Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Share & Anti-Pulitzer & Tell with Michael Cruz Kayne and Sam Reich About this episode What does Mark Cuban think of Pablo's big Pulitzer Prize win? Did A. I. write that JPMorgan threesome lawsuit? And are the steroid Olympics in fact the Apollo mission of RFK Jr.'s America? Plus: third-tier "Mad Men" characters, self-canonization, the polymath of punch-ups, the lifespan of an inbred beagle... and Zoop.
Further content:
• Pablo Torre left the worldwide leader in sports to start a podcast. It just won a Pulitzer. https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2026/pablo-torre-finds-out-pulitzer-prize-kawhi-leonard/ (Poynter)
• Ex-JPMorgan banker Chirayu Rana files wild new claims against exec https://nypost.com/2026/05/04/business/ex-jpmorgan-banker-chirayu-rana-files-wild-new-claims-against-lorna-hajdini/ (New York Post)
• Inside the Enhanced Games, Where Athletes Compete on Steroids. And Growth Hormones. And Adderall. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/inside-the-enhanced-games (Vanity Fair)
• Michael Cruz Kayne: Sorry For Your Loss https://watch.dropout.tv/videos/michael-cruz-kayne-sorry-for-your-loss (Dropout TV)
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
0:06 Speaker 01 Soccer doesn't make anyone wet.
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1:20 Speaker 01 The Pulitzer's gonna get taken away.
1:22 Pablo Torre? Oh, God.
1:23 Speaker 01 They're gonna listen to this audio quality.
1:25 Pablo Torre? This is, I'm realizing what a nightmare it is to follow up winning a Pulitzer Prize with this episode.
1:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, you've made a huge mistake. You've made a huge mistake.
1:35 Pablo Torre? It's tough.
1:37 Speaker 01 It's real tough.
1:38 Pablo Torre? Sam Reich, thank you for being here. I have been looking forward to meeting you, only to cast you aside for a second to talk about myself.
1:45 Speaker 01 Good.
1:46 Pablo Torre? Wonderful.
1:46 Speaker 01 Thank God. I loathe being this hairy attention.
1:52 Pablo Torre? So we're gonna get back to doing share and tell with Michael Cruz Kane and our new friend, Sam Reich, the CEO of Dropout, which is this truly amazing comedy company that I want you guys to know about. That'll be all happening just a second here. But something I feel obligated to formally tell you, you being the listeners and viewers who stick with us here three times a week, is that on Sunday at 12:04 PM Eastern, I got a call from our licensing partners at The Athletic and the New York Times Company. And they told me something unforgettable.
2:25 Speaker 01 We're actually awarding you the first ever anti-Pulitzer.
2:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's exactly right.
2:31 Pablo Torre? That felt more logical than what actually happened, which is that the staff of Pablo Torre finds out, it turns out, had won the Pulitzer Prize. And look, if you're wondering if this is the most surreal thing that has ever happened in my life personally, the answer is yes.
2:54 Speaker 01 Congratulations. I mean, what a startling achievement. Have you, like, you had to do this at some point, I'm guessing. You had to go through your own stuff and go, what here do I feel like might be worthy of a Pulitzer?
3:08 Speaker 03 Also, I would say I've been on, if I had to guess, 7,000 episodes of this program. And not one of them is remotely close to Pulitzer-worthy.
3:17 Speaker 01 You do not know that you weren't submitted, do you, Michael?
3:20 Speaker 03 I guess I don't know for a fact. Maybe the 12th episode investigating Bill Belichick's girlfriend could have been the one, but I'm not sure.
3:32 Pablo Torre? And so, smash cut to Monday afternoon, when I find myself as an independent journalist here at Metal Lark Media, whose show joined The Athletic Podcast Network last September, atop this iconic red staircase in the middle of the New York Times building. And if you were a true journalism nerd like me, you may have seen this scene before in photos or movies. It's this annual gathering of all of these reporters and editors and dignitaries arrayed across multiple floors of this enormous, open-floor-plan newsroom, the largest newsroom in America, to hear speeches from the winners of this genuinely overwhelming award.
4:17 Pablo Torre? There was the unbelievable investigation that The Times reported into the Trump administration's self-enrichment. There was their astonishing news photography in Gaza, these trenchant columns about authoritarianism. And also, a multi-part series about circumventing the NBA salary cap, involving a company called Aspiration.
4:42 Speaker 04 It is a surreal honor to address the galactic extent. I'm coming out of a rimmed planet in your network. And I'm thrilled to be invited to celebrate a day full of recognition that is final. I knew you guys were good, but today is really one of those days where I feel a little loose again. Part of this is, frankly, because I'm from the New York City border, a first-generation American, parents from the Philippines, like you're well-creed describing The Times.
