Radio Better Offline: Pablo Torre and David Roth

Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York city. Ed Zitron is joined in studio by Pablo Torre of Pablo Torre Finds Out and David Roth of Defector to talk about independent media, what makes a compelling show, and what it’s like raising a turtle. Pablo Torre Finds Out: https://www.youtube.com/@PabloTorreFindsOut Investigating Belichick's Girlfriend: The Power of Jordon Hudson, Revealed https://youtu.be/As5P5TA-ERk?si=-PfM7fZ-Tw8S-yQc Hank Azaria on His Bruce Springsteen Tribute Band, Apu and Finding His True Voice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rnyMXm1ThQ David Roth https://defector.com/author/david-roth https://bsky.app/profile/davidjroth.bsky.social YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:36Speaker 02

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• 1:14Ed Zitron?

  Every morning I wake up to 100 punishments, each worse than the last, all so that I can bring you the greatest podcast of all time. I'm Ed Zitron and this is Better Offline.

• 1:34Ed Zitron?

  Now that we've got that out of the way, we've got many new items in the Better Offline merch store. Go and buy them. There's a zip hoodie, which I fucking love, and a word mark shirt, a t-shirt, and there's a hat. It's lovely. You can also get infant clothings. I think like if you put that on a baby, though, they will take the baby from you. Anyway, so today I'm joined by the incredible Pablo Torre of Pablo Torre Finds Out and David Roth of Defector, co-owner of Defector and a turtle, I believe.

• 2:01Speaker 04

  Yes, I do. I am the co-owner of a turtle.

• 2:02Ed Zitron?

  What's the turtle's name?

• 2:04Speaker 04

  Turtle's name is Marvin.

• 2:05Ed Zitron?

  Marvin.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  And he is, well, it was a pair of turtles, but Marvin is the surviving turtle.

• 2:12Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's fine. They had, he had, the other guy had a good, long life. George had a good, long life.

• 2:17Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 2:18Speaker 04

  And something you don't learn when a man sells you a turtle out of a bucket of drywall on Canal Street is they live. Chinatown turtle. Yeah, I got a Chinatown turtle on an impulse 24 years ago.

• 2:30Ed Zitron?

  Oh, wow. So you've had them a while.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, they live forever. Like, the people that the vets that treat them are also the vets that treat birds. And the lady that when I took Marvin to the vet, because he'd been eating parts of the the tank, I was told I was told this was normal, that they

• 2:44Ed Zitron?

  It happens.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  Whatever is around goes in. And then it stays there until such time as he starts acting alarmingly enough that you take him to the vet. She also treats birds. And she was like, yeah, this is a this is a thing with your pets that are basically dinosaurs is that if left to their own devices, they will live for as long as their owners.

• 3:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 3:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. Which is cool to think about. For the rest of my life, I got this little pet.

• 3:07Ed Zitron?

  I mean.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  He doesn't like me. Like, that's pretty plain.

• 3:10Ed Zitron?

  Do they show affection?

• 3:12Speaker 04

  Nah, I mean, no. Like, it would be hard to tell. Like, if I pick him up and, like, you know, give him some pets on his shell.

• 3:19Speaker 05

  Does he appreciate your Bernie Sanders?

• 3:21Speaker 04

  I do communicate with him in a series of accents. Yeah, it's not a lot of

• 3:25Ed Zitron?

  He responds well to Bernie.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  I am once again asking that you eat this piece of radicchio like, blow it into your tank. Uh, yeah, he well, they'll I guess that is how he responds to it is by eating the piece of radicchio that I've lowered into his tank. He loves chicories.

• 3:39Ed Zitron?

  What's chicory?

• 3:40Speaker 04

  Any kind of chicories, you know, your cabbages.

• 3:41Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay, I didn't know that.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  Castel Franco. I know Pablo, that's what I'm talking about.

• 3:45Ed Zitron?

  This is a tech podcast.

• 3:47Speaker 05

  I'm mostly here to throw Bernie Sanders cues and cabbage references.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you.

• 3:52Speaker 05

  Back and forth with Rob.

• 3:53Ed Zitron?

  And that's what we're talking about today. So both of you guys are some of the most gifted sports broadcasters and writers I've ever met.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  Agreed.

• 4:01Ed Zitron?

  I'm not blowing smoke. It's I don't I don't give freebies.

• 4:04Speaker 04

  Many are saying this.

• 4:05Ed Zitron?

  But I think both of you have also done something really incredible with, like, the format, in the sense that it's not like it's about sports in so much as sports is part of the world and culture itself. Even, and Pablo, your, like, Jordon Hudson thing and the Bill Belichick stuff, that was fascinating to me despite honestly wanting to know less about Bill Belichick, who is the former and the many non-sports.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  I love the disclosures here.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:27Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, the many non-sports listeners can say, a sports episode? How dare you? Oh, my God, do you want to hear me fucking talk about Kevin Roos again? I'll do it in, like, one day. I'll probably do it on this podcast.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  You're all right. I'm already doing it.

• 4:39Ed Zitron?

  I'm already doing it. But it's fascinating because it's not.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  I don't need to underline that I could give you 90 minutes on the turtle. We already know that that's true, so that threat will hang over the rest of this podcast.

• 4:48Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I'm getting emails asking about more fucking turtle stuff now.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  You think I don't have turtles? Wait, I didn't even ask. Have you?

• 4:54Ed Zitron?

  So, talking of

• 4:55Speaker 05

  Ended poorly.

• 4:56Ed Zitron?

  Small, old, wretched things. Bill Belichick is the coach now of UNC, University of North Carolina, football coach, and he was the coach of the New England Patriots. And he has a girlfriend who is 24 years old. So it's not really about the sports. It's about that there's just this random woman who has ingratiated herself into Dunkin' Donuts commercials and the like. And you kind of broke that story open in a very interesting way where it wasn't like just you on your own talking. You had a, I forget who else you had on that.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  Katie Nolan, Michael Cruz Kane as my accomplices in this journalistic act of alleged malpractice.

• 5:30Ed Zitron?

  Oh, and some say. Malpractice, according to Bill Simmons, who will explain shortly.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  The Bills, the Bills in general aren't, aren't, aren't necessarily cottoning.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Most of your, your upper New England Bills have had some issues with it.

• 5:42Ed Zitron?

  Your William problems. Yeah, and it's, it's funny because the way you tell that story is not, you get a lot of people who do the talking to the camera stuff, but it feels that you kind of regale people with the tales and the journalism while also doing quite firm, well researched stuff as well.

• 5:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I was inspired by one of the things that has baffled me the most on YouTube, which is the unboxing video. Because the unboxing video, once I learned that there's this kid, I assume your audience is very familiar with Ryan's toys.

• 6:10Ed Zitron?

  I'm not, so.

• 6:11Speaker 04

  I weirdly am familiar with Ryan's toys and I don't, I don't have children and my niece and nephew do not watch that shit. And yet Ryan's.

• 6:19Ed Zitron?

  My child does not watch YouTube ever.

• 6:21Speaker 04

  But this is just, it's a kid with a channel.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  I believe, I believe we've watched Ryan, the, the, the eponymous Ryan truly age in real time.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  31 years old.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  And he's, he's been making like NBA max contract money beyond that, well beyond that now, I mean, the second.

• 6:38Ed Zitron?

  But, and he just unboxes stuff.

• 6:40Speaker 05

  But, but, but, but toys, Ryan's toys, his parents bring him toys that he then opens up and plays with. And the audience is in the tens of millions. He is an archetype on YouTube. He's a, he is a genre unto himself that has inspired so many imitators, all of which spoke something fascinating because you're watching, again, take the, if you can put the pedophilia aside for a second. Okay. And you're just watching a kid open toys. The question-

• 7:08Ed Zitron?

  Don't say things like that. That's not nice.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Legally speaking, Roth, you know what-

• 7:11Ed Zitron?

  I do.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  You know what I have to do legally speaking? I had a talk with you before we walked in. You said you wouldn't call me out on my-

• 7:19Ed Zitron?

  I'm sorry.

• 7:19Speaker 05

  On my disclosures.

• 7:20Ed Zitron?

  I didn't think you were serious. I thought you were bluffing. I thought it was a power thing.

• 7:23Speaker 05

  Listen.

• 7:24Ed Zitron?

  Certain dominance.

• 7:25Speaker 05

  If you just take this as a, why is this so popular question?

• 7:29Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  There is something fascinating about it. You are watching, you are vicariously living through someone else authentically be surprised and delighted by something inside of a box.

• 7:39Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  And this format has been imitated, copied, spread throughout YouTube. And so the whole idea of what if I could authentically surprise and delight a friend of mine, not with a- I don't even know if a Power Ranger is a reference that anybody gets anymore.

• 7:55Ed Zitron?

  But something you found.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  Right. But, but journalism, actually.

• 7:58Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 7:58Speaker 05

  What if the toy is journalism that they can then open up and play with and poke at and ask me questions about? What if I did that? What if I could just sort of channel the, the thing that the, the sun god that is the algorithm seems to enjoy about the unboxing video? What if I could do that for journalism?

• 8:16Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 8:16Speaker 05

  And so I did exhaustive, insanely, uh, uh, exhaustive reporting into the Bill Balachek, Jordon Hudson question, which is also a story about the highest paid employee in the state of North Carolina, public employee, who is also the archetype of a certain privacy discretion, do your jobness, Sun Tzu cosplay, now being sort of the opposite, inverted by this woman who is now running his life, um, beyond just the age gap stuff. What if I could do that for Katie Nolan, Michael Cruz Kane and surprise and delight them with what I had investigated?

• 8:48Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 8:48Speaker 05

  And so that's kind of my solution to trying to make YouTube content.

• 8:52Ed Zitron?

  And to, and also kind of like a, kind of radio show host as well. It's, you've got like quite an interesting setup as well.

• 8:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, man, we're trying to do, look, the, the, the show is audio first insofar as when I edit the show, I am only listening to it.

• 9:05Ed Zitron?

  You're editing it on your own?

• 9:07Speaker 05

  We have a staff of a half dozen people who are on the editorial side. But me, I always-

• 9:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I imagine you're editing, just, I was gonna say, if you did that all your own, that sounds like-

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Even Soderbergh, so it's just like five different credits, different names.

• 9:20Speaker 05

  iPhones, shooting everything on iPhones. I, I am doing a pass, an editorial pass, which I am making cuts and all that stuff, restructuring, but I'm only listening.

• 9:29Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Because I want someone who's only listening to not have the question of like, eh, it feels like they thought about a second.

• 9:34Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 9:35Speaker 05

  But also, we are a three-camera setup-

• 9:38Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 9:39Speaker 05

  -in our studio, such that we are a YouTube show, so that nobody watching on YouTube thinks they thought about a second. And so, we are kind of torturing ourselves to be a fully-fledged product, and already, you can sense the sort of like, the, the, the discomfort viscerally-

• 9:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 05

  -of being a journalist who is making a product that I've analogized to a YouTube channel that is definitely not for pedophiles. We've established that.

• 10:01Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for saying-

• 10:02Speaker 05

  Just cannot say this more clearly, but, but trying to be where people are with the knowledge that they probably won't switch platforms, they'll probably just gonna, they'll live wherever we find them, and we just gotta, we just gotta give them, hopefully, something that they can spend some time with.

• 10:18Ed Zitron?

  And you're fully independent, or are you backed by someone like-

• 10:21Speaker 05

  The, uh, is Dan Lebatard a corporate monolith?

• 10:24Ed Zitron?

  I don't know who that is.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  I love that.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  Technically, he's a private equity entity.

• 10:28Ed Zitron?

  No, that's how you say that?

• 10:30Speaker 04

  Do you know about the, Metallica's actually really interesting.

• 10:32Ed Zitron?

  No, I don't, but also, I thought he was Lebatard.

• 10:35Speaker 05

  Well-

• 10:35Ed Zitron?

