Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out "Who Is Going to Pull a Pablo Torre on Pablo Torre?" About this episode How did a firing at ESPN birth this show? Can you be anti-establishment within the establishment? And will the principles of journalism survive, when billionaire principals keep contaminating the newsroom? Dan Le Batard and Human Battery Chris Cote join Pablo for another navel-spelunking edition of Share & Tell. Plus: making Jay Bilas play the race card, a Nazi poker hand with Joan Rivers, the O'Reilly factor, Jared from Subway... and six billboards outside Akron, Ohio.
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• Previously on PTFO: Le Batard's Lost Trump Tapes, Revealed https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/OTUyZDcyMWMtODRkZC0xMWYwLWFjNDUtYWYzYjU5MDY5NmI5
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Transcript 7,496 words · 15 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, presented by eBay Live. I am Pablo Torre, and today you're going to find out what this sound is.
0:07 Speaker 01 Are you Jewish?
0:08 Pablo Torre? I am not. I am Jewish.
0:09 Speaker 01 Then shut up, then you don't know what you're talking about.
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1:56 Pablo Torre? I'm on the smart show. Oh, God.
1:59 Speaker 04 That crushes me.
2:02 Speaker 04 Crushes me.
2:04 Pablo Torre? How do you feel, Dan, hearing your producer, Chris Cody, say that phrase as a way of introducing?
2:10 Speaker 04 He doesn't have that kind of jubilance about working on the show that has built everything here. He's got a jubilance about his debut voyage on Pablo Torre Finds Out.
2:20 Pablo Torre? I'm smart.
2:20 Speaker 04 Look at how excited he is. I'm on the smart show.
2:26 Pablo Torre? What are we finding out today? It's good to see how happy Chris is to be investigating journalistically. The reason I wanted to do this is because we get questions here at Pablo Torre Finds Out, and one of the questions is from a, I want to just get her name correct, it's from a listener named Jordan Hudson. And in November, this is November 26, 2025, 11:56 a.m. Eastern, Jordan Hudson said, quote, "Who funds PTFO?", question mark. "Who is going to pull a Pablo Torre on Pablo Torre?", question mark.
3:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, if people do not know how all of this was birthed, Chris Cody, in some ways, is ground zero on everything it is that we're doing here. Him in his bed staring at his ceiling when ESPN, unbeknownst to me, had already told him they were letting him go. He's scared about his future. His father, mentor of mine, one of my best friends, comes in the room and says, "Well, Dan's not gonna let them fire you. Dan's not gonna let that happen." And that's him having more confidence in me than I had in me at that time.
3:36 Pablo Torre? I have Chris in a race car bed. Is that, the picture you're painting of like Greg Cody, longtime Miami Herald columnist, legend in South Florida, mentor of Dan Lebatard, coming into the room of his son, Chris, aforementioned. Chris is in pajamas? You're in PJs?
3:52 Speaker 04 Well, it wasn't a room in the house, although you can be forgiven for thinking that. He was in his own room and his father had called him, but I've known Chris since he had the equivalent of a race car bed. I'm gonna guess I've known Chris since he was six years old? Five years old?
4:07 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I have memories of you coming into my house and eating chips and salsa at a very young age.
4:12 Speaker 04 Oh, those Tostitos, those Tostitos were so good. Eileen always kept them stocked and I would just come over. Yeah, I've known Chris for, I've known Chris and his father for more than a quarter of a century.
4:22 Pablo Torre? And so for people who don't know the origin story of a company called Meadowlark Media, you may know that I have this partnership, we have this partnership with the New York Times and The Athletic, very fancy, The Gray Lady, all of that stuff. But if you just like joined the audience of PTFO, the alleged smart show, you should know the birth canal from which we emerged, to keep the metaphor of like parental.
4:47 Speaker 04 Painful, painful pregnancy, this, this was a painful labor.
4:51 Pablo Torre? You thought it was twins, it was just one giant self-absorbed noggin. I mean, Dan, the origin story of Meadowlark is the origin story not just of The Dan Lebatard Show, which I hope people have some sense of, but it's the exit of The Dan Lebatard Show from ESPN. Whatever we do here, in which we stir up [BLEEP] and investigate things, it has its roots in a show I fell in love with until the show abandoned me, as I remained at ESPN, actually, in 2020.
