Radio Better Offline: Pablo Torre and David Roth

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
A media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Every morning I wake up to one hundred punishments, each
worse than the last. Also that I can bring you
the greatest podcast of all time. I am at Zeitron
and this is Better Offline. Now that we've got that

(00:26):
out of the way, We've got many new items in
the Better Offline merchantore go and buy them. There's a
zip hoodie, which I fucking love, and a word mark
shirt and a T shirt, and there's a hat it's lovely.
You can also get infant clothings and I think like
if you put that on a baby, though, they will
take the baby from you anyway. So today I'm joined
by the incredible Pablo Toure of Paplatory Finds Out and

(00:47):
David Roth of defecta co owner of Defector and a turtle.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
I believe, Yes I do. I am the co owner
of a turtle.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
What's the turtle's name.

Speaker 3 (00:55):
Turtle's name is Marvin, Marvin uh and he is what
a pair of turtles? But Marvin is the surviving turtle. Oh,
oh yeah, it's fine.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
They had he had.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
The other guy had a good long life. George had
a good long life, okay, And something you don't learn
when a man sells you a turtle out of a
bucket of dry wall on Canal Street is.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
Oh, you got a Giinatown turtle.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
Yeah, I got a Chinatown turtle on an impulse twenty
four years ago.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Oh wow, so you've had them a while.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Yeah, they live.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
Forever, like the people that the vets that treat them
are also the vets that treat birds. And the lady
that when I took Marvin to the vet because he'd
been eating parts of the tank, I was told this
was normal, that they happen. Whatever is around goes in
and then it stays there until such time as he
starts acting alarmingly enough that you take him to the vet.

(01:44):
She also treats birds, and she was like, yeah, this
is a This is a thing with your pets that
are basically dinosaurs. Is that if left to their own devices,
they will live for as long as their owners. Yeah, yeah,
which is cool to think about for the rest of
my life.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
I got this little pet.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
I mean he.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Doesn't like me, Like, that's pretty they do they show affection? No,
I mean no, like it would be hard to tell.
Like if I pick him up and like, you know,
give him some pets on his sh.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
You appreciate your Bernie Sanders. I do communicate with him
in a series of accents. Yeah. He responds well to Bernie.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Once again asking that you eat this piece of ridicuo
like your tank. Yeah, he well, they I guess that
is how he responds to it is by eating the
piece of ridicio that I've lowered into his tank. He
loves chickeries. What's chickery any kind of chickeries? You know
your cabbages, Castel Franco. I know Pablem's not talking about this.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
I'm mostly here to throw Bernie Xander's cues and cabbage reference. Yeah,
thank you and forth with Rod.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
And that's what we're talking about today. So both of
you guys are some of the most gifted sports broadcasters
and writers I've ever met. Not blowing smoke, I don't give,
but I think both of you have also done something
really incredible with like the format in the sense that
it's not like it's about sports insomuch as sports is
part of the world and culture itself. Even in Pablo,

(03:07):
you're like Jordan Hudson thing and the Bill Belichick stuff
that was fascinating to me. Despite honestly wanting to know
less about Bill Belichick, who is the former and the
many non sports I.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Love the disclosures here.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yeah, yeah, the many non sports listeners say a sports episode,
how dare you? Oh my god, do you want to
hear me fucking talk about Kevin Russ again? Or do
it in like one day? I'll probably do it on
this podcast.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
You're already doing I'm.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Already doing it though, but it's fascinating because it's.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
The underline that I could give you ninety minutes on
the turtle. We already know that that's true, so that
threat will hang over the rest of this podcast.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Oh, I'm getting emails asking about more fucking telltle stuff.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
I don't have turtles.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
Wait?

Speaker 1 (03:44):
I didn't even ask, have you?