  Like, like the French for bastard.

• 10:37Speaker 04

  The French bread?

• 10:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. The French bastard, Dan the bastard.

• 10:41Speaker 05

  Dan Leba-, Dan Lebastard is my corporate partner.

• 10:44Ed Zitron?

  Damn, that's a real disappointment.

• 10:46Speaker 05

  A Cuban guy with a French name who looks white, all of this is very-

• 10:49Speaker 04

  What a country, only in New York, right?

• 10:51Ed Zitron?

  Disappointed in his name, but beautiful.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  You should, I, like, Pablo may be too modest to do it, Metallica is an interesting experiment, you should talk about it.

• 10:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, so basically, uh, Dan Lebatard left ESPN, took his RSS feed with him, which is the key to starting a new business and microwaving a business, is have your audience-

• 11:07Ed Zitron?

  Have a feed.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  Have your feed, right? And so what he did was he partnered with John Skipper, who's the former president of ESPN.

• 11:14Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 11:14Speaker 05

  And they did not want to hire any ad salespeople. And so their licensing partner wound up being DraftKings. And DraftKings, you may know from every ad you've ever seen during a sporting event.

• 11:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Speaker 05

  And otherwise, the point being that Dan, who wanted freedom, wanted editorial non-interference whenever possible, founded an arrangement in which, yes, the company got to choose its own editorial docket, got backed by this company in which, by the way, I don't know if you've paid attention to sports or betting.

• 11:50Ed Zitron?

  I have not.

• 11:51Speaker 05

  But they have the money now.

• 11:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's it's kind of getting in bed with one devil, I guess.

• 11:56Speaker 05

  And and for legal reasons as well, I will not comment.

• 11:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 05

  But but but the the short answer to where I am is that they funded Metalark decided, we want to start a new show from scratch. We want to trust this guy that we are friends with and and know and hopefully trusted. And I got to create a show from scratch in now the vision that you have seen or heard. But where I am now to speed run through my trajectory briefly is that Public Torre Finds Out is no longer in the licensing deal with DraftKings. We are now independent with Metalark as our co-owner, but looking for a partner.

• 12:39Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 12:40Speaker 05

  And so if you're listening out there and you have a maybe.

• 12:44Ed Zitron?

  Open AI.

• 12:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:46Ed Zitron?

  They're definitely.

• 12:47Speaker 05

  Very good. Oh, they're good.

• 12:49Ed Zitron?

  They got money now.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  But we we we we just met with Palantir.

• 12:54Ed Zitron?

  That's great.

• 12:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, also another one.

• 12:55Ed Zitron?

  They really understand your audience. You should know the social security number of everyone. Everything about your audience.

• 13:02Speaker 05

  The WWE is not presenting us, actually.

• 13:04Ed Zitron?

  And Drill.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  What is interesting to me about this, as somebody who also works in independent media, we'll talk about that in a moment, I guess, the, the way that you spent the money that you got from the corporate partner was, like, obviously, the show looks good, it looks pro, it sounds good, like, there are talented people working on it. I have friends, Jeb Lund did, it was a guy that I do another podcast with, it's about Hallmark movies, not about sports, or, yes, but-

• 13:29Speaker 05

  Like and subscribe.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, but did a feature with you guys and was, like, I'm not, I wouldn't say I was jealous, exactly, but I was very impressed with the report, repertorial apparatus behind all of this, that it's like, it seemed more like working with 60 Minutes than it would be like doing a story for Defector. You're so much better at pitching my show than I am. I don't know, man, it's, but, what I mean by this was that, basically, like, there were producers, there were people that were like, "I'll file that FOIA for you, I will do, like-"

• 13:59Speaker 05

  We are trying to be an actual news magazine, in an era in which news magazines are either compromised in various ways, or just dead now.

• 14:05Ed Zitron?

  We're just kind of giving up on doing that?

• 14:08Speaker 05

  Right. So, so Jeb, by the way, who I cannot trust enough, co-hosts a pod with David Roth about Hallmark movies.

• 14:14Ed Zitron?

  Okay, you can joke about this, but every single, during CES, we did like 13 and a half hours of audio, you know?

• 14:20Speaker 04

  That's not even an exaggeration, either.

• 14:21Ed Zitron?

  Every single episode, and I did three 30-minute breaks, so, sections even, at the end, I was like, "David, what podcast do you do?" And every time, like, joylessly, "Yeah, okay, so, this is Chris-"

• 14:32Speaker 04

  I don't like promoting my shit, and it also felt weird because I was not holding myself out as an expert, but the idea of, you know, I'm going off about, like, "You shouldn't be AI in vacuum cleaners, bitch!", you know, and just trying to-

• 14:43Ed Zitron?

  And you do say that.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Trying to be big energy on it, and then at the end, it's feeling, "And if you like that, you're gonna love me, like, breaking down the worst performances of Candace Cameron's career every two months in a podcast."

• 14:54Ed Zitron?

  A guy who kind of looks like Chad Michael Murray, or Chad Michael Murray.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  Or Chad Michael Murray, sometimes you do get Chad Michael Murray, but yes, it is like a, anyway, we're off, we're far field with this.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's, I think the- But, but, what you said, just to catch you up, was, we had Jeb Lund as a correspondent, looking into his alma mater, which happened to be the college in Florida that Ron- DeSantis had taken over.

• 15:13Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 15:13Speaker 05

  And and hey.

• 15:14Ed Zitron?

  College.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  The New College of Florida, and he had taken it over. It turns out by basically bombing it with baseball players. So they turned over the student body, repoliticizing it, replacing, you may even say, great replacement.

• 15:29Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 15:29Speaker 05

  Foring them, the students, this deep and proud history of like, of liberal arts, of like, of like hippie dumb even.

• 15:37Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 15:37Speaker 05

  Replaced by baseball player recruits so that they could then change the demographics of the institution as well as refocus everything in the model of various.

• 15:46Ed Zitron?

  Imagine if they tried to put any of this fucking effort into literally anything else.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  It's all pranks, basically, is this the spirit of conservative governance. Who shows up in that episode. What if he tried to do other things?

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. What if he tried, what if he tried jumping out of a helicopter?

• 16:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 16:02Ed Zitron?

  He could even have a parachute, maybe.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  That's not, yeah, sure. That's nice of you to say.

• 16:06Ed Zitron?

  It's an idea. No, no, no, just throwing it out. We are, we are just riffing.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:10Ed Zitron?

  You don't know.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Having fun.

• 16:11Ed Zitron?

  I could be a piano in there.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  He could do anything. Maybe he flies. We don't know.

• 16:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but the.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  What might if I know? The bit that I wanted to underline with that, though, is that like, that sort of journalism is hard and expensive, but it is also, it doesn't have to come out the other end as like morally safer, sitting in a chair, talking to a whistleblower.

• 16:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  Like, the bit that I have enjoyed the most about the, certainly the, the bit about like Jordon Hudson is good for this. I mean, it's good on its own, but like, so much of when we talk about journalism, we talk about, you know, the dangerous state that it's in and, you know, all of that is, is true. It's also fun. Like, it is a cool thing to do with your time.

• 16:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  And the bit that I think you captured in that, which is sort of like at the, the core of what makes like a good podcast good, is that like, when you're reporting a story, there's this like, sort of like flowers for Baljernon bit where like, for 90 minutes after you file the story, you are an expert on a thing that you just did all this reading and all this reporting on. And then if you're like me, slowly the curtain drops and then when it goes back up, it's just like a 1989 Dave Magadan baseball card at an empty stadium. All of that goes away. But when you know your shit and you're like telling people crazy stuff that they don't know and they're responding to it, like, first of all, you feel more interesting than you actually are. But also, like, I've been on both sides of it. It is fun.

• 17:35Ed Zitron?

  You also learn more about the material as you get someone to bounce it off of.

• 17:38Speaker 05

  But I think that that part, like, I thank you for, again, pitching the show better than I could. Because the premise-

• 17:45Speaker 04

  I'm angling for a job.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  I mean, well, listen, mister-

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Freely, it's PR.

• 17:50Speaker 05

  You kill one more turtle, you may have something on your hands.

• 17:54Speaker 05

  To me, the idea here is that this stuff doesn't need to just be, you know, a you ought to proposition. It's like you want to actually hang out while we're doing journalism.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 18:07Speaker 05

  And that part of like, it is stupid but smart, it is highbrow but lowbrow, it is fundamentally silly and also nutritious in some meaningful way. That's why I love and I'm not yet tired by my job.

• 18:22Ed Zitron?

  And I'm the same way with Better Offline, because I don't bother to worry so much about whether I'm perfect, as many people email me. Thank you.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  It's nice to have people reminding you when you're not.

• 18:33Ed Zitron?

  Thank you. Oh, there's a slight echo in the room. There's a slight echo in my heart now.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Great note.

• 18:37Ed Zitron?

  But it's, you get to talk about this stuff that's very serious, but when you read "objective", quote unquote, journalist, it's just this dry fucking pallid list of stuff with some degree of context versus the very human reaction you can have to the news of the day, even if it isn't a conclusive thing, even if it's just OpenAI did this, or the very strange things that constantly happen with the Bill Belichick thing, like, uh, Jordon Hudson getting banned from UNC, like, these moments, these moments are fascinating to discuss and lost in regular journalism, I find. They just, they go, well, this happened. Shit.

• 19:14Speaker 05

  Well, I also think that so much of our magnetic field in journalism is the sun god of the algorithm that I was describing before. And for me, I think, you know, Dave Mackin aside, there are just lots of pockets of sports that are so much more fun than what the A-block on a given talk show is that day. And I am somebody who often might be participating in that A-block of like, I love, and I'm not here to say, ah, sports, television, bleh. It's merely that they have dined at the same buffet for so long that there's all this other stuff. And so it's hard to not, just like speaking the language of endless metaphor here, but

• 19:55Speaker 05

  like, what if there's a restaurant that also served the other things on the menu?

• 20:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but even one of my favorite dining experiences I had recently, my dear friend Noah Aaronstein, friend of the show, I went out with him to the Yemeni Cafe, which is exactly what it sounds like. And he ordered it, and there was this guy, Chris Crowley there. I think he works at New York Magazine or New Yorker. He's gonna be really pissed, I forgot about that. It was so nice to just be there with two experts to just tell me what the fuck was going on. Then we went to the Long Island Bar, I think, it's the place where they invented the Cosport. And just having them regale with the stories.

• 20:27Speaker 05

  With the Long Island Bar down on Atlantic Avenue?

• 20:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, good burger there, too.

• 20:32Ed Zitron?

  And it was just, no, try the cheese curds, let me tell you about that.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're delicious.

• 20:35Ed Zitron?

  Sitting around with someone who really loves and knows a shit ton about something and having a discussion about it is electric and fun. It's the basis of all, well, not all podcasting, but it's the basis of why we like entertainment and why we have experts in general. But I feel like it's something kind of lost on modern journalism. Like, you don't, oh, you know us. I had a journalist the other day be like, oh, yeah, they don't want us doing opinion about the subjects we write about. I don't want to fucking shoot myself. It was just like, oh, I wouldn't want the people who know stuff to talk about this. They might.

• 21:04Speaker 05

  It's a category error. I also think that it's one of those things where, and I understand how, if you work in a serious news gathering organization, like, you would take this work seriously. But there's also something very useful about taking stupid shit seriously in this case, which is basically, this is another bit of defector experience with this. We were filing a bunch of FOIAs to UNC, everybody is, to try to figure out, you know, what are, the emails exchanged between Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson and the provost and whoever, whatever, just for yucks.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  We saw that one of Pablo's producers had filed hundreds.

• 21:38Speaker 05

  Oh, you saw those?

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was, it was funny because it's like you can see who else is sort of in there.