5:25 Speaker 04 Well, you say the show abandoned you, but what happened at ESPN is that the president of ESPN left in an extortion scandal, and I had not realized the amount of protection and cover he had been providing for us as an entity, because as soon as he left, things started happening to me professionally that had never happened before, where I had always had a very simple relationship with all my employers. I do my job well, you keep rewarding me for doing my job well. I get to hire and help my friends in order for all of us to do our job well. But as soon as John Skipper left ESPN and he came over and became the CEO of Meadowlark, helping us create the business of this and getting the DraftKings deal
6:08 Speaker 04 that is a pioneering deal in the industry, I realized that we were in trouble. And I did, the last straw on that for people who do not know, there were a number of things politically happening. I wasn't allowed to talk about the things that I wanted to. There was interference, there were issues, and then the last straw on that was during layoffs, one time they just come in and didn't even tell me they were letting go of my best friend's son, and nobody was even informing me until after it happened, and so. I rehired him at a dollar more than whatever it is that they were paying him. And I kept him on air and that's when the whole thing just blew up.
6:46 Pablo Torre? What was the job that Chris had when he was rehired, Chris?
6:49 Speaker 04 He was so bad at it. He was so bad at it. He was so bad at it. He was my assistant allegedly, but I couldn't get a hold of him.
6:58 Pablo Torre? Yeah, that was not my strength. That's I'm way better at my job now, believe it or not. The way to prove that ESPN made a mistake firing Chris was for Dan to put him in a job in which he was absolutely terrible.
7:10 Speaker 04 The thing about that, though, is that as a symbol or a hood ornament on what we're doing, I would say it ended up being a huge favor that ESPN did me because I never would have even imagined, never mind done, I never would have imagined doing any of what happened next, which is to create a safe space for the people I care about and the things I care about in a world that I now don't recognize and didn't see coming because it's so unsafe. I did not see any of this happening five years ago. When I say any of it, I mean this company, but I mean America too. I did not see any of this company and happening to the media.
7:54 Pablo Torre? Well, I think it's really important to point out that like, why do I feel protected and certainly funded, but also emboldened to take on figures that have a lot more money than all of us combined, multiple times over in billionaire owners and at times the actual US government and various celebrities, on and on and on, is because of the stuff that Dan actually was like kind of coercing Chris to do while you guys were at ESPN. Like that was the spirit was even inside of the company that was paying you, you would be willing to do things that made it uncomfortable for those people who were in charge.
8:37 Pablo Torre? And so the thing I think of is a video that is not even of Chris. It's of Chris dressed as a battery. I'd like to play that for everybody who's not seen this before.
8:49 Speaker 04 I've got a battery back there. It is a corporate sponsor. I want to, on air, take that battery down there myself and stand in the crowd behind First Take. Billy and Stugatz can handle whatever it is that we have to do there. I want to do that. Do I have permission to take, I want to put in the First Take shot, both me, I'm not asking, I'm, I'm asking your assessment.
9:10 Speaker 05 Dude, dude, is the, uh, authority given to me as eternal yes man to one Dan Lebatard. Knock yourself out, pal.
9:18 Speaker 04 All right, let's go, uh, Battery. We're going down there. Chris, uh, you help the Battery get down there.
9:24 Speaker 05 Battery, the Battery has entered the shot.
9:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:27 Speaker 05 Briefly, they have cut away, they have Derrick Henry on First Take right now. This is not terrestrial radio norms where you tell your audience to tune away. Supplementally, if you watch, there is a Battery and a Dan Lebatard at a bar.
9:42 Speaker 04 Jiggling.
9:42 Speaker 05 I believe ordering a drink in front of, uh, some, uh, bikini beachgoers that are sitting at the edge of the Cleveland pool. It's amazing, the visual. Oh, there was a producer trying to stop Dan Lebatard right now.
9:56 Speaker 04 Oh no, this is getting testy. Oh my god, Dan is in his face. Oh boy.
10:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, are you seeing this?
10:02 Speaker 04 All right, this is a better idea. Forget about a happy place, play by play of Dan and the security guard. This is great.
10:06 Speaker 05 This is awkward as all get out.
10:09 Speaker 04 All right, so me and Billy.
10:10 Pablo Torre? This is the absolute strangest I've ever seen.
10:14 Speaker 00 Oh god.
10:16 Pablo Torre? I remember that so vividly. Cannot, cannot underestimate how many bikini clad beachgoers, or whatever Mike Ryan said there, were actually at the edge of the pool right in front of Chris, also teetering on the edge of many things at that point in his life, it seems.
