Share & Bezos & Tell with Ezra Edelman and David Remnick

What does the death of The Washington Post sports section mean for the future of sports, journalism and propaganda? Was "Melania" a movie — or crypto? And how does LeBron guarantee his story now? Plus: Tony Kornheiser, Paul Thomas Anderson, Nuke LaLoosh, New Yorker clickbait, Carmelite nuns, the glue of commonality... and the uselessness of despair. Further content: • "Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight" https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/democracy-dies-in-broad-daylight (David Remnick) • "The Crackin', Shakin', Breakin' Sounds" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/10/24/the-crackin-shakin-breakin-sounds (Nat Hentoff, 1964) • "A Day with the Duke" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1970/06/27/a-day-with-the-duke (Whitney Balliett, 1970) • Subscribe to "The New Yorker Radio Hour" https://pod.link/the-new-yorker-radio-hour • Read "King of the World" https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/king-of-the-world-david-remnick/1002989144 • Watch "O. J.: Made in America" https://www.hulu.com/series/oj-made-in-america-d6d1f241-2fc0-4ff9-a8f8-42e04f182787 Previously on PTFO: • The Banned Prince Documentary: Director Ezra Edelman (Finally) Speaks https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/OTUzMTViMzQtODRkZC0xMWYwLWFjNDUtZGZjM2YxNzc4YTEw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  By the way Pablo, you're getting [bleep] getting me in trouble with the entire universe because I can't [bleep] help myself.

• 0:13Speaker 00

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• 1:25Speaker 00

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• 2:32Speaker 04

  This is quite zippy. I've got such a shit studio because we only first started, you know, having this good sense to do it on YouTube recently and it's really primitive.

• 2:43Pablo Torre?

  I don't think The New Yorker would approve of the color scheme here.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  I love it.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  By the way, the other thing, David, like you asked why, what we're doing, you already know what we're doing, but I basically said yes, if there were someone that I would be interested in doing this with and would give me necessary cover because he's a pain in the ass. And so I'm like, if there's a real journalist who still like does things and I'm like, okay.

• 3:07Pablo Torre?

  The journalist in conscience of my show has arrived to degrade me and to approve of David Remnick.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  Well, I think that's called being off to a good start.

• 3:17Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. Could you introduce David for those who are not familiar with David Ezra? And I'll have you, David, do the same and take the burden off of me as the host.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  David Remnick, his eminence is the editor in chief of The New Yorker magazine, one of the crown jewels of American media, who I will also say is one of the clearest writers of prose we have in American letters.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 3:43Pablo Torre?

  Tony Kornheiser says something about you, by the way, that I want to share.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  This I gotta hear.

• 3:47Pablo Torre?

  He says-

• 3:48Speaker 04

  We don't do Ezra?

• 3:49Pablo Torre?

  Well, we'll do Ezra in a second.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm fine with that.

• 3:50Pablo Torre?

  We'll do Ezra in a second.

• 3:51Speaker 04

  The Book of Ezra.

• 3:53Pablo Torre?

  Kornheiser says about you, David, that you're the only person he knows who has gotten smarter as he got older.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  Tony's gotten dumber?

• 4:01Pablo Torre?

  Well, I'm not here to-

• 4:03Speaker 04

  Isn't that what age is all about?

• 4:04Pablo Torre?

  Draw the deduction that you just did. But he says you are ever voracious in terms of finding stuff out and thinking clearly and producing.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  That's nice to hear and thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Has Tony gotten more crotchety as an older person?

• 4:20Speaker 04

  He, and I say this with love, he is precisely the same. In other words, Ezra Edelman is the maker of the single greatest, I had this called sports documentary because that undersells it. One of the great documentaries ever about OJ Simpson. And another documentary too that I'm looking forward to seeing and God willing.

• 4:43Pablo Torre?

  Oh, he hasn't, he hasn't got an entree into.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Well, we discussed it.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Well, Pablo, have we, have we met?

• 4:49Pablo Torre?

  Um, I'm just.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  You think I'm, you think I'm just like giving this out on the streets?

• 4:52Pablo Torre?

  You called him his eminence. I'm like, when does Remnick get to see the thing?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Well, by the way, we're in a public forum. I'm not allowed to show.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  That's why, that's why I said that. So I was in the sports department of the Washington Post. There was once such a thing. Jeff Bezos killed it this week. I guess we're going to discuss that. And Tony Kornheiser had come from the New York Times. He was also in the style section for a while, where I was as a boy in the eighties. But he was a sports writer above all. And the same Long Island Jewish kid, wise ass Seinfeld era, but he's older than Jerry Seinfeld, I think. He was much the same, much the same.

• 5:37Pablo Torre?

  Larry David before Larry David.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Totally, totally. I would say Larry David is a ray of sunshine compared to Tony sometimes. But you would know better.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Well, like the fact that I remember like one line from a real sports piece I did on PTI, which again, I reminded David of when I saw that David, again, his eminence, very busy, little like 28 year old producer at HBO writes him an email and he gets on the phone with me to talk about like Tony and Mike on background, which was just incredibly like, I mean, I appreciated it to no end, but.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  And, and by the way, Kornheiser and Wilbon, those two guys, that thing they do on television, that was just what they did all day. And eventually they got paid for it. In other words, if you're a sports writer, almost all your activities at night, the games are at night. Why we came into the office, I have no idea, other than to bull shit around, right? Michael's exactly my age, which is to say he's 67 years old. And so this black kid from Chicago, we were very young at the time, and Tony, who seemed much older, but, you know, he was in his 30s. There was just a sweetness to their relationship and a, you know, a kind of ribbing, funny

• 6:58Speaker 04

  tension and texture to it that somehow, I don't even know how they invented PTI, that it came to be.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Well, that's, that's a story for a different day. And all I was gonna say is, there's one line in this piece that said, after, because as you know, Mike stays up late and watches games.