Speaker 2 (03:46):
So talking of it ended poorly, small, old wretched things.
Bill Belichick is the coach now of unc University of
North Carolina football coach, and he was the coach of
the New England Patriots. And he has a go friend
who is twenty four years old. So it's not really
about the sports. It's about that there's just this random
woman who has ingratiated herself into dunkin Donuts commercials and

(04:07):
the like, and you kind of broke that story open
in a very interesting way where it wasn't like just
you on your own talking. You had to forget who
else you.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Had on Katie l and Michael cruz Kan as my accomplices. Yeah,
in this journalistic act of alleged malpractice.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Oh and now practice. According to Bill Simmons, who will explain.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
The bills, the bills in general aren't aren't necessarily cottoning.
Most of your upper New England bills have had some
issues with.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
It, your William problems. Yeah, And it's it's funny because
the way you tell that story is not that you
get a lot of people who do they talking to
the camera stuff, But it feels that you kind of
regale people with the tails and the journalism while also
doing quite firm, well researched stuff as well.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah. I was inspired by one of the things that
has baffled me the most on YouTube, which is the
unboxing video. Because the Unboxing video. Once I learned that
there's this kid, I assume your audience is very familiar
with Ryan's toys.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
I'm not so.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
I weirdly am familiar with Ryan's toys and I don't
I don't have children, and my niece and nephew do
not watch that ship and yet.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
My child does not watch YouTube ever.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
But this is just it's a kid, and in the channel,
I believe, I believe we've watched Ryan, the eponymous Ryan
Truly age in real time, thirty one years old, and
he's been making like NBA Max contract money. Beyond that,
well beyond that. Now I'm in the second and he
just yes, but but, but but toys. Ryan's toys. His

(05:34):
parents bring him toys that he then opens up and
plays with, and the audience is in the tens of millions.
He is an market type on YouTube. He's a he's
a genre on too himself that has inspired so many imitators,
all of which spoke something fascinating because you're watching again
take the if you can put the pedophilia aside for okay,

(05:55):
and you're just watching a kid open toys. The questions
like that. That's not legally speaking, Roth, You know what
I do and know what I have to do legally speaking.
I had a talk with you before we walked up.
You said you wouldn't call me out on my on
my disclosure.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
I just think you were serious. I thought you were bluffing.
I thought it was a power thing.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
Listen, circum if you just take this as a why
is this so popular? Question? Right, there is something fascinating
about it. You are watching, you are vicariously living through
someone else authentically be surprised and delighted by something inside
of a box. And this format has been imitated, copied,

(06:35):
spread throughout YouTube. And so the whole idea of what
if I could authentically surprise and delight a friend of mine,
not with a I don't even know if a power
ranger is is a reference.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
But something you found right?

Speaker 1 (06:47):
But but journalism actually right? What if the toy is
journalism that they can then open up and play with
and poke at and ask me questions about what if
I did that? What if I could just sort of
channel the thing that the sun god, that is the algorithm,
seems to enjoy about the unboxing video? What if I
could do that for journalism?

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Right?

Speaker 1 (07:07):
And so I did exhaustive, insanely exhaustive reporting into the
Bill Balichick Jordan Hudson question, which is also a story
about the highest paid employee in the state North Carolina
public employee, who is also the archetype of a certain
privacy discretion. Do your jobness sun Zoo cosplay now being
sort of the opposite inverted by this woman who is

(07:29):
now running his life beyond just the age gap stuff.
What if I could do that for Katie Nolan, Michael
cruz Gane and surprise and delight them with what I
had investigated, right, And so that's kind of my solution
to trying to make YouTube.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
Content and also kind of like a kind of radio
show host as well. It's you've got like quite an
interesting setup as well.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yeah, man, we try to do. Look, the show is
audio first, insofar as when I edit this show, I
am only.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
Listening to you're editing it on your own.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
We have a staff of a half dozen few people
who are on the editorial side.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
But me, I always I imagine you're right. Just I
was gonna say if you did that earlier on that
sounds not connecting.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
Even Sobird just like five different credits to the name iPhones,
shocking everything on iPhones. I am doing a past an
editorial pass which I am making cuts and all that
stuff restructuring. But I'm only listening because I want someone
who's only listening to not have the question of like,
and it feels like they thought about a second, right,
But also we are a three camera setup in our

(08:30):
studio such that we are YouTube show, so that nobody
watching on YouTube things they thought about a second, and
so we are kind of torturing ourselves to be a
fully fledged product. And already you can sense the sort
of like the discomfort viscally of being a journalist who
is making a product that I've analogized to a YouTube
channel that is definitely not for pedophiles. We've established that

(08:52):
you not say this more clearly, but but trying to
be where people are with the knowledge that they probably
won't switch platforms, They'll probably just gonna live wherever we
find them, and we just gotta we just got to
give them, hopefully something that they can spend some time.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
And you're fully independent or are you backed by some
like the is.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Dan Lebttard a corporate monolith?