10:34 Speaker 04 The thing that I remember there, and Chris is doing the happy hands of the Battery now, is that there was a black screen in front of his face, and I could see out of the side of my eye, as I was yelling at the security guard, that he looked terrified inside of the costume, but there was no evidence of that because his hands kept moving happily the way a mascot does. So he stayed in character as a mascot, but he was indeed scared, correct?
11:02 Pablo Torre? Oh, I was very scared. What I remember most about that was in the stairwell before we walked down, I, Dan kinda just checked in with me of like, hey, we're going down here, but you're cool, like, you're good with this, right? And I hit him with like the bad boys, Dan, we ride together, we die together. Like, I legitimately said that verbatim. I'm like, I'm in this with you. Let's go.
11:19 Speaker 04 You know what I was actually pissed off about there? It's that First Take came down here and I'd been asking for years to have our staff be able to have some of the continental breakfast that they put out. And they told me it's $11 a day each person, Dan, if you want to do that. Then First Take comes down here and they just start eating all the muffins and they don't have to pay for anything. And so that's where it started. And then they wouldn't let us interact with their show. And so I just got pissed off and made a mess.
11:45 Pablo Torre? Yes, you made a mountain out of a muffin.
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12:40 Pablo Torre? I don't know what jumps out at you when you think back at all of the times you were asked, "Why are you guys harming us?" What jumps out as like the greatest hits of stuff you guys did that you knew would be interfering with the money? What was on that list?
12:57 Speaker 04 Uh, the one that I remember that was sort of the starting point on it, we hadn't been there very long. It was a funny one in retrospect, uh, because of everything I'm about to tell you, which is... During a quaint time when newspapers mattered, I was calling around during our show as content all over Cleveland, asking how much it would cost to buy a newspaper ad that said to LeBron as he headed back to Cleveland, "Hey, you're welcome from Miami." And we got stopped at every turn and were asked to pay like $100,000. And furthermore, they wouldn't take our money when we were asking about it.
13:37 Speaker 04 So, we decided to put up billboards at much less of a cost, which as the newspaper industry falls apart, it's funny to think about getting billboards a lot cheaper because newspapers wouldn't take our money. But we were talking about all this on air, and then ESPN suspended me because they said once we did it, we were gonna fly a banner over his homecoming and everything else. Once we did it, they said you didn't give us any notice. And I'm like, but I was talking about it for weeks on the show. They weren't listening to the show, which is how that happened. We came to get a babysitter after that because they, what I'd requested when I got there from Skipper, just leave us alone. They did. They didn't listen to the show. And so, we were getting away with things right up until we didn't.
14:22 Speaker 04 And in that case, we offended LeBron, his camp, and literally the money.
14:26 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I should clarify that you also offended the general state of Ohio as this newscast kind of illustrated.
14:35 Speaker 04 Not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six. That's right, six of these "You're welcome LeBron, love Miami" billboards, spread across Akron. They cost about 100 grand and they were put up by ESPN TV and radio host Dan Lebatard, who lives in Miami. Well, the four-letter network suspended him for two days because they say they had no idea what he was up to. They released a statement saying in part, "His recent stunt does not reflect ESPN's standards and brand. We were not made aware of his plans in advance." Lebatard sent a text to a reporter in response to the suspension, which reads, "I guess ESPN didn't find it at all quite as funny as I did."
15:22 Pablo Torre? Good times. What were those two days of suspension like? What did, what did you do with your free time? Do you remember?
15:28 Speaker 04 It was lovely. I remember it being lovely. They yanked the whole show off the air. I thought the rest of the people were gonna be able to do it, but they yanked all of us off. Those billboards did not cost a hundred grand. That's fake news. That guy got that wrong. You'd be stunned how cheap the billboards are in Akron. And, and the money that newspapers refused in Akron was about 10 times more than those billboards. But I remember getting the call, because I was on the beach. I was literally on Ocean Drive in a convertible as they're calling me. And they're saying, yeah, you're suspended. And I've just got a giant smile on my face. Because it's like, this is exactly how it is that I want all of this to go. I want to be anti-establishment from within the establishment.
16:10 Speaker 04 I want to rail against nonsense and see if we can be a playpen where people can just do absurd things.
16:17 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I gotta clarify. This was long before the movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It was Six Billboards Outside Akron, Ohio. And my favorite part, honestly, about all of this was the newscast, which proceeds to interview another familiar character.
