YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Bai

lines on the record
70
first
2017-02-06
most recent
2017-02-06
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “I used to write for Audrey. You know, I never even seen an Audrey Heppermo. I know who she was. I think she appreciated that actually. Breakfast, Tiffany. I badgered her for nothing. No, I was a kid. I had not watched anything. I just knew she was a super nice person and she was doing.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Many ways to put it in the book was the ethos of the business became after that really became, you know, we know you're a fraud, we just have to figure out how. Right. And that's”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Really interesting because I met Bob Woodward for the first time in college. I'm sure he does not remember this and said it's a very similar thing to him than he'd been inspiring and he had actually no use for me. But as I wrestled with this and in my book and all the truth is out, I wrestle with this. The legacy of Watergate for me is complicated. I've come to see it as much more complicated than I did then as a kid. Yes. It did inspire a lot of us, it certainly inspired me years after as a kid, and it created this great model for journalism. But it also created this perverse incentive of Journalists who could get rich and famous and be celebrities by taking people down and the idea that if you were the ultimate journalist, you were exposing people from frauds they were.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Even my grandmother was a lawyer some of the first women lawyers on my mother's side. So, you know, although my father's side hadn't gone to college, but for me, that would have been a natural course. So it was more a question of how was I going to take that writing ability and what was I going to do with it?”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, well, I didn't. Although, you know, really one of my very earliest memories and certainly my earliest political memories of Nixon resigning. So I was fascinated by that. I think a lot of people in my generation, you know, because this was, I graduated high school in 1986, I didn't know that I could make money as a writer of journalists and that was kind of a big thing then. You know, that was the kind of new generation, the Reagan era. My dad was a lawyer. I think he would have liked for me to be a lawyer. I come from a family of lawyers, really.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I mean, as early as I can remember grade school. You know, I can remember I literally remember, I don't think I've ever talked about this, but I remember being called to the principal's office in grade school because I had written, I had been reading sports biographies, and I had written a mock biography of sports heroes that did not exist. And to this day, I'm not sure why it was called it. I'm sure I got all the dates wrong. I don't know if they thought I was like pretending something was true that wasn't, or if they just wanted to understand where I'd gotten it from, but I was always writing in my spare time. And I loved history and I loved politics. I got very interested in Watergate very young. You know, I was growing up in the late 70s, early 80s, so it was very fresh in the public mind. I read books about the Watergate figures. For a while, I love it.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, I always wanted to write. I don't remember a time where I wasn't writing, I was in trouble in school for writing. And if I weren't writing journalism, in some other life, I'd write novels. I'm now writing screenplays. I'm working on a bunch of projects in Hollywood. I just write. I love to learn new kinds of writing. And when did that start?”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I mean, this sounds. Self effacing, and I don't think it is, but unlike you, David, I actually can't do anything else. This is what I do. I write, I love history. At some point you had...”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I find it a strange thing for him. I mean, well, this is the story of him and his presidency, but it's an odd direction impulse to indulge because there's very little he can actually do about it. It's not something that the public is up screaming about. It's not something the federal government's really involved in.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “What has a strong emotional appearance? I mean, one of the things that's interesting about it, and you remind me of the inaugural address where he talked about the American carnage, right? And he was largely talking about here in Chicago, right? He keeps talking about what's happening in Chicago. Most people didn't vote for him. He didn't win any urban votes. He did very poorly across the board in urban areas. So the nostalgia he plays to is nostalgia of people really like my parents who remember vibrant cities but don't live there. I have”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And the more you tax, the harder it is to attract business, and the harder it is to redo your downtowns and get residents. And you get into this very, as you know, you get into this very not virtuous cycle.