• 21:43Speaker 05

  We were just doing this today, seeing what else people filed.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  But I love that, like, the idea of, I mean, all of those cost a little bit of money. All of them take some time to do, and yet it is like, you're gonna get a better product out at the other end of it, but also it's funny to spend time using the Freedom of Information Act or stuff like that. It doesn't all need to be like-

• 22:03Ed Zitron?

  I'm chasing down this very bizarre, turtle-esque man and he's extremely young. No, I'm not getting into the age discourse, it's not worth it.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:13Ed Zitron?

  But it's-

• 22:14Speaker 04

  The bit that people should know if they don't follow sports is that Bill Belichick is the crustiest, nastiest dude, just like a guy famous for like being like rude to reporters, rude to people that he works with.

• 22:25Ed Zitron?

  And he wears like a hoodie with holes in it and it's, he looks like-

• 22:28Speaker 05

  I mean, Donald Trump, I mean, he's someone that Trump spoke about at one dais or another where he says, uh, there's this letter, this letter, uh, this correspondence between Belichick and Trump. He's, he is in many ways truly the paragon of what it means to be the greatest coach in football, many believe, and also the biggest asshole.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:50Speaker 05

  Uh, and he is, he is both. And so this being the character at the heart of this is partly why, yes, we did have, uh, one of our producers file hundreds of public record requests.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  But that's like, to me, that, and I think that all of this stuff that I remember most fondly reading has that element of like applying a great deal of rigor and work, like not just in terms of, and craft too, obviously. Like you want it to read well and sound good and all that, but doing way more than you need to on a silly thing is to me like basically 100 times out of 100 that works.

• 23:25Ed Zitron?

  And everyone has a weird proclivity they can talk about for hours. That's why I can't legally bring up JoJo's Bizarre Adventure on the show anymore. My heart read him for me this morning. Um, but it's just, also, we all have our own things, so watching someone else do that and put real love and effort and sincerity into it is a powerful and interesting thing, and shooting the shit with some people that actually give a shit about it, who might not know everything, so it's kinda like friends having a discussion, but taken seriously.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like the sort of dynamic that I imagine makes Rogan work for people, which is basically like two guys just like, you know- Going back and forth for a while, but if like, one of those people has to know what they're talking about. Ideally, another one of them would be funny, like the, basically the armature is there.

• 24:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  And then if you populate it with people that, you know, like you happen to have two really good counterpunchers in there. Katie Nolan, one of the like legendary radio talents of her.

• 24:15Speaker 05

  Truly.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  That like, you do that and then like, you make sure that you know the stuff like A to Z, like that's. I mean, whatever, it's not revolutionary, like you said, but it is also like, that's just a product of doing a good job.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  It's also something that isn't incentivized, given the basic math of how to do anything now.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  So the whole idea of like, we're gonna spend a lot of work, a lot of money. I mean, again, I cannot stress enough how much of Dan Lebatard's money I've been spending.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Hell, yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 05

  To do this stuff. And I don't expect anybody else, like, the whole question at a certain point that you begin to contemplate around, like, what did we do here? What is this format? Why does it work? Who else can compete with us in this category? Like in Silicon Valley, as you know, they talk about the moat a lot.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  How do you build a moat around yourself? I am pleased to report that our moat is just our weird obsessiveness.

• 25:05Ed Zitron?

  And also the people, the literature, like you and you, like.

• 25:08Speaker 05

  Yes, no, it's, it's, do you obsess about this enough such that you want to spend money hiring people? Who are going to obsess about it even more? And that is, again, if you're gonna start from scratch, it's not what I would advise anyone to do.

• 25:23Ed Zitron?

  I actually don't know if I agree. I, I like the high production. I think taking stuff seriously on the production level is good, but I don't know. I have, I put out a newsletter this morning, Monday, the 16th of June. I'll probably do a new podcast about it as well, but it's like, I feel like they all want the Joe Rogan of the left. And they're like, how does this keep happening? We have this amicable oaf who is curious about everything because he knows nothing. Oh, and we also have this insanely high production thing. We make sure that everything's done really well and it sounds good and it looks good and it's well done on social. And the subject, he clearly has someone doing the research for him because if he has three hours of questions off there, he may just be like a true.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  Oh, I don't know that he's doing any research.

• 26:06Ed Zitron?

  No, I don't, I mean, for him.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  All right, yeah.

• 26:07Ed Zitron?

  For him. Like, I would not be surprised if he didn't know who was in front of him, like, who, who's this, Jamie? That's Donald Trump. It's Donald Trump.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  Is he good?

• 26:16Ed Zitron?

  Is he?

• 26:17Speaker 04

  Is he any good?

• 26:18Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:19Ed Zitron?

  Hi. Like, it's, I mean, there's also Lex Friedman, which is just a mystery, but it's-

• 26:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I have many follow-ups about Lex.

• 26:27Ed Zitron?

  I, well, my first question is, why can't he say a sentence? He's just like, hello.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  I'm always struck by this on those podcasts, things that are like, popular, that are not for me.

• 26:38Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  It's like, that's the story of my life, it's fine. It's just like, it's way easier for me to, even, you know, like, seeing a few minutes of Ant-Man and the Wasp, and I'm like, nope, not, that does not-

• 26:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  -go, you know, in any of my-

• 26:50Ed Zitron?

  But that makes sense.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  But it's also, I'm just saying that it's like, not for me. The idea of watching a podcast where like, someone who is obviously either both unprepared or just like, not good at talking, like, I don't get how that works.

• 27:04Ed Zitron?

  He has mental latency. Like, he, he, during the Donald Trump interview, which I only watched bits of because I don't want to die.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:12Ed Zitron?

  He goes, "Politics is a dirty game."

• 27:15Speaker 04

  So true.

• 27:15Ed Zitron?

  And he just pauses and goes, "How do you win at that game?" This is the most popular tech podcast.

• 27:22Speaker 05

  Really good.

• 27:23Ed Zitron?

  And it's just, Donald Trump's like, "Yeah, this is very true." Like, it's just like, so bad, it's like-

• 27:27Speaker 05

  I love that he wears black tie.

• 27:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 05

  Does he? He wears, like- He always wears like, a black suit with a black tie and a white starched shirt, so cool.

• 27:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  Like, the cater waiter swag, that's a really solid thing.

• 27:39Speaker 04

  Real party down aspect.

• 27:41Ed Zitron?

  It looks like a guy that John Wick would kill.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  Working a wedding and then I'm-

• 27:45Ed Zitron?

  Like, it's, I don't, but, with stuff like that, I'm just insulted by the whole Lex Friedman thing, he's so bad, but-

• 27:51Speaker 04

  Aren't those podcasts also like, six hours long?

• 27:53Ed Zitron?

  They're so long. He did one with Sam Altman for like, four hours. He could have said anything, I can't watch it, I try to, my brain stops. My brain just like, shuts down. It's like I've been in a car accident.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  That's an awfully long time to be spending with any two dudes, let alone if one of them is Sam Altman.

• 28:10Ed Zitron?

  And he's just like, "Yeah, you know, data centers will help build themselves now." And it's like, wow, what is data? How do you, computer?

• 28:19Speaker 04

  Fuck me up. I wish, I hope this is as long as The Irishman.

• 28:21Ed Zitron?

  No, I-

• 28:22Speaker 04

  I want, I want all of that.

• 28:23Ed Zitron?

  I wanna be on Lex Friedman so bad, I should just be clear. I'm gonna read him riddles, like, it's gonna be amazing.

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• 29:41Ed Zitron?

  But you look at like Theo Von or Joe Rogan, and you see their productions. Theo Von is a good interviewer. He's got, despite his insane, he has like an insanely long name. Do you know his name?

• 29:51Speaker 04

  His real name?

• 29:52Ed Zitron?

  His real name?

• 29:53Speaker 04

  No.

• 29:53Ed Zitron?

  Oh my Christ, I am so happy to be the per-

• 29:55Speaker 04

  It's Dutch-ish.

• 29:56Ed Zitron?

  It is no-

• 29:57Speaker 04

  Theophilus?

• 29:58Ed Zitron?

  No, this is that-

• 29:59Speaker 04

  Von something or other, like Burlingame?

• 30:01Ed Zitron?

  Listeners-

• 30:02Speaker 04

  Or whatever comes after it.

• 30:02Ed Zitron?

  Theo Von's real name is Theodore Capitani Von Kernitowski III.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 30:07Ed Zitron?

  One of the greatest names of all time. And his whole thing's been like, "You're damn."

• 30:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. I feel like this is a good decision by Theo Von to go by Theo Von, given the proceeding.

• 30:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  Kernitowski-

• 30:20Ed Zitron?

  It'd be so much funnier if he used this whole name, though, and kept doing the like, "Yeah, my name's Kernitat-"

• 30:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:26Ed Zitron?

  But his interview-

• 30:26Speaker 04

  Third of my name.

• 30:27Ed Zitron?

  But you don't get the sense from Rogan or Kernitowski that they're condescending or that they have, like, maybe they are in some way to like, people of color, I don't know. But they have a genuine like, "Oh, I want to be here, I'm interested, I'm interested in getting good material out of you," and it's kind of like calm and effortless. And it's like, maybe there is effort behind it, but it's just, it feels like a lot of that is just genuinely missing from media. It's something you both do in podcasts, and you obviously do way more podcasts, Pablo as well. But it's just like, let's get the, let's get some interesting shit. Let's have a good conversation. Because I don't know, several people who know each other discussing something interesting might have a good, interesting conversation, like you could listen to on your, on your phone in a podcast. It's not that hard.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  What's hard about it, though, I'll tell you what I found hard about it. And it's different.

• 31:15Ed Zitron?

  I don't mean it's not that hard.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  No, it isn't that hard. I mean, it's not hard relative to, like, we know that people like it, you know, and so like, doing it well is a skill that you can learn. And I, we've enjoyed when Pablo's come on the defector podcast, distraction, like, it's like getting to shoot around with, with like, LeBron. Like, you're just, you've done a lot of this. You're really good at talking. You have less verbal junk than I do. Like, it's fun.

• 31:37Speaker 05

  You're a verbal junk baller.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  My, I'm just, I'm just, yeah, absolutely. But beyond that, I think that, so that is like, it's a learnable skill to be able to do. The challenge for me, though, is, I want to be as good at talking or as knowledgeable as whoever is on. And for the most part, I'm not. And that's not a criticism of me. It just means that, like, you have to be willing to ask simpleton-type questions.

• 31:58Ed Zitron?

  I actually want to put this in a more empathetic sense. Same with the listeners.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:02Ed Zitron?

  They're logging on to hear you tell them something, and maybe you, Pablo, telling you something that you don't know, and you're learning. Maybe they too will learn. It's something Robert and Sophie early on said. It's just like, if you don't know something, just ask every fucking time. Because there will be a listener who's like, oh.

• 32:18Speaker 05

  I, I believe, it's funny to mention like LeBron, because oftentimes I have to do the, exercise my mind of like, do I need to explain who LeBron is to people?

• 32:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  Like, truly, like, I presume that the audience that comes to my show does not know anything about anything.

• 32:34Ed Zitron?

  And LeBron James is a basketball player, if you don't know, and one of the best.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  One of the biggest basketball men we've got.

• 32:39Ed Zitron?

  He's, he's really good.

• 32:40Speaker 04

  Prominent, as well.

• 32:41Speaker 05

  He's very strong.

• 32:42Ed Zitron?

  Space Jam 2, not a good movie.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  Sorry. But, but what I would say about, about like, what, about like, meeting the listener, wherever they are, it is, to me, it is about, um, The exercise of can I make someone who doesn't give a single shit about this care about this story and so we do stories about fencing corruption. We'll do stories. I mean, I can, I could waste your time mentioning all of the obscure things that I have, I think, conned people into listening to.

• 33:11Ed Zitron?

