"The Rehearsal" Is a Sports Profile, with Mina Kimes

Mina joins Pablo after he finally watches "The Rehearsal" to discuss the thin line between fact and fiction, Nathan Fielder's enviable HBO budget, reverse-engineering plot twists, social awkwardness — and what goes into writing a great sports profile. • Subscribe to the Mina Kimes YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@minakimes 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:23Speaker 01

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• 0:56Pablo Torre?

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• 1:40Pablo Torre?

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• 2:04Speaker 03

  Even your burns are so convoluted.

• 2:06Pablo Torre?

  God damn it!

• 2:07Speaker 03

  I was just gonna say, he looks like the guy from Shrek, Lord Farco. That's what I was thinking. I was like, ooh, here's one I got for you, Pablo. Hit him with this, the Shrek image.

• 2:16Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  It is hot in L.A. today.

• 2:27Pablo Torre?

  What are we talking?

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Actually, I haven't looked. But I'm going to Nashville, where it's hotter, because there's like a heat wave on the East Coast. This is Nino's first flight since he started walking, which is a long time ago. So we haven't flown very much. And I am preparing for the apocalypse.

• 2:49Pablo Torre?

  What's your strategy in the event of the apocalypse?

• 2:52Speaker 03

  So, context is, he is not only walking, he is incredibly squirmy and does not like being confined and is like very hard to wrangle. I feel like a high school football team that's going up against the perennial state champion and knows they're gonna lose. So I'm pulling out every trick play possible. I have done so much research into ways to entertain your toddler on a plane at this point that I'm arguably over-prepared for this trip.

• 3:27Pablo Torre?

  The best play available in my playbook, which has 100% success rate, is just give him an iPad. Are you willing to do that?

• 3:40Speaker 03

  Well, okay. Yeah, please. I am not one of those, oh, no, we're too good for iPads. The problem is, he is a little bit under iPad age. So he is 21 months, right? And I actually started training him on the iPad for this trip about a month ago. Like, I started giving him limited Elmo, just like...

• 4:07Pablo Torre?

  You've been microdosing him with Elmo?

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, little Elmo. To the point where he now thinks, he thinks the iPad is Elmo. And he thinks the TV is basketball, because that's the only thing I ever have on when he's allowed to watch it. And so I've been giving him like little 10 minute, 15, 20 minute increments of Elmo, also training him to wear his little headphones. And I think I've created a little enough demand to where he can probably get like maybe an hour, maybe not all at once of iPad. It's a four hour flight. So if he was a little older, I'd put him on that thing the entire flight.

• 4:43Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah, we're, we're, we're giving Violet that in any, any even vague emergency situation. Do you realize though, and this is maybe germane to what we're gonna do at some point in this episode, are you aware that you've been Nathan Fielder-ing your son? You've been rehearsing, Nina.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. I have not put that connection together. Yeah, you're right, I have been. We have been rehearsing, rehearsing this flight essentially. And Nathan Fielder and my son probably have the same level of social skills, so it makes sense.

• 5:16Pablo Torre?

  Before we get into what we're here to talk about today, which I think is gonna be, I've been meaning to do this, just you and I talking to each other in a way where we can like fully brain dump. But I do, because of Cortez, I do wanna play something because, speaking of toddlers, I have not seen this clip yet, but I am told that I should see it and maybe address it. So could we please cue whatever Cortez queued up now?

• 5:41Speaker 04

  I was at, when I couldn't hear, I was having to keep myself occupied. I was reading the latest glowing Pablo Torri profile in the New York Magazine.

• 5:49Speaker 05

  So Pablo is featured in, in a very prestigious publication? I had not heard this.

• 5:55Speaker 04

  New York Magazine. And as you could guess, it took, one, two, three, four, five, 13 words before the Peabodys were mentioned. And so that was good. By the way, but speaking of featured, I did think it was nice that Pablo kind of, because I didn't like Pablo and Bill feuding. I thought it was nice that he went on the pod with Bill and stood his ground, to his credit, didn't back down. And if people didn't hear it, I, we did a kind of supercut of it for him so they could hear the 90 minutes Pablo and, or six. 60 minutes Pablo and Bill spent hashing it out. Two podcast legends. Go play it for us if you could.

• 6:35Pablo Torre?

