Utah Politico Pop Culture Rundown—Speaker Brad Wilson

NOTE ABOUT THIS FEATURE: There is a quote in one of my favorite movies High Fidelity, based on the wonderful Nick Hornby novel of the same name, that goes something like this: “What really matters is not what you are like, but what you like…books, records, films—these things matter.” While I somewhat disagree that it doesn’t matter at all what people are like, I do agree that it matters very much, and is very interesting and often revealing, what people like in terms of pop culture and media.

I thought it would be fascinating (hopefully!) to hear from the important and interesting people in Utah government and politics about their tastes in culture and media and how they consume news and entertainment. I believe that shared appreciation for culture and media can be a unifying force in a world that seems to find new ways to separate and divide us.

We sincerely appreciated Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall being our first participant in this feature. You can find the transcript of our chat with her here.

Our desire is for this regular feature to provide an informative and entertaining glimpse into the lives and minds of key decision-makers and influential political players in the state, and perhaps provide a good recommendation or two in the process.

We were very excited to have Utah House Speaker Brad Wilson agree to be our next guest on the Utah Politico Pop Culture Rundown. The transcript of our conversation, which is lightly edited for clarity and concision, is below:

Justin Y. Allen, UTPOL Underground Contributor (JYA)

Well, Speaker Wilson, thank you for taking time to be our second guest on the Utah Politico Pop Culture Rundown.

Speaker Brad Wilson (BW)

It’s my pleasure. People are clamoring for this opportunity coast to coast. I’m honored to be number two.

JYA

Well, the hope is that after we have heavy hitters like yourself doing it, nobody will be able to resist the invitation to be a part of this feature.

I just hope that by the end of this, people don’t say “He’s the most boring person I’ve ever met.” We’ll find out.

JYA

I find it very hard to believe that will happen. So, what are some of your favorite movies? Just talk about the movies that you’ve loved in your life, your family favorites, and your go-to movies?

Well, we are a movie family, actually. This is one of our things that we really like to do. And sometimes I don’t know if it’s about the popcorn or the movie, but we do like to see movies. I have a long list. When I think about the shows that have been meaningful for me, there is everything from the kind of regular stuff, like the Star Wars films from the 70s and 80s when I grew up, to kind of funny things. My wife’s gonna be embarrassed, but one of her favorite movies is Princess Bride. That’s a great movie.

We just went and watched the new Marvel’s Black Widow movie and that was a great show as well. I took my daughter and it’s really awesome to see movies with strong female characters. I don’t really want my daughter to become an international assassin, which is what that movie was about, but that was a good movie.

I love cars and one of my favorite more recent movies is Ford vs. Ferrari. And there’s this really amazing connection with that car from Ford vs. Ferrari being here in Utah. Another one of our family’s favorite shows, and it is such a stupid movie, is What About Bob? When our family needs a good laugh, that’s a show that we enjoy.

JYA

Do your children ever try to find parallels between you and Dr. Leo Marvin?

You will have to ask them that…

JYA

You don’t occasionally pull out the puppet with your kids?

No, but I have yelled “We’re sailing!” before on the boat. We don’t have a sailboat, though. Just a powerboat.

JYA

What about Rom-coms? Surely there has to be a favorite Rom-com…

I don’t have a great movie memory. You know how some people can quote lines from movies all the time? They have to be really special for me. Rom-coms? Nothing is coming to mind. That tells you a little bit about the state of my marriage, I guess.

JYA

Those are all really good choices. What About Bob? is a family favorite of ours, as is Princess Bride. You mentioned Star Wars earlier. Any other movies as a teenager or kid that were especially influential or made a big impression on you?

Well, it’s all a blur once you get into your 50s, which I am now. But you know what I’m really excited about this year? I think this was originally from my late teenage years, but there is a new Top Gun coming out. That was a show from either early adulthood or my teenage years–I can’t remember which it was. And I’m going to sound like a total geek, but I bought some Top Gun gear on Amazon the other day just to commemorate the new Top Gun coming out.

JYA

That is perfect. That is precisely the kind of information that we are trying to mine out of this interview.

This is really kind of embarrassing, but I really liked growing up with some of the Rocky movies. They were good!

JYA

Those are back in. There’s a whole new generation of Rocky movies–the Creed movies.