  I mean, the Hank Azaria interview was fascinating and that was like the furthest from what you actually do because and he wasn't telling just stories about like the Simpsons stuff like it was like.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  He was great and we tried to, the joke of my show is that we're a technically sports show, which just means that like somewhere like an Easter egg, you'll see a sports reference. I don't think anybody cares enough to check the box, but I'd check the box. I mean Roth, by the way, just to, the thing, the compliment I want to pay him is that when it comes to like thinking about politics in a way that speaks so fluently, the languages of hyperintelligence and utter stupidity, no one is better at David Roth and diagnosing that in Donald Trump.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  That's nice.

• 33:51Speaker 05

  Like you need to be someone who is so brilliant that they're also a moron and Roth, like truly it's, it's being fluent at both sort of registers.

• 34:00Ed Zitron?

  And the, one of my favorite ones is like my good friend Beetlejuice.

• 34:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a lot of, just the idea of thinking about who you could convince him is a real guy and a fan of his.

• 34:09Ed Zitron?

  He's just standing in front of a candy man.

• 34:11Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 34:11Ed Zitron?

  Candy man.

• 34:12Speaker 05

  You know, I knew Walrio. I know, we were friends. We were great friends, but we're not friends anymore.

• 34:17Ed Zitron?

  You gotta die.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  Yep. But the, the bit that I, the dumb question thing, the version of it that I sort of like, whatever, this is like positive self-talk that I'm saying into a microphone.

• 34:28Ed Zitron?

  Go for it.

• 34:28Speaker 05

  We had Bob Muld on.

• 34:30Ed Zitron?

  Who's that?

• 34:30Speaker 05

  Bob Muld, Husker Du and Sugar, like iconic punk rock musician man.

• 34:36Ed Zitron?

  And also very strong.

• 34:37Speaker 05

  Yes. And as we, yeah, also had worked in wrestling, like real, just like one of the most interesting guys in the world as a writer, not as a, as a performer, but he, you know, those bands mean a great deal to me. He is my co-host Drew McGarry's favorite musician ever.

• 34:51Ed Zitron?

  And I gotta listen to this.

• 34:52Speaker 05

  The question that I asked him basically after, you know, he had a new album out, I listened to it and I don't know enough about, it helped that it was about music, which is basically just a foreign language to me. So I can't be like, when you made this decision, you're.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  Fret work on the bridge here truly like I can't you know like I even saying it here.

• 35:09Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I could not either.

• 35:10Speaker 04

  I had to do I had to do the dumb guy voice to put it over. But I asked him like, is it fun to write a song like, is it is it cool to do that?

• 35:17Ed Zitron?

  Question.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  And I think I had to get past the anxiety of like asking someone I respect a question that is basically like something a seven year old would have asked and yet like I we got a really good answer. And also I wanted to know, you know, like it's better to admit what you don't know and ask the seven year old question. Then it is to try to like bluff and do the expertise thing along with someone who's a real expert.

• 35:43Ed Zitron?

  And I have I have this theory that I will never be able to prove, which is I think most people forget stuff all the time. Like you will be listening to something and be like, who's LeBron James go fuck. Uh, golf, uh, no, or like who and like you will forget all terms like on the show I onerously in people say you repeat yourself. I repeat myself like defining what generative AI is probabilistic. What does that mean Doug? Because sometimes you will be listening to an hour and a half of me talking, you might fucking forget something. And also being empathetic, like I don't know with like when I'm hanging out with my friends, people don't know shit all the time. Part of the fun thing of being alive is helping people know stuff and having shared experiences and I love that question. Of what like I want to ask, and this is for somewhat meaner reasons.

• 36:26Ed Zitron?

  My dream question to ask any tech executive is, are you happy? I want to ask Sundar Pichai, are you happy? Because it's a hell of a question because you want to say yes, but you know, I've got a follow up. What makes you happy? And you know, they don't have shit.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  For him, it's like all the stuff. He's the guy that gave the interview where he's like all day. I'm just fucking asking questions of our AI. I talked to Gemini all day long.

• 36:48Ed Zitron?

  That's such an Adela of Microsoft.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  No, that's what it was.

• 36:51Ed Zitron?

  No, but similar gargoyle like.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:54Ed Zitron?

  But it's just.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Profiling on my part, wrong, remove it from the podcast.

• 36:58Ed Zitron?

  Profiling of like extremely rich asshole ruining products. I mean, like, welcome to the show.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  But there was something, I think the idea of like, what is any of this for is a good question to ask yourself.

• 37:10Speaker 05

  To bring it back to Rogan for a second though, it also feels like anyone who is. Industry is seeing rates of ketamine usage decrease so dramatically cannot possibly.

• 37:21Ed Zitron?

  What does that indicate to you?

• 37:23Speaker 05

  It just, it just feels like there is a fundamental searching for something like fulfillment.

• 37:28Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  And a happiness.

• 37:29Ed Zitron?

  We're lonely.

• 37:30Speaker 05

  And by the way, like.

• 37:31Ed Zitron?

  Everyone is like men, women, like everyone is more disconnected.

• 37:35Speaker 05

  And, and I find that in sports, of course, like if there's any lesson to learn from Bill Balachek and Michael Jordan and Tom Brady and every greatest of all time in any category you want. It is that they won everything and are miserable.

• 37:47Ed Zitron?

  Yes, completely.

• 37:48Speaker 05

  And, and so how do you fill the void that you thought the trophies, the money, the generative AI was going to fill? You search for other things like the Silicon Valley thing. And again, I'm not, by the way. Something I'm frustrated by is just how now uncool Joe Rogan made psychedelics.

• 38:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 38:07Speaker 05

  And maybe, maybe I'm the least cool person to think of it in those terms. The point being though, that there is something that is missing that people are trying to find. And I think, are you happy? I, I presume that all of them are actually quite un.

• 38:22Ed Zitron?

  And I would be, this would be a hostile interview technique that they will never, because one of my favorite things is that I grew up thinking I was stupid. I thought I was stupid until like two years ago. I'm deadly fucking serious. It's an incredible technique though.

• 38:35Speaker 05

  No amount of, you have like a real nice house.

• 38:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 38:38Speaker 05

  Like there, there was no point where you were like, damn.

• 38:40Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 38:40Speaker 05

  Accidents keep happening.

• 38:41Ed Zitron?

  No, no, it's luck.

• 38:43Speaker 05

  All right.

• 38:44Ed Zitron?

  Like I.

• 38:45Speaker 05

  I like how the thing where you have the accent that makes you sound smart didn't work on you as the guy.

• 38:50Ed Zitron?

  It did not work on you, but it means that.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  It's worked on me from the very beginning. I was like, damn, this guy really knows his Raiders football. How did he learn so much?

• 38:57Ed Zitron?

  Oh God, I'm gonna get emails about the Raiders. Do you know, looks good. I think Brock, anyway.

• 39:03Ed Zitron?

  But it means that I've never walked into a room being like, oh, I hope he doesn't think I'm stupid. Which is actually useful for PR business as well. But in any given interview, I feel like interviewers, Neil Patel, um, will go in there and be like, I'm gonna ask the best fucking questions in the world. Not the most useful, not the most interesting, but the ones that make them sound good and get the biggest, most self ingratiating thing done. And I understand why, but it's. You have access to someone that people don't have access to. Can you at least get something new? Can you at least not line them up with the buffet of options? I don't know if you get it as much in sports, just because if someone lies about being good at sports and then goes and plays poorly, you can notice that.

• 39:46Speaker 04

  Oh, but sports is full. We did an episode, actually, that's kind of related to this, and it's about kind of the tyranny of jargon in sports and how lots of people are trying to perform the vocabulary of a coach, which is kind of like, or write like a scout.

• 40:02Ed Zitron?

  What is the, what is the vocabulary of a coach or a scout?

• 40:05Speaker 04

  So there's a lot of phrases. Do you have like a couple of like brown note, like nightmare phrases? The one for me is impact winning. That's an NBA one.

• 40:13Ed Zitron?

  Does that mean?

• 40:14Speaker 04

  It means it's a good basketball player. It's the most annoying way to say that this is a helpful player to have on your team. No, it's not. It's not like an acronym.

• 40:21Speaker 05

  That's like, it's almost like an idiomatic, just sort of like.

• 40:24Ed Zitron?

  So they just say someone's an impact player?

• 40:26Speaker 04

  But there's also just like the fighter pilot, kind of like call sign stuff where it's like, yeah, spider two Y banana.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a lot of like play calling.

• 40:34Ed Zitron?

  Oh, oh, sorry. Just within the game.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  So spider two Y banana is this, is a play call that I will not even begin to summarize for you.

• 40:40Ed Zitron?

  I thought you were literally talking about planes. I thought you were doing like a plane thing.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  It is a John Gruden play.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  If I know a listener of the pod, friend, friend of it, so be gentle, but. And I don't even know, is spider two Y banana apocryphal or is it?

• 40:56Speaker 05

  It's real. No, no, it was.

• 40:58Ed Zitron?

  Me and Deuce.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  Ed knows because Ed's been to Gruden's quarterback boot camp.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  You were doing squads with Deuce Gruden.

• 41:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, Jared Lorenzen coached me. It didn't go well.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  R I P?

• 41:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I believe so, yeah. R I P to the legend.

• 41:13Speaker 05

  But there is, there's all this vocabulary that's sort of signals that you have the fluency of a, of a, of, of, of a code that is so indecipherable to the outside person that it becomes a point of pride. And so in sports, there's just a lot of peacocking around that language.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 41:32Speaker 05

  A lot of like, oh, they're, you know, they're, they're running cover three there, but they're doing a stunt to the.

• 41:37Speaker 04

  Just like stuff that's meant to exclude.

• 41:40Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  And so when you say like a person who asks a question that is intended to signal their knowledge as opposed to help the listener understand anything. I think of the ways in which people are cosplaying coaching all of the time. And also, it's kind of why, as much as we have already been crapping all over Joe Rogan and Theo Von, something that I do appreciate, generally speaking, I've not listened to all their episodes, but what they do tend to do is not try and perform over intelligence.

• 42:12Ed Zitron?

  And the thing is, you can say like, I've seen some Theo Von, I've seen some Joe Rogan. They fucking host white supremacists in the open. It fucking sucks. You can still look at the format and learn, and I think people have trouble separating those things. Cause it really comes down to they, their questions are simple. And then they get like Jordan Peele's going, have you seen the nightmare men?

• 42:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:33Ed Zitron?

  Like you're just some insane shit. And then he says nothing to that. Cause Joe Rogan's like, yeah, yeah, I met, I knew a guy like that.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  That happened to my buddy Eric. Yeah, there is that sense. I think also there's a difference in sports discourse where there's, everything that you said about like the sort of ostentatious performance of expertise and like insidey, you know, like everybody wants to be plugged in.

• 42:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  It has impacted in some ways like the language. In fact, I just used impact as a verb. So it's clearly made something on.

• 43:03Ed Zitron?

  Made an impact.

• 43:03Speaker 04

  Made an impact on like a concussive.

• 43:05Ed Zitron?

  But you used it correctly.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  But yes, I did, yes, I did. But the way that that's like worked out, I think that there's, the way that people like Scoop Smith type guys, you're like Shams Charania dudes, like they write not in like a syntax that is observable outside of text messages from agents to guys like him, that there's something very like artificial about it.

• 43:26Ed Zitron?

  Just for the listeners, is a guy who mostly says a guy has been traded or signed a contract.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  He says it first.

• 43:31Speaker 05

  He, he, exactly. He is five seconds ahead of the actual public announcement.

• 43:35Ed Zitron?

  He also was the one that scooped Donald Trump getting COVID.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  I hate that Shams gets.

• 43:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And what sucks is I found out through. I was speaking to someone at the time for some reason, I can't disclose, um, and they showed me a clip from the Barstool show, the Yak, when it happened. Oh, wow. And when they showed this guy on there, Stephen Che, and it's just like the worst 10 minutes of just like a guy who may basically was like, yeah, I think Shams would break World War III. And just these guys like wanting him to be wrong and they just hate every, like, everyone's kind of miserable. Yeah. Like, anyway, so Shams just breaks news. That's his only thing. He breaks news, and that is like a function.