  Murrow and Peabody. Peabody's Peabody nominated Edward R. Murrow Award. Peabody Award nominated Peabody. Edward R. Murrow, Peabody's Peabody. Peabody Award nominated Peabody. Peabody's Peabody, Peabody, Edward R. Murrow Award. Murrow and Peabody.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  I imagine I have the relationship with Pablo that Pablo has with, um, Larsa Pippin. Where like I'm, I don't have anything against him. I'm kind of fascinated by him. I don't totally understand the, you know, the big deal, but there's no ill will.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  He got your ass. He got your ass. Let's just call it what it is. He got your ass.

• 7:13Pablo Torre?

  I, I, it has come to my attention that in, in my attempt to, uh, reestablish what would have been called into question, which is my journalistic credibility in general. I maybe overdid it. So, um, sniped, sniped.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  There's been a little misleading editing there. I don't know, but I, can I, can I say something by the way? I just did a panel and one of the questions at the panel was if I really hate Nick Wright. And I, this actually ties into what we're going to talk about with the rehearsal. I, I, I could not believe that people didn't understand it was a joke. Nick Wright is like a friend of mine. I, I really like and respect him. And yeah, they, we're going to talk about the rehearsal.

• 7:52Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah. What's fact? What's fiction?

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. What's a bit? What's real?

• 7:57Pablo Torre?

  Hard to tell. It's hard for me to tell. Um, is Nick Wright still banned from PTFO? I think the answer must be yes.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Well, after that, whoo.

• 8:05Pablo Torre?

  And also, um, does Nick Wright have something in common with Larsa Pippin? I would say yes. Yeah, I would say they're both, um, almost clinically obsessed with Michael Jordan. Um, that seems to be, that seems to be a through line. Um, so yeah. You Nick Wright.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  I thought he was a LeBron guy.

• 8:25Pablo Torre?

  Well, he's obsessed. He's obsessed in the way that, you know, he can't stop thinking about Michael Jordan.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  It's okay. Get, take some time, you know, maybe do a few rehearsals. You going after Nick Wright.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Just, we gotta just call it. I'm a neutral observer. I'm not a neutral observer. I'm team Pablo.

• 8:43Pablo Torre?

  Thank you.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  However, he got your ass. I'm sorry. I have to call it like I see it. He got your ass.

• 9:06Pablo Torre?

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• 9:39Speaker 00

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• 10:02Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 10:40Pablo Torre?

  So what we actually came here to discuss is a thing that I just finished. So today, I just finished watching all of it. In the last hour, I finally did something that I got mad at myself for waiting so long to do. Because now that I've watched the rehearsal, I just want to tell you that I think it's one of my favorite things I've ever seen.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Okay, unequivocally love is your review.

• 11:07Pablo Torre?

  With questions and concerns, but my reaction, the greatest compliment I can pay it, is that I think I'm gonna be thinking about this for a very long time. And it made me reflect on like, how to do what I do better?

• 11:25Speaker 03

  We should probably just explain who Nathan Fielder is. If you're listening to this and you haven't watched any of his work, that's kind of amazing, I guess. The original show that kind of catapulted him to fame was Nathan For You.

• 11:38Speaker 06

  My name is Nathan Fielder, and I graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades. Now, I'm using my knowledge to help struggling small business owners make it in this competitive world. This is Nathan For You.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  This went on for multiple seasons. It kind of, I don't know if I would say it hit a wall because he became too famous, but a lot of those stunts were predicated on people not knowing who he was. And I think he has become a little famous. So then he launched a show called The Rehearsal. And season one, this is season two that we're gonna talk about. But The Rehearsal is based, it's a kind of a continuation of the same through line, which is people really struggle with awkwardness in real life, and awkward situations and confrontation. And some people struggle with it more than others. What if we created these elaborate recreations, simulations, of real world issues, conflicts, whatever, that allowed people to reenact these tense moments with the help of actors?

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Things like raising a child, all the way up to like having a confrontation with a family member. So that was season one. Season two was much more focused.

• 12:51Speaker 06

  I've been studying commercial aviation disasters sort of as a hobby.

• 12:56Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 12:56Speaker 06

  And I've been staging my own recreations of these disasters to better understand what's really going on. And... I started to notice a disturbing pattern in the causes of these crashes.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  The idea was this theory that he came up with, this is revealed in the first episode, that a lot of plane crashes are caused by a lack of communication between pilot and the first officer, first officer not being willing to speak up, the pilot shutting them down. Again, the through line is, you know, all of his work is about human communication and why it's difficult. So he comes up with this idea of like, let's apply the Fielder method, the rehearsal, to this specific problem. He goes on a journey of trying to recreate it, trying to get people in positions of power in the government to care, but it keeps hitting walls. And then ultimately, it results in this finale where he himself flies the plane so he can get inside the cockpit.

