“Please Enjoy It Or You Are Fired”: Inside PTFO, with Dan Le Batard

PTFO keeps winning awards. But what do we do for an encore? How do you make something special without losing our standards — or our minds? Do you guys even enjoy this? Pablo visits Miami to see his friend/boss, Dan Le Batard, and Dan’s producer, Chris Cote. They discuss balancing real life; perspective in the face of grief; Oprah; and figuring out how to serve an audience without missing the point. • Donate to the Kyra Fund, which will support research on Glioblastoma, one of the deadliest cancers https://fundraise.gbmresearch.org/campaign/812889/donate Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is. Even if you hit him in the balls, it'll make a memory. Right after this ad. This episode is brought to you by apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another, and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps

• 0:43Pablo Torre?

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• 1:19Pablo Torre?

  We are rolling now, yes? Okay, so Dan, my one task for Chris Cody, who is behind the glass, and dancing immediately, is if Kawhi Leonard gets traded, you need to tell me?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  I'm on it.

• 1:36Pablo Torre?

  And if anyone else gets indicted in a gambling scandal, same, same deal.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  I'm your man.

• 1:40Pablo Torre?

  Okay, great. Dan, hi.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Nice to see you. I feel like this is a perpetual state for you, that you say this to your wife, you say this at funerals, you say this in confession, you say this to the priest, you say this everywhere.

• 1:53Pablo Torre?

  I was talking to David. David Sampson, our friend, fellow Pulitzer Prize winner. And we were morbidly talking about what if the NBA announces its ruling on the aspiration story during the funeral of his daughter, which we were attending yesterday. We're taping this on Monday. And so your joke is, is it's, it's the thing that's in the back of our minds.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  This is a plague for the over preparers among us. I don't live in the world that you guys do with this stuff. Like, that is not dark comedy. That's just deeply dark. What if Kawhi gets traded during my daughter's funeral? Is not a question anybody should be asking.

• 2:40Pablo Torre?

  What if any number of things that are floating in the air are announced at a time in which we are here to grapple with like what's actually important in life and death? It was, it's a bit, look, in the screenplay of what David's life is certainly, as I am here in Miami, which I have not been in with my wife Liz, uh, since you, since you got married to Valerie, we are here again because of the worst thing that's happened to a friend of mine. Um, since the last worst thing that happened to a friend of mine, which was your brother's death. That's how, that's how doing this show and being at this company has also, uh, felt.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  I have spent the last nine months during what is David Sampson, experiencing what I think is about the cruelest thing I've ever seen a human being, uh, experience, uh, texting him some form of, what about the Padres bullpen? What do you think of the Padres bullpen today and some of the things that you're covering in sports? It sort of makes everything very small. It's ma- it makes even something as substantive as your ambition and David's ambition, both of them very willful substantive things. It makes them shrink and pale in, uh, in comparison, but not so much that the two of you aren't thinking at the funeral, what happens if Kawhi gets traded?

• 4:06Pablo Torre?

  I should say that I was, I, I cannot speak for David on that. I just know that previous conversations had acknowledged what would be the most inconvenient time for us to work?

• 4:19Speaker 02

  It's dark subject matter.

• 4:20Pablo Torre?

  Dude, by the, by the way, so just on that. On being dad, as I am now, as David is. You know, I just want to say, like, we want everybody we know to donate to the Kyra Fund. I just want to say that up top here, in a totally unambiguous way. We'll put in the show notes. Kira Sampson, age 28. And so, when I'm here, and we're also grappling with like, real, like, what is, who gives a [bleep]. Like legitimately, that's the thought I had sitting at that service was, if I don't

• 5:01Pablo Torre?

  put this in perspective, I am failing. The all-consuming nature of this job, like, I need to, I need to remind myself of like, why these relationships, and these friendships, and these, and these bonds, why they matter so much to me. And it's not because we won an award, or we might get the thing, it's that we got to do this.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  That is the definition for success for this for me, is getting to keep doing it. And it's fairly simplistic, and it's a lot different than how I've ever looked at some of this stuff, because you do get altered by grief, and altered by death. I have found ambition can very often be lonely, and is almost always insatiable. So, the chase never stops being the chase, and unless you stop running, because you make a conscious decision to stop running, everyone uses the trope of, this puts life in perspective.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  But until you've been soaked in the stale sickness of what grief is in your body, in your stomach, you wake up, you can't sleep, it's always sort of there. Unless you have had that weighted vest on you, you don't understand how profound those words are, even if it seems simplistic, because it's what everyone says when death is around.