Speaker 3 (09:15):
I don't know who that is. I love that technically
is a private equity entity.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
That's how you say that.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
Do you know about the metals actually really interesting?

Speaker 2 (09:23):
No, I don't. But also I thought he was about
todd Well like like the French.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
Like the Boston the French bread.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yes, the French Boston.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
Dan Dan Dan la Bastard is my corporate partner.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
That's a real disappointment.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
A Cuban guy with a French name who looks white.
All of this is very in a country only.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
But beautiful.

Speaker 3 (09:44):
You should like, I would love problem. Maybe too modest
to do it. Mental ark is an interesting experiment. You
should talk about it.

Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yeah. So basically, Dan Lebutard left ESPN took his RSS
feed with him, which is the key to starting a
new business and microwaving of business is have your auto faith,
have your feed right. And so what he did was
he partnered with John Skipper, whos before president of ESPN,
and they did not want to hire any ad salespeople,
and so their licensing partner wound up being draft Kings

(10:13):
and DraftKings you may know from every ad you've ever
seen during a sporting event and otherwise. The point being
that Dan, who wanted freedom, wanted editorial non interference whenever possible,
found an arrangement in which, yes, the company got to
choose its own editorial docket got backed by this company

(10:37):
in which, by the way, I don't know if you
pay attention to sports or better, I have not, but
they have the money now.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yeah, it's it's kind of getting in bed with one devil, I.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
Guess, and and for legal reasons as well, I will
not comment. Yeah yeah, yeah, but but but the short
answer to where I am is that they funded Metal Lark,
decided we want to start a new show from scratch.
We want to trust this guy that we are friends
with and and know and hopefully trusted, and uh, I

(11:10):
got to create a show from scratch in now the
vision that you have seen or heard. But where I
am now, to speed run through my trajectory briefly, is
that uh, Parbatory finds out is no longer in the
licensing deal with DraftKings. We are now independent with Metal
Lark as our co owner, but looking for a partner. Okay,

(11:31):
And so if you're listening out there and you have
a maybe open a yeah, they're definitely very good. They're good.

Speaker 4 (11:40):
They got now but we we we we.

Speaker 1 (11:43):
Just met with Palenteer. That's great. They really understand your audience.
You should know the social.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
Everything about your audience.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
The w WE is not presenting us actually, and Dreill,
what is interesting to me about this as somebody who
also works in independent media. We'll talk about in a moment,
I guess.

Speaker 3 (12:02):
The way that you spent the money that you got
from the corporate partner was like, obviously, the show looks good,
it looks pro it sounds good, like there are talented
people working on it. I've friends Jeb Lund did it
was a guy that I do another podcast with Hallmark Movies,
not out sports or yes, but like a subscribe yeah,
but did a feature with you guys, and was like,

(12:25):
I'm not I wouldn't say I was jealous exactly, but
I was very impressed with the report repertorial apparatus behind
all of this, and it's like it is it seemed
more like working with sixty minutes than it would be
like doing a story for Defector.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
You're so much better at matching my show.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
I don't know, man, it seemed.

Speaker 3 (12:43):
But what I mean by this was that basically, like
there were producers, there are people that were like, I'll
file that foya for you.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
I will do Like we are trying to be an
actual news magazine, an era in which news magazines are
either compromised in various ways or does dead. Now we're
just kind of giving up on doing that, right So, Jeb,
by the way, who I cannot truss is enough co
host pod with David Roths about Hallmarks.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
Okay, you can joke about this, but every single during CES,
we did like thirteen and a half hours of audio,
you know, not even an exaggeration, every single episode, and
I did three thirty minute breaks so sections even at
the end it was like David will podcast you, and
every time like joyously, Yeah, okay, so this is great.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
I don't like promoting my shit, and it also felt
weird because I was not holding myself out as an expert,
but the idea of you know, I'm going off like
you shouldn't be AI in vacuum cleaners.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
Bitch, you know, and just trying to do say that,
trying to be big energy on it, and then at
the end feeling like and if you like that, you're
gonna love me, Like breaking down the worst performances of
Candice Cameron's career every two months.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
A guy who kind of looks like Chad Michael Murray
or Chat Michael Murray.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
Sometimes you do get Chad Michael Murray. But yes it
is like a uh, we're off, we're firefield.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
Yeah I don't, but but what you said just to
catch you ple up was we had Jeb blood And
as a correspondent looking into his almae matter, which happened
to be the college in Florida that Ron DEA. Sanders
had taken over, oh and hed College, the New College
of Florida, and he had taken it over, it turns
out by basically bombing it with baseball players. So they
turned over the student body, repoliticizing it, replacing, you may