• 13:54Speaker 06

  How do you feel about me landing this thing?

• 13:57Speaker 07

  I'm confident.

• 13:59Speaker 06

  Yeah?

• 13:59Speaker 07

  How about you?

• 14:00Speaker 06

  Are you?

• 14:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  Based on what?

• 14:03Speaker 07

  I don't know. I feel like you can kind of tell.

• 14:06Speaker 06

  This lands the same as the sim, right? The simulator?

• 14:09Speaker 07

  What?

• 14:10Speaker 06

  This lands the same as the simulator, right?

• 14:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 14:17Pablo Torre?

  Nathan Fielder flies an actual [BLEEP] commercial airliner, filled with human actors who are playing passengers, does it successfully.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  We learned that he's been training as a pilot for two years.

• 14:29Pablo Torre?

  Simultaneously is just a production question, which again, I'm always fascinated by like structuring, how you structure a thing like this. At every moment, he is simultaneously proposing something and reenacting it in order to prepare for some execution that he is going to try and do, seemingly in what would count as the present tense of the rehearsal?

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:51Pablo Torre?

  That alone is so interesting to me, because the sort of threading of-

• 15:00Pablo Torre?

  You seeing him hiring the actor, as well as the person who the actor is going to portray, all of it is intuitive enough to follow, but it's so complicated that I understand if people are also just like, this is trying really hard and I don't quite get it.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  So a lot of the complexity of it, I think, and that introduces like some mixed feelings in some ways, is it's a mix of actors and real people. I think about like the episode where he has the sort of awkward, sweet, endearing pilot who has struggles asking women out on dates and working up the courage to kiss them. That's a real man.

• 15:38Speaker 06

  So this scene will be mostly improv, and your character is named Captain Powers in this, okay? A little funny, right? Yeah. And he's called that because he actually has a power, which is that every date he goes on, he has no problem asking for a kiss and then doing it. Okay? And the other character is named Jennifer Kiss Me, and Jennifer will be played by Emma. Okay. Okay, who's an actress, as you know? Yeah. All right. Well, let me go get your scene partner then, okay?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  And then he's putting actors in the situation with them, and one of those actors is then being asked to just be their self, but she's still an actor. And I think Nathan himself is the ultimate like, kind of pathos of that, which is he is both an actor and he is himself. And I think something that's really tricky to unpack in all of this, and it comes to a head, I think, at the end too, is like, how much of this is the real Nathan versus how much of it is him playing a role? Which is to say, it's presented, the six ep- it's just a six-episode series, as like a fact-finding mission. Like you're being taken on this journey with Nathan where one thing leads to another. He like hits a wall, so he tries another path. That opens up something. He finds out all these people on the internet

• 16:55Speaker 03

  are obsessed with him being autistic. That leads him down another path. Ties in at the end. The- all of it ties together.

• 17:01Pablo Torre?

  Yes, Sully Sullenberger is in there too, by the way, as like a big key arc.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  The third episode is like this insane unhinged thing where he recreates the life of Sully Sullenberger. But the episode is presented as, one thing leads to another, come along on this journey with me. But that, to me, is all- It's all structured. This is all pre- this is not, that is not reflective of reality, which is what makes the finale, I think, such an achievement, like artistically, because the amount of work and planning and production to make all of these things feel like they weave together naturally and organically is insane, insane.

• 17:34Pablo Torre?

  Also, very clearly, like, I have to imagine that he started, he worked backwards, right? And so, in storytelling, in magazine journalism, Mina, you know that like, if you're gonna evoke the first person, there is this device you can use where it's like, "So I tried this and that didn't work, so then I did this." And the presentation of it, I mean, it's sort of ethically, you are beholden to your own code of honor, right? Like, it could be easy to say, "This happened and didn't work, or this happened and did work, and therefore this next thing happened," and you sort of put it into a chronology that makes it the most, let's just say, fun, palatable version of the complicated story you want to tell.

• 18:15Pablo Torre?

  I have to imagine that what Nathan Fielder is not showing us is, in fact, that part of like, "We gotta land the plane literally."

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:25Pablo Torre?