• 6:30Pablo Torre?

  Right. I mean, so the last time I was here again with Liz, Liz was pregnant.

• 6:36Pablo Torre?

  And it was at your wedding. And Chris was there.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  That's right. Chris, what did you make of Pablo being the ordained minister? Pablo is at the center of a literal love story, whether it's me and the Cody's, or me and my wife, or me and him. He's literally the person who married me. What was your experience at the wedding there after you hit Dan Patrick in the balls while juggling near him?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the big takeaway for me is me juggling. I have that video we can show here. It's me juggling for Dan Patrick and losing one of the balls. And I hit him in the midsection. It's fine. He was fine. He was still impressed overall. But I was impressed with Pablo. He didn't use many words that I didn't know. And I was kind of expecting that. He didn't make it about himself. He made it about you guys, beautiful ceremony. I remember Dan's blue suit looked great.

• 7:22Pablo Torre?

  Do you remember Dan crying immediately upon arrival?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yes, I remember him. As soon as he saw his beautiful bride, just a blubbering brook.

• 7:31Pablo Torre?

  It was, it was so on the nose for anybody. There were betting lines, like, when is Dan gonna start crying? And the answer was as soon as physically possible. By the way, like, that's really, 2019 was before I officially joined Metal Lark. Before PTFO was a glimmer in anyone's eye. That was the first reporting that you assigned to me was officiating your, your, your, your union.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Valerie called our wedding day and her wedding day, her special day, a party for Dan's friends because so many of you were at the center of what it is that we were doing there. And I will tell you, though, that whether they be my friends or not my friends, Valerie is not very trusting with precious things to others. So that she handed you the, the ability to speak on behalf of both of us, and you took the great care of actually reporting it.

• 8:31Pablo Torre?

  Interviewing, both of you.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and, and took great care with that. She knew you would, and it's why, it's at least why she chose you, in part why. There are many reasons, but that's pretty high up on the list because she knew you would treat it with great care.

• 8:45Pablo Torre?

  Every time I come to Miami to do something like celebrating, or mourning, or feeling real feelings, I end up reporting.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Well, one of the reasons we're here today is not to talk about the specifics of my wedding, but to explain to your audience, I hope, an understanding of what it is you're doing here and why it is that you're doing it. Because in the reporting of details, you can hide some of your own personality or vulnerabilities, because you're always telling the stories of others. And I sort of wanted to sit down with you here under these circumstances, when we're dealing with life and death stuff, on what the mission statement of this project is for you. Because I have found it difficult to sort of impress upon you

• 9:54Speaker 02

  some form of you have to enjoy all of this by acting somewhat as if you've already arrived, without the laziness that comes with people when they arrive at things. And I think you've had some difficulty sort of separating those things. You feel some form of, I don't want to speak for you, but some form of, no, I've always got a chase. Once I've arrived, then the journey and the destination make it so that the chase is over. And part of what fuels you is the chase.

• 10:27Pablo Torre?

  This is where I will cop out by quoting you, because this is a text that like, Chris, this is the kind of text that you dream of getting from your boss?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Had to be at 4 a.m.

• 10:37Pablo Torre?

  Get the...

• 10:39Pablo Torre?

  Yes. Early.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  His best work.

• 10:42Pablo Torre?

  "This is the very best stuff," Dan wrote. "If this is as good as it ever gets, it's plenty [bleep] good. Please enjoy it, or you are fired."

• 10:55Pablo Torre?

  And it made me happy to receive that. I said, I love that so much. But the unspoken part of it is like, easier said than done.

• 11:06Pablo Torre?

  Because the goal is like, if this doesn't get more fun, I think we've [__] up. If I don't have the perspective on like, what did we accomplish? What does that free us to do? Does it free us to be present at a [__] funeral?

• 11:23Pablo Torre?

