Gene Demby
Appearances
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
Oh, always, always a pleasure. Anytime. Be safe out.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
Well, I mean, Stephen A. Smith was a Daily Beat reporter in Philadelphia covering basketball, and he became a basketball insider. And then he got invited into the world of cable news, and so he worked at CNN. Then he was at ESPN, and he became a star, right?
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
I mean, anybody that sees Stephen A. Smith talk, like, he's the sort of person that if you're walking through an airport and you see ESPN on TV, like, your eyes are drawn to Stephen A. Smith. So he's got that sort of magnetic personality.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
He's captivating when he gets rolling, right? And so he's, you know, been on sort of this trajectory for the last few years. He's accrued a lot more power and a lot more prominence over like the last five, 10 years. ESPN has shared a lot of their more prominent personalities, people like Bomani Jones, Dan Lebitard, folks like that who've moved on.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
And so this created more of a room for him to kind of stretch out and be like, this is my network. I mean, the biggest way you see that represented is his $20 million a year salary, right? And why would he want to run for president? I mean, this is a guy who has done some acting on General Hospital. He's made all the rounds on all these cable news shows. He was just on Sean Hannity, right?
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
Talking about this very topic. And so it kind of gets to why would he want to do this? Well, it increases your public profile. Stephen A. Smith is already very popular, but it only can help.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
Well, he calls himself an independent. I mean, he's been pretty adamant about the fact that I'm not a Democrat, nor am I a Republican. And it's sort of the cliche, I'm a staunch conservative when it comes to my money. So he doesn't want to pay taxes, right? He's a rich guy that doesn't want to pay taxes.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
But he says, I believe in live and let live, whatever that means, because it's not like he supports trans inclusion in sports, right? We have to sort of take his word that he believes in, you know, sort of like a cultural progressiveness. Maybe he has that. That's what he says he has. But, you know, it remains to be seen.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
Yeah, so I just started working at ESPN right around that time.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
So after Jamel does this, there's this big meeting in Bristol, Connecticut, which is the ESPN headquarters, right? And they fly everybody in. So just imagine everybody famous you've seen on ESPN is there in this room. I'm there with them. And I actually sat next to Jamel Hill during this presentation. Part of it was about...
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
Extensively, it was about the direction of the company and assuring people about, you know, this is a bad time for a cable news channel. We're hemorrhaging viewers. Everybody's saying ESPN is hyperpolitical. But it was also just an occasion to roll out our social media policy.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
And that is when you started seeing a lot more emphasis on like, hey, I don't want you saying nothing about politics or mentioning Donald Trump or anything like that on air or on social media. Once I went on vacation to Cancun, I'm down there with my wife having a good time. You know, I'm about to get in a pool and I get a call from my editor to tell me, hey, man, the Roseanne show got canceled.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
Make sure you don't tweet about that.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
I mean, I think people remember why Roseanne got her show canceled. She had said some pretty regrettable things. And people probably could imagine where I might have fallen on that. But because ESPN did not want us talking about that stuff, I was unable to and I did not. But anyway, that's just sort of the climate we had found ourselves in at ESPN during those years.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
It's good with you, Brittany. Yeah, appreciate us having you back. Yeah.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
So I've seen Stephen A. Smith basically say, well, I just think everybody's crazy and we need to move to the center, right? That is basically his biggest political talking point. And he'll go on any outlet to talk about this. And so the way he's leveraging it is by just drawing more attention to himself and his brand. And so it gives him some sort of influence, whether or not he chooses...
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
to use it for political means but it means that like whether we believe he should be a political figure or not or whether he believes he is or not he is one when you go into Sean Hannity multiple times I mean it's also just kind of disingenuous to say you're not a political figure I mean you are bro sorry for sure
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
Oh, let's go. Okay, yeah, come on. Let's do it.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
I'm going to say 26.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
I say the Celtics, but I'm open to the idea of the OKC Thunder. OKC Thunder.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
It was C. I'm going to go B. Rocket Man seems like the more appropriate song.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
Come on, man. I'm just here. Well, we see how washed I am. I have two kids. Gene has one.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
Yeah. I'm even more washed. Yeah.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
Oh, that's pity. That's pity, by the way. I recognize what it is. It's not pity.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
I'm thinking, it seems like you got to have your money.
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
I mean, $150,000, you know. $150,000, yeah, I could see some like. Get somebody that I don't want. You think Master P? You went if Master P was like, well, I got $150,000, I can do that. They don't want to open it up like that. Yeah, like, Memphis Bleak, can you go this way?
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
I was like, I want to be up there, too, you know?
It's Been a Minute
Are men in your life getting more political? This guy may be why.
I'm not seeing the appeal. And I'm glad you said Cheesecake Factory. That's a real salt of the earth type of restaurant.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And to do that processing, I'm joined by Abine Clayton, who covers gun violence for The Guardian. What's good, Abine?
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
All right, so first I got to set the scene a little bit. So it's been over a week since a masked gunman shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, outside a Manhattan hotel. This week, authorities identified and detained an alleged gunman, and he's being charged with murder. You've probably heard his name by now, Luigi Mangione.