• 44:12Speaker 04

  There's a guy that does it for the NFL.

• 44:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  There's a guy, they're trying to make Jeff Passan, who's like an ace feature writer, they're trying to make him that guy for baseball on ESPN.

• 44:20Speaker 05

  The incentives are to be a news breaker because you are, I mean, by the way, when Woj was doing this, Adrian Wojnarowski, who I should disclose, uh, is a person who now works for St. Bonaventure as their general manager.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 44:32Speaker 05

  He's the GM, but was making, you know, millions, well, millions of dollars being the news breaker, basically like the human, uh, yeah, like scoop machine.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, just fielding texts 24/7.

• 44:43Speaker 05

  And there was just a bit, I don't know if you remember this, but during the NBA draft one year, um, when Woj, I think, was at ESPN, so he was working for the broadcaster of the draft, but trying to scoop the draft.

• 44:54Speaker 04

  I know what you're talking about.

• 44:54Speaker 05

  By five seconds ahead.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 44:56Speaker 05

  And so in order to get through the, to thread the needle, uh, he ended up just not saying, "The Bulls are about to take Jimmy Butler," or whatever, uh, this is, you know, got some retconning.

• 45:10Speaker 04

  We're dating ourselves here.

• 45:11Speaker 05

  Yes. But it's basically like, uh, "The Bulls are targeting, the Phoenix Suns are circling."

• 45:17Speaker 04

  He kept coming up with new phrasing, and it's hard. There's like 32 picks. So he'd be like, "I'm hearing that the Bulls are in soresold by Wendell Carter Jr. at this spot," which is just amazing.

• 45:29Ed Zitron?

  I mean, every single Better Offline episode says, "walks you through," because I cannot fucking think of another way to say it, and I refuse. So I get Mr.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  But you can see all of what we're describing here. These are not, these are great paying jobs, and they do tend to select for people who are like metabolically capable of responding to text messages for 20 hours a day. But, although when Woj.

• 45:49Speaker 05

  That's me.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  When Woj left the job, he was basically like, "This sucks. I hate it. Again." A hard time.

• 45:55Speaker 05

  It was like, I'm unhappy.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 05

  Was basically his press release.

• 45:59Speaker 04

  And like, yeah, whatever the opposite of Michael Jordan, I'm back. He's just like, nope.

• 46:03Speaker 05

  I'm gone.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  The whole thing. But like, that is a function of all of this. But I think the bit that is kind of missing from it, and you see it when, you know, like when a podcast works, or if you're reading a story that's written by somebody who is given the space and the time to write something that they like, which is increasingly rare. All this shit is fun. Everybody's here because it's fun. No one is here because it is important. They're like, especially with sports. There are aspects of it that you can use as sort of like a way into seeing things about the broader culture that are important. But none of this is like mandatory.

• 46:40Speaker 05

  Right.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  You know, and so.

• 46:41Speaker 05

  It's a game.

• 46:42Speaker 04

  And so to the extent that you can talk about it in a way that is fun, and that is not either like actionable gambling intelligence, or part of some like endless barber shop set to that where everybody's arguing about who's now, or somebody's legacy, or whatever.

• 47:01Speaker 05

  Legacy.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. That's one of the best topics to play fight about with the fellas.

• 47:05Ed Zitron?

  But the thing is, this is something missing from the tech industry, because most people in tech, when you talk to them, don't seem to want to talk about anything. You've got this growth of, who is it? I really should know this one. Ryan something. There's a former player who has a really good podcast with a bunch of players.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  Ryan Clark.

• 47:22Ed Zitron?

  Yes, Ryan Clark. And he just sits around and he has very serious conversations, sometimes quite jokey ones, with other people that have played games of sports for money. And that's why it's interesting, because you're hearing their experiences and it's kind of rough and ready. Probably a little bit cleaned up more than we know. I imagine in some of the, I don't know in his case, but I imagine there are more harsh cuts.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  He's got like a real job to avoid losing. But I do think that there's, what you're talking about, though, is that like, people want something authentic.

• 47:47Ed Zitron?

  And the tech industry constantly tries to create it, but it always ends up being a venture capitalist and three of their investments being like, you know, I was using generative AI the other day and it just changed my life. How I I were going to ad break. And it's just like, these fucking people piss me off because tech is so universal. Whether or not you consider yourself technical, kind of the same way with the sport. It's like, baseball, one of my favorite, Casey Kagawa, friend of the show, once said it to me. It's like, it's still a child's game. It's still the same game. Aaron Judge plays baseball a lot better than a kid playing Little League, but he's still hitting a fucking ball. And there is something universal about that. I think tech's getting there. Perhaps we're not there quite. I think most people are not accepting it yet, but the fact is, I think there is something deeply personal about tech that no one's fucking touching in this way. And they should, because it's interesting.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is one of the big endpoints to me. One of the ones that I think like, you were first to and should be repeating as often as possible, which is that basically, everybody that, at some point, everybody liked all this stuff. And now they don't.

• 48:44Ed Zitron?

  And they still like, they like, no, they like the stuff, they hate the tech industry.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then I think that like, and so that, you know, we create this demand for people that they, you know, it's cool to be able to like, read anything as it happens. Like, it will make you insane, but it's not bad. Like, it's like, kind of gratifying, actually. Yes. And yet, like, that, you take that interest and then you use that to like, sort of leverage ways to make more and more money off of it and dilute the experience more and more. And I think that that, you know, when someone is doing that to you for information that you need to understand the world around you, I think that that is criminal. When someone is doing that to you for sports stuff, I just think it's rude. I just think it's like a dick move, basically.

• 49:27Speaker 05

  Well, I also think, big picture, that every, I mean, this is, this is gonna sound profoundly unprofound, but like, everything is tech.

• 49:34Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 49:35Speaker 05

  Like, sports, it's impossible to talk about, everything we've basically talked about so far, has been filtered through the lens of tech.

• 49:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 05

  In ways that it's different now than it used to be, in ways that these characters are people that we now know in, in a dimensionality that didn't previously exist, because, you know, Jordon Hudson posted an Instagram thing of a philosophy textbook that was autographed by Bill Balachek, the day that they met, when she was, turns out, 19 years old.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 50:00Speaker 05

  Not important. Look.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  It's a little bit important, actually.

• 50:04Speaker 05

  You know my disclosures.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 50:06Speaker 05

  You know my disclosures.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  You know, sometimes when you're looking at Jordon Hudson's Instagram account, it's just for work.

• 50:11Speaker 05

  It's just because I'm a journalist. But look, my point being that it's when it comes to like media, the future of media, it's just impossible to disentangle every conversation I ever have from the fact that we are working in some direct or stochastic way for tech companies.

• 50:31Ed Zitron?

  Mm hmm. You even mentioned the sun god of the algorithm.

• 50:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's it's just impossible to not think about standard of success through the lens of what a tech company has engineered.

• 50:42Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 50:42Speaker 05

  And so it's it's, yeah, it's omnipresent.

• 50:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, the challenge with this too, this is for Defector, which is more of a, it's a print product.

• 50:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  You know, like it's a website that people subscribe to and read, and we have a podcast and we do videos every now and then. But most of what we do is writing. That to Pablo's point about the the tech industry, this has been like the challenge for us. I think like we've got a steady loyal subscriber base. We're good. It's a good business.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  How you direct people to your posts is not just, I mean, it's the challenge that we're talking about the most, but any place that is print. As these sort of the tech mediated spaces through which people used to discover this, as they either dry up or actively turn against their users. That idea of like, I guess, discoverability is the term.

• 51:32Speaker 05

  I say that word all of the time and I hate myself every time.

• 51:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it feels bad because it's like, it's a fake ugly word.

• 51:37Speaker 05

  It feels like impact.

• 51:39Speaker 04

  Yes, it does feel, it has that.

• 51:41Ed Zitron?

  But it kind of goes back to the thing I was saying about the money side. It's like, I don't know, this show was quite successful in part because iHeartRadio put it on the fucking, not the actual show, but they put a bunch of advertising behind it, which is awesome. I'm glad, really glad they did it, but it's like a big part. What a surprise, a show has trouble finding new listeners when they have no discover. And just.

• 52:00Speaker 05

  We are, we every, look, obvious sort of statements of fact. It is harder to find anything now because all of us are fragmented, siloed, not consuming the same things, have personalized. Feeds again explained by the tech industry.

• 52:16Ed Zitron?

  And personalized by their standards.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And so true and and some platforms are now like disincentivizing hyperlinks to places. I mean, literally like this is this is why it's so hard to get discovered. And so if the standard for just success becomes, do you know that this exists?

• 52:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 52:36Speaker 05

  The game becomes, I mean, again, to return to another sort of like axiom, it becomes an attention game. Because that counts as something in a meaningful way. And so to have in Defector's case, a subscription driven site, by the way, everything now wants to be a subscription.

• 52:51Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 52:52Speaker 05

  Um, so kudos to.

• 52:53Ed Zitron?

  We were early.

• 52:54Speaker 05

  Kudos to journalism to.

• 52:56Ed Zitron?

  Just start a premium feed on a on where's your app. Please subscribe. I need money. Like also, it costs me thousands a year to do.

• 53:05Speaker 05

  That's nice. What are you going to put on the premium?

• 53:07Ed Zitron?

  I do a I do a Friday, Friday news.

• 53:10Speaker 05

  You said nudes?

• 53:10Ed Zitron?

  Nudes, yes.

• 53:11Speaker 05

  Artistic news.

• 53:13Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you have to get that. The magnifying glass tool. Anyway, um, no, it's no Friday news. N U W S. It's why I can't say the word porn either. P A W N because I'm like, you're watching porn stars, huh? I'm like, yeah, the show with Rick.

• 53:28Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:29Ed Zitron?

  Best I can do.

• 53:31Ed Zitron?

  I'm sorry. Uh, it's just even doing that felt dirty, but I was kind of like, yeah, this costs me thousands of dollars a year.

• 53:38Speaker 05

  Like, I'm contemplating the same thing. What are we going to put behind our premium sort of?

• 53:42Ed Zitron?

  But I'm all. And it's just the only advantage I think I really have is that I can write so much so fast. And I I'm pretty good at the writing, but I can just fuck in the tape. Today was like.

• 53:54Speaker 05

  Your like average newsletter is my monthly output in terms of word count.

• 53:59Ed Zitron?

  But I don't post it at four fifty five PM on a Friday.

• 54:01Speaker 05

  Well, that's that's a failure on your part because that is editorial best practice.

• 54:04Ed Zitron?

  That's that's what everyone loves and what they sign up for. But it's it's fucked. But I also think it may end up being something good because people are being way more direct with what they actually want. I also think this is something where legacy media really fucks up because, okay, you've got the daily. Actually, I want to tell a really fucked up story. So I heart media awards, right? Which I did not win to Kevin Roos and the case of you. Very unfair.

• 54:30Ed Zitron?

  When they did an announcement of the different, someone was in a category, it was, uh, they were saying, okay, we've got this podcast, and then the daily with Michael Barbaro. And it's like, and now I went outside and then there was a politician there and I thought, does he do politics? And someone goes, we love you, Michael.

• 54:46Speaker 04

  That's nice.

• 54:46Ed Zitron?

  I want that person found. I want that person jailed.

• 54:50Speaker 04

  A Michael Barbaro super fan?

• 54:51Ed Zitron?

  No, who is the Michael Barbaro super fan? Like, like the Japanese idols, but for Michael Barbaro.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  I think if you did a live recording of the daily, you would have to do it at like, the forum at Madison Square Garden.

• 55:01Ed Zitron?

  That's so sad.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's tough, man. This is a real hard thing to get your head around, but this is like...

• 55:06Ed Zitron?