• 7:13Speaker 04

  He does, and.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  And Tony does, and, and we just have like, Kornheiser walking out of his house at 5:30 in the morning and saying, and Kornheiser grumpily greets the dawn. I'm like, that's, but like, okay, so we're here, I'm like, we're here because the [bleep] universe that is.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's sad.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Jeff Bezos, who I guess is the universe these days, killed the Washington Post sports section.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  And a lot more than that. He may have killed the Washington Post. I hope that's not the case.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  I mean, for me, as someone who grew up literally learning to read, reading the Washington Post sports section as a kid, and I grew up in DC in the 80s, this is a significant section amongst all sections in newspapers across America, even though we're also talking about the paper of Watergate.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  And Ben Bradley and Catherine Graham, this to me, it might as well, like, as far as I'm concerned.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  It's unconscious.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  As far as I'm concerned, it is the death of the Washington Post.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Well, I, I hope you're wrong, but I think the odds are with you.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Help me understand why you actually think that. Why, why this section and what else, whatever else came with it, in your mind, means the writing's on the wall.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  Well, look, I'm not so naive to think that everything stays the same forever and ever and ever. I'm not so naive to think that people consume sports news the same way they did when I was in the sports section of the Post in the early, mid 80s. I, I know that, I see that, for example, I have one son who, you know, he's, he's watching the game on TV, and on his lap is a laptop, and he's also got on his phone some insane, you know, you know, one of those things where a fan is reacting in real time in Spanish to a Yankee game. So that wasn't happening in the early 80s, that kind of thing. Nevertheless, sports.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  Especially locally, is an enormous glue of community. And how do you not understand that is beyond me? To not understand that all the local ball teams, or Georgetown and Maryland basketball, et cetera, to say nothing of high school sports, is a glue of community, conversation, commonality, in a world that's riven with conflict. And to not understand that is to not understand American life, much less Washington DC.

• 9:34Pablo Torre?

  The moment we're in, in which sports is otherwise economically booming.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:39Pablo Torre?

  When few other things feel big anymore.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:41Pablo Torre?

  Right? It's the last big tent in American life. And so the question is, why feel comfortable cutting back on that? Which is not merely a civic, local concern, but also just a concept? That sports deserve accountability via journalism.

• 9:59Speaker 04

  Look, I don't want to bring us down straight into the gutter, but here's the thing. It's not just about sports. What happened with Jeff Bezos is that he bought The Washington Post for $250 million, which to him is chump change, half the price of his boat. Not kidding, $250 million. Okay, in fairness to him, it is a yacht. It's a nice boat, as they say. I'm sure it has two oars, not just the one. And what about his, what about the sister boat? That's the trail boat with the helipad. You don't have that? I don't have that. Go to get one. I have a second toilet.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  But this was, this was a fun thing for him. And it was an item of prestige and no doubt power to have The Washington Post. Right? Okay, it's not as thick a paper, in a sense, as The New York Times. You could argue that The Wall Street Journalist is better in some ways, on the center right, or whatever. But it's The Washington Post. And he was a terrific owner, if somewhat absent and distant owner, through the first term, of Trump. And then something happened and they, you know, the Trump bump started to go away. Losses started to accumulate. And Bezos didn't find that amusing and they tried to fix it as well they should. You know, you want a business that doesn't lose money.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  I understand that. But to kill it, to cut huge portions of the newsroom, sports, huge dollops of the foreign desk. Really, the only thing that remains with any consistency is politics and national security. And to take the opinion section and say, no, you can't endorse Kamala Harris.

• 11:39Pablo Torre?

  That was...

• 11:40Speaker 04

  They'd lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

• 11:43Pablo Torre?

  As a business premise, right? The question of what are we? And they decided, we're going to service, and this is what you're driving at that I want to get to, a transactionality with the administration, which as somebody who studies, of course, Russia...

• 11:56Speaker 04

  Which is obscene. I've seen it too many times.

• 11:58Pablo Torre?

  I mean, this is not subtle. It's not subtle and it's done because on some level for Bezos, who is otherwise, by the way, shaking hands with Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin and financing a documentary that I want to talk about, at least because Ezra is here. But they do it because... It's too bad it's too late to qualify for this year's Oscars.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  It is. I wouldn't have missed it.

• 12:20Pablo Torre?

  But it's obvious... But it's because it works on some level.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  Yes, it does work. Because he has Blue Origin, which is, requires government cooperation to go into space. And his main business, let's not forget, is Amazon. And as I was writing this little screed of mine on the, on the New Yorker's website, I'd already written about the boat thing and I picked up the journal just to take a 10 minute break and there on page two was a very interesting article about how the Republican-led corporate tax bill took Amazon's corporate tax bill from $9 billion to $2 billion. That's a $7 billion saving.

• 13:06Speaker 04

  Would they have gotten that if, if Bezos had not proved so...

• 13:12Speaker 04

  Pliable, cooperative? I leave that to you.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  So let's, okay, you, you're not inside Jeff Bezos's head.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  I'm not.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  You are, you can be as cynical as, well, maybe not as cynical as me, but you can be cynical like me. But like, did he not, I don't know if he used this phrase when he bought the Washington Post, but he basically, did he not acknowledge that it was a public trust?

• 13:32Speaker 04

  He, you know, he said all the right things in the beginning, and almost to a corny degree, he was behind that motto, "Democracy dies in darkness," which people kind of giggled about a little bit.

• 13:43Pablo Torre?

  What did you think of that?

• 13:45Speaker 04

  It was, in terms of sentiment, I can't disagree with it, but it's, you know, for marketing degree, it seemed a little gothic to me.

