Bradley Campbell
speaker
95 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Bradley Campbell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Pablo Torre Finds Out · Blood Empty: How a Beloved Team Made a Deal with the Devil · 15 May 2025
podcast
Oh, it's good. It's good. Well, dude, question.
Have you ever done something, and this will go somewhere. Have you ever done something to someone where you ask them to, you know, like a favor for you? They do it and only then afterwards do you realize that, oh man, you just asked them to do like something absolutely wretched.
And moving in New York is basically like, would you like to... Would you like to be basically stuck in a set of stairs trying to maneuver a couch at like a 64 degree angle?
I did this with my cousin Max, who lives in Germany. And we were talking on Zoom. And I looked on, you know, kind of on Google Maps. And I found out where he was at. And I'm like, oh, dude, he's next to Borussia Dortmund.
And at that time, they were incredible. They had Erin Holling. They had Christian Pulisic. Is there any chance, like, you could get me a hat? Yeah, you're that kind of cousin.
Exactly. Can I get some merch? Can I get some merch? And he was just like, yeah, okay. So he gets one. And then I proudly, like, put the Borussia Dortmund hat on the next time we're on Zoom. And I'm like, Max, check out my hat. And he was like...
Yeah.
It's huge.
But then he told me, like, well, it's okay. It's just, it's been a hard time to be a Schalke fan. And I was like, what do you mean?
He told me about this storied team of his, Schalke 04, one of the best in all of German football, just became dead inside.
Wow, that's a great phrase. Yeah, welcome to the German language. He went on to tell me all about Schalke 04's downfall. And as he was doing this, I realized that it was a very German story, a Faustian tale, if you will.
One that involved a deal with the devil, the selling of a soul, and a story that dropped his favorite football club out of the top division and down into a geopolitical firestorm that our own president has said could lead us to World War III. Right.
So at first, I had absolutely no idea. So I went to Germany to find out.
I mean, if you've seen The Little Mermaid, that's a Faustian tale. If you've watched Tenacious D and The Pick of Destiny— Also Faustian tale. The Little Mermaid gets to be among... Gets to walk.
Yeah, yeah. Tenacious D gets to shred.
Yeah. Which, judging from what we heard from Max and the Blood Empty soccer team, is kind of where Schalke was. I flew the overnight to Amsterdam because it's a much cheaper flight. And then, gosh, I took a couple of different commuter rails. And then got to a little West German town called Gelsenkirchen.
It felt like being on Amtrak and then going through the Alleghenies and then all of a sudden landing in Pittsburgh.
Definitely, definitely. It had this vibe of industry and kind of this vibe of an area that's seen better days. It was the center of the mining region in Germany. But all the mines have been capped, so there's no mines anymore. They switched from coal power to natural gas.
And it's full of fans with just a ton of hope and a ton of faith.
Immediately kicks in. It's always like lottery or nothing. But then you start like walking through Gelsenkirchen. You're like, this is a poor area. It's a lot of working class immigrants. A lot of them coming from Turkey. And then a ton of working class Catholics. So much that Pope John Paul II... I mean, this is the original cool pope, by the way. I know, the cool pope.
Showing 1–20 of 95 · page 1 of 5
Next →