  But this is the thing with these...

• 55:08Speaker 04

  It's at Budokan. He's gonna, he's gonna do a live episode.

• 55:11Ed Zitron?

  I'm opening up the fucking pit of the daily show.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  About how the subway is too scary now. That's gonna be the episode that they're gonna perform.

• 55:18Ed Zitron?

  And that's when I'm hitting with the wheelbarrows. That's when I'm just fucking spinning.

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• 56:37Ed Zitron?

  The legacy media people are pissing away because they have the discovery, discoverability part done already. The New York Times could do so much interesting shit, but they're so afraid of this vague objectivity thing. I know Pablo, you have to do your disclosures and shit, but they're just like, nah, instead of doing the disclosures, we'll just do a really boring and shitty job. What if it was just really dull? And so they already have the hard part done and they choose not to do anything extra because they're like, oh, well, people want this. Have you fucking tried?

• 57:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:05Ed Zitron?

  Have you tried even once?

• 57:07Speaker 04

  I'll say this with sports too. This is an advantage that we have in this space over a place like the Times. I mean, the Times has got a report on things that are not fun. Like, so a little bit of whimsy. And anytime the Times attempts whimsy, there's this sort of like dog walking on its hind legs thing where you're like, we shouldn't be doing that.

• 57:24Ed Zitron?

  You don't experience this.

• 57:25Speaker 04

  But also you're like impressed. You're like, wow, I didn't know you could do that. Like, please stop. Like, the thing with sports that does sort of like, move you in a direction where like you could do more of that type of stuff. Like, you don't need to talk about sports in any particular way. The challenge for, you know, I think for sports talk radio, which is something that I can't imagine an audience that overlaps less with the audience of this podcast than the people that listen to WFAN. But there are, like, there's guys whose job it is to just go sit in a studio for five hours every day and like every day. Like, this is a weekly thing. And just somebody calls in and they're like, I don't think the islanders should do that.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  And then the guy's like, you're wrong. And that goes on for an extended period of time. That is like, it's a grim way of doing it, but it also is like, it's not, there's very little in that space where you see people like sort of trying to do something different. Like, there are other ways of doing it. How it all sort of defaulted to this like... Sour Puss play fighting shit is a mystery to me. Other than the fact that it's like, if you had to sit and do something into a microphone for five hours a day, you'd probably come out of it pretty crusty, too.

• 58:40Ed Zitron?

  So I, I actually, the reason that I like doing the talking with the microphone thing is actually Penn State. I was on the Lion FM. If you are a Lion FM listener who heard me on college radio, email me.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  Were you doing talk or playing music?

• 58:54Ed Zitron?

  Uh, both.

• 58:54Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 58:55Speaker 05

  I was co-hosting with Joe Paterno.

• 58:56Ed Zitron?

  That was me and Joe Paterno.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  Did the weekly call-in show.

• 58:59Ed Zitron?

  I didn't know who he was. I just thought he lived there.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  Elderly Italian man from the community.

• 59:03Ed Zitron?

  No, I did crazy shit. I had like a band on, this guy called Epileptic Pete, was epileptic. He had his own, um, eight-string bass and they played like, uh, video game music. People fucking loved it.

• 59:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:13Ed Zitron?

  You just have some fun with it, but talk radio is extremely interesting. It's extremely, when it's done well, it's, I hope that this is kind of the format I'm going for here.

• 59:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was the idea in Vegas, I know.

• 59:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  It was fun. I'd never really done that before.

• 59:24Ed Zitron?

  And people, because talk radio is actually magical when done right. But the done right is having a host that sounds like they're just talking, but has thoughts about everything and they've been thinking about it to ask questions in some way. Pablo, you do this excellently. And it's like, it pisses me off because it's like they don't want to try anything other than the exact standard. But I think the answer is, it's the fucking algorithm. It's that they want to normalize and fit into what they think will go viral, baby.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  Which generally is stuff that makes you mad, right? I mean, I feel like that's the idea of like where that-

• 59:56Ed Zitron?

  It's that or stuff that's already big.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:58Ed Zitron?

  It's that or you already work for a big newspaper. It's already a big brand. Other than the top of the iTunes podcast, I don't know what's going. Everyone is called like, "The Smile Hour with Dr. Janine Benin." And it's like, each episode is 60 minutes long and it's like,

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Dr. Janine Benin.

• 1:00:15Ed Zitron?

  How to smile more? I've brought smile expert, Jesus DeFat, and he will tell us all about smiling. And they have like 10 million, like, five-star reviews, like this podcast chain. And you listen to them and it sounds like- It sounds like what I imagine they'd listen to in the Soundgarden video of Black Hole Sun.

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

  That's like what's coming out of the radio when the lady's about to chop the fifth.

• 1:00:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, so I think my overarching theory of the future of media and everything is that we're all OnlyFans now.

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:00:47Speaker 05

  Um, which is to say that like-

• 1:00:48Speaker 04

  Get those nudes.

• 1:00:49Speaker 05

  Yep. Which is to say that like, there is a bunch of stuff that's wildly popular that's just not my kink.

• 1:00:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 05

  Now, I can also access the hyper-specific thing that is mine.

• 1:00:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:00:59Speaker 05

  Or create it and monetize it, but it's that thing of like, in an era in which scale of the level of, uh, The New York Times or any incumbent publication is now impossible to recreate.

• 1:01:10Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:10Speaker 05

  For various reasons, including, by the way, like, to get back to Joe Rogan or Bill Simmons, like, the first mover advantage of like, being one of the first podcasts cannot be replicated anymore. There's just too much competition, uh, and short of having, I'm trying to get the, the genealogy right, short of having someone whose husband's sister dated Taylor Swift or something.

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  Is this, is this how Bill Simmons?

• 1:01:35Speaker 05

  No, I'm just, like, there, there are certain ways to, like, speedrun growth.

• 1:01:38Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:39Speaker 05

  Taylor Swift adjacent is one of them.

• 1:01:41Ed Zitron?

  Theo Von was on Rogan and they all cross pollinate.

• 1:01:44Speaker 05

  The Joe Rogan cross pollination being another. Um, in general, yeah, we're aspiring to smaller arenas, but we are also aspiring for the people in those arenas to give us money.

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:01:56Speaker 05

  And that OnlyFans economy of like, hey, if I show you some ankle, will you pay me for my increasingly, uh, bold takes or reportage? Or, I cannot stress this enough, Bernie Sanders impressions. Um, yes, it turns out they will.

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's the, the thing that, and I try to like, sort of count my blessings with this, with the vector, cause like, it is, it's a good business.

• 1:02:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  Like, we're not, we're growing and yet, like, I think that the challenge with it, you know, we're gonna turn five in September as a website. And that like more or less by website standards is like middle age. And I don't think anybody like, we all love it. We all love working with each other. Like, it's not going to change. And yet there's a part of it where like, we don't all want to just like, get old and die with our readership either. You know, that like, we want to be able to do new stuff and we want to be able to hire more people and change the sort of the perspective of the site over time. And all of that costs money. I think just because we want to feel like we're growing and not repeating ourselves.

• 1:02:56Ed Zitron?

  Why do you want to grow? So I put back.

• 1:02:59Speaker 05

  I like the alternate slogan, "Democracy dies with us."

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  Yes, right. That's, but that I feel like is the cultural moment that we're in. Not to get too depressing about it, but you can see this with like, this is the apex of Trumpism. Like, he wants all of America buried with him like a fucking pharaoh. This is not a culture that is built to last beyond his like, last breath. Because what happens after that is none of his business. He doesn't care.

• 1:03:24Ed Zitron?

  But I actually think it's grimmer than that. I think it's one step further and it's everywhere. It's the rock economy, the growth at all costs thing. It's, people don't know why they want to fucking grow. They just want to grow. Everything in our society tells us to grow. What do you want to do? I want to be a CEO. I want to, I want the biggest thing ever. It's not about the product, it's about the position.

• 1:03:40Speaker 04

  This is where I'd put the, the, an emphasis on like, the difference for what? Like, Defector does not want to become Fox Sports.

• 1:03:47Ed Zitron?

  But even then, you feel.

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  Like, we don't want like, to televise a bowl game.

• 1:03:50Ed Zitron?

  But you feel the allure of growth still. And this is not a criticism.

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  Mostly is just to like, because we want to have like, new people and do new shit. The challenge with it too, though, is that like, the ways in which you can make money there. And we've had new revenue streams and we're making more money. We have ads for people that aren't signed in. Like, they see that now. We've got the podcasts, those have ads in them.

• 1:04:09Speaker 05

  You sell those cell phones, those gold plated cell phones.

• 1:04:12Speaker 04

  We sell gold plated cell phones, which are very, uh, those are great. And we're looking forward to making those right here in the United States. We're going to make them in Slifton, New Jersey.

• 1:04:19Ed Zitron?

  Did you see the Smartless cell phone?

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, there is one of those, right?

• 1:04:21Ed Zitron?

  So, Smartless, one of the biggest comedy podcasts in the world, listeners, has made a MVNO. So a cell phone network that lives on top of T-Mobile.

• 1:04:30Speaker 05

  What is MVNO?

• 1:04:31Ed Zitron?

  Uh, I forget what it stands for. It basically means you can have a sub.

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  It's the same thing as like Mint Mobile, right?

• 1:04:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you can run your network on enough, yes.

• 1:04:39Speaker 04

  A network.

• 1:04:39Ed Zitron?

  I, I've never.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  Is Ryan Reynolds going to lead to the collapse of the telecommunications industry? Can that possibly be?

• 1:04:45Ed Zitron?

  Thank you, Daniel, our producer, mobile virtual network operator.

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:04:48Ed Zitron?

  I knew that. Yeah, Daniel, thank you. Um, it's, um, but it's that. Really, there's a great slate piece on it as well that was just really echoed how fucking sad it was. Cause these guys are like super rich already and super popular. But they needed a cellphone.

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, growing for, for the sake of just being like, there's more money out there to be made is, I think this is an area where like, everybody at Defector wants to fucking blog. That's our job. That is what we want.

• 1:05:16Ed Zitron?

  And that's why I fucking pay.

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think that like, and it's why I feel happy in this work in a way that I haven't felt before. I worked at all different types of sites in the past with all different types of funders. I don't know what Vice was. I guess that's a Ponzi scheme. I worked for places that were owned by private equity. That wasn't great. I worked for places that were owned as part of some sort of like venture backed attempt, you know, at Vox, basically, whatever it was that Vox was trying to do.

• 1:05:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Speaker 04

  I was briefly a part of that. In all of those instances, everybody that I worked with just wanted to do our work.

• 1:05:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Speaker 04

  And yet you were subject to the, I mean, not even just like the whims kind of like cheapens it. I mean, it was whatever it was that they wanted to do was what you were going to wind up, you know, downstream that would arrive as an avalanche when they rolled the snowball from the top of the mountain where they were. But the, the thing with all of that, I never felt safe in any of those jobs, including the ones where, you know, I organized one workplace at Vice. I worked at a very strong union workplace at Deadspin. In all of those instances, the, I mean, obviously it's much, much better to organize your workplace than not. And I advocate anybody that wants to do it should try to do it. But at some point, the people that you're working for don't want what you want. They don't care about what you do.

• 1:06:29Ed Zitron?

  And they don't read it.

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  And they don't read it. That is, and which is extremely important that I think that like in any of those, there's this wish. And I remember this, I was talking to Megan Greenwell, who is my editor in chief at Deadspin.

• 1:06:40Ed Zitron?

  Brand new book, I think.

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  Has a new book about private equity called Bad Company that is very good. I recommend it.

• 1:06:45Ed Zitron?

  She's gonna come on the show at some point.

• 1:06:46Speaker 04

  Good.

• 1:06:47Ed Zitron?

  I was going to ask her.

• 1:06:48Speaker 04

  The, uh, but.

• 1:06:49Ed Zitron?