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Everything just left Bridgeport and for all the reasons that we know, right? Because it cost too much to make stuff there, right? A lot of it went overseas because plants went to new cheaper parts of the country and became more automated, right? Those jobs went away very, very quickly, actually. And then when you have empty factories and joblessness, you also have the services have to leave, right? My family's bakery. My mother's family had a bakery. There's no one to come to the bakery anymore. The bakery goes away, right? You know, they used to complain about the labor costs, the truckers. They couldn't keep going. It all just breaks down. And then what happens ultimately is as people flee to the suburbs, partly because the economic issue, partly because the racism, and partly because of fear of crime and all of it, all of it intermingled, there's no tax base anymore. And what happened to cities like Bridgeport is they start taxing people more for the services they need for the poor.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Bridgeport made shoes, you know, leather items. I mean, when my parents were young, it was still a pretty potent manufacturing time, which of course breeds all kinds of other industries. And the Sikorsky made helicopters on the edge of Bridgeport near Stratford and worked, you know, for a lot of the time my parents could remember, worked triple shifts, you know, through the night making that stuff after the war.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, and the darker side of that picture, right? Because it's always inherent in this, and you have to acknowledge it is a racism. There was always an undercurrent of it. It changed, meaning The race has changed, meaning the neighborhoods they grew up in were now all black and then all Latino, and they were unsafe, and the economy was terrible, and somebody had to be to blame for that, right? So, you know, I can be honest about it. That was an undercurrent of my youth. My parents were of a generation that really resented that changeover. They had seen their neighborhoods deteriorate. And so one of the things for me, you know, as a young reporter going into urban neighborhoods was the awakening of understanding that there were a bunch of sides to that story.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, that's funny. I think everybody whose parents went from the city to the suburbs had a certain amount of the same experience. It was they had very, they had great nostalgia and very romanticized memories probably of how great a city it was. It was. It was the park city. It was the city of PT Barnum and it still has some beautiful architecture. They would talk, you know, my dad went downtown every day. And when I was a kid, I remember going downtown with my grandmother, and they would always talk about what it used to be like, what it was, what used to be over there. The theater, the movie theater where the birds had built huge elaborate nests in the marquee because nothing ever occupied the space for the bulk of my childhood, you know, that was the great marquee theater, and that's where they went and saw movies. So that really makes an impression on you.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So for me, as a reporter, I think particularly early in my career, that was a driving force of curiosity for me was I wanted to get off the train for whatever reason. I wanted to understand what was going on in the cities like Bridgeport and like the Bronx and New York. I wanted to, you know, I wanted to experience that world. Figure out why we couldn't seem to do anything about it.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Manhattan and the Bronx, you'd see it always a Yankee fan. I go to the Bronx, you'd see it all from a train, but you knew you never got off.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, and I was about to go to graduate school for journalism, so he never saw that part of my career. I was actually speechwriting for the UN at that time, UNICEF. But the thing about Bridgeport particularly, because we really lived five minutes from Bridgeport. Both my parents grew up there and my mother's family had a bakery. My dad practiced law there for 30-odd years. Is that, you know, that was a, without my even knowing it growing up, that was a very visceral and primary education in deindustrialization and the economic changes that were going on. Something was very wrong, right? People went out towns like mine because the neighborhoods had deteriorated, the businesses had closed, taxes were high, services were low, crime was rampant. I cannot remember a time as a child when you weren't told to put the latches down. This is when you had manual latches, put the latches down in the car driving through certain neighborhoods. So, you know, and you took the train, the Metro North runs from that area into New York City, and you would go through Harlem and”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “My dad was a trial lawyer, a defense lawyer, did a lot of medical malpractice, aeronautical disaster, just back-to-back trials. He died pretty young.”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I did, I'm from Trumble, Connecticut, which I was just talking to one of the students here who's from Greenwich, and I said, that's about 20 minutes and two planets away. The lower edge or the upper edge of the Gold Coast. So Bridgeport's not so gold. It's a tough city. And it is, as you know, it's formative where you grow up. Yes. So, I think the significance for me, I mean, I had a relatively routine suburban existence. What'd you folks do?”

    2017-02-06 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 119 - Matt Bai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source