(14:18):
even say, great replacement, burying them the students, this deep
and proud history of like, of liberal arts, of like,
of like hippie dumb even replaced by baseball player recruits,
so that they could then change the demographics of the
institution as well as refocus everything in the model of various.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Even if they tried to put any of this fucking
effort into literally anything else.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
It's all pranks. Basically, if Christopher Ruffo, who shows up
in that episode, what if he tried to do other things? Yeah,
what if he tried What if he tried jumping out
of a helicopter? Yeah, I don't know if that's not Yeah, sure,
that's nice of you to say that, certainly, No, no, no, just.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
We are just riffing. Yeah, you don't not having fun.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
He could do anything. Maybe he flies, we don't know.

Speaker 3 (15:06):
But the bit that I wanted to underline with that, though,
is that, like that sort of journalism is hard and expensive,
but it is also it doesn't have to come out
the other end as like morally safer sitting in a
chair talking to a whistleblower.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:20):
Like the bit that I have enjoyed the most about
the certainly the bit about like Jordan Hudson is good
for this. I mean, it's good on its own, but
like so much of when we talk about journalism, we
talk about, you know, the dangerous state that it's in,
and you know all of that is is true, it's
also fun, like it is a cool thing to do

(15:43):
with your time.

Speaker 5 (15:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
And the bit that I think you captured in that.

Speaker 3 (15:46):
Which is sort of like at the core of what
makes like a good podcast good, is that, like, when
you're reporting a story, there's this like sort of like
Flowers for Maaldron one bit where like, for ninety minutes
after you file the story, you are an expert on
a thing that you just did all this reading and
all this reporting on it. And then if you're like me,

(16:06):
slowly the curtain drops and then when it goes back up,
it's just like a nineteen eighty nine Dave Maggot and
Baseball card at an empty stage. All of that goes away.
But when you know your shit and you're like telling
people crazy stuff that they don't know and they're responding
to it, like, first of all, you feel more interesting
than you actually are, but also, like I've been on
both sides of it, it is fun.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
You also learn more about the material as you get
someone to bounce off of. But I think.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
That that part, like I thank you for again pitching
the show better than I could, because the premise I'm
angling for a job. I mean, well, listen, mister, are
you kill one more turtle? Something on your heads?

Speaker 2 (16:45):
To me?

Speaker 1 (16:46):
The idea here is that this stuff doesn't need to
just be you know, and you ought to proposition. It's
like you want to actually hang out while we're doing journalism, right,
And that part of like it is stupid but smart.
It is highbrow butt lowbrow. It is fundamentally silly and

(17:06):
also nutritious in some meaningful way. That's why I love
and I'm not yet tired by my job.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
And I'm the same way with better offline because I
don't bother to worry so much about whether I'm perfect.
As many people email me, thank.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
You, please have people reminding you, thank you.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
Oh, there's a slight echo in the room. There's a
slight echo in my heart.

Speaker 6 (17:27):
Now, great note.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
But it's you get to talk about this stuff that's
very serious. But when you read objective quote unquote journalist,
it's just this dry, fucking pallid list of stuff with
some degree of context, versus the very human reaction you
can have to the news of the day, even if
it isn't a conclusive thing, even if it's just open
aye did this, or the very strange things that constantly

(17:52):
happen with the Bill Belichick thing like Jordan Hudson getting
banned from you and see like these moments, these moments
are fascinating to discuss and lost in regular journalism. I
find they just they go, well, this happened. Shit. Well.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
I also think that so much of our magnetic field
in journalism is the sun god of the algorithm that
I was describing before, and for me, I think, you know,
Dave magnum aside, there are just lots of pockets of
sports that are so much more fun than what the
a block on a given talk show is that day,

(18:27):
and I am somebody who often might be participating in
that a block of like I love look, and I'm
not here to say sports television. It's merely that they
have dined at the same buffet for so long that
there's all this other stuff and so it's hard to
not just like speaking the language of endless metaphor here,
but like, what if there's a restaurant that also served

(18:49):
the other things on the menu?