  Then I think we've [__] up.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it won't be successful the way that I define success this stage of my life. When you say though, easier said than done, the people who have had the most success in entertainment make it look easy without you having any earthly idea of how hard it was. And it was almost always exceptionally hard. And you specifically have already done the hardest thing the hardest way. You're at a trough where everyone has a microphone now. Everyone has a podcast. And on merit, you're making something that is universally seen as the very best of those things.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  There are not really breakout podcasts anymore in sports. You have one of the biggest and best things that there are in the intimate medium of podcasting. And also, as your journalistic career has advanced, I'm 57, you're barely 40. You have done all of the things that I have done in my career that have taken 10 and 20 years. You've done it in one and two and three years. I had to write 10 years of columns. You wrote five articles. You were on Pardon the Interruption before me. You now have a similar-

• 12:42Pablo Torre?

  More than five for the record, Chris. Put that down in the transcripts. Way more, yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Five long magazine articles is all he ever did. He went from fact checker, most meticulous of bottom rung jobs in sports writing, to doing something that is following your heart and your curiosities. And you've had every success imaginable. They have to start feeling like successes so that you're working from a place of maximum confidence as opposed to using, you know, whatever the fuel of insecurities can be to make people great.

• 13:14Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, look, I, the problem with this whole enterprise insofar as there is a problem, which I want to be- Self-aware about is that I love making the show so much that it is making me love it less. Is that, does that track?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  I mean, I had a lot of trouble with joy before my brother died. It's one of the, like, to the degree that you honor me by telling me that you have learned anything from me. If you don't learn this thing at the same speed that you've learned all of the other things, you won't be enjoying forty to sixty. You'll be missing an assortment of things in the, in the consumption of what it is that's making this thing great and also making it feel the need to always top yourself. Because now you've placed your standard, which is the very highest thing, and your audience appreciates that standard. You are a tastemaker now. They are trusting you to tell them what's important, what is good.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  And I'm sort of begging you, please, please, put down your standard a, a, a modic, a touch. Put down your standard a touch so that you can enjoy it more. Because I don't think the two things are conflated. I think that you can make the great work without it suffering the, the way that it, uh, sometimes does.

• 14:34Pablo Torre?

  Well, now this is postmodern, right? Because this episode, to break the fourth wall, to throw Chris Cody Kool-Aid Man style through the fourth wall, is the thing that you're describing. This is ostensibly easy on some level to make. It's us sitting down, we're just talking. And on another level, when you say, lower the standard, it is, that's salary capture convention, the cardinal sin in the NBA. That is the cardinal sin of podcasting to me, lowering the standard. I'm like, I, that's, that sounds f***ing gross. And yet, the audience, right? So why is Chris Cody here? I also am looking at him as a reminder of like a, a literal human embodiment of an audience.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  And lowering the standard.

• 15:14Pablo Torre?

  And also that.

• 15:16Pablo Torre?

  And what I'm thinking about is speedrunning through this very strange business, learning from you lots of things that I enact every day. What I did not get, because it took you X number of years and it took me X minus Y number of years, is some solidity, some grasp of like, so what is this audience that is now coalesced around this show at a rate that's beyond my expectation in less than three years? We launched this in September of 2023. What do they want?

• 15:52Speaker 02

  You don't know, though, what your audience wants. It's something that you're grappling with because your audience is relatively new. Like, I would say that over the last 20 years, right? They make fun of me because anytime we do something in public, I make sure to spend a lot of time talking to people afterward. And I sort of have a profile because what we do daily, it's really just us in here. And most of the time we've been doing it, we felt like nobody is watching us because we were a radio show for a long time and literally nobody was watching. It wasn't a video product once upon a time. But the strongest of links is the people who are with us because they know, for example,

• 16:36Speaker 02

  that when Chris Cody was let go from ESPN, that we hired him back the next day and put him on the air as a middle finger to ESPN. And so whatever we're doing that day or that week or that month that might not be good enough or might not live up to whatever it is that they want, they connect with us from there. The connection is more intimate and it's more meaningful because it's from there. And what I'm telling you is you already have that connection with your audience, even if you're not out there and you don't have 20 years of data to back up and confirm that you know exactly what they want, because a lot of people want a lot of different things. And what they want, most of all, if they're spending an hour a day with your podcast, is for you to show them what they

• 17:21Speaker 02

  want, because they're not quite sure until they've heard it on your show. But now they know they like it. That they know.