5:23 Speaker 04 And I've seen documentaries, and you guys do this thing. And it's even better when you get to do this thing as a part of it. That's what I'm trying to do.
5:36 Pablo Torre? But just one quick bit of context here, apparently, is that it is very rare, I have been told, for sports journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize. And our category, audio reporting, which is, of course, not a sports category, it had never before been won by a talk show as a genre, either. Certainly not one that has also taste-tested the greatest strains of athlete-branded weed.
6:03 Speaker 04 But if you talk to the folks who make up your show, but it is something for you today, Chris Vamelo, Matt Zalbino, Daniel Capadia, I've played Dan Levis Park, Danny Miami, who founded Metal Media, they'll tell you that this painfully sincere appreciation of journalism began at conception, as it were. What we wanted to do from the very beginning was to ban the dallying of reporting in a sea of... Not. And the value of our core obligation needs of principle of public interest is the thing that I find as a key element of our kindred spirit here. One of the things, though, that I've learned, of course, making the show is that sincere
6:48 Speaker 04 veneration of journalism principles can coexist with extreme conviction around journalism's form. And I don't think that you're on everything, far from it, just ask the NBA. But in reducing this series about the Clippers and a carbon credits company and the NBA, we thought a lot about how reporting is presented and communicated and designed for new audiences. And it turns out these audiences may not realize at first blush that they actually share the same principles of many of the people in this room today. The principle of reporting of fear or favor, and maybe they've actually believed in that all along.
7:30 Speaker 04 And that is helped, in part, because the way we do our show, we bring friends, expert witnesses, like David Sanzen and Meena Hassan, who open middle folders and read financial statements and synthesize testimony of corporate whistleblowers. And it has been incredibly entertaining to learn that if you believe that reporting can be both fun and important, an audience of sports fans might actually agree. So, sports helps, obviously, as a genre. I continue to think of sports as the cheese we melt on the broccoli of any number of non-sports hotspots. But I also think of it as the industry where the richest people on earth are increasingly
8:10 Speaker 04 desperate to buy in, only to realize when it comes to these pesky regulations and new journalists, that they simply cannot buy the thing that they want the most.
8:22 Pablo Torre? And at this point in the speech, I will now observe, listening back in retrospect, I had basically unilaterally started podcasting.
8:33 Speaker 04 So I'll just stand here by saying thank you to everybody who bet and supported a show like this. Makes any much sense, frankly. And I'll say thank you to the folks who made Pablo Torre find out what it is, which is to say, a show that is a lot more than the guy whose name gets to begin it. We made this thing pretty kinds of deep into Walter Avro, Maxwell Carney, Brian Cortez, Lonnie Linda, Patrick Kim, Mimi Lomen, Robin Gray, Claire Taylor, Randy Burcic, Bailey Carlin, Andrew Northern, Chris Poe, down with us. The secret of Pablo Torre finds out in case it's not obvious now, is that a whole bunch of people that we need to maybe go there. And as a kid who grew up here, his parents
9:14 Speaker 04 admitted they continue to wonder if it's too late for me to go to med school. It may have been out there watching me reveal something to them right now. I think what I found out is that I found a career in team two crowd. So thank you so much.
9:35 Pablo Torre? And so, right now, dear listener, is around where you might be wondering what many have been asking in the days since our staff won this thing during an ongoing NBA investigation, incidentally. What about Mark Cuban? And so I will now just quickly read from an email I received from our old debate partner, the foremost representative of Team Balmer, the billionaire former Mavericks owner, who sent this on Tuesday at 1:09 PM Eastern. The subject line, "Congrats!" exclamation point. Quote, "I want a fake Pulitzer for
10:17 Pablo Torre? my contributions." Smiling face emoticon. "Well done." End quote.
10:29 Pablo Torre? And yeah, look, I gotta admit, despite it all, I miss that guy. And all of this now returns us to our new special guest today, another character in the world of independent media, as we take a tour of a couple of very different sorts of workplaces.
10:54 Pablo Torre? How should we explain who Sam is, Michael Cruz Kane?
10:57 Speaker 03 I guess I would say that he runs Dropout. That'd be the first thing that I would say. Sam runs Dropout, which is like, kind of the coolest thing going, I guess, in the world? I think it might be the coolest thing happening.
11:07 Pablo Torre? That is the slogan, which feels, which feels bold, but it does resonate.
11:12 Speaker 01 A little self-aggrandizing?
11:13 Speaker 03 I think there are like, maybe, uh, two companies that are not bad. I'm gonna say Dropout, and maybe UNICEF would be the other one. But I don't even know. I don't know if that's right. I don't know if UNICEF is problematic or not. There's gotta be something wrong with it. I just don't know. I don't know what it is.