Speaker 5 (18:51):
Yeh.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
But even one of my favorite dining experiences I had recently,
my dear friend Noah Arenstein, friend of the show. I
went out with him to them Andy cap Fe, which
is exactly what it sounds like, and he ordered it.
And there's this guy Chris Crowley there thinking he works
at New York Magazine or New Yorker. He's going to
be really pissed. I forgot about that. It was so
nice to just be there with two experts to just
tell me what the fuck was going on. Then we

(19:12):
went to the Long Island Bar, I think it's the
place port and just having them regale with the stories with.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
The Long Island Bar down on the Avenue. Yeah, yeah, yah,
good Burger there, and it.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
Was just like try the cheese coats. Seeing around with
someone who really loves and knows a shit ton about
something and having a discussion about it. He's electric and fun.
It's the basis of all well not all podcasting, but
it's the basis of why we like entertainment and why
we have experts in general. But I feel like it's
something kind of lost on modern journal like you don't,

(19:43):
oh you know us. I had a journalisty the other
day and be like, oh, yeah, they don't want us
to do an opinion about the subjects we write about.
I don't want to fucking shoot myself. It was just like, oh,
I wouldn't want the people who know stuff to talk
about this. They might it's a category.

Speaker 3 (19:56):
I also think that it's one of those things where
and I understand how if you work in a s
pious news gathering organization like you would take this work seriously,
But there's also something very useful about taking stupid shit
seriously in this case, which is basically this is another
bit uh defectory experience with this. We were filing a
bunch of foyers to unc everybody is to try to
figure out you know, what are the emails exchanged between

(20:19):
Bill Belichick and Jordan Hudson and the provost and whoever whatever,
Just for yucks, we saw that one of Pablo's producers
had filed one hundred.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, it was. It was just funny because it's like
you can see who else is sort of in there.
We're doing this today seeing what else people filed.

Speaker 3 (20:37):
But I love that, like the idea of I mean,
all of those cost a little bit of money, all
of them takes some time to do, and yet it
is like you're gonna get a better product out of
the other end of it. But also it's funny to
spend time using the Freedom of Incremation Act or stuff
like that. It doesn't all need to be taking.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
Down this very bizarre took lesque man and he is
extremely I'm not getting into the age discourse. It's not
worth it, I'm but.

Speaker 3 (21:04):
It's the bit that people should know if they don't
follow sports, is that Bill Belichick is the crustiest, nastiest dude,
just like a guy famous for like being like rude
to reporters, rude with.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
People here like a hoodie with holes in it, and.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
He looks a Trump. I mean, he's something of that
Trump spoke about at one Dais or another where he says,
there's this letter, this letter, this correspondence between Belichick and Trump.
He's he is in many ways truly the paragon of
what it means to be the greatest coach in football,
many believe, and also the biggest asshole. Yeah, and is

(21:42):
he is both. And so this being the character at
the heart of this is partly why Yes, we did
have one of our producers file hundreds of public.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
Record, but that's like to me that and I think
that all of this stuff that I remember most fondly
reading has that element of like applying a great deal
of rigor and work, like not just in terms of
and craft too, obviously, like you wanted to read well
and sound good and all that, but doing way more
than you need to on a silly thing is to

(22:13):
me like basically one hundred times out of one hundred.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
And everyone has a weird proclivity. I can talk about
for hours. That's why I can't legally bring up jud
Jo's bizarre adventure on the show anymore. My heart ready
informed me this morning. But it's just also we all
have our own things. So watching someone else through that
and put real love and effort and sincerity into it
is a powerful and interesting thing. And shooting the shit
with some people that actually give a shit about who

(22:36):
might not know everything. So it's kind of like friends
having a discussion but taken seriously.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
Yeah, it's like the sort of dynamic that I imagine
makes Rogan work for people, which is basically like two
guys just like you know, going back and.

Speaker 1 (22:49):
Forth for a while. But if like one of those people.