• 17:28Pablo Torre?

  Um, are you suggesting that

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:31Pablo Torre?

  you should fire one of my producers?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:34Pablo Torre?

  So that I can rehire them?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Be a good look for you. It's a good idea.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  It's been done, but not a terrible idea to make me the man for firing. How many, how many of your audience members know Chris Tummanello? How many of them know Matt Sullivan? How many, how many of them know that you have a newsroom? That, what, what do you think the audience knows about how the puppet comes to life?

• 18:02Pablo Torre?

  This is, I think what this episode is, is surprise. Like, I'm a person who has all of these neuroses, in case you didn't get told that directly by me before in the 400 episodes we've done.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  You haven't said that, though, right?

• 18:17Pablo Torre?

  Not like this.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  The reporting hides the vulnerability, right? You, when, when we left ESPN, you told me, as a, you, you've given me very little sort of firm advice, but one of the things that you did say is, you have to go more vulnerable now. You, you must, in terms of whatever the growth and transformation is.

• 18:36Pablo Torre?

  Because I know intellectually what the right thing to do is. It's just harder to actually enact it. And does our audience, the Pablo Torre finds out audience, do they want the rest of me? Because this is a lot of, what we're doing here is like the stuff that you and I talk about. Because I love making the show and I want to keep loving it, which means also, hey, here's a big checkbox, Pulitzer Prize, beyond my expectation. What does that let me do now? And does that mean that I do this show in the way that I've dreamed, I've dreamed of doing, which is like forever? That's the goal.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  I believe that what the audience wants is for you to follow your heart and your curiosities, because you've already proven to them that you know what's interesting to the audience. In some ways, it's almost incumbent upon you as the post-modern newsroom.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  To tell the audience what's most important and to trust that your standard on discerning is going to have more care than theirs, not as any insult to them, but because they're passengers, they're signing up for you to tell them what's important, they're signing up to learn, they're signing up to see where your curiosities take them because you've become, a tastemaker seems like an ugly word, but well, but you, you are somebody who's deciding what are the things that are most interesting on this platform and the fact that they've gathered around the platform already tells you that that's like the hit rock group or music group getting on stage and saying, well, what do you want? And they're

• 20:18Speaker 02

  asking, well, play, play the hits, play, you're, you're the musician.

• 20:24Pablo Torre?

  Another Kawhi Leonard episode. Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  I don't think they want a 12th Kawhi Leonard episode.

• 20:29Pablo Torre?

  I don't know, man, I've seen the, I've seen the metrics. Um, no, and by the way, like, to that point, um, I think one thing that I have learned and have such faith in as I'm asked by places like the New York Times and the Athletic and other newspapers, the Financial Times reached out, all these places that are, are like these august institutions. They're turning to me, to us here at Metalark, and they're saying, can you help us make this fun? We do the journalism, we do the serious, can you help us do whatever it is that your secret sauce is? It's take the work seriously in ways that you will never admit to your audience, except maybe on an episode like this, how much you stress about,

• 21:09Pablo Torre?

  are they enjoying this? Does this sound right to their ear? Um, and make it like you're not doing that.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  But you don't think, you don't think that they're, I, I know how it sounds coming out of my mouth. It's totally counterintuitive to say some form, as I've told you a couple of times now, the lowering of the standard almost sounds like an insult to you, but the place that your standard is, is so unsustainable. If the goal is to do it forever, you're going to fry and the loosening of your standard because you're so proud.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Is never gonna be enough to make anything that has your name on it bad. You'd just be suffering it less. I'm not even asking you to actually lower the standard. I'm asking you to take some of the suffering out of it because it's not required. You seem to think it's required. And this was my relationship with writing and it's why I stopped writing. It's why I chose community and laughter and communal stuff. Because writing was so lonely and the obsessive compulsive perfectionism. I don't think perfectionism is a noble trait. I think humans aren't meant to be perfect.

• 22:24Pablo Torre?

  Disagree. Of course, of course, you have a very good point.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  It's unkind. It's not self-love. It's not forgiving of yourself. It's always not good enough in some respect in a way that you need to, you need to care for yourself slightly better than that. Otherwise, you're gonna be, when I tell you ambition can be lonely and it's insatiable, you're gonna be 15 years from now fried.