• 13:56Pablo Torre?

  I would go, maybe even Baroque. I hated it, and I think part of it is...

• 14:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, but what you hated is that it was corny. What you didn't hate was its sentiment, which is that without democratic vitality, democracy diminishes and dies.

• 14:13Pablo Torre?

  But the question becomes, how do you sell the premise of journalism? And how do you market it? And it's interesting to already reference all of The President's Men and Spotlight, because those are two films that do an excellent job of making journalism feel cinematic and vital and necessary to democracy without being a bumper sticker you'd be embarrassed that your parents had on their car.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  By the way, I'm going to push back in the sense that how deep can you go with your roster of movies that Hollywood has made about journalism? Since you named two in the last 52 years.

• 14:44Pablo Torre?

  We need more.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  His Gal Friday for certain.

• 14:47Pablo Torre?

  But, but I think there is a challenge, and, and this brings us, we're going to jump around a bunch here, so forgive me, but like, the question of like Melania, the aforementioned film, being labeled a documentary, right? It raises the question of what does journalism have if not the challenge and responsibility of defining its own terms?

• 15:09Speaker 04

  Melania is the polar opposite of what Ezra does. The polar opposite. First of all, it's a business transaction. It is taking $40 million and giving it to the Trump family. It's no different than these transactions that you're seeing now in the crypto business in the Middle East to curry favor with and to solidify those relationships. It is corruption. It's corruption. You see the film, Pablo?

• 15:39Pablo Torre?

  Um, I haven't finished it.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  You've seen it, but not personally.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  You seriously? You went to the theater?

• 15:46Pablo Torre?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  Oh, I did. The first, the first morning, Ezra, 10:30 in the morning, Times Square, Saturday.

• 15:54Pablo Torre?

  Okay.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. Is this like- Reason code. I'm a journalist. What, I'm not gonna see that film?

• 16:00Pablo Torre?

  I love this.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  You're yelling at me because I forked over 20 bucks or something?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, I know, I know, I know you can expense it, that's fine. But like, um, oh, do, do, do tell.

• 16:10Pablo Torre?

  You didn't see it?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 16:12Pablo Torre?

  I want David Rebek's review of Melania.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  I cannot not ever see that [bleep] movie.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  You have to see it.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Movie.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  How I envy you seeing it for the first time. Um, first of all, I'll also admit that I also bought popcorn and you get a bucket. It was Melania bucket, you know, with her image and it's a movie.

• 16:37Pablo Torre?

  Like it's Dune? They, they gave out novelty buckets?

• 16:41Speaker 04

  They didn't give them out, my friend, they sold them.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  They sold them. Give them out. You are so naive, you're so young.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Oh, no, please, keep going, keep going, I'm on the edge of my seat.

• 16:54Pablo Torre?

  God, Biden crypto?

• 16:55Speaker 04

  The film unaccountably begins with the music Gimme Shelter, the Stones song. And we're at Mar-a-Lago. By the, and you know who the filmmaker is, Brett Ratner, an upset.

• 17:08Pablo Torre?

  Epstein files?

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Oh, did you look him up in the Epstein files? Is he in the Epstein files?

• 17:13Speaker 04

  I don't have all day, but-

• 17:15Pablo Torre?

  He is, he is, he appears.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Does he?

• 17:17Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  So the film, there's a lot of shots that give you a, begin with a tight focus on the first lady's Christian Louboutins. And then you slowly pan up and, you know, like a Bond girl, it, you know, but Madame Tchaikovsky at the same time. It, it's really weird and you go from one- Private conveyance to another. You go from Mar-a-Lago to the limo, to the plane where she's sitting all alone, to Washington, to New York. And all along, there are fittings for inaugural dresses and ball gowns and so on. If this is an exercise in humanizing, it didn't fully succeed.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  But the frame is the 20 days leading up to the inauguration.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  That's right. And, you know, God forgive me, when he comes on the screen, things come alive a little bit.

• 18:10Pablo Torre?

  The capital H he.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Yes. When Trump comes, because he has this certain, as we know, presence.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Well, OK, so did you go see that movie because of what you understood it to be already in that they paid $40 million and there's another $28 million in, or if that's right?

• 18:27Speaker 04

  I'm a journalist, I go to see it.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Right, OK. Did you actually go with the hope, if not an expectation, that even if you understood what it was, as far as a farce, as a documentary exercise, that you actually might learn something, even by what you're absorbing about her?

• 18:44Speaker 04

  I tried to keep hope alive, as Jesse once said.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  OK.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  I, I...

• 18:50Speaker 01

  And...

• 18:50Speaker 04

  What's my choice?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  OK, no, but you actually thought that you might get some insight into this human based on what you're...

• 18:58Speaker 04

  That didn't happen. And I don't think it was designed to do that.

• 19:18Pablo Torre?

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• 19:52Speaker 02

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• 20:27Speaker 06

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• 20:58Pablo Torre?

  I want to read Ezra's mind for a second, though. Because the question of the labeling, the vocabulary that I was referring to, right? A documentary.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:05Pablo Torre?

  Melania is like, an obvious call. But everything's a documentary now. Much like everyone who has a microphone is a journalist. And I want to actually have you help limit the scope of what we're looking at.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Well, but again, I mean, I don't know. I could give you, we could go into all different-

• 21:23Pablo Torre?

  Your true definition.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  No, but we can go in, oh, I don't know. Am I going to answer your question? But we can go into like, we're sitting here doing a podcast. So the rise of podcasts in the universe, which was some sort of then, you know, offshoot of traditional journalism. And then you have people, you're a journalist, and you do a real show where you like, break real stories. You know that the prevailing model of podcasts is just people sitting around talking [BLEEP].