  Megan, if you hear this.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  But we were talking about the experience of trying to like convince the private equity concern that had bought. Was Gizmodo Media, now it is Geo Media, basically unrecognizable.

• 1:07:01Ed Zitron?

  Fucking Spanfeller.

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  Spanfeller, Jim Spanfeller, bad guy.

• 1:07:03Ed Zitron?

  Come on this show, man, I've got some fucking questions.

• 1:07:05Speaker 04

  But he, uh, great head of hair, though. I hate to say it, but it's like, it's amazing. Yep. He's got a quiff?

• 1:07:13Ed Zitron?

  A quaff?

• 1:07:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Ed Zitron?

  A quaff?

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  Yes. Anyway, he looks great. Uh, he's been getting by on his looks for years, though. But we were trying to like, go to them with the information that we had, which is like, we're making more money than we're spending. People read this, these people comment on everything, these blogs get passed around, it's this many, you know, millions of unique readers for stuff. They just didn't give a shit. It wasn't a business they wanted to be in. And the difference with Defector, and I, I hope that this is the case for you all at Metal Arc 2, because it is like, as similar as something that is that much bigger and more popular can be, that there is like, you're doing the work that you want to do, and you're doing it without somebody's hand in your pocket or trying to fucking rat a two of you around in editorial ways.

• 1:07:58Speaker 04

  And that is, when you remove that interference from the equation, it feels as fun as it actually is.

• 1:08:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think, so to get back to, uh, the misery of Michael Jordan and every tech executive and, uh, blogs that aren't run in the way that I think Roth is describing, I think that's all the time at work. Like, the point of getting the money is to do the job that you want to do. And it is not the other way around. It is not to contort and develop some sort of content dysmorphia, such that you've convinced yourself.

• 1:08:33Ed Zitron?

  That's fucking good.

• 1:08:33Speaker 05

  That, oh, this is what beauty is now.

• 1:08:36Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:08:36Speaker 05

  It's like, no, trust your own, we got into this because we have a sense of taste around what we want to do and what's good and what's bad. The more that we can actually earnestly believe and act on that is the whole reason to try and, to try and engage with the market in whatever way we're allowed to.

• 1:08:51Ed Zitron?

  I just, what pisses me off is, I'm pretty sure that if you just did everything we're discussing, it would be insanely profitable, because no one's fucking trying. So just, if you just did it at the broadsheet types, I'm sure that there are people who are desperate to have Michael Barbaro, like, tell them that the subway seat was sticky.

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, many millions of people, no accounting for taste.

• 1:09:09Ed Zitron?

  But what if, instead of that, it was someone entertaining? Do you think that they would get scared? Or do you think they'd be like, I'll give this a go?

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  I think that there's, I think that a lot of that stuff could be better, or it could be different. I think the more important to me is the idea that like, You should be able to pick more widely what experience.

• 1:09:27Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  And if the, you know, the Times isn't going to offer you, they could, uh, you know, but the Times isn't going to offer you like, here's a version of the Daily where the guy doesn't sound medicated. Like, or, you know, some of these things that are, it's just a different energy. Maybe try this out. See if you like it. That like, it doesn't, it shouldn't be just one platform offering all of this stuff. But I do think that there's enough ways to enjoy things that like, you know, and the difference with sports, I mean, there's like ways to be a fan. Maybe you like to shout about legacy, or maybe you are somebody that likes to grind tape, whatever.

• 1:10:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02Speaker 04

  You're all working off the same text. Everybody fundamentally understands what they're talking about. There's just a lot of different ways to talk about it. It should be a healthier ecosystem than it is for that reason, I think.

• 1:10:12Ed Zitron?

  So this is dating me a bit, but there's a crazy thing. They already tried this with the tech media and it worked really well. There used to be like seven different tech columnists. You kind of used to have like Dwight Silverman over at the Houston Chronicle, I think, or Dallas Morning News, forgive me Dwight. You had like He Wath Ray over at the Globe. You had Eric Benderoff over at the Tribune. You had all of these, like David Pope, one of the most well-known tech reporters, Steve. And every week, and he would sometimes just be like, yeah, I tried a new e-reader, it sucked.

• 1:10:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Ed Zitron?

  It's my first interaction with him, actually. And it was like, people didn't read David Pope. He was kind of like your weird uncle and then had some stuff that happened, which made you really potentially not like him. But nevertheless, there was a level of entertainment that came from these personal voices talking about something that was very personal to people that worked in the New York fucking time, in major broadsheets. I just think that they've got safer. But I also wonder if that's not me just being kind, or maybe they're just fucking lazy.

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is a, this is a.

• 1:11:09Ed Zitron?

  And incurious as well.

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  Another Ed, uh, point that has been instructive to me, this kind of like the rod economy idea. And I've sort of. I mean, it's hard to not spiral when you think about this, but like, what are you gaining by? Like, you are getting some small savings by eliminating the tech columnist from the Houston Chronicle from your ledger. You're not paying a guy $90,000 a year, or whatever it is.

• 1:11:33Ed Zitron?

  These guys used to get paid shit tons of money as well.

• 1:11:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, there is that.

• 1:11:36Ed Zitron?

  No, but they used to get paid shit tons of money, and they were on there for years.

• 1:11:40Speaker 04

  Yes, presumably they were adding some sort of value. To me, this is the bit that I don't get, is like, when you drain a company and kill it, and you get some money from it, the private equity model of basically like, piling a bunch of debt onto something, you take from this company what is valuable, you leave them with the debt, in a few years, they go away. So you have all this money now, that might otherwise have gone into that company. We can understand that that's bad, and that it's unfair to a lot of people. Also, what do you do with that money? This is the bit that I've always sort of wondered about. Like, what is Jim's? Is it you just, like, you book the fucking chain smokers to play a party at the football weekend?

• 1:12:19Ed Zitron?

  I must be clear, the answer is nothing.

• 1:12:21Speaker 04

  So is that, so I imagine...

• 1:12:22Ed Zitron?

  It sits there on a...

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  You have some, like, transparency into this scene of super wealthy people.

• 1:12:26Ed Zitron?

  It's nothing. It's absolutely fucking nothing. They sit on it.

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  So, by the way, this is where, again, the metaphor sort of becomes the reality, right? So sports is currently grappling with the influx of private equity. The leagues are now passing rules to allow shares of teams to be bought by private equity firms. And part of the looming sort of storm cloud here is the idea that actually, as with content, as with grocery stores, as with any industry, there's a conflict between what that thing is meant to do, and its actual standard of success, and growth, yeah, profit, right? So the whole idea of like, the part of sports that is seemingly elemental is here. Our goal is to win.

• 1:13:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, everybody's trying to win.

• 1:13:12Speaker 05

  If, when that breaks...

• 1:13:14Ed Zitron?

  Except winning isn't always profitable.

• 1:13:16Speaker 05

  Right, so that, and that breakage between winning and profit, that's where you are inviting a corruption that has been visited upon every... Every other thing in American life that we've already out.

• 1:13:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, and this is, I mean, true as a fan, but I think that anybody that participates in the culture in any way like there's, you don't have to know what the Pittsburgh Pirates specifically are like to understand that like this is a team that is owned by a billionaire, that is part of a system that is created.

• 1:13:45Ed Zitron?

  And to explain for the listeners who don't listen to sport.

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  Pittsburgh Pirates are a baseball team.

• 1:13:49Ed Zitron?

  And also, but specifically the fact that they can be a bad team and make a shit ton of money.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Ed Zitron?

  How?

• 1:13:56Speaker 04

  So, and probably you're welcome to jump in when I get anything wrong. Couple of things. Built a great ballpark with some public money. It is a great place to go and hang out and drink beers, even if the team is bad, which the team reliably has been for more than a decade. The owner has a lot of money, enough money to buy a baseball team, which you need. This is another area where private equity and then I think eventually sovereign wealth is going to become.

• 1:14:20Speaker 05

  Sovereign wealth is also being legislated in to buy shares from Abu Dhabi.

• 1:14:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so that's like all international sport is all that. It just hasn't really happened in the United States yet.

• 1:14:30Speaker 05

  But it's coming.

• 1:14:31Speaker 04

  I mean, a team like the Cowboys or the Giants, their valuation based on what the number is, it's like, no person could buy it.

• 1:14:38Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  It's too many billions of dollars, like whatever, like Elon or Jeff Bezos could buy it, but they're not going to because they.

• 1:14:44Ed Zitron?

  Elon Musk to buy like the Pirates.

• 1:14:46Speaker 04

  This is, I considered a blog calling him out on that, like being like, you coward, buy the A's. Like, prove it. Prove how smart you are.

• 1:14:55Speaker 05

  Elon was like, I'm a fan of the Eagles and the Steelers.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  And I was like, oh, Lord. Classic. Like, it's like somehow, like you took a Hillary Clinton line and you made it sound like.

• 1:15:05Ed Zitron?

  They call me the boss of tech.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  Anyway, so here's how the Pirates make it work. Extreme, it is not expensive to run a Major League Baseball team if you don't pay anybody.

• 1:15:18Ed Zitron?

  But you can not pay people and still make money.

• 1:15:20Speaker 04

  There is no salary floor, so the product that you put out there basically needs to be, needs to be minimally competitive. Like, you can't have people like coming to your house and burning it down. But minimally competitive for the Pirates means losing 100 out of 162 games basically every year.

• 1:15:34Ed Zitron?

  Jesus.

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  The other way that you make money off of it, though. It's like there's TV deals, that money is guaranteed. There's like, you know, parking, there's concessions. There's a million different ways to make a little bit of money at a time. And then the big thing that makes it work is that because this structure that baseball has a revenue sharing system. So that basically this is money coming from the biggest.

• 1:15:56Ed Zitron?

  Socialism.

• 1:15:56Speaker 04

  It is socialism for rich guys, exclusively for rich guys.

• 1:16:01Ed Zitron?

  Awesome.

• 1:16:02Speaker 04

  It is only within that system. So a team like the Yankees that makes all this money and plays in a big market and has this huge TV deal that the Pirates could never get, because Pittsburgh is so much smaller than New York. They pay money into a system that is then reallocated to the Pirates. The idea being that this would create some sort of parity because that money is supposed to be used on either major league payroll or player development. Or there's ways that you can use it too, that are more responsible than others. Like using it to pay a big league ballplayer is good. Using it to develop a player development program that teaches a raw high school kid that you drafted how to throw a pitch that he doesn't know how to throw.

• 1:16:42Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  That is also extremely cost effective and works. Good teams do both, the Dodgers do both.

• 1:16:48Ed Zitron?

  You don't have to do any of this shit.

• 1:16:49Speaker 04

  Pirates do neither.

• 1:16:50Ed Zitron?

  You don't have to do any of it.

• 1:16:51Speaker 04

  Yes, you don't.

• 1:16:52Ed Zitron?

  Because you can just sit there and the money comes in.

• 1:16:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:16:53Speaker 05

  And, and think about it also, not merely, because I think there's, yes, there's a philosophical approach that is overarching here. There's also just like the edge cases of like, you have a choice. You can re-sign the player that will make your fans not merely happy, but feel on some level fulfilled as part of the allegedly civic trust here.

• 1:17:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:17:13Speaker 05

  Right? You got a star player that's about to ask for more money and everybody wants to keep him. And in fact, it makes sense for you to keep him because your goal here is to win a title. Instead, what you will do is let him go because he is now too rich for your blood.

• 1:17:27Ed Zitron?

  And you don't need him to run your business.

• 1:17:29Speaker 05

  You don't need him to make the margins.

• 1:17:31Ed Zitron?

  Exactly.

• 1:17:31Speaker 05

  Yes. That in fact, you could still make without him.

• 1:17:34Speaker 04

  That's exactly the point. The, the margin thing is to me like, it's, and this is the sort of short term thinking that you see in tech a lot.

• 1:17:40Ed Zitron?

