Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out “Please Enjoy It Or You Are Fired”: Inside PTFO, with Dan Le Batard About this episode PTFO keeps winning awards. But what do we do for an encore? How do you make something special without losing our standards — or our minds? Do you guys even enjoy this? Pablo visits Miami to see his friend/boss, Dan Le Batard, and Dan’s producer, Chris Cote. They discuss balancing real life; perspective in the face of grief; Oprah; and figuring out how to serve an audience without missing the point.
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0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is. Even if you hit him in the balls, it'll make a memory. Right after this ad. This episode is brought to you by apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another, and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps
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1:19 Pablo Torre? We are rolling now, yes? Okay, so Dan, my one task for Chris Cody, who is behind the glass, and dancing immediately, is if Kawhi Leonard gets traded, you need to tell me?
1:35 Speaker 01 I'm on it.
1:36 Pablo Torre? And if anyone else gets indicted in a gambling scandal, same, same deal.
1:40 Speaker 01 I'm your man.
1:40 Pablo Torre? Okay, great. Dan, hi.
1:42 Speaker 02 Nice to see you. I feel like this is a perpetual state for you, that you say this to your wife, you say this at funerals, you say this in confession, you say this to the priest, you say this everywhere.
1:53 Pablo Torre? I was talking to David. David Sampson, our friend, fellow Pulitzer Prize winner. And we were morbidly talking about what if the NBA announces its ruling on the aspiration story during the funeral of his daughter, which we were attending yesterday. We're taping this on Monday. And so your joke is, is it's, it's the thing that's in the back of our minds.
2:24 Speaker 02 This is a plague for the over preparers among us. I don't live in the world that you guys do with this stuff. Like, that is not dark comedy. That's just deeply dark. What if Kawhi gets traded during my daughter's funeral? Is not a question anybody should be asking.
2:40 Pablo Torre? What if any number of things that are floating in the air are announced at a time in which we are here to grapple with like what's actually important in life and death? It was, it's a bit, look, in the screenplay of what David's life is certainly, as I am here in Miami, which I have not been in with my wife Liz, uh, since you, since you got married to Valerie, we are here again because of the worst thing that's happened to a friend of mine. Um, since the last worst thing that happened to a friend of mine, which was your brother's death. That's how, that's how doing this show and being at this company has also, uh, felt.
3:24 Speaker 02 I have spent the last nine months during what is David Sampson, experiencing what I think is about the cruelest thing I've ever seen a human being, uh, experience, uh, texting him some form of, what about the Padres bullpen? What do you think of the Padres bullpen today and some of the things that you're covering in sports? It sort of makes everything very small. It's ma- it makes even something as substantive as your ambition and David's ambition, both of them very willful substantive things. It makes them shrink and pale in, uh, in comparison, but not so much that the two of you aren't thinking at the funeral, what happens if Kawhi gets traded?
4:06 Pablo Torre? I should say that I was, I, I cannot speak for David on that. I just know that previous conversations had acknowledged what would be the most inconvenient time for us to work?
4:19 Speaker 02 It's dark subject matter.
4:20 Pablo Torre? Dude, by the, by the way, so just on that. On being dad, as I am now, as David is. You know, I just want to say, like, we want everybody we know to donate to the Kyra Fund. I just want to say that up top here, in a totally unambiguous way. We'll put in the show notes. Kira Sampson, age 28. And so, when I'm here, and we're also grappling with like, real, like, what is, who gives a [bleep]. Like legitimately, that's the thought I had sitting at that service was, if I don't
5:01 Pablo Torre? put this in perspective, I am failing. The all-consuming nature of this job, like, I need to, I need to remind myself of like, why these relationships, and these friendships, and these, and these bonds, why they matter so much to me. And it's not because we won an award, or we might get the thing, it's that we got to do this.
5:27 Speaker 02 That is the definition for success for this for me, is getting to keep doing it. And it's fairly simplistic, and it's a lot different than how I've ever looked at some of this stuff, because you do get altered by grief, and altered by death. I have found ambition can very often be lonely, and is almost always insatiable. So, the chase never stops being the chase, and unless you stop running, because you make a conscious decision to stop running, everyone uses the trope of, this puts life in perspective.
6:07 Speaker 02 But until you've been soaked in the stale sickness of what grief is in your body, in your stomach, you wake up, you can't sleep, it's always sort of there. Unless you have had that weighted vest on you, you don't understand how profound those words are, even if it seems simplistic, because it's what everyone says when death is around.