  And to get there, how do I get there? And so that's, there's so much cleverness there, but it's also artifice.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  A through line. The autism community on the internet has become like fans of him in this show because of complicated reasons. I think like it, there's, they like that it mimics this idea of like, masking is the term they use, right? Like, hey, if you learn to just kind of enact these emotions in social cues, you can start doing it in real life. They also believe, some of them, some people believe Nathan is autistic. And, you know, this is introduced partway through the show, and then it becomes a through line, and it becomes a tension point when he's confronted with like, "Am I, do I have to disclose this possibility to fly the plane?" And then at the end, you said, he decides, "The interior doesn't matter. What matters is how I'm being received and my interactions

• 19:17Speaker 03

  with other people," right? Like, this is the big conclusion. But like, that's not how it happened. Like this, I'm sure, you know, he's known about this forever. I'm sure in working back- Backwards, he thought it would be an interesting thing because of the connection to the, you know, conflicts between people in the cockpit, the challenges of flying a plane. And that leads me to a question, Pablo, which is like, so there's this moment where he takes a test, or he's in an office with a woman, a doctor, I believe, an expert, who explains to him like, oh, you know, people who are autistic have trouble like differentiating between like the emotion shown in other people's eyes. So she's like, for example, and she's showing it to him, and he is like, uh, he gets it wrong twice.

• 20:00Speaker 06

  Which one would you choose? So you're saying these people have trouble with this, you're saying? Yes. That's the point you're trying to make? That's right. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Choose what you think on this one. Yeah, terrified maybe at least, yeah. Okay, so I'm upset. But this is a very difficult test, because it's very, very subtle. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And even like, we would disagree perhaps on this. Right. All right.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  He's acting, right? So, so, so, but is he? I don't know. I thought this is a man who's definitely acting, this is a comedian, he knows it's funny if he kind of like shies away from it. But if he's acting, does that at all diminish the inclusion of the issue?

• 20:39Pablo Torre?

  Exactly. Does it diminish it is the thing that I I'm grappling with, because what I see in comedy all of the time is a convenient retreat to comedy when it comes to, wait a minute, you're lying to us, or you're not taking this seriously, or you're not living up to the implicit premise of this all being real and true. And it's like, no, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just a comedian or no, just an actor, right? This is a bit of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, this is also a thing that feels like a docu-style examination of human behavior that is actually on some level a theatrical production. And so you're right, if I am Nathan Fielder, what I know in my mind is, me getting these questions wrong is the best thing for this scene.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:19Pablo Torre?

  And so, in a world in which elsewhere in the show, I believe it was episode two, I wrote this down, because there are little like winks, they're kind of obvious, but maybe I think they're worth highlighting anyway, where Nathan Fielder says, quote, "I've always felt that sincerity is overrated, it just ends up punishing those who can't perform it as well as others." Which I think speaks to some of the certainly like reading of social cues, but also I think is a meta-commentary on like, am I lying or not? Am I performing or not? Am I the greatest performer of sincerity? Or am I somebody who cannot do it? And I think he benefits from being the guy who is guileless and also the most Machiavellian. Right? He is both seemingly a victim of the thing he is examining as well as the greatest practitioner of it.

• 22:04Pablo Torre?

  And that's where it's especially, I think, tense.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  It's so slippery. Do you think it's had interesting things to say? Like, do you think? Because I think that's what I'm wrestling with is whether the ultimate like theses and the themes and the points are undermined by the artifice and the fact that he is ultimately acting for the most of the show.

• 22:29Pablo Torre?

  That's a really good question. I think it is undermined by the cleverness and the artifice. Because I'm thinking about like, what did I find out while watching the show? It was entirely about the craft of making it to me? Like, that's what I, again, we just spent a whole conversation talking about like, strategy, ethics, structure. The way in which this is not something that is fundamentally about a journalistic or truth-centric enterprise is that by the end, the whole thing of like, Nathan finds out that communication with his fellow pilot is the thing that you need more of to successfully

• 23:10Pablo Torre?

  land planes and avoid crashes is so far in the rearview in the service of fundamentally an amazing stunt, which is, I flew a plane and landed it.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  I'm going to agree with you. I think it was much more about art than like any particular underlying message. You know, his, like, the conclusion he comes to at the end, which is like, the results of this test don't matter. It doesn't matter if I have this diagnosis because I was able to do this incredible thing and I was received a certain way by people. And it's actually these interactions with others that can be rehearsed and role-played that define who we are much more so than what's in our mind. There's certainly some truth there to that. And I think you can look at examples of, you know, like, some of the rehearsals and some of the more heartwarming examples, maybe the pilot did, or in a little bit of confidence by role-playing like a guy asking for a kiss. I don't know. But-

• 24:06Speaker 03

  I do feel that message. I was like a little bit like, yeah, but you're not, you don't really mean this. Like, you didn't really realize this. You're just putting a button on your...