16:32 Speaker 06 Dan did it all in jest, you know. To him, it was all good-natured fun. You know, it was never meant as any sort of harsh criticism of LeBron.
16:44 Pablo Torre? There's no news interview that that guy will not turn down. Greg Cody, Chris's dad, showing up like they interview the neighbor of the serial killer? To be like, did you have any sense? That he would be like-
16:54 Speaker 04 He was so somber. He was so serious. Dan meant it in jest. He meant no harm.
17:01 Pablo Torre? I need to keep on reaffirming to people that one big part of why your show was the way it was inside of ESPN was because you had a problematically fearless capacity to just get people mad at you.
17:15 Speaker 04 But Pablo, we weren't that dangerous. Like, it's such a silly sports playpen. The idea that somber interviews from Greg Cody about Dan just meant it and like, it's all nonsense.
17:28 Pablo Torre? We played those sounds for weeks.
17:30 Speaker 04 Look at what we're talking about here. So there's just, whatever we were doing wasn't that controversial. What got us gone at the end, when it became politics and stuff is more serious. But any trouble that we got into was always silly. It's me selling my Hall of Fame vote to Deadspin to make a point, but it's just nonsense. It's just noisy. My, my brother used to call me a provocateur and you've taken over the mantle from us. So people should understand Pablo Torre finds out represents the things in my career that I am proudest of having care taken by him. I realized coming in to do this today, I've been paid for this to do journalism since I was 17 years old. So I've literally
18:13 Speaker 04 been doing this for 40 years now. And, and your show represents, your show represents the modern evolution of all of my sensibilities because the smartest people at ESPN, like you, wandered over to what we were doing and were like, how's this allowed to exist over here?
18:32 Pablo Torre? It was always smart, but also stupid. You know, the founding of this show, part of the reason why we are, I think, organically grown out of you and funded by the empire you built was we want to make sure that we are also being laughed at as well as doing stuff that hopefully cuts through in a way that, that matters. Except in this case, to be, yeah, frank about it, like, instead of Jay Billis hanging up on you, because I think it was you asked, like, is, what would happen if Tyler Hansbrough was black? Right? Was that, was that why he got mad at you?
19:07 Speaker 04 He was, uh, he was the player of the year, but wasn't considered somebody who would be a high draft pick. And Michael Beasley was, uh, somebody who was considered better. And so I was just asking if any of the white biases made us look at Tyler Hans, Hansbrough as less than, I made the mistake of asking Billis this question though, hours before the national championship game. He was in maximum serious mode and I'm throwing him questions about race and why it is that the white player is, uh, viewed as less than than the black player. If someone with Tyler Hansbrough's resume were black, do you think people might say he's unathletic or he's not athletic enough?
19:49 Speaker 07 Dan, Dan, no offense, but this is stupid. I mean, I, you know, all due respect. I mean, if you guys want to talk about this, I'm, I'm here to talk about whatever you want outside of this.
19:57 Speaker 04 No, we don't, we don't have to talk about anything, but it's not stupid. And you can't start a sentence. Jay, you can't start a sentence with no offense and then say this is stupid.
20:05 Speaker 07 Okay, then take offense. It's stupid and I don't want to talk about it anymore. You want to talk about something else?
20:10 Speaker 04 No, thank you. Good talking to you.
20:11 Speaker 07 You too.
20:14 Pablo Torre? He even ended up doing bits for us.
20:15 Speaker 04 I know. Uh, they'll come around. Eventually you're going to be hosting a podcast with Jordan Hudson. I know you are.
20:22 Pablo Torre? Why did, I mean, the list of people who inspired like, do the thing, ask the question that you're interested in, that no one else may be when they are, uh, tuning into a sports show, but you're going to make it kind of nourishing. Who else is on that, on that Mount Rushmore, Dan? Cause I have some names that, uh, I, I, I recall. I'm like, is it Joan Rivers? Like who's the, who's the, who, who are the people that were just like, oh, they, they don't get the show and you kind of love that actually.
20:56 Speaker 04 Do you have the sound back there, Chris, of Joan Rivers hanging up on the show? I gotta find it. Premise of our show has always been some form of get them into the circus tent, however it is that you get them into the circus tent, and then at concession surprise them with some vegetables, with some nourishment, be able to go from dumb to smart, have some range, and occasionally make someone like Joan Rivers hang up on you.
21:21 Speaker 01 You know, guys, I'm gonna hang up now because I thought we were gonna have a nice talk, and I wanted to talk about my coming to Miami tomorrow, and if you think now I'm gonna defend that I called somebody Hitler, are you Jewish?