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And we kind of have to walk a very delicate line here because we're talking about, you know, violence here, a brazen murderer. which is pretty scary to think about for a lot of people. And at the same time, there's been a lot of praise and solidarity for this alleged gunman and his actions. I mean, just listen to some of these reactions.
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
The alleged shooter even got his own superhero-esque nickname, with some people on the internet calling him the Adjuster. And on the other end, there are reports of CEOs across industries being scared for their lives, beefing up their security details, removing their identities from their companies' websites.
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
All right, Abine, as somebody who covers gun violence, how would you characterize the reactions we've been seeing to this shooting? And how have these reactions been different from the normal reactions to violence?
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Obviously, we are not condoning murder. And this is an awful tragedy for his family. But the response is... it reminds me a little bit of the way when you read about like Bonnie and Clyde, right? They were doing these really horrible things where they were killing people, they were robbing banks, but there's also during the great depression and people are very, very angry at bankers, right?
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
You know, banks that basically tanked the economy and, you know, people have lost their livelihoods, they lost their homes. And so because they were robbing banks, it was seen as a sort of, even though what they were doing wasn't sort of vigilantism, right? It wasn't sort of resolving any of the situations that people found themselves in.
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
They were also going after or hitting the pockets of people that were really, really unpopular. And this feels kind of like that kind of folk hero thing.
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Yeah, I mean, it's something that we don't really think about as, you know, violence.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
But just last year, the American Medical Association reported that a third of the physicians they surveyed, and they asked a thousand physicians, a third of them said that they'd seen delay or denial of care due to prior authorization lead to, you know, either serious adverse health effects for their patients or even death.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Why do you think people have a harder time seeing what happens to people like us on the business end of insurance companies' decisions as violence, but we can see gun violence more clearly as the destructive thing that it is?
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
We should also know here that we do know, at least the police said, that the bullets he used had inscribed on them the words deny, defend, and depose. And that echoes a phrase commonly used to describe the alleged tactics that insurers use to avoid paying out insurance claims to their customers. And UnitedHealthcare, we should say, is the biggest health insurance company in the country.
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And it was just slammed last month in a Senate investigation for denying people certain types of care as a way to boost the company's profits.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Like, honestly, when I first heard the news, I thought about when my wife and I were going through our long, arduous IVF journey, not long after we conceived and had our son, I'm so thankful for, one of the big clinics in our area informed its patients that our health insurance was dropping coverage for that clinic.
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And so that didn't impact me and my wife directly, but we just could not stop thinking about all the other folks That we would see like in the waiting room, right? The people who are in the middle of treatment and suddenly they were going to have to pay out of pocket if they could, right? To try to start a family.
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
And it's just like very financially and emotionally devastating news that must have been to them, right? Because these are choices about their lives that are out of their hands. And it all kind of happened on a dime through the decisions of some healthcare executive or somebody with an actuarial table somewhere.
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
criticizing how the media has been covering this, like how the public is riding with this alleged shooter and the media hasn't been able to capture that sentiment. How do you think the reactions of the public differ from what you've seen, from the way you've seen this covered?
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
You know, it was really interesting to see Ben Shapiro, you know, famed right wing pundit sort of lamenting the air quotes, the less response to the shooting and taking glee. His audience clapped back at him really pretty hard. It was like, nah, this is not a left thing. We are very angry at these people, too.
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Like, we don't have tears to shed for these people as well, which is really interesting to watch them have to metabolize the fact that this wasn't like partisan schadenfreude. This was like a thing that is felt broadly across ideological categories.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
I keep thinking about when we cover like police violence on Code Switch, one of the things we always have to like remind people is that like these individual cases, they often unearth like all this feeling. Anger that people have over historical racism, right? Like it all comes to bear on these individual cases.
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
But there's no way the actual resolution of these cases like in an American court, right? Like- It's going to resolve all those issues. Right. And so I imagine that the trial for Luigi Mangione is going to be really, really heavily covered. Right. Maybe even like OJ levels of coverage. Right.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
But then what's going to happen is that people are going to like think of the verdict as reckoning with all this other stuff that this case is unearthed. And it can't do that. The verdict is only about this case. It's only about who shot whom, who was where. I wonder what that means for how we do or don't resolve all that other stuff.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
So I guess to close out, I'm wondering, at the end of the day, this is still the killing of a man whose murder, as we said, is standing in for all these other things, right? This rage that so many people feel towards this larger system. I'm wondering, what do you think are the wrong lessons that we could take away from this moment?
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Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
Abide, you are incredible. I've learned so much here. Thank you so much for coming in and trying to think about this and trying to make sense of this very banana story. And obviously the story is far from over. I mean, this trial is going to be. an obsession. So thank you for coming on. Thank you so much for having me.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
That was Abine Clayton. She covers gun violence for The Guardian. We're going to take a quick break, but when we get back, I'm handing the mic back over to Brittany Luce, the great. She's going to get into why you should have gratitude, not just on the holidays, but all year round. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. And as for you, you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR.
It's Been a Minute
Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain
What's good, everybody? All right, first things first. I'm famously not Brittany Luce, although I aspire to be. I mean, the wardrobe, the glasses. No, I'm actually Gene Demby, one of the co-hosts of NPR's Code Switch. Brittany is out on vacation. Lucky her. But she asked me to jump in because she wanted somebody to be here to help process the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting news with all of you.