11:28 Pablo Torre? That's what we're here to find out.
11:30 Speaker 03 That's why-
11:30 Pablo Torre? What is Sam hiding?
11:32 Speaker 03 We're here to confront Sam with a bunch of emails we've found that are-
11:35 Speaker 01 There's actually oil under my home, and we're drilling right now.
11:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's the thing. All the money is used for fracking.
11:42 Speaker 01 Not anymore. I got that Kickstarter money now.
11:44 Pablo Torre? Sam is currently, for those not watching on YouTube, Sam is burying a million dollars in Kickstarter money that he raised in the last two hours with a new board game.
11:52 Speaker 03 The board game, by the way, if I'm not mistaken, Sam, is called Fracking, apostrophe. Is that right?
11:58 Speaker 01 It is. It is.
12:01 Speaker 03 It's a game to teach your kids the virtues of fracking.
12:04 Speaker 01 It's called I Drink Your Milkshake.
12:08 Pablo Torre? When I monitor Dropout from afar, I marvel at, not just the financial success and the Kickstarter money and all this stuff, but you have clearly accessed a demographic that was starving for the thing that you uniquely are offering.
12:25 Speaker 03 It's an eye-opening thing for me to be like, oh, someone I know can just win a Pulitzer? That's crazy. A guy I know can make a million dollars on Kickstarter for a board game? What? It's wild. It's exciting that this is the world that we live in. Although, there are only like a few good things.
12:42 Pablo Torre? There's so much-
12:43 Speaker 03 These are two of them.
12:43 Pablo Torre? There's so many bad things. There's so many bad things, Sam. I wonder what it feels like to be the proprietor of a good thing.
12:51 Speaker 01 The bar is pretty low for good thing. There are no shareholders because we're not a public company. There's no private equity because we basically turned over from Call of Duty and Drop Out in such a way that it was just handing over the bank account. And because there isn't, that means that the only greedy person here who's going to [BLEEP] this up is me. And if I'm not a sociopath-
13:18 Speaker 01 We will tend to be a pretty good company.
13:22 Pablo Torre? Sam feels like not only a good playdate, but like a genuinely decent person who is, if nothing else, incentivized to be decent. And yet, the story that I want to know if Sam knows about is this JP Morgan story.
13:37 Speaker 01 I think I might have read a headline, but I would love, I'd love a little dive.
13:43 Speaker 03 Put on your trunks, my guy. We're going for a dive.
13:46 Pablo Torre? We're going to the NewYorkPost.com.
13:49 Speaker 03 Everyone's favorite website.
13:51 Pablo Torre? Because the Daily Mail.
13:52 Speaker 03 Oh, I have it bookmarked. No problem.
13:55 Pablo Torre? The NewYorkPost.com is where we journalistically will turn in the episode that, once again, follows the winning of a Pulitzer Prize.
14:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, kind of a meandering conversation, ending in a little bit of news dive.
14:06 Pablo Torre? Yeah. Quote, "bombshell sex harassment suit against a woman whose name I'll leave out because it feels like she shouldn't be named in public."
14:13 Speaker 03 Yes, shouldn't even be in the story.
14:15 Pablo Torre? She's not really a relevant character. Against, fill in the blank, female employee's name, JP Morgan branded "complete fabrication" as John Doe is unmasked.
14:26 Pablo Torre? Now, you're familiar with this story, Michael?
14:28 Speaker 03 I am quite familiar.
14:29 Pablo Torre? From your recollection, what was this story, these fabrications allegedly, this sex harassment suit about?
14:38 Speaker 03 So, sort of the first thing that broke about this was not that it was fabricated, but that there was this massive, very detailed, expansive sexual harassment case filed against a woman at JP Morgan by a man who was her subordinate. And it was very detailed, right? Like, specific things she would say to him, acts she forced him to perform, drugs that she...
15:00 Pablo Torre? Do you want to read some of the quotes?
15:01 Speaker 03 Do I want to read some of the quotes? Not especially. You can read some.
15:06 Speaker 01 I think we'd all be better protected if they came out of the mouth of a Pulitzer winner.
15:12 Speaker 03 No, these are all fake, these are fake quotes.
15:15 Pablo Torre? Again, so-
15:16 Speaker 03 None of this was ever said by a person, until Paulo says it right now.
15:20 Pablo Torre? Well, to be clear, the Daily Mail had obtained a copy of this lawsuit. The Daily Mail's article has since disappeared. But it's made its way out to the internet and the sort of like archaeological dig of what was the story about leads me to this woman in question allegedly telling this guy who seems to have, spoiler alert, made all of this up, quote, "I bet your little Asian fish head wife doesn't have these cannons."