6:30 Pablo Torre? Right. I mean, so the last time I was here again with Liz, Liz was pregnant.
6:36 Pablo Torre? And it was at your wedding. And Chris was there.
6:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:39 Speaker 02 That's right. Chris, what did you make of Pablo being the ordained minister? Pablo is at the center of a literal love story, whether it's me and the Cody's, or me and my wife, or me and him. He's literally the person who married me. What was your experience at the wedding there after you hit Dan Patrick in the balls while juggling near him?
6:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's the big takeaway for me is me juggling. I have that video we can show here. It's me juggling for Dan Patrick and losing one of the balls. And I hit him in the midsection. It's fine. He was fine. He was still impressed overall. But I was impressed with Pablo. He didn't use many words that I didn't know. And I was kind of expecting that. He didn't make it about himself. He made it about you guys, beautiful ceremony. I remember Dan's blue suit looked great.
7:22 Pablo Torre? Do you remember Dan crying immediately upon arrival?
7:26 Speaker 01 Yes, I remember him. As soon as he saw his beautiful bride, just a blubbering brook.
7:31 Pablo Torre? It was, it was so on the nose for anybody. There were betting lines, like, when is Dan gonna start crying? And the answer was as soon as physically possible. By the way, like, that's really, 2019 was before I officially joined Metal Lark. Before PTFO was a glimmer in anyone's eye. That was the first reporting that you assigned to me was officiating your, your, your, your union.
7:59 Speaker 02 Valerie called our wedding day and her wedding day, her special day, a party for Dan's friends because so many of you were at the center of what it is that we were doing there. And I will tell you, though, that whether they be my friends or not my friends, Valerie is not very trusting with precious things to others. So that she handed you the, the ability to speak on behalf of both of us, and you took the great care of actually reporting it.
8:31 Pablo Torre? Interviewing, both of you.
8:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, and, and, and took great care with that. She knew you would, and it's why, it's at least why she chose you, in part why. There are many reasons, but that's pretty high up on the list because she knew you would treat it with great care.
8:45 Pablo Torre? Every time I come to Miami to do something like celebrating, or mourning, or feeling real feelings, I end up reporting.
9:10 Speaker 02 Well, one of the reasons we're here today is not to talk about the specifics of my wedding, but to explain to your audience, I hope, an understanding of what it is you're doing here and why it is that you're doing it. Because in the reporting of details, you can hide some of your own personality or vulnerabilities, because you're always telling the stories of others. And I sort of wanted to sit down with you here under these circumstances, when we're dealing with life and death stuff, on what the mission statement of this project is for you. Because I have found it difficult to sort of impress upon you
9:54 Speaker 02 some form of you have to enjoy all of this by acting somewhat as if you've already arrived, without the laziness that comes with people when they arrive at things. And I think you've had some difficulty sort of separating those things. You feel some form of, I don't want to speak for you, but some form of, no, I've always got a chase. Once I've arrived, then the journey and the destination make it so that the chase is over. And part of what fuels you is the chase.
10:27 Pablo Torre? This is where I will cop out by quoting you, because this is a text that like, Chris, this is the kind of text that you dream of getting from your boss?
10:35 Speaker 01 Had to be at 4 a.m.
10:37 Pablo Torre? Get the...
10:39 Pablo Torre? Yes. Early.
10:41 Speaker 01 His best work.
10:42 Pablo Torre? "This is the very best stuff," Dan wrote. "If this is as good as it ever gets, it's plenty [bleep] good. Please enjoy it, or you are fired."
10:55 Pablo Torre? And it made me happy to receive that. I said, I love that so much. But the unspoken part of it is like, easier said than done.
11:06 Pablo Torre? Because the goal is like, if this doesn't get more fun, I think we've [__] up. If I don't have the perspective on like, what did we accomplish? What does that free us to do? Does it free us to be present at a [__] funeral?
11:23 Pablo Torre? Then I think we've [__] up.
11:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, it won't be successful the way that I define success this stage of my life. When you say though, easier said than done, the people who have had the most success in entertainment make it look easy without you having any earthly idea of how hard it was. And it was almost always exceptionally hard. And you specifically have already done the hardest thing the hardest way. You're at a trough where everyone has a microphone now. Everyone has a podcast. And on merit, you're making something that is universally seen as the very best of those things.