• 22:48Pablo Torre?

  Well, I think the perverse order of operations here, which is the blessing and the curse, is that we got the thing, the cosign, from the ultimate journalistic body of taste and judgment. We got it and now I, it's like, we got, okay. So then, now what?

• 23:16Pablo Torre?

  The end of June and July can be a really rough period for sports fans with football still a few months away and basketball and hockey ended. But this year, we're pretty lucky because not only is there a World Cup, there is a World Cup in our backyard. And so make sure to check out the Athletic Podcast Network to stay up to date on all things related to the World Cup. You can wake up with the Totally Football Show from LA, then dive deep into the biggest talking point of the day with the Athletic FC Podcast. And you can watch the Tifo Podcast fool around on their daily live streams in the afternoon. All shows are free to watch or listen on your favorite podcast platform. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. With Apple Card, you earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases,

• 24:01Pablo Torre?

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• 24:45Pablo Torre?

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• 25:31Pablo Torre?

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• 25:49Speaker 03

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• 26:03Speaker 02

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• 26:27Pablo Torre?

  I think about audience a lot. And I think about it because what I was trying to say is, not that everything needs to be perfect, because that is of course unrealistic, but my way of winning over the audience effectively is writing. Like, the secret of my career journalistically is not that I gave up writing after writing five articles, it's that I stopped writing for print and started doing it in a format that now because many people, most people, no one else really tries to write and report

• 27:11Pablo Torre?

  and also do what you guys do here in Miami at the same time, it has, it has, that's, that's the secret of the show, actually.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  But how much is this, how much of this has changed since the birth of your daughter and the seismic change of climate in all of journalism that had ESPN erasing a whole bunch of journalistic jobs? ESPN went into the journalism business when they didn't have any responsibility to go into the journalism business and many sports writers profited greatly off of that. You and I had the conversations where I was telling you, pretty forcefully, stop writing. You had fallen in love with writing for ESPN the magazine. It was difficult for you to give that up.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  And I was hitting you pretty hard with the idea of it's not a lack of nobility to grab some of this cotton candy here and make sure that you take care of your career. But that was before you had your daughter.

• 28:10Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  And before the collapse of journalism jobs. And so how much of this has to do with the fact that your career was in jeopardy and it was a very real fear as you were bringing a life into the world?

• 28:25Pablo Torre?

  A lot, a lot. By the way, the, I don't know, I don't think Chris Cody ever got this, but what Dan is describing, Chris, is like him showing up in his convertible on South Beach, picking me up after we do a show and being like, "How's writing treating you?" As the wind blows through our hair. Look, man, I, a lot of it's from that anxiety. It is. Like, the jobs that I dreamed of, I, which I got. Senior writer at ESPN The Magazine, co-hosting a show with Bomani, High Noon, on ESPN, a daily debate show.

• 29:05Pablo Torre?

  Even ESPN Daily, which was my first, like, awakening to the format of audio. After being like the last guy among my friend group who didn't have a podcast, it's funny that I became this guy, the guy who can't stop podcasting. ESPN Daily radicalized me in that way. It showed me, wait a minute, the muscles I had, the writing, reporting, structure, editing, humor, all that stuff, that I realized this medium actually is me. If I can bring all of that to it. And then all of that went away.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Why can't you separate, though, the idea of you behaving as if you've arrived doesn't have to become the work becomes less good, it's the person making the work becoming more confident.

• 29:53Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, that's, that's, I think you sort of loaded the answer into the question there.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  But I believe that you should be at maximum strength and confidence that your choices are the right ones because they've been rewarded from the peril and the fear of, am I going to be able to sustain a career that feeds my daughter here as journalism collapses? You've proven it the hardest way. If that is not to give you the confidence of, okay, I can do this and I've been validated by all of the external forces and it's still not good enough because ambition is insatiable, it's a hole that you can never fill if you're the most ambitious. It's always gonna be the shovel and the dirt until we're at a literal funeral over the

• 30:42Speaker 02

  weekend where we're watching somebody buried and you're wondering, is my perspective right on the things that I'm caring about? Because some of the things I'm caring about make me miss some important moments because even when I'm at home, I'm always thinking about what I have to do next because the treadmill of daily making of things never. Never stops.