15:46 Speaker 03 I think that was the sentence that immediately made me go, "Is this real?" Because I don't think, I've, I just can't, cannons doesn't seem like a way that a person-
15:56 Pablo Torre? That's where, that's the first word.
15:58 Speaker 03 Right away, I hear someone referring to her own bosom as cannons, and I'm skeptical.
16:04 Speaker 01 It feels like, like something that like a, a third tier Mad Men character-
16:10 Speaker 03 Yes, absolutely.
16:11 Speaker 01 Might have said.
16:12 Speaker 03 A day player on Mad Men says the thing about the cannons and then he gets fired.
16:15 Pablo Torre? It also feels a bit 1960s to call someone a slur that I didn't know, which is fish head.
16:20 Speaker 03 Is fish head an Asian slur?
16:22 Pablo Torre? That's what the internet is concluding.
16:24 Speaker 03 Because that I, I also never, as a, as a half Asian person, I have never in my life heard someone called a fish head.
16:30 Pablo Torre? Right, right, right, right.
16:31 Speaker 03 Why fish head? I'm trying to think of things that are unique to the head of a fish. They have eyes on opposite sides of their head, right?
16:37 Pablo Torre? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
16:37 Speaker 03 That's the other, that's the only fact I know about fish. They eat, do we eat fish heads, maybe?
16:41 Pablo Torre? I do.
16:42 Speaker 03 I mean, my mom will [bleep] up a fish head, for sure.
16:43 Pablo Torre? Absolutely, my mom will eat the eyes out of a fish head.
16:45 Speaker 03 Really?
16:46 Pablo Torre? Are we now justifying-
16:47 Speaker 01 When you're, when you're trying to justify a slur, you're already on the wrong side of the slur.
16:51 Speaker 03 Okay, see, this is why you should run your company that you run, and I should be doing whatever I do. Immediately, I'm like, there's gotta be something to this.
16:59 Speaker 01 What about this slur? What is the con, the truth that would lead us to establish this slur?
17:05 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly. Um, okay, I see what I've done is wrong, I understand. Sam's right.
17:09 Pablo Torre? The journalism of was, does any of this smell weird?
17:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:15 Pablo Torre? Fish head aside, it continues in which the woman in question is allegedly propositioning the original litigant for oral sex in the office on one occasion, asking allegedly, and let's presume again falsely, quote, "Birthday BJ for the brown boy, my little brown boy."
17:37 Speaker 03 Okay, that also doesn't, didn't sound real to me when I read it. And I should say, it's still possible, it's all real.
17:44 Pablo Torre? So is Sam-
17:45 Speaker 03 But I really don't think so.
17:47 Pablo Torre? Is any of this ringing a bell?
17:49 Speaker 03 Sam, have you ever heard the phrase "birthday BJ for the brown boy" before?
17:53 Speaker 01 I'd never heard that phrase before.
17:55 Speaker 03 Okay.
17:55 Speaker 01 That was, that was a first for me.
17:57 Speaker 03 As we get further into the story, which I knew we were gonna get into, I'm finding it a kind of a combination of quite funny and a little uncomfortable.
18:05 Speaker 01 Well, the discomfort is like, if this is real-
18:09 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:09 Speaker 01 Are we wrong to poke fun at it?
18:12 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:12 Speaker 01 Right?
18:12 Pablo Torre? So, this is where I will encourage further headline readings from the New York Post, beyond the whole thing being a fabrication according to JP Morgan, and beyond the fact that the litigant seems to have withdrawn the lawsuit, but then refiled a different weirder version of it. Here's another headline. Ex JP Morgan banker, and I think we can say his name, because he's now a main character in this, and that seems fair, journalistically.
18:34 Speaker 03 Fine by me, we can always bleep it out.
18:36 Pablo Torre? Great.
18:37 Speaker 03 We won't. It's not we, I have nothing to do with it. Someone might bleep it out, someone might not.
18:40 Pablo Torre? Ex JP Morgan banker Chirayu Rana files wild new claims against exec, including lurid threesome invitation, days after going viral with fabricated sex slave allegations. That was 5:30 PM on May 4th, and this is a very live story, for the record.
18:55 Speaker 03 It's a kind of bravery, maybe, to accuse someone of something that everyone thinks is totally false, and then go, "I'm not backing off this, actually. Instead, I'm gonna actually make this more insane. I can make this way worse. It was already bad for me, but watch, I can make this way worse."
19:10 Pablo Torre? The other headline, 3:11 PM on May 4th, ex JP Morgan banker Chirayu Rana pretended his dad was dead to get bereavement leave, but he's alive and spoke to the Post this weekend.
19:23 Speaker 03 And that's incredible.
19:25 Speaker 01 That's fantastic. Cause, cause everybody knows you don't pick a dad. You gotta go more distant in terms of relatives-
19:33 Speaker 03 Absolutely. You gotta go with someone that can never be found. You gotta go Samos. You gotta go cousin.