12:07 Speaker 02 There are not really breakout podcasts anymore in sports. You have one of the biggest and best things that there are in the intimate medium of podcasting. And also, as your journalistic career has advanced, I'm 57, you're barely 40. You have done all of the things that I have done in my career that have taken 10 and 20 years. You've done it in one and two and three years. I had to write 10 years of columns. You wrote five articles. You were on Pardon the Interruption before me. You now have a similar-
12:42 Pablo Torre? More than five for the record, Chris. Put that down in the transcripts. Way more, yeah.
12:45 Speaker 02 Five long magazine articles is all he ever did. He went from fact checker, most meticulous of bottom rung jobs in sports writing, to doing something that is following your heart and your curiosities. And you've had every success imaginable. They have to start feeling like successes so that you're working from a place of maximum confidence as opposed to using, you know, whatever the fuel of insecurities can be to make people great.
13:14 Pablo Torre? Yeah, look, I, the problem with this whole enterprise insofar as there is a problem, which I want to be- Self-aware about is that I love making the show so much that it is making me love it less. Is that, does that track?
13:30 Speaker 02 I mean, I had a lot of trouble with joy before my brother died. It's one of the, like, to the degree that you honor me by telling me that you have learned anything from me. If you don't learn this thing at the same speed that you've learned all of the other things, you won't be enjoying forty to sixty. You'll be missing an assortment of things in the, in the consumption of what it is that's making this thing great and also making it feel the need to always top yourself. Because now you've placed your standard, which is the very highest thing, and your audience appreciates that standard. You are a tastemaker now. They are trusting you to tell them what's important, what is good.
14:12 Speaker 02 And I'm sort of begging you, please, please, put down your standard a, a, a modic, a touch. Put down your standard a touch so that you can enjoy it more. Because I don't think the two things are conflated. I think that you can make the great work without it suffering the, the way that it, uh, sometimes does.
14:34 Pablo Torre? Well, now this is postmodern, right? Because this episode, to break the fourth wall, to throw Chris Cody Kool-Aid Man style through the fourth wall, is the thing that you're describing. This is ostensibly easy on some level to make. It's us sitting down, we're just talking. And on another level, when you say, lower the standard, it is, that's salary capture convention, the cardinal sin in the NBA. That is the cardinal sin of podcasting to me, lowering the standard. I'm like, I, that's, that sounds f***ing gross. And yet, the audience, right? So why is Chris Cody here? I also am looking at him as a reminder of like a, a literal human embodiment of an audience.
15:12 Speaker 02 And lowering the standard.
15:14 Pablo Torre? And also that.
15:16 Pablo Torre? And what I'm thinking about is speedrunning through this very strange business, learning from you lots of things that I enact every day. What I did not get, because it took you X number of years and it took me X minus Y number of years, is some solidity, some grasp of like, so what is this audience that is now coalesced around this show at a rate that's beyond my expectation in less than three years? We launched this in September of 2023. What do they want?
15:52 Speaker 02 You don't know, though, what your audience wants. It's something that you're grappling with because your audience is relatively new. Like, I would say that over the last 20 years, right? They make fun of me because anytime we do something in public, I make sure to spend a lot of time talking to people afterward. And I sort of have a profile because what we do daily, it's really just us in here. And most of the time we've been doing it, we felt like nobody is watching us because we were a radio show for a long time and literally nobody was watching. It wasn't a video product once upon a time. But the strongest of links is the people who are with us because they know, for example,
16:36 Speaker 02 that when Chris Cody was let go from ESPN, that we hired him back the next day and put him on the air as a middle finger to ESPN. And so whatever we're doing that day or that week or that month that might not be good enough or might not live up to whatever it is that they want, they connect with us from there. The connection is more intimate and it's more meaningful because it's from there. And what I'm telling you is you already have that connection with your audience, even if you're not out there and you don't have 20 years of data to back up and confirm that you know exactly what they want, because a lot of people want a lot of different things. And what they want, most of all, if they're spending an hour a day with your podcast, is for you to show them what they
17:21 Speaker 02 want, because they're not quite sure until they've heard it on your show. But now they know they like it. That they know.
17:28 Pablo Torre? Um, are you suggesting that
17:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:31 Pablo Torre? you should fire one of my producers?
17:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:34 Pablo Torre? So that I can rehire them?
17:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:37 Speaker 01 Be a good look for you. It's a good idea.
17:39 Speaker 02 It's been done, but not a terrible idea to make me the man for firing. How many, how many of your audience members know Chris Tummanello? How many of them know Matt Sullivan? How many, how many of them know that you have a newsroom? That, what, what do you think the audience knows about how the puppet comes to life?
18:02 Pablo Torre? This is, I think what this episode is, is surprise. Like, I'm a person who has all of these neuroses, in case you didn't get told that directly by me before in the 400 episodes we've done.
18:15 Speaker 02 You haven't said that, though, right?
18:17 Pablo Torre? Not like this.
18:18 Speaker 02 The reporting hides the vulnerability, right? You, when, when we left ESPN, you told me, as a, you, you've given me very little sort of firm advice, but one of the things that you did say is, you have to go more vulnerable now. You, you must, in terms of whatever the growth and transformation is.
18:36 Pablo Torre? Because I know intellectually what the right thing to do is. It's just harder to actually enact it. And does our audience, the Pablo Torre finds out audience, do they want the rest of me? Because this is a lot of, what we're doing here is like the stuff that you and I talk about. Because I love making the show and I want to keep loving it, which means also, hey, here's a big checkbox, Pulitzer Prize, beyond my expectation. What does that let me do now? And does that mean that I do this show in the way that I've dreamed, I've dreamed of doing, which is like forever? That's the goal.
19:17 Speaker 02 I believe that what the audience wants is for you to follow your heart and your curiosities, because you've already proven to them that you know what's interesting to the audience. In some ways, it's almost incumbent upon you as the post-modern newsroom.
19:34 Speaker 02 To tell the audience what's most important and to trust that your standard on discerning is going to have more care than theirs, not as any insult to them, but because they're passengers, they're signing up for you to tell them what's important, they're signing up to learn, they're signing up to see where your curiosities take them because you've become, a tastemaker seems like an ugly word, but well, but you, you are somebody who's deciding what are the things that are most interesting on this platform and the fact that they've gathered around the platform already tells you that that's like the hit rock group or music group getting on stage and saying, well, what do you want? And they're
20:18 Speaker 02 asking, well, play, play the hits, play, you're, you're the musician.
20:24 Pablo Torre? Another Kawhi Leonard episode. Yeah.
20:26 Speaker 02 I don't think they want a 12th Kawhi Leonard episode.
20:29 Pablo Torre? I don't know, man, I've seen the, I've seen the metrics. Um, no, and by the way, like, to that point, um, I think one thing that I have learned and have such faith in as I'm asked by places like the New York Times and the Athletic and other newspapers, the Financial Times reached out, all these places that are, are like these august institutions. They're turning to me, to us here at Metalark, and they're saying, can you help us make this fun? We do the journalism, we do the serious, can you help us do whatever it is that your secret sauce is? It's take the work seriously in ways that you will never admit to your audience, except maybe on an episode like this, how much you stress about,
21:09 Pablo Torre? are they enjoying this? Does this sound right to their ear? Um, and make it like you're not doing that.
21:15 Speaker 02 But you don't think, you don't think that they're, I, I know how it sounds coming out of my mouth. It's totally counterintuitive to say some form, as I've told you a couple of times now, the lowering of the standard almost sounds like an insult to you, but the place that your standard is, is so unsustainable. If the goal is to do it forever, you're going to fry and the loosening of your standard because you're so proud.
21:46 Speaker 02 Is never gonna be enough to make anything that has your name on it bad. You'd just be suffering it less. I'm not even asking you to actually lower the standard. I'm asking you to take some of the suffering out of it because it's not required. You seem to think it's required. And this was my relationship with writing and it's why I stopped writing. It's why I chose community and laughter and communal stuff. Because writing was so lonely and the obsessive compulsive perfectionism. I don't think perfectionism is a noble trait. I think humans aren't meant to be perfect.
22:24 Pablo Torre? Disagree. Of course, of course, you have a very good point.
22:29 Speaker 02 It's unkind. It's not self-love. It's not forgiving of yourself. It's always not good enough in some respect in a way that you need to, you need to care for yourself slightly better than that. Otherwise, you're gonna be, when I tell you ambition can be lonely and it's insatiable, you're gonna be 15 years from now fried.