• 31:03Pablo Torre?

  Well, this is where I'll answer sort of the ESPN part of your question as well because what we've learned, and I'll also broaden this to include all the people who work on the show who won the Pulitzer Prize, right? It was the staff of Pablo Torre finds out. What we as a show have discovered after initially fearing that the problem would be, we don't have enough story ideas. And so we launched with a runway six months ahead of story ideas. Like that was a lot of the summer of 2023 was me writing down, we could do this, this, this, and this magazine style evergreen just reported that no one else is touching. We started with a lead.

• 31:43Pablo Torre?

  I'm proud that we have not surrendered that lead. I have become almost unsettled by how few people are trying to compete. No one else is gonna do it. So maybe it's us. Maybe we just never stop doing it.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  You enjoy the meticulousness of let me put an architect's rigor into the making of these plans. So you're enjoying the doing, you're enjoying the results, you're enjoying the rewards of the result, but all of it is so pressurized that it becomes less than joy when it's joy plus joy plus joy plus joy equals pressure.

• 32:22Pablo Torre?

  That should be joy. It should be joy by my math.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Don't you think? It seems like by my math too, it seems like that would be the math equation, but it just becomes more and more pressure to top yourself, one of your best friends. Okay. And I, I suffer for him and he just laughs at me. He's like, knock it off. But the prison of Ezra Edelman to make the OJ Simpson documentary, one of the greatest documentaries ever made, to have to follow that. And then to make a better documentary about Prince and not be able to show it to the world is a special kind of cruelty. The pressure of following the greatness, taking all of that time, you're in, you're, you're near that loop, near him.

• 33:06Pablo Torre?

  It is a betrayal of Ezra's confidence, I suppose, but this is also true to our friendship that I am now about to tell you that one of the first people I got dinner with after winning the Pulitzer was Ezra to talk about, so what do you do? What do you do when you've won the thing that you can't top?

• 33:21Speaker 02

  I couldn't believe Pablo when your first comments to me after winning the Pulitzer were about the dark cloud of expectation that comes with the Pulitzer. As opposed to what I imagined when it is that we formed this company, which is the joyous moment onstage when you're shaking a trophy at people who didn't believe because you believed in a love story or you believed in something that didn't fit in these cynical times. Like to, to arrive at that moment with you and to have you remind me as I'm calling you to congratulate you.

• 33:57Pablo Torre?

  That you won a Pulitzer.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 33:58Pablo Torre?

  You too did.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  I needed the reminder from you because I, in coming to tell you, you have to enjoy this. You reminded me and you need to enjoy it too as the person who backed the dream.

• 34:10Pablo Torre?

  Which is our friendship, by the way, and also we're literally the guest in one of the episodes we submitted that won. Our friendship is funny that way because you get to tell me the things that you know intellectually and that you are enacting emotionally to me who can do the first part but not the second. I also agree intellectually, a lot harder to enact, and also write back at you.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I discuss this in therapy all the time. I speak my feelings more than feeling my feelings.

• 34:41Pablo Torre?

  And, and, and same, which is why I think we're friends, is that we both know better.

• 34:48Pablo Torre?

  I, I've been asked more and more, and it is, it is the thing I obviously take pride in doing. I've been asked more and more to explain why the show works, what's different about it. Like, just like, give us the log line of why this matters now more than ever, this moment in American history. And I say, "Sports Illustrated is a zombie. HBO's Real Sports is dead." The news magazine as a concept. If you look at any given news magazine television show at CBS and otherwise, everything is in-

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Trust in media is dead.

• 35:21Pablo Torre?

  And so, to me, you know, the thing that I have felt so energized by, which you have done for decades here, is using sports as the way to talk about everything else. The whole idea that you could earn the trust of an audience, of a, of a country, that is otherwise skeptical of journalism as a concept, and has no time to be spoon-fed vegetables by these self-serious people. The idea that sports could be the cheesy melt on the broccoli. Another thing I find myself saying a lot.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  You love that saying.

• 35:55Pablo Torre?

  I do.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Too much, I'd say.

• 35:57Pablo Torre?

  It works. It keeps on working.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  I do love cheesy broccoli, though.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  I, I'd say it's stopped working.

• 36:04Pablo Torre?