Those were good. You know, I just thought of another movie that’s more recent. Most of these are all kind of fun movies that we’re talking about, but Jeni and I traveled to India about 13-14 years ago and spent two weeks there travelling to some really remote parts. And we got back and maybe a couple years later, Slumdog Millionaire came out. First of all, that is an amazing movie–one of my all-time favorites, and that has a lot to do with the fact that we spent time over there, right? If people haven’t seen that movie, they should. What was amazing to me about that show is it is actually like the stuff we saw. We saw the fruits of that kind of behavior, the types of things people did to survive, and the price that children paid for those kinds of difficult circumstances. It’s just an amazing movie that makes you really feel fortunate as to who we are and how we live here in this country.

JYA

It’s been a long time since I saw that. I need to revisit that one. Any other films you can think of? Or have we exhausted your memory of movies that you love?

I’m just trying to think about some quirky things that we’ve seen. You know, another movie that my family loved was a movie called Eddie the Eagle or something like that. Kind of inspirational and really funny. And just a great movie.

JYA

What about on the TV side? I know you don’t have a lot of time to be spending with scripted television shows, but are there some favorite television programs that you guys have watched as a family. Or you and Jeni?

We have some from over the years, for sure. It’s funny though; right now, if you were to come to our house at any given time, we are almost always going to have sports on the television. And I don’t know if that’s because television just doesn’t seem as good as it used to, or if we just like sports. You know a little bit about our family. We love soccer. We love basketball. We watch a lot of sports on TV.

One of the first shows that Jeni and I got hooked on when we were first married–back when you actually had to watch on the same night at the same time every week— was The West Wing. We would never miss an episode of The West Wing. And even then I didn’t necessarily agree with all the politics of President Bartlett, but what a great, great show. And I’ve watched it a couple of times. I’ve binged it a couple of times in the last 20 years.

From a kind of guilty pleasure standpoint, another show that we watched in our early marriage that is still just a great show to watch is Boston Legal. It’s a terrible, terrible show with just a terrible, terrible protagonist. Denny Crane is such a terrible person, but so funny.

JYA

Was that the Shatner character?

Yeah, William Shatner. I think it was a super well-written show. He was great. And even had a few lessons in it. Let’s see…Are Netflix and TV the same thing now?

JYA

The lines are all blurred, right? I think they’re one and the same.

I don’t know if I should admit this or not. I talked about Ford vs. Ferrari and a show that I watched the last couple of summers that I have loved is called F1 Drive To Survive on Netflix. Trust me. As long as you don’t mind some salty language. I know you have heard salty language at some of those soccer matches you’ve gone to. It is really, really interesting. So I’ll just leave it at that.

JYA

That’s a good recommendation. That’s part of the reason I do this exercise is to come away with a few good recommendations of things I haven’t heard of.

And another weird, off the beaten path show on Netflix that I would encourage everyone to watch–and there’s no salty language in this, at least I don’t think there is, and it’s a show I would never have watched unless someone told me to watch it–But it’s a show on Netflix called My Octopus Teacher. Justin, you will be sad and emotional about an octopus by the end of the show.

JYA

I’m intrigued.

There are lots of other shows that we’ve watched over the years. I don’t know if this is TV or not–I guess this would be TV—but if you told me I could only watch one TV show ever again, it would be the HBO series on John Adams. I watched and loved that show before I was in politics.

JYA

Okay. I haven’t seen that.

You haven’t? I don’t think we can be friends.

JYA

Ha ha! Well, give me a week grace period or something?

Seriously, it is so amazing. It was based on David McCullough’s book on John Adams. Which, by the way, that’s an excellent book. It is so good.

JYA

Okay, I’m writing all these recommendations down. Any other family favorite TV shows? Any TV shows as a kid or teenager that you remember that made an impression on you?

I didn’t watch TV a lot. The only show I watched consistently growing up was M.A.S.H. Because it was on after the news and I liked to stay up. I love M.A.S.H. and I don’t know what that means.

JYA

It seemed like that show was always on. And maybe it was just because it came on after the news, but I got so sick and tired of the first few notes of that theme song.

I just loved that show. You know, we have off and on had shows that we would gather around the TV and watch. But TV watching has changed as a family. My kids all have devices that they can watch shows on, right? In some ways I kind of miss those days where you had to get together in the family room as a family to watch any kind of TV. So, it’s kind of sad actually.