22:48 Pablo Torre? Well, I think the perverse order of operations here, which is the blessing and the curse, is that we got the thing, the cosign, from the ultimate journalistic body of taste and judgment. We got it and now I, it's like, we got, okay. So then, now what?
23:16 Pablo Torre? The end of June and July can be a really rough period for sports fans with football still a few months away and basketball and hockey ended. But this year, we're pretty lucky because not only is there a World Cup, there is a World Cup in our backyard. And so make sure to check out the Athletic Podcast Network to stay up to date on all things related to the World Cup. You can wake up with the Totally Football Show from LA, then dive deep into the biggest talking point of the day with the Athletic FC Podcast. And you can watch the Tifo Podcast fool around on their daily live streams in the afternoon. All shows are free to watch or listen on your favorite podcast platform. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. With Apple Card, you earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases,
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26:27 Pablo Torre? I think about audience a lot. And I think about it because what I was trying to say is, not that everything needs to be perfect, because that is of course unrealistic, but my way of winning over the audience effectively is writing. Like, the secret of my career journalistically is not that I gave up writing after writing five articles, it's that I stopped writing for print and started doing it in a format that now because many people, most people, no one else really tries to write and report
27:11 Pablo Torre? and also do what you guys do here in Miami at the same time, it has, it has, that's, that's the secret of the show, actually.
27:19 Speaker 02 But how much is this, how much of this has changed since the birth of your daughter and the seismic change of climate in all of journalism that had ESPN erasing a whole bunch of journalistic jobs? ESPN went into the journalism business when they didn't have any responsibility to go into the journalism business and many sports writers profited greatly off of that. You and I had the conversations where I was telling you, pretty forcefully, stop writing. You had fallen in love with writing for ESPN the magazine. It was difficult for you to give that up.
28:00 Speaker 02 And I was hitting you pretty hard with the idea of it's not a lack of nobility to grab some of this cotton candy here and make sure that you take care of your career. But that was before you had your daughter.
28:10 Pablo Torre? Yes.
28:10 Speaker 02 And before the collapse of journalism jobs. And so how much of this has to do with the fact that your career was in jeopardy and it was a very real fear as you were bringing a life into the world?
28:25 Pablo Torre? A lot, a lot. By the way, the, I don't know, I don't think Chris Cody ever got this, but what Dan is describing, Chris, is like him showing up in his convertible on South Beach, picking me up after we do a show and being like, "How's writing treating you?" As the wind blows through our hair. Look, man, I, a lot of it's from that anxiety. It is. Like, the jobs that I dreamed of, I, which I got. Senior writer at ESPN The Magazine, co-hosting a show with Bomani, High Noon, on ESPN, a daily debate show.
29:05 Pablo Torre? Even ESPN Daily, which was my first, like, awakening to the format of audio. After being like the last guy among my friend group who didn't have a podcast, it's funny that I became this guy, the guy who can't stop podcasting. ESPN Daily radicalized me in that way. It showed me, wait a minute, the muscles I had, the writing, reporting, structure, editing, humor, all that stuff, that I realized this medium actually is me. If I can bring all of that to it. And then all of that went away.
29:36 Speaker 02 Why can't you separate, though, the idea of you behaving as if you've arrived doesn't have to become the work becomes less good, it's the person making the work becoming more confident.
29:53 Pablo Torre? Yeah, that's, that's, I think you sort of loaded the answer into the question there.
29:59 Speaker 02 But I believe that you should be at maximum strength and confidence that your choices are the right ones because they've been rewarded from the peril and the fear of, am I going to be able to sustain a career that feeds my daughter here as journalism collapses? You've proven it the hardest way. If that is not to give you the confidence of, okay, I can do this and I've been validated by all of the external forces and it's still not good enough because ambition is insatiable, it's a hole that you can never fill if you're the most ambitious. It's always gonna be the shovel and the dirt until we're at a literal funeral over the
30:42 Speaker 02 weekend where we're watching somebody buried and you're wondering, is my perspective right on the things that I'm caring about? Because some of the things I'm caring about make me miss some important moments because even when I'm at home, I'm always thinking about what I have to do next because the treadmill of daily making of things never. Never stops.