• 24:15Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. So, so on that note, thank you for pointing that out because what I think Nathan Fielder would say is that what he really found out is that, is that part, what you said, like, what you need can be found in other people in ways that, again, maybe you misunderstood at the outset of your journey of self-discovery. Like, that's basically the point, which is a lot like saying, what I found out was the real championship was the friends we made along the way.

• 24:51Speaker 00

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• 26:01Speaker 01

  See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 26:23Pablo Torre?

  I think it naturally brings us to the next part of, I think, what I wanted to discuss. And we can sort of like jump back and forth through all of this, if that's cool with you.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:31Pablo Torre?

  Because the question of like how you tell a story in sports journalism, in magazine writing, to just focus on like what we used to do and really pride ourselves on doing. It was always about what's the bigger idea here, you know? Like, there would be a profile, but then ideally you would find a bigger idea, something bigger to say that the profile subject or the feature subject would allow you to kind of engage with. And I actually, I don't want to presume that. I always aspired to that. Was that something that you were hunting for when you wanted to do a piece on someone else? Like, what is there beyond famous person is like this?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  So, yeah, we both used to write sports profiles for magazines. And I'm interested in also talking to you about kind of like whether or not those are still a thing to the same degree.

• 27:28Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  And it was just come up like amidst the NBA Finals, right? We need to tell more stories about these guys. That's, but profiling, I was thinking about it while watching the rehearsal a little bit. I always felt like you had to kind of dual track it.

• 27:44Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  When I was spending time with someone, I genuinely wanted to be open to the possible, like, learning new things at every step of the way, not just the beginning. Learning things through being around them, observing them, reporting and whatnot. But at the same time, while I was doing that, I was also looking for a thesis, a point. Every profile has to have a point. Then you have to be open to also that point being challenged. Sometimes I would go into stories with a belief of what the point was and it would change completely. I could think of a few examples like that, honestly, over the years. So it was, I always found...

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Kind of you had to have two ideas in your head at once. Probably not too dissimilar from what we were just describing.

• 28:28Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. No, I mean, for me, um, look, as, so the best, the things I'm most proud of were dual tracked. One track was I am reporting and meeting somebody that I do not know otherwise. And I've researched and I'm open to, as you say, like finding out all the things that I could not pre-write. The second track, I'm always on guard for like, what is this actually saying about anything beyond the narrow vantage point of you care about this guy because you're a sports fan? So the example I'll use briefly is just, one of the things I, I really enjoyed doing, even though it was very hard, was a profile of James Harden that I did for ESPN the magazine.

• 29:10Pablo Torre?

  But this piece, part of it was like this question, and again, James Harden was not a good quote, not a good interview. He was dating Khloe Kardashian at the time. I went to Houston, incidentally, to visit them and she was hanging around, went to his basketball camp. You do the stuff that makes you feel like Nathan Fielder, right? Like you're just like creepily following somebody with a laptop strapped to your chest, figuratively speaking, like taking notes and creeping around and just like watching and observing. And so I related to that part, right? There's some journalistic kind of vibes in, in, in the rehearsal as well.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:40Pablo Torre?

  But in this case, sort of the premise ended up being like, James Harden was just signing this giant Adidas contract, a nine-figure contract with Adidas. He was now like the face of the Rockets. And there was this question of like, who actually likes James Harden? Who wants to wear his shoes? Who wants to be him, right? Like, he seems like this, you know, he's this guy who like has a beard, but that seems engineered. Like, what is his deal? And by the end, like the dual track thing, like, so one track was profile, going to tell you about him and how he got to be this way. But the parallel track ended up being like this question that was inverted by the end, which was, look at the way the attention economy has been structured.

• 30:22Pablo Torre?

  Look at how people are competing to be famous and to get rich and to, again, manipulate algorithms in all these ways. The better question for James Harden is actually, who doesn't want to be like him? Because he is a guy who has every lever of like, again, dating a reality star, uh, growing this beard for, uh, branding. You could argue flopping to, to, to get points and more money. Like he is exploiting every rule available to him, including those of the internet, the attention economy, as well as basketball itself. So, second track, comment on like, what the [bleep] is celebrity now? First track, who the [bleep] is James Harden?

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Did you feel like there was a point in your reporting where you pivoted a little bit?

• 31:05Pablo Torre?

  Yes, yes, because, uh, when the guy that you, you sort of like show up to a profile, I think, and you're hoping that the subject just gives you everything and is just like very reflective. And at a certain point you realize, and this is, I think, where I'm curious for your take, like, at a certain point, you have to wonder, when am I gonna microdose like a think piece? You know, like, when am I gonna be the person who's observing stuff in a, in, in a sort of like, here is my view, my perspective personally on what's happening here versus here is a story in which there is a plot and I am telling you what I've seen as opposed to I am interpreting what I'm seeing.