• 21:46Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  And yet, that turns into this thing that people actually more readily absorb than articles in the newspaper. And it becomes this de facto thing.

• 21:54Pablo Torre?

  I'm very aware of it.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  All this thing, all this stuff starts to get mixed up. So, in the documentary sense, you have these, what we all know when we see it. Not, and by the way, not nature documentaries with, you know, David Attenborough, if not Richard Attenborough. One of the Attenburrows talking very, you know-

• 22:12Pablo Torre?

  David, yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  David. Sorry, sorry, David. Anyway. And you have things that- We all know what a documentary is when we see it, which is rooted in journalism, rooted in the humanity of a subject. There is a sort of basic contract that exists where a filmmaker is making work, and it's journalistically and artfully driven.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Some. Look, Laney Reifenschtall is also a documentarian.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  But she's also a propagandist.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  And a propagandist, yeah. There are all kinds. And, you know, we were talking before we came in here, the streaming services are filled with so-called sports documentaries that are hagiographic in the extreme, and they have journalistic elements, interviews.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Yes, and that's what's confusing.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  But who's in charge? Whose view is it?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  This is the danger, and by the way, Pablo, you're getting [bleep] getting me in trouble with the entire universe because I can't [bleep] help myself, which is like, you don't know what's real anymore. Well, this is the question. If you're reading an article in the New York Times, you understand that there's standards and practices that go through. So I know I'm reading something that has been vetted and has been fact-checked.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that doesn't prevent us from making mistakes.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and then you have to paint a correction and all these things, but it's an earnest thing, and you understand that there's a system in place. That's why these things are valuable properties in our, in a functioning society. Now, to your point, you have streaming services, and I'm not going to here to indict anyone specifically, but you have this glut of content. So now it's like, it's like, what's a documentary and what's content? And ostensibly, there's now films that exist where, oh, hey, David, I called you up and said, I would like to make a documentary on you. And you said, okay, that's cool, talk to my agent. And then you do a deal where you like decide that like, because it's like, you are, as I said, you are one of the great writers of prose in the

• 24:01Speaker 01

  history of American letters, and you go, and that's worth $3 million, and because I'm a better journalist than you, I'm going to also sort of ensure that...

• 24:10Speaker 04

  Let me complicate the conversation. When I was a kid, I loved to watch something called NFL films. There were a variety of it. And they had this voice of God.

• 24:21Speaker 07

  John Facenda.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  John Facenda. I can't even do his voice.

• 24:23Speaker 07

  The Autumn Wind is a Raider. The Autumn Wind is a Raider, pillaging just for fun. He'll knock you round and upside down and laugh when he's conquered and won.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Neither can Pablo.

• 24:37Speaker 04

  Three degrees below zero. Green Bay, Wisconsin.

• 24:42Speaker 08

  Since 1965, only one light has burned in the National Football League. It has glowed constantly for the proud Packers of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  And there was no game played in sunlight. Either it was mud in Cleveland, or it was freezing cold in the Ice Bowl of Lambeau Field, or whatever.

• 25:02Pablo Torre?

  It all amounted to stained glass, in a sense.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  It was fantastic. I was, I could not have been happier as a 10-year-old boy watching this stuff. So I would contend that there's a tradition of this that's only now filling the pockets, not just of the league, but the players who participate in it. When I was a sports writer in the early Stone Age, you could get pretty good access to Magic Johnson and Larry, grumpy Larry Bird, or whoever it was. Certainly the team I was covering. Can I tell you my little LeBron story?

• 25:39Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna ask you. You've written the book on Muhammad Ali. You've been around the globe.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  That kind of stuff is near impossible now.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  What is, okay, it's near impossible, and I want to understand.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  Muhammad Ali talked to everybody all the time.

• 25:53Pablo Torre?

  In the hospital room?

• 25:55Speaker 04

  Everywhere, in his bed, in his hotel.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  But isn't it important, and I want you to keep going, but isn't it important to try to understand what is lost in that impossibility?

• 26:07Speaker 04

  It came to occur to the athletes themselves and their people that why are we doing this anymore? So here's how it now works. Through the good offices of a friend of mine, I was able to have dinner with LeBron James and Maverick Carter, his longtime friend and business partner. And they knew what I wanted. I wanted to do a real, a real profile in the real sense. I brought this book that I'd written about Muhammad Ali. I presented it to LeBron, like, as if in a kind of holy reliquary. It was, it was very strange.

• 26:42Pablo Torre?

  What year was this?

• 26:44Speaker 04

  Four years ago, either right before or right after the pandemic. And he was lovely. It was really fun and I thought I'm in like Flint. And it's not like I was asking for the world. I wanted to come out to LA, watch him play a whole bunch of games and get some interview time and move around a little bit and talk to other people. A profile for The New Yorker. And it seemed like it was going to happen. Three days later, a representative for, a nice guy in the PR realm, comes to me and says, "Look, David, we can't do this. We can't do this." I say, "Why?" This is a guy who has everything.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  He said, "Because if we want to get our message to our fans," this is how he spoke, "we'll go on social media and say, you know, political message, A, commercial message, B, comment on, C, and it's done and it's in our voice. Done. And if we want to do a documentary, we'll do that thing. And if we want to call it," and here was the killer thing that just, my heart shattered, "if we want to tell our story, we'll call so-and-so, you know, ghostwriter of the moment, and it will guarantee that we tell our story the way we want it told. What they don't want is the intermediary of a writer or a filmmaker of any independence."

• 28:10Speaker 04

  And that was the end of that.

• 28:11Pablo Torre?

