill Gates. As far as I know, Gates never kicked a ball in Anger. Unless the name you drop is an obscure Croatian under twenty one, it's not relevant to the story. All best.

00:48:05
Speaker 2: Eric b.

00:48:06
Speaker 1: Esquire, former player of the Upper west Side National team. PS, nice job jinxing you mean lamal Oh yeah you did? And you mall man, Wow, this is a great one.

00:48:21
Speaker 2: This is I think this is really this is really for you, John, because yeah, you're the one name dropping I think, I mean, you're the one traveling with Bill Gates.

00:48:30
Speaker 3: And yeah, it reminds me a little bit of when I was hanging out with car de Levigne on the set of Paper Towns.

00:48:36
Speaker 2: Actually, and he told you never to name drop, right, yeah? She but gee, yeah, sorry, I don't know whose people are. I can't even name ever changed stay Golden, Tony boy. Yeah. Uh. I think Eric has a point. But I think this is just the lives we happened to have stumbled into. And I'm not going to apologize for not knowing Bill Gates, but for you know, knowing some people who are fun and interesting and.

00:49:10
Speaker 3: I think I don't Actually, you know, it's funny because I do name drop, and I just I realized that when I got that email that I definitely do name drop. But I would say ninety nine point seven percent of the people I have met and care about in my life are not famous, and so I should name them more. I should name drop them. I should name drop the hewns of the world. You know, Yeah, I think that you should.

00:49:40
Speaker 2: I think you do. I think you do. To be fair, I think you mentioned a lot of people today in your story from Sierra Leone who are not famous, but who are incredibly remarkable and special people. And I think to be fair to Eric b Esquire, former player of the Upper West Side national team. Just judging from that Moniker, I think that he is uh gently ribbing us tongue in cheek, and.

00:50:04
Speaker 3: I do enjoy being ribbed, although never as much as when l s Ao chose that question about Julian Nagelsman having never been a professional footballer that was classic to be to be dunked on by your teenage son is a joy I simply could not have imagined when we were in high school.

00:50:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, or you know that that would be uh kind of the one of the highlights of this podcast when we were sort of imagining this show right. Lastly, Eric's point of Jingxon give me Lamal though, I think that's really relevant man and super sad. And I keep hearing every day of players missing, you know, who are going down injured, missing the World Cup, most recently Chabby Simon's of Tottenham.

00:50:52
Speaker 3: My heartbreaks that kid.

00:50:54
Speaker 2: Brutal, man, brutal. You know, Lamal will be will be fit, man, I really do.

00:51:00
Speaker 3: I hope we should too. I mean it's going to be a better tournament with him, in addition to being great for Spain, It'll just be a better tournament.

00:51:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely so. Yeah, healing mercies to Yamin Lamal and to Chabbie Simon's and to all the players who are getting injured. I hope they make a full recovery. We're gonna have to do a mailbag show pretty soon because because some of these emails are piling up and they're really, really good. I do want to mention one thing because we had two listeners now recommend a game, and I don't do, John, do you play games like on like I do video games? I do, Okay, I don't, But now we've had two listeners recommend this one game called This Plote ed Torres and an email we got a few months ago from Mariana I believe her name was So. This Pilote is an autobiographical game about growing up in Ecuador in two thousand and one, when the country qualified for the World Cup for the first time, and how those events are remembered in processed by the game's creator as a young boy, I mentioned this. I want to mention this because you're not gonna beieve it's done. But I was at that game. And I was at that game with the girl that pulled me away from human we were trying. We're in Quito. We went to the stadium. It was so emotional because people were so happy, and she wasn't really like into soccer in the same way I was, So she was just like letting herself go with this like first time ever national celebration. Like the streets of Keito were just you know, packed, and it was incredible, and I was with her sort of feeling this kind of joy vicariously through all the Ecuadorians around me, and I was also heartbroken. I was like, I'll never see this for Peru. I really thought that. I was like, I'll never see this for pro she I think she tried to buy me an Ecuador Jersey and I was like, I can't. I can't wear that. I'm sorry, I was like, n But so anyway, we've had two listeners recommend this game and I and I don't play video games, but I'm sure it's really good. So de pelote for those of you who do play video games, it sounds really amazing.

00:53:07
Speaker 1: I think that's it, man, See you next week, See you next week.

00:53:11
Speaker 2: Thanks John, Thanks Jean, thanks Kurt, and thanks everyone for listening, and remember to send your emails away and pod at gmail dot com. Thanks so much. I see you next week. John. All right