Speaker 3 (22:52):
Has to know what they're talking about, ideally another one
of them would be funny like that, Basically the armature
is there. Yeah, and then if you populate it with
people that you know, like you happen to have two
really good counterpunchers in there, Katie Nolan, like legendary video
talents of her that like you do that, and then
like you make sure that you know this stuff like
a to Z Like that's I mean whatever, it's not revolutionary,

(23:15):
like you said, but it is also like that's just
a product of doing a good job.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
It's also something that isn't incentivized given the basic math
of how to do anything now. Right, So the whole
idea of like we're going to spend a lot of work,
a lot of money. I mean, again, I cannot stress
enough how much of Dan Lebutard's money I've been spent
to do this stuff. And I don't expect anybody else
like the whole question. At a certain point that you
begin to contemplate around like what did we do here?

(23:41):
What is this format? Why does it work? Who else
can compete with us in this category? Like in Silicon Valley,
As you know, they talk about the moat a lot, right,
how do you build a moat around yourself? I am
pleased to report that our moat is just our weird obsessiveness.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
And the people the literally like you, and you.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
Like yes, No, it's do you obsess about this enough
such that you want to spend money hiring people who
are going to obsess about it even more? And that
is again, if you're gonna start from scratch, it's not
what I would advise anyone to do.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
I actually don't know if I agree. I like the
high production. I think taking stuff seriously on the production
level is good, but I don't know. I have I
put our newsletter this morning's Monday, the sixteenth of June.
I'll probably do a new podcasts about it as well.
But it's like, I feel like they all want the
Joe Rogan of the left, and they're like, how does

(24:35):
this keep happening? We have this amicable OAF who's curious
about everything because he knows nothing. Oh, and we also
have this insanely high production thing. We make sure that
everything's done really well and it sounds good and it
looks good, and it's well done on social and the subject.
He clearly has someone doing the research for him, because
if he has three hours of questions off there, he
may just be like a true.

Speaker 1 (24:55):
Oh, I don't know that he's doing any research.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
No, I don't like for him, all right, yeah, for him,
Like I would not be surprised if he didn't know
who was in front of him, Like who you know,
who's this, Jamie? That's Donald Trump? Donald Trump?

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Is he good?

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Is he?

Speaker 1 (25:08):
Is he any good?

Speaker 5 (25:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (25:10):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Hi? Like it's I mean, there's also Lex Friedman, which
is just a.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
Mystery, but it's I have many follow ups about about Lex. I.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
Well, my first question is why can't he say a sentence?
He's just like hello, I'm.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
Al struck by this.

Speaker 3 (25:26):
On those podcasts, things that are like popular that are
not for me. Yes, like that's the story of my life.
It's fine. It's just like it's way easier for me
to even you know, like seeing a few minutes of
ant Man and the Wasp and I'm like, nope, not
that does not go you know, in any of my.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
But that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
But it's also I'm just saying that it's like not
for me.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
The idea of watching a podcast where like someone who
is obviously either both unprepared or just like not good
at talking, Like I don't get how that.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
Was mental latency, like he he during the Donald Trump interview.
I only watch bits of because I don't want to die.
He goes, Bolatics is a dirty game, and he just pausing, goes,
how do you win at that game? This is the
most popular tech podcast.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
Really good, And it's.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Just like, yeah, this is very true. Like it's just
like so bad.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
It's like I love that he wears black tie. Yeah
does he? He wears like he always wears like a
black sea with a black tie and a white Stark shirt.
So cool. Yeah, like the cater waiter swag. That's a
really solid, real party down.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yeah, it looks like a guy John I don't. But
with stuff like that, I'm just insulted by the whole
ex fertment thing. He's so bad. But those podcasts also
like six hours so long. He did one with Sam
Mormon for like four hours. He could have said anything.
I can't watch it. I try to. My brain stops.

(26:52):
My brain just like shuts down. It's like I've been
in a car accident.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
That's an awfully long time to be spending with any dudes,
let alone if one of the him.

Speaker 2 (27:01):
Samuel, and he's just like, yeah, you know dedis senders.
We wild themselves now, And it's like, wow, what is dead?
How do you computer?

Speaker 1 (27:10):
Ye?

Speaker 2 (27:10):
I wish.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
I hope this is as long as the Irishman.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
No.