19:39 Speaker 01 Hundred percent.
19:40 Speaker 03 My cousin.
19:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:41 Pablo Torre? But I would say that the dad-
19:42 Speaker 01 My cousin who I'm close to.
19:44 Speaker 03 I'm emotionally close but physically distant, so I have to go to where-
19:47 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:48 Speaker 03 He is. He's in a hospital in Minneapolis or something, and I gotta be there for a month for my cousin.
19:54 Pablo Torre? I think he might have chosen his dad, because the dad's quote to the Post when they reached him alive was, quote- I don't know anything about it. He didn't talk with us or anything. He's my son. He's a good guy.
20:07 Speaker 03 I mean, that's very sweet. I'm a fan of dad.
20:09 Speaker 01 That's nice. I like the dad.
20:11 Speaker 03 I have no problem with trying to bilk JP Morgan out of every dollar you possibly can, but I do think the means are a little messed up in this particular case.
20:20 Pablo Torre? He wanted to collect nearly three months of paid leave and apparently use the time off, this according to the New York Post, to prepare the bombshell lawsuit against the woman in question and his employer.
20:30 Speaker 01 It sounds like he might have thrown too much spaghetti at the wall at once, you know?
20:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, no edit. He needed someone to be in there being like, I don't think we should do, let's not do Fish Head, let's just do the Brown Boy BJ, actually.
20:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:44 Pablo Torre? Should we do the whole dialogue where she, according to him, asks, "Oh, did you play basketball in college? I love basketball players. They get me so wet."
20:55 Speaker 03 Hmm, no, we should not do that, actually. I think we can, I think we can pass.
21:00 Speaker 01 Too late.
21:01 Speaker 03 We can pass on that.
21:02 Speaker 01 Another case of men needing to learn to write for women.
21:06 Speaker 03 Yes. So true. Wow, what a good point. Even if she was this person, it doesn't sound like how she would talk. I wouldn't believe the ca- in the script, I'd be like, well, that's, it's a, it's, that's, that's you.
21:17 Speaker 01 We'll, we'll improvise something there. We'll have the actress improvise something.
21:21 Pablo Torre? You're saying that it's implausible that she would wake him up in the middle of the night naked and beg him while having, okay, uh, lit a cigarette and begging him to join them in this threesome that he is now claiming.
21:37 Speaker 03 It feels like AI wrote a complaint. If you had AI, be like, come up with a fantastical complaint about sexual harassment at this company I just worked at, and it's gotta be this woman. I think AI would come up with something similar to this.
21:50 Pablo Torre? If you don't [BLEEP] my brains out tonight, I'm going to sabotage your promotion.
21:54 Speaker 03 Well, pretty, pretty candid.
21:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, allegedly, allegedly a little on the nose, we might say. If we were reviewing the script, we might say, uh, try to like bury it a little more in some text.
22:08 Speaker 03 Maybe a little show don't tell on the, on the sexual harassment if you, if you can.
22:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:13 Speaker 03 Also, I think a part of the story that is fun is that in investigating this, everyone at JP Morgan, they couldn't find a single person to say one bad thing about this woman. And everything that they investigated turned up nothing. And the guy would not participate in the investigation at all. So it's only JP Morgan investigating, the New York Post investigating, and the guy not participating in any way. And she's like a sommelier who spends her free time helping neighborhood kids. You know what I mean? Like, he couldn't have picked a worse target for this.
22:43 Pablo Torre? It's even made worse because, of course, we're a sports journalism oriented show. And so we looked up, did he play basketball in college?
22:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
22:52 Pablo Torre? The answer is no. He went to Rutgers University, not play basketball. He did play soccer, though.
22:57 Speaker 01 Unfortunately, he just knew well enough that soccer doesn't make anyone wet.
23:04 Speaker 03 Even he was like, the soccer, I had soccer in there, but it just doesn't make sense.
23:09 Pablo Torre? That's what's sad to me.
23:09 Speaker 01 The AI replaced it.
23:11 Pablo Torre? The biggest bummer is that he was actually an athlete and was like, I'm gonna make up a basketball career.
23:17 Speaker 03 He played college soccer?
23:18 Pablo Torre? He played college soccer for Rutgers.
23:20 Speaker 03 She's gotta be a really good soccer player.
23:22 Pablo Torre? He did not score a goal, according to our analysis of his statistics. He had a couple assists here and there, you know?
23:28 Speaker 03 That's plenty, that means he's on the field.
23:29 Pablo Torre? He was on the field.
23:30 Speaker 03 No, wait, I'm seeing freshman, sophomore, junior. Did he not play senior year? Interesting. Wonder what that's about.