  That's the word, independence.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Well, but that's the thing. So this is the same as we're talking about Bezos and Trump. It's like, what happens when we're no longer in control? They don't need us. If the message can be sort of, if Trump can lean on the person who has money, or the five people in America that have money, and these people don't really care about journalistic standards or care about art, what we get are the subjects controlling what we, as an audience, get to read.

• 28:38Speaker 04

  Although what complicates it with Trump is that Trump talks to reporters more than any president in history. It's more press availabilities and you get the feeling that with like an analysis and psychoanalysis that he says whatever is on his mind at a given moment and means it. Now, he may mean an entirely different thing. I mean, anybody with any sense at all would say, you know, that tweet, that, that, video that I put up of the Obamas, which was just a stone cold racist As apes. video, that he would say, you know, upon reflection, that was a bad idea. I didn't really have anything to do with it, but he would have bull his way around, but be at least somewhat menschy about it. No, he was utterly

• 29:20Speaker 04

  honest about it. That's who he is. So it's kind of complicated.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 29:27Pablo Torre?

  The question of independence, right, and control. So the reason I keep on turning to Ezra and badgering him is because the question becomes, what in your view, as the gold standard of, and I don't even know how you feel about this, journalistic documentary filmmaking, what will you tolerate? Because the question is going to be compromise. It's not always yes or no. There are degrees that will be proposed.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Look, I'm, you know, I think about this, as you know, all the time because I feel like I'm like exist way up in my tree by myself because I think there is a, you know, I was called naive last week by somebody because of like,

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Oh, sure.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Well, leave all names out of this and all things, but it was just basically like not acknowledging that the universe that we live in now, which is like, yeah, athletes get paid to make movies. And so it's fine that you're principled, but like, grow up a little bit. Like, this is just the way, and I'm like, I'm sorry, what happened to journalism? And I'm sorry, what happened to actually having some level of independence between a subject and a filmmaker? It changes the dynamic in terms of what gets done and how it gets done. And there's nothing that you could possibly say to me that's going to change that. Now, as a result, if we live in a universe now where I still like doing what I do. But the problem is, every single person, and granted, you know, we talked a little bit

• 30:56Speaker 01

  when I saw you in the fall about when you're talking, you know, I don't want to reduce it to the notion of just like the celebrity profile.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  But anybody who has any level of power, money, fame, that as a result, this, they have some modicum of control.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  Well, look, I take Paul Thomas Anderson, a great filmmaker. We have always wanted to do a profile of Paul Thomas Anderson. What does that entail? It entails being around him, taking notes, not just interviewing him, but observing him at work, interacting with other people, and then the writer goes off and writes what he or she wants. Paul Thomas Anderson has always said, no. Let me ask you this. Can you blame him?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  What's in it for him?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  No, that was the next part. I do not blame with these people where when you understand what has happened, if you came to me and said, hey, you want to make, I want to make a documentary about you and I'll pay you $5 million, you can review the cuts.

• 31:55Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  And like you, all these things, I'd be like, yeah, sure. Because by the way, I don't, and then maybe I'm, let's just say I'm empathetic, if not an outright hypocrite, because like the [bleep] if I'd be doing this.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Seating complete control to a stranger to do something. But the problem is the contract is that they are getting something. They are getting, it's not me, but if it's Paul Thomas Anderson, for instance, if you're, if Paul Thomas Anderson wants to make a film about someone, you should be so honored.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  Look, we have a problem, it's not just, it's hardly sports, it's pop music.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  The, it very often, the only real access, I'm not talking about, oh, you can ask six questions during the photo shoot, but real access, like Nat Hentoff writing about Bob Dylan in 1964, or I could name any number of other ones, you know, Whitney Balliett hanging out with Duke Ellington, or all kinds of things. Those things only exist now when people are in the very early ascent, you know, it's, it's not uncommon to see a good, independent profile in The New Yorker or other places, but usually on the ascent when they're coming up, which is, it means that you have to have some sort of cultural radar to figure out who that is. If you're Bad Bunny at this point.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  He needs a profile in The New Yorker. I'll spare you the metaphor. So what ends up happening is that you write from a distance, you write a critic's piece. Which is, you know, can be interesting too, but it's a very different form.

• 33:30Pablo Torre?

  The question, and I think I would have gone with Jeff Bezos needs a third trail boat or something like that. Just editing David Remnick as he talks. I think the question then becomes, what are we losing? Right? So let's admit that all of us, I assume all of us, have been interviewed at some point and probably regretted participation or the lack of control.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Every time I sit here.

• 33:53Pablo Torre?

  It might be happening right now, actually. But the question then becomes, what did we actually lose? And is there any going back? Right? Because the thing I think about when I read your writing or watch your films, such as anyone is allowed legally to watch your films anymore, is how great it is when someone who's not the subject observes the subject and gets to decide what's actually interesting. The subject is often not the best arbiter of what is interesting about them. And I feel like just that is such a remarkable loss.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Well, I was just gonna say, truth. I mean, they're also not a great arbiter.

• 34:35Speaker 04

  It's a human transaction. It's a, you're 100% right. This is also why we have fiction, by the way. We have fiction because fiction can explore depths of human experience and thought and doubt and internal mishegoss in a way that a profile, even with the best sort of access, has a hard time doing.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  We're talking about the decline in standards of journalism. We're talking about the commercialization of everything in journalism. But it's also, to me, like, it's a continual, it's like the death of cult, you're, I don't even, honestly, like, I don't even know what monoculture is. So like, you're talking about that. I'm like, but it feels like our-

• 35:15Speaker 04

  Pro football, that's it.

• 35:16Pablo Torre?