31:03 Pablo Torre? Well, this is where I'll answer sort of the ESPN part of your question as well because what we've learned, and I'll also broaden this to include all the people who work on the show who won the Pulitzer Prize, right? It was the staff of Pablo Torre finds out. What we as a show have discovered after initially fearing that the problem would be, we don't have enough story ideas. And so we launched with a runway six months ahead of story ideas. Like that was a lot of the summer of 2023 was me writing down, we could do this, this, this, and this magazine style evergreen just reported that no one else is touching. We started with a lead.
31:43 Pablo Torre? I'm proud that we have not surrendered that lead. I have become almost unsettled by how few people are trying to compete. No one else is gonna do it. So maybe it's us. Maybe we just never stop doing it.
31:57 Speaker 02 You enjoy the meticulousness of let me put an architect's rigor into the making of these plans. So you're enjoying the doing, you're enjoying the results, you're enjoying the rewards of the result, but all of it is so pressurized that it becomes less than joy when it's joy plus joy plus joy plus joy equals pressure.
32:22 Pablo Torre? That should be joy. It should be joy by my math.
32:25 Speaker 02 Don't you think? It seems like by my math too, it seems like that would be the math equation, but it just becomes more and more pressure to top yourself, one of your best friends. Okay. And I, I suffer for him and he just laughs at me. He's like, knock it off. But the prison of Ezra Edelman to make the OJ Simpson documentary, one of the greatest documentaries ever made, to have to follow that. And then to make a better documentary about Prince and not be able to show it to the world is a special kind of cruelty. The pressure of following the greatness, taking all of that time, you're in, you're, you're near that loop, near him.
33:06 Pablo Torre? It is a betrayal of Ezra's confidence, I suppose, but this is also true to our friendship that I am now about to tell you that one of the first people I got dinner with after winning the Pulitzer was Ezra to talk about, so what do you do? What do you do when you've won the thing that you can't top?
33:21 Speaker 02 I couldn't believe Pablo when your first comments to me after winning the Pulitzer were about the dark cloud of expectation that comes with the Pulitzer. As opposed to what I imagined when it is that we formed this company, which is the joyous moment onstage when you're shaking a trophy at people who didn't believe because you believed in a love story or you believed in something that didn't fit in these cynical times. Like to, to arrive at that moment with you and to have you remind me as I'm calling you to congratulate you.
33:57 Pablo Torre? That you won a Pulitzer.
33:58 Speaker 02 That's right.
33:58 Pablo Torre? You too did.
34:00 Speaker 02 I needed the reminder from you because I, in coming to tell you, you have to enjoy this. You reminded me and you need to enjoy it too as the person who backed the dream.
34:10 Pablo Torre? Which is our friendship, by the way, and also we're literally the guest in one of the episodes we submitted that won. Our friendship is funny that way because you get to tell me the things that you know intellectually and that you are enacting emotionally to me who can do the first part but not the second. I also agree intellectually, a lot harder to enact, and also write back at you.
34:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I discuss this in therapy all the time. I speak my feelings more than feeling my feelings.
34:41 Pablo Torre? And, and, and same, which is why I think we're friends, is that we both know better.
34:48 Pablo Torre? I, I've been asked more and more, and it is, it is the thing I obviously take pride in doing. I've been asked more and more to explain why the show works, what's different about it. Like, just like, give us the log line of why this matters now more than ever, this moment in American history. And I say, "Sports Illustrated is a zombie. HBO's Real Sports is dead." The news magazine as a concept. If you look at any given news magazine television show at CBS and otherwise, everything is in-
35:19 Speaker 02 Trust in media is dead.
35:21 Pablo Torre? And so, to me, you know, the thing that I have felt so energized by, which you have done for decades here, is using sports as the way to talk about everything else. The whole idea that you could earn the trust of an audience, of a, of a country, that is otherwise skeptical of journalism as a concept, and has no time to be spoon-fed vegetables by these self-serious people. The idea that sports could be the cheesy melt on the broccoli. Another thing I find myself saying a lot.
35:54 Speaker 01 You love that saying.
35:55 Pablo Torre? I do.
35:55 Speaker 02 Too much, I'd say.
35:57 Pablo Torre? It works. It keeps on working.
35:59 Speaker 01 I do love cheesy broccoli, though.
36:00 Speaker 02 I, I'd say it's stopped working.
36:04 Pablo Torre? But not just like, uh, surprise, uh, we've snuck in some human rights into your sports, but also that people, um, will follow you. Because one of the things you're doing on this show that I have internalized is not taking yourself seriously. Sports allows that.
36:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, you can tell any story through sports, any story through sports. You really can find them all. One of the things that, uh, I have told people over the years when they say you cover sports, well, I'm, I'm always correcting. I cover the people who play sports because the human stories are everywhere. Uh, you, uh, can do all of this through sports. You take what you do very seriously. Uh, I think, uh, some people also think you take yourself seriously, although this show shows more of the range.
37:02 Pablo Torre? And that's, and that's, that's been the self-imposed pressure. You know, is, how do I live up to that? Like, that's what I, I learned watching you guys here. Is like, I need to be-
37:19 Pablo Torre? You know, the thing, again, I'm looking at Chris in the eyes. And the thing I'm thinking is, Chris is an avatar for...
37:27 Speaker 01 Oh, boy.
37:28 Pablo Torre? Let's be honest, a bit of the common man.
37:31 Speaker 01 I'll take it.
37:32 Pablo Torre? I believe, though, that our audience, part of the magic is that we treat them like they're pretty smart.
37:40 Speaker 02 Well, more than that, though, it's that they trust you and you treasure that trust. And so you keep working the way that you're working to make sure that you don't betray that trust. But I'm promising you that if you enjoy all of this a little more, it is something that will show in sinking into your mistakes instead of editing them out. Uh, sinking into...
38:06 Pablo Torre? How dare you suggest that we edit our shows?
38:08 Speaker 01 Totally clean.
38:09 Speaker 02 Uh, sinking into the vulnerabilities in a way that show people that, uh, they can trust you because, uh, for all the reasons that they already trust you. Because it's, uh, even though I keep saying tastemaker, all that is is they trust your judgment. That's it.
38:26 Pablo Torre? And that, it's, it's the, that's what a magazine editor does.
38:30 Speaker 02 It's the hardest thing to come by, though, with an audience.
38:32 Pablo Torre? And it's the greatest job. The idea of, "I don't know what you're putting in my mailbox, but I'm so excited to find out." That's the greatest pleasure I have because now you're following my curiosity. And now I get to feel like I'm being more of myself, you know? Which I wasn't on ESPN Daily, which I wasn't on High Noon, which I wasn't subbing in on every show that would have me on it.
38:54 Speaker 02 Oh, but I would say that the next growth evolution for you, and this is a conversation I've had with, uh, with our friend Bhug Chambi, right? Wherever it is that my lack of confidence is, uh, they're getting a version of the artist in your art, but they're getting a very manicured version of the artist. And what I have told, uh, Bhug is, I'd be totally good, uh, you know, getting out of the, the, if what was getting out of the limousine on the red carpet was my work. I don't want to do it. I want the work to do it for me. Somewhere in here where people get to see more of your personality because you're doing an hour with your friends
39:38 Speaker 02 that has no manicuring, that has some of the looseness that doesn't make it a perfectly sculpted thing, but makes it all the more human because the audience already knows who you are and they're in on the journey, wherever it is you're taking them and however it is you're taking them.
39:58 Pablo Torre? Do you want to do a quick pickup on sculpted? You kind of stumbled over sculpted. Three, two, one.
40:03 Speaker 02 Sculpted.
40:03 Pablo Torre? There it is. Nailed it. Just put that in post.
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40:52 Pablo Torre? Okay, so here's the thing. Like, what do we do now, right? And so what I come into this studio carrying is this confidence, a true confidence of we get to do the thing that very few other independent journalistic outlets are doing successfully, which is challenging power from a position of resources, yes, but such disadvantage financially when it comes to who we are investigating and why we are investigating them. And we are earning trust in an era in which trust has dried up in this desert because wealth has meant that you can manicure reality.
41:37 Pablo Torre? And I love that we got to somehow be the show that does that while also doing a show in which we had a comedian whose catchphrase is the word hamburger. You know, I love that we are, in fact, all of these things. We hired a witch to curse artificial intelligence on Halloween. We did a whole episode, which I could not have been more excited to tell you about, in which we revealed for the first time a video of Harambe, the viral gorilla, eating its own poop.
42:08 Speaker 02 How much did you spend on that soap that was your head, the sculpture?
42:12 Pablo Torre? Butter, it was butter.
42:12 Speaker 02 Butter, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
42:14 Pablo Torre? A lot, three thousand dollars.
42:16 Speaker 02 Ridiculous, asinine.