23:36 Pablo Torre? It does end there.
23:37 Speaker 01 I do think if this man proves to be how the evidence is leaning, that he might actually be 5'11".
23:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure. That 6-0 is really
23:51 Pablo Torre? A little convenient.
23:52 Speaker 03 Strangely credulity.
23:53 Speaker 01 Or, or less, or 5-10.
23:56 Pablo Torre? You mean the guy who said that this person told him, "I [bleep] own you. I will make you pay." You really think management wants some brown boy Indian leading originations?
24:09 Speaker 03 Like, what a interesting fantasy of racism and harassment. People were probably racist to him at some point growing up. That feels only natural.
24:17 Pablo Torre? I'd like to grant him the possibility that at some point he did experience something
24:21 Speaker 03 He was a victim of some racism, for sure.
24:23 Pablo Torre? I do think he suffers from not having a friend to run this by.
24:27 Speaker 01 Hey, could you give these fake sexual harassment texts a quick punch up for me?
24:34 Speaker 03 I could for sure punch this up. I could. Should hit me up.
24:40 Speaker 01 I don't doubt that you could.
24:41 Speaker 03 I'm a polymath when it comes to punch ups. Any kind of punch up you need, I can do it. I for sure would not have said cannons. I can tell you that much.
24:48 Pablo Torre? What would you have gone with?
24:49 Speaker 03 Oh, wow. That's a really good question. For that, you're gonna have to pay me. Venmo, anyone watching this, if you Venmo me $10, I will give you access to my thesaurus that only has one entry, and it is boobs.
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26:20 Pablo Torre? The question of how to punch something up and how to enhance something.
26:24 Speaker 03 Okay.
26:25 Pablo Torre? Can we turn to the founder of the ENHANCE Games, a guy named Aaron De Souza, who has explained to Joe Rogan what his ambitions are for this competition?
26:33 Speaker 06 We're building the Apollo mission for the 21st century. You know, what did the Apollo mission do? It showed us that we were so much more capable as a human species, right? We had a new threshold, going to the moon, using science and technology to overcome our limits. This is exactly what the ENHANCE Games is about.
26:50 Speaker 03 What does it actually mean? What we're talking about is an Olympic Games where the athletes are souped up in some way. Is that right?
26:57 Speaker 01 This is an Olympic-style competition, basically, where it's like they're permitted to use drugs, but they don't have to use drugs.
27:06 Pablo Torre? Doctors in Abu Dhabi...
27:07 Speaker 03 That shouldn't be the beginning of most sentences.
27:10 Pablo Torre? ...would compose an individualized concoction...
27:13 Speaker 03 It's getting worse. It's only getting worse.
27:15 Pablo Torre? ...of enhancement drugs.
27:16 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
27:17 Pablo Torre? Selecting from testosterone, anabolic steroids, growth factors like HGH and EPO, hormone and metabolic modulators, and stimulants like Adderall.
27:27 Speaker 03 So it's like it's a super serum. It's an actual super serum.
27:30 Pablo Torre? I think the idea here is that there is a range of things that cannot happen in America legally, but they will create their version of a super soldier experiment. And then everyone's going to compete. It's the Olympics on steroids. That's the idea.
27:45 Speaker 03 Literally.
27:47 Pablo Torre? And it's funded by...
27:48 Speaker 03 And figuratively.
27:51 Speaker 03 Have you guys, have you guys ever taken steroids, either of you?
27:54 Pablo Torre? Have you?
27:55 Speaker 03 I've taken steroids a bunch because I have for eczema, for eczema. Hang on, relax.
27:59 Speaker 01 Okay, I was about to say for asthma. I, I take an oral steroid.
28:04 Speaker 03 You take like an albuterol inhaler? Or you take a, you take a pill?
28:08 Speaker 01 No, I take an inhaler.
28:09 Speaker 03 And, okay, so for me, when I'm on the steroids for, I want to emphasize I have eczema because I know that people find that really attractive.
28:18 Speaker 01 Sure.
28:18 Speaker 03 I feel invincible. When I'm on the steroids, I feel like, I, so, and I'm on, I'm on, not nearly on as much as these guys are gonna be on.
28:26 Speaker 01 For me, you know, taking a steroid is, is, is more subtle where I can breathe a little easier and I, my voice sounds a little bit less raspy and I can lift a house with my neck.
28:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, so you, you know what I'm talking about? How often do you take the, the inhaler? Every day?
28:45 Speaker 01 Every day.
28:45 Speaker 03 Oh, hell, so you're kind of, you're, you're in the enhanced games every day. That's, you live in the enhanced game.
28:50 Speaker 01 I'm jacked all the time.