  Okay. Just the Super Bowl, basically.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  But like, it feels like culture. We're losing out on something where this sort of what is discussed, how it's discussed. I mean, this gets back and I'm not gonna, I do want to bathe in my nostalgia for a second about what the Washington Post sports section was for a minute because like there's a worldview. And I'm not like such a, now I'm turning into the sort of proverbial, I'm like, oh, my parents, but like, it's like Shirley Povich was a person who wrote about race in America and like actually educated people and took a stand about things when he saw something was wrong.

• 35:54Pablo Torre?

  Shirley Povich, the longtime editor of the Post for about a century, basically, and a writer, of course.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  I think he died when he was 114.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  I think he was Calvin Coolidge's caddy as a young man. And he was in, he was in a best American women, people, every year, Shirley told me that he was in best American women every year. And on the questionnaire, they'd write, has, has gender held you back in your chosen profession? He was right, no, it hasn't.

• 36:22Pablo Torre?

  So this is Shirley Povich, also the father of Maury Povich, friend of Pablo Torre finds out. And Shirley Povich.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  One of the great lions of sports journalism.

• 36:31Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  But there is a line that you quoted to me the other day about a piece he wrote.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  Bobby Mitchell integrated.

• 36:38Pablo Torre?

  The end zone.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  The end zone for the first time.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  About the notorious racist Washington Redskins of George Preston Marshall, who were the last people to integrate the National Football League. And, and what do you say? Bobby Mitchell integrated the end zone.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Integrated the end zone for the Washington Redskins for the first time. Shirley Povich was essentially the red smith of the, of the, of the Washington Post. And I covered some fights with him, you know, I was be 25 years old, sitting next to somebody who was well into his 80s at that point. And I was covering a Hagler fight. In Las Vegas, and how happy was I to be 26 and sitting at ringside, you know, I don't know what it was, Herne's Hagler, something spectacular, maybe it was Sugar Ray Leonard. And the way, in those days, you quote unquote, "wrote" a fight story was backwards. You would just do maybe one or two rounds, and then you would send your instantly-written

• 37:35Speaker 04

  stuff to the desk, and then they would assemble the piece in the right order. At the end, you'd write what's called a flash lead, and you would have written what's called "B-matter," you know, information that would be helpful at the bottom of the piece. So when the person gets the first edition, the next morning, they're seeing who won the fight, and at least a rough outline of it. And like an idiot, like an obnoxious comp lit major from an unspeakable university, I saw the readback from Washington, and I started bitching and moaning, and bitching and moaning. And Shirley Provich turned to me and he said, "You know, David, an editor is only a mouse training to be a rat." A line that reverberates in my, in my head to this day.

• 38:20Pablo Torre?

  Boxing, which was also the thing that, by the way, Almost Famous is another film that has journalistic aspects to it. And the most that I felt like Cameron Crowe in that movie was when I covered boxing for Sports Illustrated, when I was a reporter making, you know, no money. And I think about boxing now because we just talk about the transactionality of reporting. Boxers knew that access meant sales.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  I think they're the last ones that still do.

• 38:50Pablo Torre?

  Just that instinct.

• 38:51Speaker 04

  Well, Mike Tyson, for all his really complex, disturbed, you know, character, he knew that too. They all do, because they're on their own, they're lonely. And people that would, you know, come and hang out and watch them hit a bag for an hour and jump rope. Boxers even to this day seem to feel duty-bound to talk to reporters and be revealing of themselves.

• 39:21Pablo Torre?

  To be interesting.

• 39:22Speaker 04

  Not like Bull Durham. I mean, all sports writers know that scene in Bull Durham where the older minor-league player teaches the younger player how to say absolutely nothing in an interview.

• 39:31Speaker 09

  Write this down.

• 39:34Speaker 09

  We gotta play them one day at a time.

• 39:40Speaker 09

  It's pretty boring. Of course it's boring, that's the point, write it down.

• 39:46Speaker 04

  Which you see now, done to a fare thee well after every game. Whether it's about God, or, you know, that we were misunderstood and nobody believed in us, but here we are, all that stuff that people learn how to say. Yeah, it's like, it's a little collection of them.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Boxers don't talk about that kind of thing. They talk about their innermost souls.

• 40:08Pablo Torre?

  About the sex they had last night.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:10Pablo Torre?

  They'll talk about...

• 40:11Speaker 04

  Oh, you got lucky, I never heard that stuff.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  I mean, maybe, by the way, maybe I am like a dinosaur in the sense that I'm been, I am thinking about this because you're right, DC in the 80s was like an especially fertile, like, place and period. You had, you know, the Redskins were great, and John Thompson was there, and the Hoyas were a thing, and there was like, but the idea that you...

• 40:32Speaker 04

  Lefty Drizell.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Lefty Drizell. The idea that you had a collection of writers in Thomas Boswell, and Tony Kornheiser, and Michael Wilbon, and John Feinstein.

• 40:43Speaker 04

  And Sally Jenkins eventually, and Christine Brennan, and Gary Palmer.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Like, these are like very...

• 40:47Speaker 04

  David Aldridge came along.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, David Aldridge, it's like, very like, like, independent-minded people who also sort of expressed from whence they came, in like, what their opinions were about the world through the lens of this thing, and it was very educational.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  And the glue to this, and thank God he's still with us, is George Solomon, who was the editor, the sports editor, who was, you know, a magnet for really young, talented people to come work for him, and he drove them crazy, and he drove them hard, and for a period of time, paid them really modestly, and yet you learned a tremendous amount. There's not, there's not a sports writer that I know of who worked for George Solomon that doesn't absolutely love him. I don't think they'll objectify it. David Aldridge, who I know only slightly, and then obviously did basketball on TV, David Aldridge wrote a note the other day to George Solomon that was so full of love

• 41:48Speaker 04

  and appreciation and sadness about what's happened at The Post, that I, you know, I'm a 67-year-old guy, I was, tears in my eyes about this. I just think what's been committed...