42:18 Pablo Torre? So, we are all of this. But the question of like, now that we have this benediction from like, the priests of journalism, what do we do now? I mean, frankly, like, I want to do weirder, bigger, more ambitiously. The question becomes, how do we do that while also obeying all of the lessons, which I intellectually acknowledge?
42:45 Speaker 02 You can't do those two, you can't do both of those things.
42:48 Pablo Torre? Yes, you can!
42:49 Speaker 02 You, you have to find-
42:50 Pablo Torre? No, there's a way, there's gotta be a way.
42:52 Speaker 01 Meeting Oprah's a good start.
42:54 Pablo Torre? She did touch my chest with both of her hands.
42:57 Speaker 01 Talk to me.
42:58 Pablo Torre? In France, just two common people.
43:02 Speaker 02 It's not just France, it's not just France.
43:05 Pablo Torre? Is it the sweater I have tied around my shoulder?
43:07 Speaker 02 But it's con, it's not, it's not France, it's-
43:10 Pablo Torre? Con of mammals.
43:11 Speaker 02 It's the height of, uh, foo foo.
43:14 Pablo Torre? The idea that we did a live show at the Sloan Conference in which we revealed this federal whistleblower complaint that is key to the aspiration story, and we did it as a parody of Oprah, in which we stuck it underneath people's chairs and said, "And you get a whistleblower complaint, and you get a whistleblower complaint," only for me to meet Oprah, and for her to have genuinely, I believe, no idea who she was shaking hands with or touching the chest of.
43:37 Speaker 02 She looks like she knows you there, like that, she looks like she's thrilled to meet you there. How absurd is that fan in the background, by the way? Like, how, how-
43:46 Pablo Torre? Over my, uh, right shoulder there?
43:48 Speaker 02 How con is that right there? Somebody just fanning their face.
43:52 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
43:53 Speaker 02 The sweater over the shoulder's too much, isn't it, Chris?
43:55 Pablo Torre? That's, that's called, that's called blending in.
43:57 Speaker 01 Somehow too much and too little.
43:59 Speaker 02 That's not someone who's saying, "I don't take myself seriously."
44:03 Pablo Torre? But look, I also want to acknowledge that- What, part of what my curiosity is, has always been like, I felt this at Harvard. I felt this certainly in Khan. I feel this in every interview I do with a billionaire. It's, I do wanna know, like, what's behind that door? And the fact that I could bring our audience along as we open it, as we unlock it, the door that no one else is like breaking open, that's the greatest feeling to me. Is that we can be both behind the door, but also the people who are like telling everyone else, "This is what's back here." That, to me, is, is, is what I wanna do more of.
44:47 Pablo Torre? I was hesitant at first to say it, um, but really, like, the question I have near the end here, I guess, is like,
44:55 Pablo Torre? what if we keep doing the same thing instead of listening to your advice? Like, because I think that might be what we're gonna do.
45:02 Speaker 02 Well, you're gonna burn out, you're not going to grow, and you're gonna continue to let the work speak for you, and it will speak well and eloquently for you. But I'd argue that the greatest, uh, connections made in entertainment, real connections, where you're willing to seek someone out when there's more competition than ever, it's personality-driven. You can keep doing it with the work, it's the hardest way. You're doing it and have done it the hardest way, but ultimately, they're here for your tastes, your sensibilities, your curiosities, uh, and you following your heart. So, you can make it the work, hide behind the work, it speaks well for you,
45:45 Speaker 02 but they won't see the complete you, they'll just see the artist's renderings, they won't see the artist.
45:50 Pablo Torre? What you got, Chris?
45:51 Speaker 01 The moral of the story is juggle in front of Dan Patrick. Take the chance, even if you hit him in the balls, it'll make a memory.
45:59 Speaker 02 He did, at my wedding, that's what Chris Cody did. He was juggling for some reason, I don't know why.
46:05 Pablo Torre? And you know what my production brain is saying, it's like, let's call Dan Patrick up, let's insert his view of that memory in post. Let's make that into a little documentary-style featurette inside of this episode, that'd be a great kicker.
46:18 Speaker 02 More work.
46:19 Pablo Torre? Instead, instead, instead.
46:20 Speaker 02 It's not good enough the way it is.
46:21 Pablo Torre? No, I'm like, I think we can elevate this. I think we can elevate this, let me call Dan Patrick.
46:36 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
46:42 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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47:16 Speaker 01 Everybody, listen up.
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