28:53 Speaker 03 Your testicles are, this little baby, they're so small, but your muscles are enormous. Ripped, ripped to hell.
29:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:01 Pablo Torre? You win a million dollars if you win the enhanced games.
29:04 Speaker 03 You also win a rare disease. You're gonna get something that no one's ever heard of. Doctors in Abu Dhabi are making some kind of a juice for you. You're gonna get, they're gonna, they're gonna die from something that hasn't been invented.
29:17 Pablo Torre? How dare you? How dare you suggest that a pool of capital generated by Donald Trump Jr.'s 1789 capital?
29:27 Speaker 03 Oh, great, that's good.
29:28 Pablo Torre? Peter Thiel, Balaji Sriniwassan, the Winklevoss twins, and Saudi Prince Khalid bin Alaweed bin Talal al Saud would possibly endanger any of their athletes.
29:40 Speaker 03 It couldn't sound more nefarious.
29:41 Speaker 01 It's wild. It's wild. When you look at like certain Olympic sports, like they're already not particularly humane. Like the Olympics uses people up already. If you look at powerlifting as a category, you're like, these people maybe shouldn't be like that in the way that hugs shouldn't. Do you know what I mean?
29:59 Speaker 03 Yes.
30:00 Speaker 01 And here we're talking about, like, let's, let's really ruin them though. Like, let's, let's give them the, you know.
30:09 Speaker 03 Lifespan of a, of a inbred beagle.
30:13 Pablo Torre? Allegedly.
30:14 Speaker 03 It's also like you couldn't have assembled a more evil group of people to do this. It really is like Lex Luthor, Hitler's sister. It's every bad person you could possibly imagine.
30:31 Speaker 03 It's every bad person you can imagine. They all got together and they thought of this idea. You can pretty well bet that idea is gonna be bad.
30:38 Pablo Torre? You get a million dollars to break a world record, $250,000 to win a race. You get paid appearance opportunities. There's a base salary in the mid to high six figures. And it's 12 weeks of workouts and supervised PEDs at a five star Emirati resort.
30:52 Speaker 03 Okay, nevermind, I'm gonna do it. I'll do this, this sounds fine, I'll do it. Six, base, base is six figures? I'll do it, I'll do it.
31:02 Speaker 01 If someone gives you $10.
31:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, you gotta get me, I'm working on punch downs for this woman over at JP Morgan. But as long as I can do it in between, I'm willing to, whatever it is, fight a, fight a boat or whatever I have to do at the enhanced games.
31:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, you have to fight a cruise ship.
31:20 Pablo Torre? Then the competition brings you to Las Vegas on May 24th, where, this is according, by the way, there's reporting at GQ at Vanity Fair and.
31:28 Speaker 01 Wait, all of these enhancements are happening out of the country? Where it's legal to do them and then we're bringing them to Las Vegas?
31:38 Pablo Torre? That's exactly right.
31:38 Speaker 03 This is, it's the beginning of a Batman movie is what it is.
31:43 Speaker 03 They, you do this and then they all run wild in Las Vegas. And then Batman and like a second tier DC character have to round them all up.
31:52 Speaker 01 It is very Ra's al Ghul to your point.
31:55 Speaker 03 For sure.
31:56 Pablo Torre? I'm trying to think of like which Batman villain RFK Jr. is, but he is sort of a character in this entire movement.
32:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:03 Pablo Torre? I mean, this is the peptides movement. This is the idea that by the time spectators go to the enhanced games in Vegas at the end of the month, 12 of the 19 experimental peptides the games might offer for sale.
32:17 Pablo Torre? Will be on their way to being reclassified according to, of course, the larger health.
32:21 Speaker 03 Is that true? Like, so 19 things that are not legal here, 12 of them will be made legal by the current?
32:28 Pablo Torre? According to Vanity Fair's reporting, that is, that is the consequence of these experimental treatments that are being tested and pioneered now with the approval of the US government, potentially, is that, yes, you can actually buy these peptides.
32:43 Speaker 01 Wow. And you go to these games and you buy their custom peptide in order to participate in their event. So it's rather like working retail at The Gap, where it's like, I have to buy these clothes to sell the clothes here.
32:57 Speaker 03 That's exactly right.
32:58 Pablo Torre? It's kind of more like, what if a clothing company were to sponsor an Olympic Games with the goal of finally getting to sell to other customers that are not competing in the games, in the audience, clothes that have been previously banned by the government?
33:12 Speaker 03 Previously, previously illegal clothes.
33:15 Speaker 01 Wow.
33:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, like this, this chameys is made from meth or something and we couldn't sell it before, but now we can.
33:23 Pablo Torre? That's right. But you get to do it at a five-star Emirati resort, so.