21:33 Speaker 04 I am not. I am.
21:34 Speaker 01 Then shut up, then you don't know what you're talking about. Do we get any clearer?
21:39 Speaker 04 No.
21:40 Speaker 01 Then shut up. You don't know what you're talking about.
21:44 Speaker 04 It's very strong, it's all I'm saying.
21:46 Speaker 01 Goodbye.
21:48 Speaker 04 Pablo, I was asking her follow-up questions because she had called the old poker player Doyle Brunson Hitler. Because she didn't like how something went in a poker game, and so I just said, "That's a bit strong." She hangs up. Goodbye.
22:10 Pablo Torre? But there is something to like the, okay, people you think would have a sense of humor about this absolutely do not, because they come to sports and they're like, "Ah, finally, I get to like have my version of fun." It's like Bill O'Reilly. Do you have the Bill O'Reilly? I'm sorry, I'm not just gonna throw names at Chris.
22:24 Speaker 04 Did Bill O'Reilly also hang up on us? I remember this.
22:27 Pablo Torre? I was unaware, but I see it now, it was in 2016.
22:30 Speaker 04 All right, let's hear that, then. Is there anything in your career that brings you shame, anything that you've done that you're embarrassed of?
22:37 Speaker 08 Nope, I think we've been an honest purveyor of the news, never had to retract a story, made mistakes, and we make them, we correct them, and it's because we're very careful and we're very honest.
22:49 Speaker 04 But what's the biggest one? What's the one that caused you the most unrest? Because it's not fun to go through those things.
22:54 Speaker 08 I'm not gonna get into any of that stuff, um, so if you guys have another question, I'm good, if not, we'll say goodbye.
23:01 Speaker 04 Wait a minute, what do you mean you're not gonna get into any of that stuff? I don't understand, like...
23:05 Speaker 08 We'll see you, guys. Thanks for making the time, I appreciate it.
23:09 Speaker 04 A guy who asks questions for a living. I realized in retrospect, I didn't realize the correct answer to that was, oh yeah, it's that controversy I had with the loofah. Am I pronouncing that word right?
23:20 Pablo Torre? Loofah.
23:21 Speaker 04 The loofah.
23:21 Pablo Torre? Loofah. That's right.
23:23 Speaker 04 Sorry, I put the T in there. Yeah, but he had a controversy involving a loofah.
23:26 Pablo Torre? Now, I'm very interested to find out more about that.
23:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
23:30 Pablo Torre? Yeah, there's, there's, I mean, this is 2004. There's a whole series of headlines. Yeah, you can Google that. It is funny that the first television, I tell this story on the show probably to everybody's boredom at this point, the first television I ever did, Dan, was the, was the O'Reilly Factor. I was at Sports Illustrated, it was the Beijing Olympics 2008. I had never done television before. I'm a fact checker who's way too eager, working late at night, and someone ducks their head in, the PR person, and says, hey, Bill O'Reilly wants to talk to somebody about Michael Phelps. And so I survived the Michael Phelps thing, only to realize, years later, that Michael Phelps also hung up on you guys.
24:07 Speaker 04 Do you go into the nightclub with these Kellogg's products and just drop them on the floor with your face on them?
24:12 Speaker 09 Uh, sorry, I think we have to head to the next one. But sorry, thank you very much for your time.
24:17 Speaker 04 All right, Michael, good talking to you.
24:22 Speaker 04 I didn't even get to ask what the...
24:24 Speaker 09 I didn't say it.
24:31 Speaker 09 Like, I was just, no. I was ridiculous.
24:37 Speaker 04 What did he call you with the...
24:41 Speaker 04 He didn't realize he hadn't properly hung up the phone.
24:44 Pablo Torre? That guy's ridiculous. You Robert Durst-ed Michael Phelps. You, you, the jinxed him. He went and had the live mic because he thought he was gone.
24:53 Speaker 04 That's right, that guy was a joke. I can't believe, we did not actually, just so the audience knows here, Pablo, we didn't talk about going through a litany of the people who hung up on us before this show. We just ended, we just ended up there organically as we talked this through.
25:11 Pablo Torre? Chris is huddling over his keyboard, just searching through the vault that you negotiated for. Dude, I'm telling you, you type up, you type, you type in the word, the phrase "hang up" into our search, it just goes for days.
25:25 Speaker 06 Dick Vitale hung up on us?