• 31:50Pablo Torre?

  And so when James was not a great quote, it sort of like shunted me to prioritize that second track more. And I think it, it made sense for him, but it doesn't, I, I'm sensitive though to the way in which you can overdo the second track as well.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you're describing something that I, we used to encounter a lot with profiles, which is how much you actually show of a person is constricted by access, how much you actually get to see them and be around them, which has dramatically changed over the last 10, 15 years. And also whether they have something to say, right? Like if you're around somebody who's like incredibly sospoken and uninteresting, or maybe just not, not open, you end up having to overindex another thing you have to do right around them, you have to interview you to do, um, outside reporting. And also you are more likely to kind of not vamp, but like explore ideas versus like, I, I think in my own experiences, there were stories like that.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  But there were also stories, like I was around, I did a lot of football player profiles. I was around Martellus and Michael Bennett. Very little me required in that story because they were just so funny and weird and interesting guys. So I was like, let me just spend like a few days with them and what it's described to be what. And I'll, you know, I've, I had some theses about how unique they were and why it worked.

• 33:08Pablo Torre?

  I remember, yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  But, but it was mostly just like, hey, this is what it's like to be about these dudes. Jalen Ramsey was a similar one. Where I spent three days, I think two days with him in Tennessee. And ended up just being like, here's what that was like for the most part, because he was just so interesting and funny and whatever. Versus like a guy like Justin Herbert. I went into that thinking, that was one of my last profiles. I went into that with a thesis and a theory about what the story would be about. And it kind of ended up being what the story was about, which is what is it like to be an introvert as a quarterback in the NFL? And boy, was he an introvert. So a lot of it, and I, that was where I had a ton of access. He just is not a talkative dude and is very private. And that was reflected in the story.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  And so I think you, you have to be kind of open to where the reporting takes you a little bit. But it's definitely a product of like, what actually, like, you know, the, the person and how much of them you get.

• 34:04Pablo Torre?

  I remember talking to you about this, uh, when both of us were towards the end of our runs as like full-time magazine writers. And effectively begging for access is really depressing.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  Oh my God, the stories I could tell.

• 34:20Pablo Torre?

  How would you, so you can anonymize it if you want. But like, how would you convey to someone who doesn't know what it's like to try and profile a celebrity athlete? Like what it's actually like that's not in the piece?

• 34:32Speaker 03

  I don't have to anonymize this one. When I went to, I did the profile on Luka Doncic and I went to Spain and I was there for four days. And I spent three of the days just waiting to see Luka Doncic. To the point where like, I had to basically like jump into his car in Spain to like, cause I was like, I need time. I need to see this guy. So much of being a.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Athlete profile writer was like, I think it's gotten way, way worse now. Well, maybe it's flipped around and I don't know. I actually can't speak to it with terms of access. But like, we were writing from like 2008-ish, 2007-ish through 2016-ish, whatever. And it was, it's kind of like a turning point, I think, in how athletes are covered and written about generally, which is to say, before that, access profiles were everywhere. It was just a thing. It was like, part of being a famous athlete was like a big, you know, capital J journalists would come write about you and spend time with you. And then around that time, I think, some athletes thought, well, do I really need this? Because I have my own social media. I might have my own documentary company. I'm in charge of production.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Why do I want to make myself vulnerable to this annoying, you know, kid from Harvard who's talking about his pee buddies when I can just put out my own athlete creative thing?

• 35:47Pablo Torre?

  Why is this investigative journalist from Yale who used to do things about like, you know, serious financial crimes, asking me how many nachos I eat?

• 35:57Speaker 03

  There was a NFL player who flaked on me in two states. I was supposed to hang out with him. In one state, just ended up sitting there in a hotel room, didn't write back. Then they said, okay, well, you know, he's in this other state, flew to the other state, dipped on me then. I mean, it's just, it's humiliating.

• 36:16Pablo Torre?

  The boxers were the best. Boxers were the best because their sort of like constitution was naturally to sell. And they had no concern about PR because they were basically effectively uncancelable. Like, boxers didn't give a [BLEEP]. It was great. Although I did get thrown out of the gym by Floyd Mayweather once, which was, I think, just a generally sad experience. A waste of, a huge waste of my time. But when it comes to like, what athletes need from, what they want, what they could use from a magazine, or certainly magazines are less and less the thing, but just from a profile writer. It does occur to me that like, the real estate on a publication really was a utility that they could monetize and benefit from.