33:27 Speaker 03 So I'm in. I'm absolutely in. I, I don't know if you guys have ever been to the UAE, but I have. And when they say five-star, they're not kidding about it. It's real, it's really ni- it's gonna be really nice. I flew first class on Etihad a few times, and it's better than anything that's ever happened in my regular life, and it's not remotely close.
33:47 Speaker 01 Wow.
33:48 Speaker 03 It's the best. You order the food whenever you want it, whenever you want it. You can have the same thing again. I'll have it again. And it's good.
33:54 Pablo Torre? You ordered double dinner.
33:56 Speaker 03 I have had double dinner. I've done on, in first class on Etihad, I've gone, I'll take, give me all this. And they will. They'll give you all of it. Give me two of the desserts. They'll do it. Whatever. Someone makes your bed for you and give you pajamas that you'll go change into, so you can get in your bed and eat your third or fourth dinner, however many you want.
34:14 Pablo Torre? How did this turn into a sponsored ad for Etihad Airlines?
34:17 Speaker 03 I don't know. Etihad, I have, it's been a while. Get me on, get me on there. I'll drink the weird juice that makes me strong. I'm, I'm fine with it.
34:26 Pablo Torre? I know we're all laughing as a bunch of independent media operators, but one thing that I should clarify about the enhanced games is that they will be livestreamed internationally on YouTube, Sam, and behind the scenes coverage of the athletes prep area will be featured on a new platform called Zoop.
34:42 Speaker 01 Called Zoop?
34:45 Speaker 01 Okay, see, if I was, if I was injecting athletes with experimental drugs and, and putting them, putting them anywhere, the first thing I would do as a producer of content is say, "Don't make it live." Because we don't know what's gonna happen. And the second thing that I would do is I would say, "Don't show me behind scenes footage, because I don't want to know what's going on back there."
35:09 Speaker 03 I also really like the idea, Zoop sounds like what the juice is called. Like you just, you drink, you drink the Zoop and then you're, we'll put you on, you, then you'll, what I was, what I was really hoping Pablo was gonna say was that it will be livestreamed, and this is an opportunity for us to all work together on dropout. I'm pitching that right now. If you do it, you gotta send me 10 bucks.
35:28 Speaker 01 Such an easy yes, Michael.
35:30 Pablo Torre? You're wondering if Brennan Lee Mulligan will collaborate with Zoop, which is, by the way, the platform co-founded by the guy who started OnlyFans.
35:39 Speaker 03 Well, I don't know anything about that guy, but I-
35:40 Speaker 01 It's Zoop original stories.
35:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, only on Zoop is a, that's a phrase that people are gonna say. That's a real, that's a real phrase.
35:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:49 Speaker 03 You can only watch it on Zoop.
35:50 Speaker 01 And also, the people who have injected themselves with Zoop are gonna say, "Only on Zoop." I am right now, only on Zoop.
35:56 Speaker 03 For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I'm only on Zoop. Meanwhile, I'm flying first class on Etihad, eating 15 breakfasts, five lunches, and four dinners.
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36:53 Pablo Torre? So I feel like we've sufficiently discovered, we found out today, is that this Pulitzer is not staying.
37:02 Speaker 03 No, that's not true. You deserve it. You do a lot of hard-hitting stuff besides this, and we're all very proud of you for it.
37:07 Pablo Torre? I don't know about that.
37:09 Speaker 01 Yeah. I've had a lot of fun here today, and if I feel like my contribution is any indication, you should not have that thing. But I'm willing to imagine that this show is more than just me and Michael.
37:24 Speaker 03 It's not. We're doing this again every week. Every week. Since you got the Pulitzer, you can just kind of phone it in. Like, what's left after this? What else could you win? Isn't that the most you can win? You can't win a Nobel Prize for podcasting yet.
37:38 Speaker 01 Uh, Peabody. If you have Pulitzer and a Peabody, you can really check out.
37:44 Speaker 03 You don't have a Peabody, right?
37:45 Pablo Torre? You know whether I have one or not.
37:47 Speaker 03 He doesn't know. I have one. He doesn't have one. Do you have one, Sam? You probably have one.
37:51 Speaker 01 No.
37:51 Speaker 03 Oh, I thought Dropout could have a Peabody. I don't know.
37:54 Pablo Torre? What the hell are you talking about?
37:55 Speaker 01 No, I love one. You want to give me yours? 10 bucks.
37:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, you can have mine for 10. I'll do it for 9. I'll do it for 9, because I like you.
38:02 Speaker 01 Ooh.
38:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's a discount.
38:04 Speaker 01 Punching down.
38:06 Speaker 03 What was I gonna say about the Peabody? I forget. I have one, but I don't remember anything else besides that.
38:09 Pablo Torre? I think we got the gist.
38:10 Speaker 03 Okay.
38:20 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.
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