JYA

I’ve had the same thought with my family. This is hilarious, but I want my teenagers to at least watch whatever different show they’re watching on their phone all in the same room together with everyone else, right? I mean, at least please do that instead of being off in your room or somewhere.

I’ll try that next time.

JYA

Let’s shift to music. Did you ever play an instrument growing up?

I was in the orchestra. I played the violin. My maternal grandmother, who I was very close to, was an elementary school orchestra teacher. What that meant was in South Davis County she would travel from elementary school to elementary school and teach fifth and sixth graders and was in charge of the orchestra. And then also the junior high orchestra. And I was given a violin in fifth grade and told “You’re taking orchestra.” So, I took orchestra in elementary school and through part of junior high. I didn’t stay with it, which is a regret. I actually have very few regrets. I think in life you just don’t want to have regrets. A genuine regret is that I didn’t stick with an instrument. So I played orchestra. I was actually first chair, Justin. I was pretty good.

JYA

Did you listen to or do you listen to classical music now?

Yep. In fact, a little-known trivia fact is that I probably wouldn’t be married to my wife if it wasn’t for the Utah Symphony. We were at that, “Are we going to stay together and keep dating or not? Is this going to get more serious or not?” moment, and the pivotal date was a concert at the Utah Symphony.

JYA

Do you remember what they were playing?

It was a classical Christmas show of some kind. I don’t know. To be honest, I was a lot more concerned about Jeni than I was the music that was playing that night.

JYA

It provided the appropriate ambiance for your objectives.

Yeah, it got us in the right frame of mind. We still go to the symphony. I love classical music. I’m not an expert by any means, but I enjoy it a great deal. And so, we’re not a musical family in terms of musical talent, but we always have music playing. Both my office at the Capitol and my office here has a stereo. Our home has stereo sound throughout every room, our vacation home has sound in every room, and we just like to have music playing in the background all the time. I don’t have the record collection you have—I don’t have a record collection at all.

JYA

Well, most sane people these days would just use the hundreds of thousands of songs that you have access to on your phone rather than collecting these outmoded physical objects…

There’s something about the tactile experience of an album and the way it sounds that I think you probably can’t replicate any other way. One of my daughters collects albums. Not like you do, but collects albums. I get it.

JYA

So you got me excited talking about how there is music always on. I’m dying to know what genres of music we’re talking about. What artists? What are the types of go-to playlists that you guys are consuming?

Well, it’s a safe bet that because I grew up in the 70s and 80s, you’ll find plenty of 70s and 80s music on my device. Not as much country, but rock and alternative music are always there. I’ve got teenagers so you’ll also find music from today that we listen to a lot. We spend a lot of time on our boat in the summer listening to a lot of tunes and it’s kind of hard to find music that everyone likes, but we’ve seemed to found some.

JYA

So paint me a picture of teenage Brad. Were you rocking a kind of longer hairstyle along with a black metal t-shirt? Paint me the picture of music fanhood for you at that age.

This is where political careers come crashing down. Well, you know, I was more of a rock or alternative music listener, but I wasn’t afraid to sport some parachute pants in 10th grade.

JYA

A little MC Hammer thing going on back then?

I think I wore them once, but I had a pair. I realized I looked like a complete idiot and never wore them again.

JYA

Those were different days though, right? You could rotate between MC Hammer, Metallica, and Erasure fairly comfortably back then.

That’s right. As far as my all-time favorite bands, you’re always safe putting on U2. I loved and still love Midnight Oil. I don’t know how many people even know Midnight Oil, but they are one of our favorites. And I still listen to their music now. And I also love INXS…

JYA

My first two cassette tapes were Joshua Tree and INXS Kick.

There you go. My first concert and one of my favorite bands is Van Halen. 1984 at the Salt Palace. Literally, we were on the top row of the Salt Palace. This was the Jump 1984 concert with David Lee Roth. And there was so much marijuana being smoked in the Salt Palace. And we were on the top row where all of that marijuana smoke settled. So, I’ve never smoked marijuana, but I have inhaled. I also liked Def Leppard and Depeche Mode. Growing up, that was the music that I listened to.

JYA

Yeah, that’s perfect. For some reason, I have very lasting memories, both positive and negative, of junior high school dances. Can you think back to any memorable Junior High slow dance songs? What were the songs that were playing when you finally had the courage to go ask that cute girl to dance?

I have blocked nearly every memory of junior high out of my mind for good reason. Everyone should do that; it’s good for your mental health.