25:27 Pablo Torre? What?
25:27 Speaker 04 Did he?
25:28 Pablo Torre? Wait, you got Dickie V, the happiest, the happiest man in sports broadcasting? You made an enemy of?
25:34 Speaker 04 Let's see.
25:35 Speaker 09 How am I gonna waste my time, Dan?
25:40 Pablo Torre? No context?
25:41 Speaker 04 Well, no, I think the context was if I remember that correctly,
25:47 Speaker 04 he was saying that no college coach would cheat. That no col- that no college basketball coach would cheat under any circumstance. I don't remember whether he was talking about Patino or Calipari, it was one of them. And that's what happened at the end where we're like, come on, what do you mean?
26:02 Speaker 09 How am I gonna waste my time, Dan?
26:05 Pablo Torre? Oh, love a landline hangup. Miss those.
26:07 Speaker 04 I do miss those.
26:09 Pablo Torre? But Dan, but that, but like, I think for people who don't remember your sort of like worldview as a columnist, you would be the guy, as Chris looks for the next person to get mad at you, you would be the guy who was saying the thing that people found rude about like, this is what's actually happening in sports. There are people who cheat, there are scandals, there are ridiculous characters who are lying to you. And you wanted to laugh at those people when it felt very rude to even acknowledge that they existed. Like, that was your whole thing as a writer.
26:42 Speaker 04 Well, you say I wanted to laugh at those people, I'd shorten that sentence. I just wanted to laugh. The origin story on my career change is that I get to my early 30s, I'm writing about things. Writing is lonely. I get to PTI, I love the standard that they have in the back rooms where it's Wilbon and Kornheiser yelling at each other, laughing. I wanted something communal, and so I just wanted laughter. I didn't want to laugh at people. I don't, like, some of this stuff that we're doing here makes us sound like a, you know, a morning zoo hijinks show. We really were just challenging standards on why don't you guys all laugh more?
27:20 Pablo Torre? There was an interview you guys did with Ryan Howard. Ryan Howard from the Phillies, great slugging first baseman, who had a special co-star for that appearance, who you may recognize as a certain...
27:38 Pablo Torre? Jared from Subway.
27:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, this was hijinks though.
27:41 Speaker 10 You know, I got a guy named Mr. Ryan Howard over here who I think just won a, helped to win a World Series for the Philadelphia Phillies.
27:48 Speaker 04 He's a world bleeping champion, Stugott, who hits a whole lot of home runs, 55. Ryan Howard with us on 790 The Ticket. What you got, Ryan Howard? You're a world bleeping champion!
27:59 Pablo Torre? What's going on, gentlemen? How we doing?
28:07 Speaker 04 And that was the end of the interview. We never actually talked to him. We just went to commercial, but the-
28:11 Pablo Torre? And that's why guest bookers hate Dan.
28:13 Speaker 04 The performance art in that, though, Pablo, we were making fun of the fact that all these athletes are available for seven minutes and all of them are selling something. They're all there, they're not there to actually engage with you, give you anything interesting. They're there to get their percentage of Subway money.
28:27 Pablo Torre? But this actually gets to like the thing that I have been also fighting as I do things on Pablo Torre Finds Out, like tape underneath Adam Silver's chair at the Sloan Conference, the whistleblower complaint that had remained confidential until we published it, you know, that had information about the Clippers' cap circumvention scheme as alleged by two government whistleblowers from inside the company. Like, that thing of you say you're doing journalism, but now you're doing a parody of yourself. I think, Dan, the thing that I am always trying to navigate is the danger of you are satirizing something, or you're drawing attention to something and using techniques that seem
29:09 Pablo Torre? to betray your alleged goal here of doing something that feels different and nourishing by being a troll. And I have made some form of peace with that because people don't pay attention unless you grab their attention, right? You need to do things that are challenging and dangerous with people such that they can't- Escape it. They need to actually have it right there in proximity to the characters you're trying to hold to account.
29:37 Speaker 04 While art is too highfalutin, although I do believe that what you're doing presently does classify as modern art within our silly sphere, performance art is in the eye of the beholder. And in this particular case, you've got Ryan Howard on. You're a sports show. Ryan Howard has just led the league in home runs. He's your big guest. You've been promising him all show. And you've just spent 10 minutes talking to Jared from Subway about the footlong and ham and just nonsense. And finally, we get to a question to Ryan Howard and he never gets to answer it.