  But not just like, uh, surprise, uh, we've snuck in some human rights into your sports, but also that people, um, will follow you. Because one of the things you're doing on this show that I have internalized is not taking yourself seriously. Sports allows that.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can tell any story through sports, any story through sports. You really can find them all. One of the things that, uh, I have told people over the years when they say you cover sports, well, I'm, I'm always correcting. I cover the people who play sports because the human stories are everywhere. Uh, you, uh, can do all of this through sports. You take what you do very seriously. Uh, I think, uh, some people also think you take yourself seriously, although this show shows more of the range.

• 37:02Pablo Torre?

  And that's, and that's, that's been the self-imposed pressure. You know, is, how do I live up to that? Like, that's what I, I learned watching you guys here. Is like, I need to be-

• 37:19Pablo Torre?

  You know, the thing, again, I'm looking at Chris in the eyes. And the thing I'm thinking is, Chris is an avatar for...

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 37:28Pablo Torre?

  Let's be honest, a bit of the common man.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  I'll take it.

• 37:32Pablo Torre?

  I believe, though, that our audience, part of the magic is that we treat them like they're pretty smart.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  Well, more than that, though, it's that they trust you and you treasure that trust. And so you keep working the way that you're working to make sure that you don't betray that trust. But I'm promising you that if you enjoy all of this a little more, it is something that will show in sinking into your mistakes instead of editing them out. Uh, sinking into...

• 38:06Pablo Torre?

  How dare you suggest that we edit our shows?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Totally clean.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Uh, sinking into the vulnerabilities in a way that show people that, uh, they can trust you because, uh, for all the reasons that they already trust you. Because it's, uh, even though I keep saying tastemaker, all that is is they trust your judgment. That's it.

• 38:26Pablo Torre?

  And that, it's, it's the, that's what a magazine editor does.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  It's the hardest thing to come by, though, with an audience.

• 38:32Pablo Torre?

  And it's the greatest job. The idea of, "I don't know what you're putting in my mailbox, but I'm so excited to find out." That's the greatest pleasure I have because now you're following my curiosity. And now I get to feel like I'm being more of myself, you know? Which I wasn't on ESPN Daily, which I wasn't on High Noon, which I wasn't subbing in on every show that would have me on it.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Oh, but I would say that the next growth evolution for you, and this is a conversation I've had with, uh, with our friend Bhug Chambi, right? Wherever it is that my lack of confidence is, uh, they're getting a version of the artist in your art, but they're getting a very manicured version of the artist. And what I have told, uh, Bhug is, I'd be totally good, uh, you know, getting out of the, the, if what was getting out of the limousine on the red carpet was my work. I don't want to do it. I want the work to do it for me. Somewhere in here where people get to see more of your personality because you're doing an hour with your friends

• 39:38Speaker 02

  that has no manicuring, that has some of the looseness that doesn't make it a perfectly sculpted thing, but makes it all the more human because the audience already knows who you are and they're in on the journey, wherever it is you're taking them and however it is you're taking them.

• 39:58Pablo Torre?

  Do you want to do a quick pickup on sculpted? You kind of stumbled over sculpted. Three, two, one.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Sculpted.

• 40:03Pablo Torre?

  There it is. Nailed it. Just put that in post.

• 40:17Speaker 04

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• 40:52Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so here's the thing. Like, what do we do now, right? And so what I come into this studio carrying is this confidence, a true confidence of we get to do the thing that very few other independent journalistic outlets are doing successfully, which is challenging power from a position of resources, yes, but such disadvantage financially when it comes to who we are investigating and why we are investigating them. And we are earning trust in an era in which trust has dried up in this desert because wealth has meant that you can manicure reality.

• 41:37Pablo Torre?

  And I love that we got to somehow be the show that does that while also doing a show in which we had a comedian whose catchphrase is the word hamburger. You know, I love that we are, in fact, all of these things. We hired a witch to curse artificial intelligence on Halloween. We did a whole episode, which I could not have been more excited to tell you about, in which we revealed for the first time a video of Harambe, the viral gorilla, eating its own poop.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  How much did you spend on that soap that was your head, the sculpture?

• 42:12Pablo Torre?

  Butter, it was butter.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Butter, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

• 42:14Pablo Torre?

  A lot, three thousand dollars.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Ridiculous, asinine.