JYA

Probably some good Def Leppard or Depeche Mode slow songs, maybe?

I think The Police maybe had a few. Maybe Air Supply? Honestly, you should have seen me in junior high. I had buck teeth the size of Bugs Bunny. And so the girls were not coming within 100 feet of me. I wore braces for five years to fix that problem. Junior High girls were not flocking in my direction.

JYA

Well, they’re all sorry now. It worked.

Yeah, right! I do have pretty straight teeth now.

JYA

So let me ask you this…Is there a single song that you think you’ve listened to more than any other song in your life? What do you think that might be?

Oh, man. You know what just came to mind and I have no idea why, but something from Def Leppard. That’s probably what it is because we always have some Def Leppard on the boat and we are often on our boat.

JYA

Let’s talk more about books. You mentioned John Adams obviously… Any other favorite books, either lately or that you read growing up?

Favorite books is kind of a big category. If you were to open up my Kindle, it’s a hot mess. There’s every kind of book on there that you could imagine. I like business books. I don’t have as much time as I used to sadly.

Just like you’ve got all those albums behind you, behind me are all business books. And I’ve read most of them. As you know, there are certain books that have a profound impact on you. And this is going to sound so cliche, but it’s just the honest truth. And there’s a whole story behind this. And interestingly enough, it’s really the same month I told you about when I was dating Jeni, where I read Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And I have it right here on my bookshelf. And it changed my life. And it really saved my career.

So, I have a strong affinity for business books. They’ve really shaped my career and shaped how I approach the world. I keep four books handy that I can grab right off my desk. I’ll tell you what the others are. I have one from Jim Collins called Good to Great. A book that most people haven’t heard of is from an author called Marcus Buckingham called First, Break All The Rules. It’s really a book about leadership and management together, and how they’re so integral. The fourth one would be The Four Disciplines of Execution. It’s also a Covey book. That book has made a really interesting and important impact on my business. I’m in my business office right now and those are some favorite business books, but I’ve got dozens more.

JYA

Let’s hear all of them. You’ll be providing some readers a summer reading list here.

I’ll just give you a couple of others. I’m guessing a lot of people have heard of Patrick Lencioni. He’s a great business author that writes all of his books in a business fable format. And they’re really great books to use with a team of people. They’re all targeted for different purposes. He would be a great author for people to look into. I just finished a book called The Infinite Game (by Simon Sinek) at the recommendation of someone else. And it was such a good book.

I don’t know if a lot of people do this, but I’ll download a book on my Kindle. And I’ll start reading and I will think, “This is so good.” So then I also order it on Audible. And then I order a hard copy of the book. And that was one of those books for me. Because it was an interesting book where I thought it transcended business into politics really well. I’ve been driving people in my office crazy talking about it, but it’s just a great book to kind of reframe how we think about life in the sense that life is not full of wins and losses. The game will continue, so you’ve got to think kind of longer-term about how you manage your business, your political career, or things like that.

A couple of my other favorite books I read in the same year quite a few years ago. I read Unbroken and The Boys In The Boat. Both amazing books. And when I think of factual, historical books, those are two that really stand out and should be on everyone’s must-read list. I’m guessing most people probably have read them.

JYA

I love that you’re talking about how much you read on your Kindle. Obviously, you buy a lot of physical books as well. What is the percentage of the ratio of Kindle reading versus physical book reading?

It’s probably 70% Kindle and 30% paper. I love the tactile feel of reading a book, but Kindles are just so dang convenient. It’s got a light for when my wife goes to sleep, and it is so easy to use.

JYA

Are you still reading any newspapers or magazines? Are you subscribing to any magazines in your home or office?

Not as much on the newspapers anymore. I might offend some people here. Hopefully, no reporters see this, but I’m finding it harder and harder to find newspapers anywhere that I think execute very well. And I do read a lot online, but it’s kind of from all over the place. It’s kind of been a big disappointment, the last five or so years on the newspaper side of things.

Magazine-wise, I still read magazines. Here at the office, we get Utah Business and it’s great. I also get some other magazines like Men’s Journal. I think I live vicariously through the people that have the adventures in Men’s Journal. I read car magazines. Most of those I’m reading online now. And, we have for our entire marriage got Reader’s Digest in the mail every month. And the only problem is I realized I need to upgrade to the old people, larger font version of Reader’s Digest now. They make the normal size and they make the old people size, and I need the old people size now.

