The fifth bonus episode of The Source Material - the second and final conversation with Jared Beasley.

Last week you heard Jared Beasley at Frozen Head: awake for three nights, present, inside the story. This week you hear the studio version: rested, reflective, with the distance that only time gives you.

Whistling in the Dark is the book conversation, Jared talking about what it took to write The Endurance Artist, what he found inside the story of Gary Cantrell, and what the Barkley means as a cultural object beyond the race itself. There are things Jared can say in the studio that he couldn't say at Frozen Head. You can't see the shape of something when you're standing inside it.

Next week: the man himself. But first, the biographer who spent three years trying to understand him.

Show Notes

Guest Featured









Jared BeasleyJournalist and author of The Endurance Artist: Lazarus Lake, the Barkley, and a Race With No End (Simon & Schuster)

Key Themes

  • The writing of The Endurance Artist: what three years of reporting looks like from the inside

  • What Jared found that surprised him most about Laz

  • The Barkley as a cultural phenomenon: Netflix, the New York Times, the viral photographs

  • Laz on his own fame, the quote Jared captured that appears nowhere else

  • What the race means beyond sport, the philosophical argument of the book

  • The difference between the Laz the public sees and the Laz Jared came to know


Standout Moment

Jared on the moment he knew he had a book: the math problem, the quit, and the email, and realizing that Laz had put him through a version of the Barkley before he'd ever set foot in Frozen Head.


Series Context


Bonus Episode 05 of 06. The penultimate episode of The Source Material. Next episode: Barkley's Mad Genius - Doc and Laz, the final word.


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