Jeff Hobbs, SHOW THEM YOU'RE GOOD

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[2:15]Jeff Hobbs is the author of Show Them Your Good, a portrait of boys in the City of Angels the year before college.

[2:21]He's also the author of the short and tragic life of Robert Peace, which won the Los Angeles Times book preps and also the book The Tourists. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

[2:31]Hi, Zibi. Hi, how are you? Good. Thanks. Thank you so much for coming on momstone of time to read books and talking about your latest books show them your good.

[2:41]But as I mentioned to you over email, I also loved your first book. So anyway, welcome on. That means a lot.

[2:47]So show them your good. Can you tell listeners please what it's about? Show them your good. Yeah, it's about a group of senior boys at two different high schools in very different neighborhoods in Los Angeles applying to college.

[3:00]And going through their last year of high school. And what inspired you to tackle this topic. It seems like you're very interested in how different lives along the same timelines can beer off in different ways from this book from Robert Pierce book.

[3:15]What's that about? Where's that coming from?

[3:17]I mean, so I wrote the short and tragic life of Robert Peace about a really good friend of mine from college who passed away and that book was very hard and personal and I didn't really think anybody would read it because it is hard.

[3:34]But when it came out something sort of terrifying happened, which is that a lot of schools started asking me to come visit and talk and you can already tell after two minutes that I was never meant to speak in public.

[3:50]Really, yes, we can general. Yeah, so I went to schools from Ivy League schools to juvenile halls and a lot of spaces in between, I would say mostly city public high schools and had these conversations with young people and what I found, you know, we were talking about race and education and access and entitlement.

[4:14]There was something about Rob Peace and his story that kind of brought young people, particularly young men to share their own stories or even just fragments of their families and their aspirations and I carried those home from these different places and started.

[4:32]I don't know it was meaningful and I just started thinking that maybe there's a way to tell some stories about what it looks like and feels like to be 18 years old in America right now.

[4:43]What was your experience at 18 like it was unremarkable.

[4:47]I played some sports and what part of the world did you graph in?

[4:51]I grew up in the country in Pennsylvania, so a small school where you go to school with the same 50 people for 14 years, very different from going to high school in Los Angeles.

[5:03]But yeah, this project in no way was me trying to relive the glory days or sort of the opposite.

[5:11]And how did you find the guys in your book like the character, not character, the actual person, Owen, his parents were in the film industry and so, you know, had such reputable careers themselves and then you have other,

[5:28]boy, his parents were Chinese immigrants and you have boys, all different kinds of boys. Let me just say that for all different backgrounds. How did you find them and why did you pick them?

[5:37]Sure. Well, I didn't really pick them so to speak. So I sort of undertook this project and started reaching out to schools and my wife thought I'd lost my gourd, which maybe I had, but very few schools want some awkward journalist roaming around their hallways.

[5:56]I know what I mean, mainly because, you know, schools get dinged a lot by journalists. But so these two schools, I visited both of them before to again speak at assemblies and do book groups and so yeah, so I knew some teachers and principles took a chance and open their doors.

[6:17]They just kind of sent an email out to seniors and said there's going to be this guy hanging around if you would like to meet him, you know, come to such and such classroom at such and such time.

[6:29]So these guys came one of these schools is in South LA right outside of Compton, which is a neighborhood, you know, a lot of people have heard of and even think they know what it's like and the other school is Beverly Hills High School, which again, if you watch TV in the 90s, you might think you know what's going on there.

[6:49]But yeah, so these four or five guys in each school came and then they kept coming every week. And so that yeah center of the research was just these roundtable conversations I would have with these groups once a week for two or three hours at a time about what was going on with with their lives. I think they came because I brought food.

[7:11]Yeah, that will bring most young men anywhere. So what do you feel like after spending all this time with all these guys and analyzing all their interactions, their family and their grades and everything.

[7:27]What was like the main takeaway like what it like I feel like people are very down on the use in the US today and what kind of life are we giving them and all this like do you feel that sense of pessimism do you feel more optimism like what's your sort of outlook on the next generation if you will.

[7:45]Oh well I'm optimistic and I mean I always risk sounding a little bit kumbaya maybe but I got to know these guys really well over the course of a year and what I found is it's an exceptionally interesting generation I think because these guys know that they're the ones who are going to be dealing with a lot of issues that you know for older people we talk about them and we get outraged about them.

[8:14]But they're still kind of abstract whether you're talking about climate or politics race all those things I think these guys know that you know it's on their shoulders and not abstractily.

[8:26]But ended up coming out of these conversations is the idea of self determination, which is you know it's our national ethos that if you want something in dream big and work hard you can get that thing and particularly in schools that is something that's that's a notion that's drilled in pretty hard it's in every graduation speech I've ever heard and I've heard a lot at this point and a lot of that year as they applied to college again from very.

[8:55]different backgrounds, very different levels of privilege and family circumstances and levels of help you know I think it was them learning that those lines are not straight and life is messy and things go wrong and the way they adapted to that messiness of being a human being is what makes me optimistic because that is resilience and.

[9:22]resilience and resilience is the other thing that's drilled in high schools, true, so when you were writing this book and doing all the research, what was your process like how long did you take to do the researchers is the writing and like how did you sort through just the piles of.

[9:38]transcripts like how did you actually do it, oh I mean you know that's just a lot of work so for the year this was the 2016 17.

[9:48]school year where these guys gave me a lot of time when they didn't really have much time and yeah again I mean I probably spent 100 hours or so with each group and.