• 42:18Pablo Torre?

  So, we are all of this. But the question of like, now that we have this benediction from like, the priests of journalism, what do we do now? I mean, frankly, like, I want to do weirder, bigger, more ambitiously. The question becomes, how do we do that while also obeying all of the lessons, which I intellectually acknowledge?

• 42:45Speaker 02

  You can't do those two, you can't do both of those things.

• 42:48Pablo Torre?

  Yes, you can!

• 42:49Speaker 02

  You, you have to find-

• 42:50Pablo Torre?

  No, there's a way, there's gotta be a way.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Meeting Oprah's a good start.

• 42:54Pablo Torre?

  She did touch my chest with both of her hands.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Talk to me.

• 42:58Pablo Torre?

  In France, just two common people.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  It's not just France, it's not just France.

• 43:05Pablo Torre?

  Is it the sweater I have tied around my shoulder?

• 43:07Speaker 02

  But it's con, it's not, it's not France, it's-

• 43:10Pablo Torre?

  Con of mammals.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  It's the height of, uh, foo foo.

• 43:14Pablo Torre?

  The idea that we did a live show at the Sloan Conference in which we revealed this federal whistleblower complaint that is key to the aspiration story, and we did it as a parody of Oprah, in which we stuck it underneath people's chairs and said, "And you get a whistleblower complaint, and you get a whistleblower complaint," only for me to meet Oprah, and for her to have genuinely, I believe, no idea who she was shaking hands with or touching the chest of.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  She looks like she knows you there, like that, she looks like she's thrilled to meet you there. How absurd is that fan in the background, by the way? Like, how, how-

• 43:46Pablo Torre?

  Over my, uh, right shoulder there?

• 43:48Speaker 02

  How con is that right there? Somebody just fanning their face.

• 43:52Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  The sweater over the shoulder's too much, isn't it, Chris?

• 43:55Pablo Torre?

  That's, that's called, that's called blending in.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Somehow too much and too little.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  That's not someone who's saying, "I don't take myself seriously."

• 44:03Pablo Torre?

  But look, I also want to acknowledge that- What, part of what my curiosity is, has always been like, I felt this at Harvard. I felt this certainly in Khan. I feel this in every interview I do with a billionaire. It's, I do wanna know, like, what's behind that door? And the fact that I could bring our audience along as we open it, as we unlock it, the door that no one else is like breaking open, that's the greatest feeling to me. Is that we can be both behind the door, but also the people who are like telling everyone else, "This is what's back here." That, to me, is, is, is what I wanna do more of.

• 44:47Pablo Torre?

  I was hesitant at first to say it, um, but really, like, the question I have near the end here, I guess, is like,

• 44:55Pablo Torre?

  what if we keep doing the same thing instead of listening to your advice? Like, because I think that might be what we're gonna do.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  Well, you're gonna burn out, you're not going to grow, and you're gonna continue to let the work speak for you, and it will speak well and eloquently for you. But I'd argue that the greatest, uh, connections made in entertainment, real connections, where you're willing to seek someone out when there's more competition than ever, it's personality-driven. You can keep doing it with the work, it's the hardest way. You're doing it and have done it the hardest way, but ultimately, they're here for your tastes, your sensibilities, your curiosities, uh, and you following your heart. So, you can make it the work, hide behind the work, it speaks well for you,

• 45:45Speaker 02

  but they won't see the complete you, they'll just see the artist's renderings, they won't see the artist.

• 45:50Pablo Torre?

  What you got, Chris?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  The moral of the story is juggle in front of Dan Patrick. Take the chance, even if you hit him in the balls, it'll make a memory.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  He did, at my wedding, that's what Chris Cody did. He was juggling for some reason, I don't know why.

• 46:05Pablo Torre?

  And you know what my production brain is saying, it's like, let's call Dan Patrick up, let's insert his view of that memory in post. Let's make that into a little documentary-style featurette inside of this episode, that'd be a great kicker.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  More work.

• 46:19Pablo Torre?

  Instead, instead, instead.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  It's not good enough the way it is.

• 46:21Pablo Torre?

  No, I'm like, I think we can elevate this. I think we can elevate this, let me call Dan Patrick.

• 46:36Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 46:42Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh. Anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Everybody, listen up.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.