• 36:59Pablo Torre?

  Now, it's sort of like, it's all tiles on their Instagram page, you know? So I don't, I, it's hard for me to blame them for being less and less open to this stuff.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  It's a tough sell now for the reasons you described. And I still think there's a lot to be gained by letting someone else tell your story and... Presented in a like deeply considered fashion. You see that with some documentaries for sure still. I think that's kind of although there's now a lot of that's the one field where there's a lot of it is athlete made. And that's a whole other thing, but Herbert, who I mentioned, like that obviously was not his idea. His marketing people were like, hey, would you want to do this? And I would argue it's like the only real glimpse people have gotten into Justin Herbert. It made a lot of people understand him and talk about him and like him, you know,

• 37:52Speaker 03

  because he's just extraordinarily quiet and private. And I think, um, you know, the goal is not to do propaganda for them or whatever. But I think in terms of like helping people understand him, it was,

• 38:05Speaker 03

  you know, kind of the only thing that's been done on him in that fashion.

• 38:09Pablo Torre?

  Correct.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  But that's a tough sell like, hey, like, yeah, you can market being commercials and you can post and you could do podcasts. But if you really want people to like you, let somebody think about you for a long time and write about it. That's a tough, that's a tough pitch. I get it. I'll tell you what, he did not like being interviewed and he did not like having me hang around. I went to his, um, he had like a golf tournament, so I spent time in Oregon for the piece. And, um, his family was so lovely and I got to like, there was, you know, I talked to a lot of his teammates. Cause I was like, all right, this dude's not, not really like a talker. Let me talk to like Keenan Allen and stuff. And he, Herbert himself did not like being interviewed, but whenever he would see me interviewing like his teammate,

• 38:51Speaker 03

  he would be like the shack hiding behind the telephone pole, trying to figure out what was going on. This like six foot six quarterback. I'd be like, it's fine, Justin. And he'd be like, why did he say that? And I'm like, dude, you could talk.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  It was very funny. Um, but yeah, it's you're giving up control in a way that I think is, is scary.

• 39:10Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I think, uh, the most you can hope for is, and this is sort of like the pledge. And maybe this brings us back to, to Nathan Fielder towards the end, which is just that like, you kind of hope that the person you entrust with your vulnerability kind of sees your story the way that you do. And you hope that they represent it ethically. Like that's kind of, you know, like, because look, as, as anybody who is telling a story, there are two, two things. One thing is.

• 39:42Pablo Torre?

  One thing is, is don't talk about your Peabody nomination. Uh, that, that will come back to bite you. Um, the second thing though, is be extraordinary. I mean, this, it's sort of like if my mom called me up one day and was like, guess what? I just got a call from the New York Times or from GQ Magazine and they just talked to me for an hour. I'd be like, oh God, no. Right? Like you don't want, I would, I would, I would advocate always like discretion unless you have done enough thinking where like you're strategic. Like I don't, I don't blame people for being careful, right? Like I just, I, I get it because what I'm trying to say is the storyteller's foremost obligation is to the best story.

• 40:27Pablo Torre?

  And so all you really hope for ethically is for them to hear your side of the story such that you influence truthfully as the subject, the story that you want told. And maybe you'll get there and it'll be perfect and great. But sometimes you are playing defense from the start. And that is something that it's hard for me to spin. It's just, it's kind of just how it works.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Let me ask you one more question about profiles. And this is kind of from the perspective, I guess, of the athletes. We talk about like why they're a dying thing and they really are, right? Like we, we should start there. Like there's less and less of these written all of the time for a litany of reasons, starting with people don't read anymore.

• 41:23Pablo Torre?

  And by the way, and also like links being deprioritized on various platforms like Twitter that used to like.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  Well, that's, that's, that's what I'm actually going to ask you about is like, can they still make an impact though? Like I, cause that's kind of. You know, um.

• 41:37Pablo Torre?

  What's impact?

• 41:38Speaker 03

  I feel like during, yeah, that's, that's the other question because I think definitely you don't see profiles take over the internet in the way they did 10, certainly 15, 20 years ago, right? Like you, it's not, I, it did feel like 15 or so years ago, there'd be like a big story coming out and everyone was talking about it like, oh my God, did you read Jair Moringer on Alex Rodriguez or whatever? And that doesn't feel like the case anymore. And I don't think it's the fault of, it's definitely not the fault of the writers or the athletes. I think even it's just that's the internet has changed. So in a world where people don't read and people don't talk about things on social media to talk about stories, I certainly

• 42:22Speaker 03

  know why we think they should still exist, but do you think like from the perspective of athletes and sort of this industry, there's a, there's a, there's a case to be made for them?