30:14 Pablo Torre? Right. The question of like, what does it mean to be different from what everyone else is doing? And why is that race one that no one else seems to want to run? It comes at the cost of guest bookers don't want to send the celebrities to Dan anymore because he's going to [BLEEP] with them. In my case, yeah, I will say that booking guests for my show has become a bit of a of a dance of like us trying to explain, we don't just try to do the thing of investigating everybody. Some people we just want to have a we want to hang with because we respect and like their work and think they're fun and they get the show that we're doing.
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31:38 Pablo Torre? For people who don't remember how my show was born, truly, like, Dan, you came to me and you were like, "We're doing this thing here at Metal Arc. We want you to do something. What do you want to do?" And the first episode, of course, that I decided to do, we put Dan in the chair of discomfort. Because you, I mean, genuinely, Dan did not know that what we were doing with episode one of PTFO was reliving the entire history of his phone conversations on his show with literally Donald Trump.
32:12 Speaker 04 Can you fire my co-host on your way out the door, Stu Gatz? I know everyone requests this of you everywhere you go. Just fire Stu Gatz. Tell him he's fired.
32:19 Speaker 12 Well, Stu Gatz, you are absolutely fired. You don't have it. There's no question about it. As a team, you're phenomenal, but individually, you're fired.
32:28 Pablo Torre? So you are just actually physically trying to become like smaller and you're trying to shrink inside of yourself?
32:36 Speaker 04 It's hackery of the highest order. Like, I'm just, "Hey, real estate television monkey, do your television real estate monkey phrase."
32:47 Pablo Torre? That's why we started the show the way that we did, was to invert the premise upon the person who had pioneered the premise. In this case, it was the guy, to answer Jordan Hudson's question, the guy funding us. We were doing this even to him.
33:03 Speaker 04 In retrospect, right, I'm embarrassed by a great many things that happened there. Your first show embarrassed me more, and as a symbol, you're very purposeful about what you choose when you choose it. You take years, in some cases, to investigate certain things, and so you show the full range of what it is that I've tried to spend 40 years doing, and symbolically, you made the choice to open your show. With embarrassing the guy who was funding it, which also honors me because I've spent my career in some ways challenging the people above me to try and do things differently.
33:48 Speaker 04 So I don't remember, I mean, I remember how I reacted on air, which was with some embarrassment, but I don't think I said to you anything afterward, other than, you know, good show.
33:59 Pablo Torre? Well, that's, I mean, Chris, this is the key part of, of, of Dan, right? As a boss is that because the show and for better and for worse, and because I, I now resemble this, this benefit and this cost, because the show is the most important thing. And because it is only fair to have done all the things we've played for the audience here today, it is only fair for that guy to also be subjected to it. There were zero edits, concerns, objections, censoring of anything. And we didn't ask for it and it was not insisted upon us, which is how I knew from literally the first show that we're going to get to do some things because this guy's going to let us do this to him that no other show is going to be able to get away with.
34:43 Pablo Torre? Because the people funding them.
34:45 Speaker 13 He's the only boss that I could ever call fat. Sorry.
34:51 Speaker 04 I just wish the chemistry had been better with Pablo there and you hadn't interrupted him. It would have been fine as a joke if you delivered it with some chemistry.
34:59 Pablo Torre? There was a pause. There was a slight pause by him.
35:01 Speaker 04 You tried to get in there twice.
35:02 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I had such a good show.
35:06 Speaker 04 Really? That's your self-assessment, is it?
35:08 Pablo Torre? Up until now, I was cooking.
35:14 Speaker 04 The reason that we started down this particular memory lane, because I did not know we were going to end up in any of this, uh, muck and nostalgia. The reason ostensibly that we got together to do this is because I don't believe neither you nor I have done a very good job of explaining to the public what Metal Lark is doing and aspiring to, or to even Chris necessarily, what Metal Lark is trying to do. I don't know if I asked Chris Cody, why are we here both today? Not just to do this, why are we here to do this? Why are we here? Metal Lark. Why are we here? Meaning of life.
35:57 Speaker 04 To do work that helps people I care about be most themselves? Like, meaning of life stuff? Why do you work? For 40 years, I have worked to get to the kind of freedom that allows these people to be themselves in a safe space that, less than ever in media it seems, allows them to feel safe.
36:20 Pablo Torre? I feel super safe. I mean, you said it, Dan. I mean, this has been, like, I can call you fat, but I also feel extremely safe in your bosom. And it's just like, you can't do that a lot of places. There's a lot of range there, and that's why I love you.