• 42:02Speaker 04

  At the Washington Post is so unnecessary and so heedless and so disconnected. Again, I don't doubt that certain sections have to change and journalism has to take on technology and reach people in different, what do we now say, reach people where they are in all those cliches. God knows it's happened at The New Yorker. When I started at The New Yorker, we published 12 things a week and a cover and gag cartoons and that was it. And now it's, I don't know how many podcasts and video and online every single day. The Atlantic was a sleepy monthly magazine. Now it's something quite, quite different.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  But they, these places have found a way to succeed. I don't think it's impossible for the Washington Post to do so. I hope, I hope and pray that this experience of criticism is, I have to think that Bezos is hearing it. I hope it reaches him because his obituary will not just say that he invented Amazon. If he keeps it up, he'll be the guy that trashed the Washington Post and that's a misery.

• 43:20Speaker 10

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• 44:56Pablo Torre?

  So I'm reading this quote from Jeff Bezos, who finally spoke about everything that happened at your former newspaper, David. And he said, quote, "The Post has an essential journalistic mission and an extraordinary opportunity. Each and every day, our readers give us a roadmap to success. The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus."

• 45:13Speaker 04

  Well, the data would never have told you in the days when you couldn't really get the data in the way we can now, that high school sports was of value. Because it was only a small number of people who were reading about such and such a high school, but they were reading it ardently. If I were to just publish the things that I knew would do well in terms of clicks, we would be a very different magazine. Very, very different. I'm not stupid. I usually know what's going to, quote unquote, "do well."

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. So what I can tell you as a kid who grew up there... What also the Post did as far as covering local sports and covering high school sports and like every weekend you could pick up and you could see the box scores of all the football games of the basketball games and what it meant as a kid who was an athlete in trying to sort of like see your name in the paper and really be covered like it's sort of in the same way that they are covering Georgetown and University of Maryland and the Redskins and the Bullets. You actually felt a part of this community and you were striving to make all met in, you know, that the paper determined because they covered local sports. There's something that integrated all of us together in a way that, yeah, maybe I'm being [bleep] quaint and naive.

• 46:24Speaker 04

  No, you're not, you're not. I mean, look, there, all kinds of things are aimed at a newspaper's destruction. You know, first it was, what was the service that came along where you?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Craigslist.

• 46:39Speaker 04

  Craigslist came along and that killed classified advertising. Then Google and Facebook really made advertising and certainly display advertising near impossible because they scooped up just about the entire advertising business. So scraps were left. Now, that's near impossible for a local newspaper to handle. But the New York Times, which by the way is owned by a vastly less wealthy family than Bezos. Vast, the Sulzbergers have only one thing, they have the New York Times. But they're a newspaper family and they've learned how to make it work and they have certain advantages, there's no question, but they've made it work through subscribers by adding games and food and all those things that people make fun of, but it widens the

• 47:24Speaker 04

  aperture so that you've entered New York Times world and you're doing the crossword puzzle and you're reading about Donald Trump and you're reading, you know, opinion pages and then you're learning how to make, you know, cook a steak properly. That seems to me an institution that knows who it is, what it is, for all its faults and all the rest, and learned how to change so that it could survive. There was a time, not so long ago, that everybody figured, well, the Sulzbergers, they can't sustain the New York Times. Carlos Slim is going to buy it or Mike Bloomberg, who doesn't particularly like the New York Times, is going to buy it and all would be lost. They made it work because they put the effort into it and they were connected to this thing.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  I don't see any sense that they're connected. This guy Will Lewis seemed to not particularly even like the enterprise.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  It's just wrong. It's wrong.

• 48:19Pablo Torre?

  But all of this is to say that what I love about your films and your magazine is that when I start it, when I open it up, when I press play, I have no idea what the [bleep] I'm about to get. And so the question of data leading editorial judgment is an enemy of that surprise and that discretion and that taste and that judgment, which is human. And so the case of this episode is not like we need to, and I would love it if we could cap internet speeds and make it so that we can't, you know, make everything available in your pocket, both the casinos as well as the sum total of human knowledge,

• 49:01Pablo Torre?

  which has been bad for business and human mental development. What I am saying, though, is that there's an opportunity selfishly, economically, to make premium things. I'm not saying this is going to be everything. The question is, can you make some things worth paying for? And can you protect the people making it from the compromise that makes it like everything else?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  By the way, this might be not fair to ask you in a public forum, but

• 49:27Speaker 04

  It's all right.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  where does your ethical standard, sort of, you can be like, I went to see Melania because I'm a journalist.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Right? So at the same time as a journalist?

• 49:37Speaker 04

  I would have seen it anyway.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Fine. But where does, where does, like, do you get offended to a point where you go, well, Amazon then, who's owned by the person that just killed the Washington Post and is putting out this bull [bleep]?

• 49:49Speaker 04

  You mean, and then I order my books on Amazon?

• 49:51Speaker 01

  And then you order your books on Amazon. So we're all hypocrites.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  We all.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  But was there, is there a level to you might go like, I'm sorry, I just can't do this anymore? Like, they don't, they've lost credibility with me.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  Look, that's, you know, that's a question of life in about 6,000 different areas, but, you know, unless you're a Carmelite nun. Unless you live entirely apart from modernity and look, at the other, not recently, maybe a year or two ago, the magazine online did, asked a whole bunch of people what their favorite bookstores were. And I decided to be honest, because everybody's going, "Well, Three Lives is this wonderful little bookstore and the da-da-da-da." I live in the West Side. The best bookstore in the Upper West Side, the one that has a lot of stuff, is Barnes and Noble.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  And I remember back in the day when Barnes and Noble was, you know, it was like the Nora Ephron movie. It was the bad guy that was closing all these indies. Well, they're, the indies now are very rare. Some of them are, real estate prices are so high that they, they just can't carry much volume. And they're not all that good. I mean, I wish it were otherwise, but they're just not. So now Barnes and Noble, which used to be the Darth Vader of this, you know, little universe, certainly where I live, is terrific.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Wait, is that Barnes and Noble still there, like, near 72nd and Broadway? The one that's like right below that?