• 42:33Pablo Torre?

  So doing this show has made me think about this because we basically try and pre-aggregate ourselves where it's like, what do we think the clips are gonna be? Let's make sure that we send them out because really what you're doing, what does impact mean? Does it mean that you got aggregated by like NBA Central? You know, does it, is at Legion hoops or whatever? Are they, does getting to the aggregators mean that you made a sound? Like, is that actually what sort of like internet currency feels like?

• 43:01Speaker 03

  If MLF football misrepresents you while you're blocked, does, do you still get the click?

• 43:07Pablo Torre?

  Does Dove Kleinman want to use your writing to fund an entirely fraudulent internet empire? If so, then maybe there's hope for us yet in the world of profiles. But it's, look, it's also telling to me that when it came to the rehearsal, that this was two years to do six episodes. You know?

• 43:33Speaker 03

  I'm more than two years.

• 43:35Pablo Torre?

  Probably more, but at the very least was training to fly a plane for two years. It does feel like the incentives of everything are leading us to, you know, outside the genre we're currently speaking inside of, in which we are chained to the furnace of content. If you want to do this ambitious, sort of creative, arty, like, we're telling stories kind of stuff, you're doing it less often, but hopefully more impactfully. Bigger swings, but fewer of them. Precious, big swing projects like Nathan Fielder, like Wright Thompson, by the way, who just had this Aaron Judge profile, which you didn't get to, but like, he's still doing it at a really high level in this way. X times a year, a couple of times a year.

• 44:17Pablo Torre?

  And then there's, what do you do inside of a world in which you're always on? And that's where we are living, you know, in various media. And that's how we try to, you know, I guess the answer is like, do meta-commentary. That's how you can still keep profiles alive.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  I think where I come down on the rehearsal, I know we had it for a long time, and certainly where I come down on pieces like the ones Wright did, which is really excellent, people should go check it out. Speaking of, we didn't even get into, we talked about profile writing, you could, Aaron Judge, not a great quote, but it's a great story.

• 44:49Pablo Torre?

  Command F Judge said, or Judge says, you'll see how much access Wright got.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  But you learn a lot about him and what he means to the organization and baseball and the pressure of it.

• 44:59Pablo Torre?

  And the history of the Yankees.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's great. The part about him honing his swing, I thought was so interesting and his perfectionism is really interesting, so. Anyways, people should go read it. But what I feel about both these things is I'm just really glad they exist. That's kind of how I felt after watching the rehearsal, like, you know, so much of what you make now is so ephemeral and requires such low effort. The effort to impact proportions of making art have never been worse. And I'm complicit in that too, you know, I put out dumb clips all the time. To see someone make something that took such an obviously incredible amount of effort,

• 45:40Speaker 03

  and then to see it resonate with people the way it has, to be a topic of conversation, such an insane... Bizarro, unhinged piece of art. I'm just happy that that's happening and that people like him are doing stuff like that, regardless of how much of it was him playing a role versus being himself.

• 46:02Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, no, I think that's a really good way of putting it. And I guess what I found out today brings us back to where we started, which is that, yeah, I mean, look, I think you're right. I need to workshop this Nick Wright metaphor. Nick Wright's like saying, you know, it's a real Pablo Torre Lars Piven dynamic. I think it's actually, to circle everything back to its most symmetrical sort of conclusion, I just think that Nick Wright and I are both jealous of people who are more ambitious and more creative than us. And that's how I feel about the rehearsal. And that's clearly how he feels about this show. So the ultimate compliment, the ultimate compliment, is that I want to be more like, more like the rehearsal, I think.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  Even your burns are so convoluted.

• 46:48Pablo Torre?

  God damn it!

• 46:49Speaker 03

  I was just gonna say, he looks like the guy from Shrek, Lord Farco. That's what I was thinking. I was like, ooh, here's one I got for you, Pablo. Hit him with this, the Shrek image. You've been spending this entire episode thinking about how to get back at Nick Wright.

• 47:01Pablo Torre?

  God damn it.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  And meanwhile, I'll just quote tweet him with like the Shrek guy in a loop. People will go crazy.

• 47:06Pablo Torre?

  That's also a better strategy.

• 47:22Pablo Torre?

  Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, Chris Tumanello. Our studio engineering by RG Systems. Our sound design by NGW Post. Our theme song, as always, is by John Bravo. And we will talk to you next time.

• 47:58Speaker 00

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