36:34 Speaker 04 I feel like Floyd Smernich holding his stepson to his chest at the beginning of DTF St. Louis.
36:41 Pablo Torre? I'm honestly rattled after I just cut off Pablo a few years ago, so I just didn't want to talk anymore. I didn't really like you going to me there, if I'm being honest. Made a mountain range that is Dan's breasts out of a muffin. Yes, we're continuing. Oh, really? Me?
36:55 Speaker 06 Hunter, penalty, two minutes, four, leaking confidence.
36:58 Pablo Torre? All right.
37:07 Pablo Torre? The thing I do want to say for people who don't understand how it is we get away with this stuff, which has legal jeopardy potentially and has, like, financial costs, is because, Dan, you have, and this is the sincerity of it, you have protected the journalism. At a time when other people funding things, they have legitimately actively run from it because it has costs. So when I say that, like, the premise, and this is where it comes, I think, around full circle, the whole glory of ESPN was that there was a wall between journalism and business at its best, right? That was what I enjoyed.
37:51 Pablo Torre? In ways that I am so grateful for at the version of ESPN that we worked for, right, when I was there full time. It's what you enjoyed when despite the fact that you do all these things up until the very end, they still were like, you know what, we get the value of having somebody who will be beholden not to our business compromise, but to something like his own personal perspective and principle. Like, that is so important for any media company to have. And so here at Metalark, when I do stories that are investigating and in fact jeopardizing potentially, if I don't do them the right way, business relationships, right?
38:32 Pablo Torre? I do episodes that interrogate and investigate gambling scandals, prediction markets, the government, all of these hot button issues. There is a wall that you have constructed with your body between the business and the journalism. Genuinely, the question I have as I look across the landscape is who else gets to be protected by that? And there aren't many places left, except for places that are independently trying to carve it out as a matter of pride of this is why we do what we do.
39:07 Speaker 04 Free is expensive and the way you use the word principle, we have seen principles, L E, contaminated by principle, P A L, because the newsroom is now being run by billionaires who don't care about the need for separation between the editorial board and the sales team. And all of that stuff has been contaminated and all of this stuff that we're presently doing is not merely expensive. When you talk about the cost of journalism, journalism is no longer a good business.
39:47 Speaker 04 The way that we're presently doing it allows us to make it a good business because of all of the things that are in play that allow us to have the number of employees that we have and we have DraftKings supporting something on the front end because we're using their sales staff to sell what it is that we do and allow us to be fundamentally independent. And there'll be any number of people who say, get off your high horse here. You work for a gambling company. All of the money that anyone takes is polluted, but DraftKings
40:24 Speaker 04 allows us to be 100% independent, not 99% independent. We have no partnerships that compromise us. It is at the front of everything it is that I have chosen here and has been chosen for me because as I said, without taking too much credit for being a visionary, ESPN forced me into this position. I would have never done it if they hadn't pushed us out the door. It's not anything that I was thinking of there.
40:54 Pablo Torre? So as I reflect, you know, pridefully on the ways in which my journalism remains uncompromised, Chris Cody is shooting finger guns as the guy who was actually the precipitating event.
41:07 Speaker 13 A lot of blame pointed at me. Not today.
41:10 Speaker 04 Like, I feel like I wanted to hear you weave the tapestry of what it is that you do because I don't think Chris knows. Like, if I ask Chris, what is Metal Lark doing? The difference between how Chris would explain that and how you would explain that would also explain why he isn't usually invited on the smart show.
41:29 Pablo Torre? Let's go out on this, Chris. How would you summarize Pablo Torre finds out in your understanding as my colleague and financial backer in some sense?
41:40 Speaker 13 Just finding a bunch of shit out, man.
41:42 Speaker 04 He's an investor. He's a stockholder and he's an investor in the company. Not in some ways. He is. He has equity in the company. Like, Chris Cody, Chris Cody is technically kind of your boss. Not just the reason for you being over here, but kind of your boss.
42:01 Speaker 13 Hey, Pablo, hey, hey, you're doing great. Keep it up.
42:09 Pablo Torre? I feel like I can't really improve on that, so. Let's probably just end it there.
42:23 Pablo 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 Tumanello. Our studio engineering is by RG Systems. Our sound design by Andrew Burstik at NGW Post. Digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern. And our theme song, as always, by John Bravo.
42:46 Pablo Torre? We'll talk to you next time.
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