• 51:11Speaker 04

  Well, mine is at 82nd and Broadway, and it's-

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Oh, that's been there for, yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's been there a long time.

• 51:17Pablo Torre?

  I used to go into so many Barnes and Nobles and read the magazines and not pay for them.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  That's okay.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  And go to the bathroom and, you know.

• 51:23Speaker 04

  That's okay. It's cool. You know, it's like selling heroin on the, in the playground. Sooner or later, you're paying.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  And what happened?

• 51:29Pablo Torre?

  It worked, David. It worked on me.

• 51:31Speaker 04

  Boom, boom, boom, boom.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Barnes and Noble and the Virgin megastores.

• 51:35Pablo Torre?

  Oh, God. But you mentioned the Carmelite nuns, and I guess what-

• 51:40Speaker 04

  As, as one does.

• 51:41Pablo Torre?

  As one, as one, as one must.

• 51:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:45Pablo Torre?

  The thing that I, I love and respect, what, what, what face?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  No, it just makes me, this is the thing. He's absolutely right, but you know me, I have a problem with my own fucking principles.

• 51:54Speaker 04

  Purity.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and purity. At the same time, it's like, it's then the normalization of [BLEEP] that happens, where you then go, "Ah." The erosion of standards, that happens where you go, "I accept. I submit that all this [BLEEP] that gets put out, I can't not consume it, because that's what's there." And I'm like-

• 52:13Speaker 04

  No, and look, it is no excuse for terrible crimes to say, "Well, we're all fallen beings in this terrible world."

• 52:21Speaker 04

  There are limits.

• 52:22Pablo Torre?

  The thing that I love, though, about both of you guys and Carmelite nuns is that there are pangs of conscience.

• 52:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, but then you run the risk of self-celebration, which is itself a sin. So, nobody loves reporters more than reporters.

• 52:39Pablo Torre?

  No question.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  And that nobody has nostalgia for the press world more than people inside it. And so that's worth also being self-aware of.

• 52:51Pablo Torre?

  We've been spelunking our own navel for about an hour.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Well, no, but this get, no, but I do genuinely, as someone who avowedly is too pure, and it's a, it's a constant existential discussion for me. It's like, you have to evolve, evolve or die, like, you know? And so as I'm listening to David and as I'm sitting here, I want to actually ask him a question like, where it's, it's not as bad as I think. Where it's like, it's actually okay with what does exist now in terms of the proliferation of options, or the, there are more people who get to ply their craft because there isn't a monopoly and there are four people who, like, there is a network television and we get to see six shows.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  It's a bigger question. I mean, I think we're asking that about American life all the time. And I get this, I'm get, I'm sure you do too, in this, in this rut of conversation all the time about despair, and I can't look at the news, and is it going to be okay? As if some person who knows the news two seconds before a civilian has an answer to all this. I think it is fair to say that life is never fantastic. And human beings struggle with innovation and new technologies all the time.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  You know, we have on our staff a guy named Bill McKibben. Bill McKibben was right about one big thing earlier than anybody else. Bill McKibben brought to light the problem of climate change in the pages of New York at great length in the mid to late 80s. And yet, Bill McKibben refuses despair, which to me is the most useless emotion of all. And it's, I think, and I'm not a New Testament guy, but I think it's called the unforgivable sin. Bill McKibben is, what's he writing about now? Is about how the Chinese actually have climate change right. That the Chinese are building more solar panels than they know what to do with.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  So he has a measure of hope. And I think that's worth remembering, too. And it's also worth remembering that all of us at this table know that American life has been, in many ways, immensely worse. Immensely worse. So it's our job to investigate, complain, criticize, whine, all the rest. But I really do refuse the kind of despairing mode, because what good is that?

• 55:27Pablo Torre?

  I think that's a better slogan than "Democracy Dies in Darkness." I refuse the despairing mode, because what's the use in that?

• 55:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's fair. It doesn't really trip off the tongue in the way you'd want, though.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Down with despair.

• 55:41Speaker 04

  Down with despair. Perfect.

• 55:43Pablo Torre?

  Down with despair, colon, a podcast by Ezra Edelman.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  And that would be up with despair?

• 55:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think Ezra's mode on most days is going to be up with despair.

• 55:56Pablo Torre?

  Ezra Edelman, David Remnick, thank you for circle jerking. I don't know, whatever this was.

• 56:04Speaker 04

  Please, Pablo, some dignity. I don't have a job.

• 56:07Pablo Torre?

  Eustace Tilly.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Well, what I would say is two things.

• 56:09Pablo Torre?

  Browning at me.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Thank you, Pablo, even though I don't like you asking me to be on your show. But like, more importantly, thank you, David, because I actually, as someone who is incredibly busy and has [BLEEP] to do, that you would take the time to come here and do this.

• 56:20Speaker 04

  It was fun. It was great to see you again. Haven't seen each other in months.

• 56:23Pablo Torre?

  A pleasure.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Thanks, Pablo.

• 56:34Pablo Torre?

  Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tubinello. Our studio engineering is by RG Systems. Our sound design by Andrew Bersick and NGW Post. Digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern. And our theme song, as always, by John Bravo.

• 56:57Pablo Torre?

  We'll talk to you next time.

• 57:08Speaker 10

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 57:41Speaker 06

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