All right

All I'm going to be is a joke

All I'm going to It's a joke.

Hello, everybody. It's Monday, April 21st, and we've got some chopup coming at you. On today's show, Felix and I are privileged to be joined by a historian whose work I have just said we have both knowingly and unknowingly expressed and been informed by throughout the entire course of our show. It is our distinct privilege to be talking with Greg Grandin today. Greg, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan.

Greg, in preparing for today, and obviously you have a new book coming out tomorrow, America, America,

a new history of the new world, which is a sort of a hemispheric portrait of the last

500 years or so of this side of the planet and sort of how North and South America are sort of

histories and destinies are very much intertwined and inform one another. In preparing for today's

interview, I was thinking like, well, how should I kick things off?

Well, I don't want to say today when I woke up offered, you know, a bit of good news, but I'll say

it's a bit of tragic comic kismit that I woke this morning to the death of Pope Francis. And I guess

I'll begin there, Greg. Pro Francis is mentioned in the book, and I'm just wondering what you see in his life and career as sort of like embodying a lot of the currents of history and politics and the sort of tensions and contradictions between them. What do you see in the life and career of Pope Francis and his passing? Yeah. I mean, it sums up a lot of the arguments of the book.

I mean, you know, he died right after meeting J.D. Vance.

I guess the main question is whether Vance killed him or he just lost the will to live

after meeting him.

I don't know with one or the other.

But, I mean, you know, I mean, there's a lot to say about Francis because he does kind of embody so many different currents. And one that's often overlooked is that he was in Argentine. And he was a, you know, I don't know if he was a perinist, but he grew up in Peronist Argentine, when the working class was entering the political arena

demanding social citizenship. And that had a big effect on him. And certainly he lived through

the worst of the fascist counter-revolutionary terror of the 1970s. There's a little bit of a murky

history there about his role.

And possibly collaborated with the Argentine junta in the 70s?

You know, I've just been having this Twitter fight with people because I posted,

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