[10:00]I went to classes and dances and sports games and plays and proms. So that's a tall stack of

[10:08]transcripts. You know, I recorded most of it and you take that home and type it out and start

[10:14]rooting through it. And really the hard thing was, you know, editing what was probably 2,000

[10:21]pages of single-spaced transcripts down to a book because you get very attached to people and

[10:28]you get very attached to their stories and you have to leave things out and that's hard sometimes.

[10:34]That's true. Do you always know you wanted to sort of investigate and be a journalist and a writer and

[10:40]all that? Like, was that something that you always had in your mind? Well, writer, yes, to the point

[10:46]where, you know, my older brother was playing baseball games and my dad would be yelling at me to

[10:51]get out of a tree and stop reading. But journalism, no. And that was something that sort of happened

[10:58]when my friend died, Rob Peace. It's not as if I went to his funeral thinking I was going to write a

[11:04]book, but I went to his funeral and, you know, people did the things they do at funerals to celebrate

[11:10]a person and mainly that is to tell stories. And at the time, I guess I thought I'd just write down

[11:17]some stories maybe for a high school newsletter where the Yale magazine or something that,

[11:22]again, nobody would read. Let Mike speak to his life more than his death and at undertaking kind of,

[11:28]I call it a eulogy that got out of hand. But, you know, through that process, I guess I just

[11:35]learned I was a good listener and that I like listening. So I like listening too. Maybe we should

[11:40]just have a podcast where we both just sit here silent and just, you know, hear the background noise

[11:44]and see how that gets. Listen to the big thing and around. Yeah, I could drag in a dog if you want it.

[11:51]So what project are you working on now? I've been, I spent the last year on a project about

[11:56]juvenile halls sort of similar, some different schools, they are schools sort of jails slash schools

[12:04]and I've just been spending time with young people going through those systems. Exciting.

[12:09]And why does your wife think you're out of your cord for like focusing so much on this age group?

[12:14]And basically reliving your youth that you didn't really have in this way. And like, what's that about?

[12:20]Well, I think you just said it and I mean, it's odd to tell your family that you're not going to

[12:26]be cooking dinner on Friday night because you're going to a Halloween dance and

[12:31]well, that way. Yeah, I thought the stories were just really powerful. Like, they're kids,

[12:37]but they're making these adult decisions. And, you know, you mentioned Owen,

[12:42]whose parents are very successful in Hollywood. And he's kind of the perfect picture of this

[12:48]privileged Beverly Hills kid, but he's his mother's bedridden with an illness. And he, you know,

[12:55]he knows how little the world really cares about privilege. And he knows randomness. And just

[13:01]he's trying to figure out how to be a good person knowing nobody really cares if he's a good person

[13:06]because he's a rich kid from Beverly Hills and a kid named Carlos who was applying to Ivy League

[13:12]schools in DACA at the same time and kind of carrying that societal narrative of upward mobility of

[13:20]all these kind of tropes we have in our, in our world. I don't know, when you get underneath them

[13:24]a little bit and look at the humans, they're pretty complicated. And they're, and they're

[13:28]hard narratives for these people to carry. It's true. I felt so terrible for Owen's mom

[13:34]with not being able to find diagnosis for so long and ending up in a wheelchair and

[13:39]like all of that without knowing even really what was going on with her.

[13:43]Yeah, there's a really touching scene to me when he's in all the school plays and

[13:47]he was practicing like a song and dance number for Huttonham County spelling bee was the place title.

[13:53]So at night he would sort of sing and dance at the foot of his mother's bed while she kind of

[13:59]harshly critiqued him. Yeah. Well, I mean none of my kids are running around doing full on

[14:04]dance recitals for me like that. I don't know. Maybe just figure out a way to get better acting

[14:10]output. Anyway, do you have any advice for aspiring authors? Oh, no. I mean, it's usually just kind

[14:18]of clumsy process of stumbling around. I find well, my particular work, which I guess is called

[14:25]immersion journalism. I don't know if it exactly fits. But like we said, it's just kind of sitting

[14:31]and listening and you know different issue, but I'm a white guy who grew up pretty easy and my work,

[14:39]you know brings me around people who don't look like me and didn't grow up easy. And that's

[14:44]a complicated thing. A lot of them trust me to tell their stories and I take that seriously and

[14:50]a lot of them don't trust me to tell their stories and I take that seriously too. It's great.

[14:55]Well, thank you, Jeff. Thanks for talking about your new book. And I'm sorry. I read your last

[15:00]book a while ago. I should have like reread it before we talked to L. I remember as how much I

[15:04]loved it. And I'm sorry if I messed up any details. That's a while back. Sometimes I just have a feeling,

[15:11]you know, like I see book covers. I get like every cover. I feel like a feeling and I remember

[15:15]loving it or not really liking it or not even finishing. And I don't know, some books really stand out

[15:19]on the shelf, but I can't always say exactly what about it was what I don't know. Anyway,

[15:25]sorry for not bringing up any details, but I know it was amazing. And this was a really interesting

[15:30]portrayal of all of your people also. No, it means a lot that you would remember that you would

[15:35]have me. Well, good luck on the juvenile hall thing. And if you get all the way back down to kindergarten,

[15:42]I have one of those, you know, lurking about. So, you know, if you get there, you might need like a

[15:46]therapist alongside. I don't know. We'll see what happens, but that sounds treacherous.

[15:52]I have a first grader, so I'm sort of in that all day. Got it. Yes. All right. Well, thank you so much.

[15:59]It was nice to chat with you today. Yeah, it was well. Thank you. Okay. Thanks. Bye-bye.

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