We've all been there. Your buddy and former editor-in-chief Megan Greenwell has an acclaimed new book about the predatory industry that wrecked your previous workplace and is eating away at American life everywhere you look, and she's got an hour to spare on her book tour to talk to you on your podcast. So far, so relatable. But! Your co-host is out of town, and also if it was just you and Megan there's a chance the podcast would be like 40 minutes of questions about Jed Lowrie and Brett Anderson and 20 minutes of answers amounting to "will you please stop asking me about Brett Anderson." Not to belabor the point, but this is one of The Classic Scenarios. And yet, this week, it happened to me.
While such an episode surely would have delighted less-discerning fans of the 2018 Oakland Athletics and absolutely infuriated Megan, thankfully it is not the one embedded in this post. That is in large part because podcast ace Kelsey McKinney joined me in hosting this week's episode. This helped us keep things focused on what matters. That is, we talked about Megan's book and how she came to write something so different from her instant-classic blog post about our shared private equity experience at the old site, and about the pluses and minuses of business (and book tour) travel, and the responsibilities and challenges that come with making a real person into a character in your book.
There is a decent amount of private equity talk—about its signature combination of depravity and incompetence, its strange self-conception, and a very funny and very huffy review of Megan's book at Bloomberg by a private equity guy—but there is also a lot of stuff that is not about that. Both Kelsey and Megan were extremely nasty and unfair to me throughout, bullying me relentlessly for everything from my dedication to purchasing fresh fish from local vendors to my stubborn refusal to even try to write a book, but I emerged triumphant, or at least upright. It came out really well, I think, and the (very vocal!) faction of 2018 A's fans who might have been disappointed can rest easy knowing that I did mention Daniel Mengden at one point, if only to set Megan up to tell me how much she appreciated it when I would let myself into her office and ask "if she'd seen that last Mengden start." At the risk of spoiling anything, the answer is "roughly as much as I expected."
There was time for just one Funbag question, but it was a winner. A question about cooking that featured the extremely vivid phrase "we prep our glop" led to a lively discussion about cooking, and reserving little treats for yourself in life, and arrived at a consensus that there is nothing wrong with glop if it is imbued with the right amount of love and care. And what, really, is a podcast episode but that?
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