JYA

That is awesome. So I’m interested, you mentioned that you are getting your information from a lot of places. Where are you getting good information? Are there specific websites that you go to or is it on social media that you’re finding articles or places that you trust that you’re picking up information?

I don’t spend a lot of time on social media anymore. And my life has been better because of it. I don’t know if I should admit that or not. I do get on there daily and still post some things. But I really have made an effort to not spend as much time and it’s been good. To be honest, there’s just so much negative and so much that’s partially accurate that I found it’s been liberating to invest my time differently. But I do get the Wall Street Journal. That’s actually one of the few places I pay for a subscription. But it’s kind of hit and miss how much I read it. You know what I’ve done? Again, I don’t know if I should be admitting this publicly or not, but I’ve taken the apps off my phone for social media. And when I want to get into them, I have to go to the web browser. It just has helped me spend a lot less time on those sites, but I can still get there if I need to. It’s been great. And I know a lot of people do this, but with Apple news, I just created a setup there that works for me with the right subscriptions to get my curated news every day. I do read the news every day, but not from one source.

JYA

Are you a theater family? Do you enjoy community theater or Broadway-type live theater?

Yeah, we like live theater. I guess they’ve all passed that age now, but we had a fun tradition with our kids where we wanted to take our kids by themselves on a couple of trips as they were growing up. And one of the trips we did was when our kids would turn eight or so, we would take them back to New York and take them to some Broadway shows. And that was just such a great experience. Now, our youngest is turning 17, so it’s been a while. We actually have season tickets to Eccles. We go to Centerpoint quite a bit here in Davis County and they do a great job. That’s definitely something that we do.

JYA

Any acting experience? I know you’ve got family involved with Centerpoint. They’ve never convinced you to get on the stage?

You know, just politics is the closest to acting that I do. So, no acting experience.

JYA

What about podcasts? Do you find time to subscribe to any podcasts and get information that way?

I spent a lot of windshield time traveling to different things. We have a cabin up in Idaho and one of my favorite things is to put on a book on tape on Audible or a podcast and just hit the road. And so I do that a lot. I’m kind of a creature of habit with podcasts. This is kind of embarrassing, but there’s a podcast called The Art of Manliness, which I actually really like. I’m not trying to be more manly, but it’s got all of these really interesting topics that are men’s interest that I listen to. I really liked the first couple of seasons of Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell. It has gotten a little bit quirky the last couple of seasons, but I’ve still listened to most of those.

One of my former employees, who is still a really good friend, has started a new podcast that I’ve really, really liked. It’s called Choose Difficult by Abe Shreve up in Weber County. It’s just a great podcast that you may want to check out. A couple of the episodes are amazing; some of the people he interviewed were great.

JYA

Well, you’ve been so gracious to give as much time to this as you have. A couple of final things I wanted to ask you as we wrap up. What are your favorite places in Utah? Your favorite place in the United States outside of Utah? And any favorite place in the world outside of the United States?

In Utah, the smart thing to say would be anywhere my wife is. I am very blessed to have a great wife. We have two favorite spots in Utah: Lake Powell, which is half in Arizona and half Utah; and Bear Lake, which is half in Idaho and half in Utah. Those would be my favorite spots in Utah, mostly because of the memories we’ve made with our family at those places.

Outside of Utah, if I need to just get away, and if we have some downtime, Jeni and I go to Hawaii. We’ve got a favorite place that we go to and we get over there pretty regularly enough and we know what we like to do. And it’s kind of rinse and repeat, which is what you need when you need to clear your head.

And if you ask me, “Of all the places we’ve been internationally, if I can only have gone to one of them, where would it be?” That’s how I’m interpreting your question. Most places internationally, I’ll never go back. You do it once and you’ve kind of checked that box. But the place that Jeni and I went internationally that was by far our favorite vacation overseas was we went and spent a week in Normandy. And it was actually not intentional. There was a legislative event there and we got put in a small group and we ended up with a private tour guide that we were able to connect with. And it was an amazing experience. I don’t say this to try to garner goodwill from people, but I will tell you that no one should be allowed to serve in the United States Congress or our Senate without having spent a week in Normandy. And it’s a place every American should spend some time. It will change your life. And I have lots of strong opinions about some of the political winds of today, but the gratitude for our country that I have after visiting that spot is very, very deep. I’ve been to some cool places, but that’s an experience I would never trade.