  Which is why I brought it up.

• 1:17:41Speaker 04

  Now, if you think of the business that you have as something that you're going to own for the rest of your life and then you're going to leave to your kids. Now, that's a little bit perverse. I don't think you should necessarily be able to do that. But if you're thinking of the business that way. The free agent that you re-sign is essential to the survival of your business because it shows people that are fans now, that you care about them and you care about the team in the future. And when those people bring their kids to the games, they're going to be watching that player at the end of his career. So that idea of like any of this stuff being built to last in any meaningful way, I think is gone.

• 1:18:14Ed Zitron?

  And I think, and it's everywhere. The reason I wanted you to go through that is, I think listeners really understand the basics of like how you have tech companies that will do as little as possible to keep the service running to make the most amount of money. I think it's important for people to know this is everywhere. The rot economy is everywhere. It's insane how endemic it is to baseball, though. You could just run a shit team forever.

• 1:18:35Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:18:36Ed Zitron?

  Well, look at Google. Not to make it the whole thing about tech, but it's like, it is very fucking depressing seeing how these people work. But I think that one thing that will work in tech that doesn't work as often in sports, but does a bit, is attacking the owners.

• 1:18:50Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:18:51Ed Zitron?

  Because Dick Monford from The Rockies, who I email with occasionally, he has stopped responding to me.

• 1:18:55Speaker 04

  Can't tell if that's a joke.

• 1:18:56Ed Zitron?

  Oh, really?

• 1:18:56Speaker 04

  No, that's very-

• 1:18:57Ed Zitron?

  I think it was emailing him about-

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  A lot of people email with Dick Monford. Like, if you email him, he'll email you back.

• 1:19:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, he didn't email me back about JoJo's bizarre adventure, which I think was what broke him.

• 1:19:05Speaker 04

  Maybe a bridge too far.

• 1:19:06Ed Zitron?

  Okay, well-

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  He might not be ready.

• 1:19:08Ed Zitron?

  Delightful show. But you can't really humiliate someone like that, but the pressure on owners has changed things in the past. Like, they don't want to be despised by an entire town. I don't think enough people know who Sundopesh Shai or Sam Altman is. And I think the more people who learn and mock them, because they're so rich, they don't have anything other than their names. And unlike sports teams, they don't have anything cool.

• 1:19:29Speaker 04

  So I think one difference with sports than tech is, in fact, the broad cultural popularity inherited over generations, such that you are invested in this team in a way that you could never- Really be invested in the same way when it comes to even the device you use all of the time.

• 1:19:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Speaker 04

  So I've talked to owners about this, NBA owners, who are like, yeah, my day job as multi-billionaire is like to obsess over the price of like polypropylene or some other, you know, material that I monetize. None, none of that is as resonant, is as much of a pain point in my life as the guy on the street who is actively booing me when he sees me.

• 1:20:14Ed Zitron?

  But imagine if they fucking like them.

• 1:20:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:16Ed Zitron?

  Like a beloved owner, like if the product was really good, people used to fucking love Google.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  So the Mets have a great example of this in that they are owned by what you can only call a prolific financial criminal, Steve Cohen. Like it's just a guy that was banned by the SEC from trading because of all the insider trading that he did.

• 1:20:35Ed Zitron?

  Oh my God.

• 1:20:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:20:37Ed Zitron?

  Guy can't have friends.

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  I know, right. They're mad at him. They're jealous.

• 1:20:41Speaker 05

  I would love, I would love Francesca on this topic specifically.

• 1:20:44Ed Zitron?

  Who is that?

• 1:20:44Speaker 04

  Like going over his art collection, there's a lot of Modigliani's, you know, and I don't like them, you know, they're too skinny. But the, we love Modigliani jokes here on the podcast.

• 1:20:55Ed Zitron?

  Also, who is that?

• 1:20:56Speaker 04

  He's a sculptor.

• 1:20:57Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:20:57Speaker 04

  And they are very skinny, but the, I'm more of a Brancusi guy, but so Cohen though, like bought the Mets as the team that he was obsessed with as a fan as a kid. And basically this is what he's gonna do with the rest of his life. He went and he took a team that was owned by a fail family, not just fail sons, it was a whole multi-generational thing. And did the stuff that I was talking about in terms of like basically investing in the little things that make an organization work better. In this case, it's people that help your pitchers pitch better, coaches that actually help in an individual way. And then also.

• 1:21:35Ed Zitron?

  Executives.

• 1:21:36Speaker 04

  Executives that like understand that these are people and that they need to be sort of like treated as such. This is like the story such as it's told about how the Mets managed to outbid the Yankees for Juan Soto. Part of it was that like the Yankees were dicks to him. They were dicks to his family.

• 1:21:50Ed Zitron?

  And Juan Soto is an extremely good player who's not been as good as he should be.

• 1:21:54Speaker 04

  He's not been, you know, he's been a little bit of a disappointment, but.

• 1:21:56Speaker 05

  But he was paid the biggest contract in the history of sports.

• 1:21:58Speaker 04

  Yes. And so it's like, you have to pay the money, but then also if you want to win that person over, the generational talent that you give that amount of money. You, in the Mets case, it was basically like they have a really nice family room for the kids of the players at the stadium, which is not something that they did under previous ownership. Yeah. And so Steve Cohen, who is a guy that is like the definition of a class enemy of mine. Everything that I want this country to be, he is in the fucking way of it being that. And yet, he does own my favorite baseball team and he has done a pretty good job hiring pitching coaches. And at some point, you like, this is all true.

• 1:22:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's all true.

• 1:22:35Speaker 04

  It's real. You can soften your opinion on a guy for that reason.

• 1:22:38Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And Steve Cohen authentically is also a guy who like listens to sports talk radio.

• 1:22:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43Speaker 05

  And is not a fake fan, is a real fan as well.

• 1:22:45Speaker 04

  And not even in like always the most flattering ways. Like he's sometimes will get on Twitter and like recommend some like lower tier Mets prospect guy. And it's like, talk to your own fucking prospect guys, dude. Like they definitely know more than this guy does.

• 1:22:58Ed Zitron?

  So I hate to wrap it up there. I'm just gonna say, Steve Cohen, if you're listening, come on better offline, let's talk about the Mets.

• 1:23:05Speaker 04

  Can I say one more thing about Steve Cohen?

• 1:23:06Ed Zitron?

  Absolutely.

• 1:23:07Speaker 04

  So this is why I think he is game and why I think he will be on this. Do you know about Steve Cohen? And this is more for Pablo, because I know Eddie did not. Do you know about his Guy Fieri fixation?

• 1:23:16Ed Zitron?

  Who is that?

• 1:23:17Speaker 04

  So Guy Fieri, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.

• 1:23:19Ed Zitron?

  Oh, sorry. I've just never heard it said like that.

• 1:23:21Speaker 04

  That's how he says it.

• 1:23:22Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 1:23:23Speaker 04

  Guy Fieri, I'll say it the way that it's written.

• 1:23:24Ed Zitron?

  How I would.

• 1:23:25Speaker 05

  He's the Modigliani of television chefs.

• 1:23:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's, yes, I think that's fair to say.

• 1:23:30Ed Zitron?

  And for our Europeans, 5,000 calorie meals.

• 1:23:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:23:34Ed Zitron?

  And donkey sauce. He looks like Smash Mouth.

• 1:23:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's a crazy, he looks like everybody from Smash Mouth made into one guy.

• 1:23:40Speaker 05

  Smashed into one mouth.

• 1:23:41Speaker 04

  Yes, it is. A smash burger of sorts.

• 1:23:43Speaker 05

  In fact, no one has resembled the term Smash Mouth more than Guy Fieri.

• 1:23:47Ed Zitron?

  Even the band.

• 1:23:48Speaker 04

  But, so his, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives really is good, though. I've never eaten in a restaurant there.

• 1:23:52Ed Zitron?

  And he's also like a good guy.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  Anyway. But so the show is him driving around the country, going to someplace, eating a hot dog and being like, that's, that's crazy, brother, that's a crazy hot dog. Steve Cohen, super fan of the show, appears in a couple of episodes as a diner and kind of like a weird, I saw one, I think I-

• 1:24:07Ed Zitron?

  Just like sneaks in.

• 1:24:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, there's one in Los Angeles of him just eating a Luganiga sausage. And he's not like a handsome man, he's just like a guy, but he's at someplace, he doesn't have any lines, but then he did- Apparently pay Guy Fieri $100,000 to hang out with him for a day and go to all of his favorite restaurants, like the hot dog places in Connecticut that he likes.

• 1:24:29Ed Zitron?

  That's exactly what I.

• 1:24:31Speaker 04

  See, to me, that is actually like, that's an inkling of that person might do a good job running a baseball team. There's a follow-up episode that maybe I need to do on my show where I find out who's actually good at being rich. Yeah.

• 1:24:42Ed Zitron?

  I would please have me on. It sounds amazing. That actually sounds like an incredible.

• 1:24:46Speaker 04

  It's not always guys that are good at being owners. Honestly, it's just not being unhappy about everything. Right.

• 1:24:52Ed Zitron?

  And the rule line that you established in that.

• 1:24:54Speaker 04

  You wouldn't tell Jim Ursay, you wouldn't tell anyone to be more like Jim Ursay, R.I.P. And yet, like, Jim Ursay spent the last years of his life with, like, a touring band of notable blues musicians, traveling venues across the country and doing the worst versions of Neil Young's songs you've ever heard that he would sing.

• 1:25:11Ed Zitron?

  That fucking rock.

• 1:25:11Speaker 04

  It rocks. It's great. I have no doubt.

• 1:25:13Ed Zitron?

  I wish more people like that. I regret to confirm, it rocks.

• 1:25:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:18Ed Zitron?

  So, we wrap up here, and I will say, another thing about all of this is that two wonderful men I'm here with, actually, Danil as well, it's like, we all fucking love our jobs and we're truly, like, deeply into them. I talked to Danil about random fucking production and stuff, it's a joy to do, and I think that that is actually the real solution to a lot of these problems, is give people who actually give a fuck money and let them do cool shit. David, where can people find you?

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  Uh, now the pressure's on, because we already know that Ed is very critical of my promos. Defector.com is the website. Uh, it is a subscription site, but you can read a few articles for free and decide if you like it. Uh, the podcast I do there is The Distraction, the podcast I do about Hallmark movies is It's Christmas Town. Yeah! And, uh, if you like Pablo and Ed, you can hear them on The Distraction. Neither one of these guys has been on the Hallmark podcast yet, but it's a long, it's a long process. It's hard. Uh, yes, mm, indeed. Uh, and then, I'm on Blue Sky, I guess, David J. Roth.

• 1:26:09Ed Zitron?

  I'll have the links in that. Pablo.

• 1:26:10Speaker 04

  Uh, Pablo Torre finds out is the show, it is on YouTube and it's a podcast, and, uh, I have a Substack, it's at www.pablo.show. Um, and I aspire to, uh, talk about some Hallmark movies with a guy who's only killed one of two turtles that he's. So far, you know?

• 1:26:28Ed Zitron?

  God killed that turtle. But, and I'm at Zitron, you can find me on a podcast that's called Better Off. Yeah, God killed that turtle.

• 1:26:37Speaker 04

  God smote my turtle.

• 1:26:39Ed Zitron?

  It's like, well, God friended me.

• 1:26:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:42Ed Zitron?

  Anyway, I'm Ed Zitsch, and you've been listening to the podcast Better Offline. We talk about technology or some such business. Wonderful producer, of course, Daniel Goodman, here in the beautiful New York City, Nevada. Please, please subscribe to my newsletter, Where's Your Ed at. What's great is this is gonna end, and you're gonna hear exactly the same shit again, and you're gonna email me and say, "Ed, re-record it." No, don't do it.

• 1:27:12Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where'syoured dot at to visit the Discord, and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:27:45Speaker 07

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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