Speaker 1 (27:13):
I want, I want all of that.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
I want to be on next Rippons so bad. I
should just be clear. I'm going to read him riddles
like it's going to be amazing. But you look at
like Theovon or Joe Rogan and you see the productions good.
Theovon is a good interviewer. He's got despite his insane

(27:38):
that he has like an insanely long name. Do you
know his name? His name, his real name? Oh my christ,
it is so happy to be the dutchessh this is
something or other likes or whatever it comes after it.
Theovon's real name is Theodore Capitani von Kernatowski, the third.
That's right, one of the greatest names of all time,

(27:59):
and his the whole thing has been.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
Like, yeah, damn, yeah, this is a good decision by
THEO Vonn to go by Theovn given the proceeding Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:09):
It'd be so much funnyer if he us this whole
name though, and kept her and they're like, yeah, my
name is current. But but you don't get the sense
from Rogan or Kernatowski, uh, that they that they're condescending
or that they have like maybe they are in some
way to like people of color, I don't know, but
they have a genuine like, oh, I want to be here,

(28:30):
I'm interested, I'm interested in getting good material out of you.
And it's kind of like calm and effortless, and it's
like maybe there is effort behind it, but it's just
it feels like a lot of that is just genuinely
missing for media. It's something you both do in podcasts,
and you obviously do when more podcasts Pablo as well,
but it's just like, let's get the let's get some
interesting ship. Let's have a good conversation, because I don't

(28:51):
know several people who know each other discussing something interesting
might have a good interesting conversation, like you could listen
to on your on your phone in the podcast It's
not that hard?

Speaker 1 (29:00):
What's hard about it? Though? I'll tell you what I've
found hard about it? And I mean it's different.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
I don't mean it's not that hard.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
No, it isn't that hard. I mean it's not hard
relative to like we know that people like it, you know,
and so like doing it well is a skill that
you can learn and we've enjoyed when Pablo's come on.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
The Defector podcast distraction, like it's like getting to shoot around.

Speaker 3 (29:19):
With a with like Lebron, Like, you're just you've done
a lot of this, You're really good at talking. You've
less verbal junk than I do. Like it's fun, you're
a verbal junk baller. I'm just absolutely.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
But beyond that, I think that so that is like
it's a learnable skill to be able to do the
challenge for me though, is I want to be as
good at talking or as knowledgeable as whoever is on
and for the most part, I'm not.

Speaker 3 (29:41):
And that's not a criticism of me. It just means that,
like you have to be willing to ask simpleton type questions.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
You want to put this in a more empathetic sense.
Same with the listeners, right, they're logging on to hear
you tell them something and maybe you Pablo telling you
something that you don't know, and you learning, maybe they too,
We'll learn. It's something Robert and Sophie earlier on said.
It's just like, if you don't know something, don't just
ask every time you have to, because there will be
a listener who's.

Speaker 1 (30:07):
Like total I believe it's funny to mention like Lebron
because oftentimes I have to do the exercise my mind
of like do I need to explain who Lebron is
to people?

Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (30:17):
Like truly, like I presume that the audience that comes
to my show does not know anything about anything.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
And Lebron James is a basketball player.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
If you on the one of the biggest basketball men
we've got, he's he's really good, prominent, he's very strong.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
But but what I would say about about like what
about like meeting the listener wherever they are it is
to me. It is about the exercise of can I
make someone who doesn't give a single ship about this
care about this story? And so we do stories about
fencing corruption, We'll do stories. I mean, I can I

(30:55):
could waste your time mentioning all of the obscure things
that I have I think confy into listening to.

Speaker 2 (31:01):
I mean, Hankazari or interview was fascinating. That was like
the furthest from what you agullly do because and he
wasn't telling just stories about like the Simpson stuff, like it.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
Was like he was great. And we tried to the
joke of my shows that were a technically sports show,
which means that like somewhere like an easter egg, you'll
see a sports reference. I don't think anybody cares enough
to check the box, but I'd check the box. And Roth,
by the way, just to the thing. The problem I
want to pay him is that when it comes to
like thinking about politics in a way that speaks so

(31:31):
fluently the languages of HyperIntelligence and utter stupidity, no one
is better at David Roth and diagnosing that in Donald Trump,
that's nice, Like you need to be someone who was
so brilliant that they're also a moron and roth like truly,
it's it's being fluent at both sort of registers.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
And did the one of my favorite ones is like
my good friend Beetle Juice.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah, there's a lot of because the idea of thinking
about who you could convince him is a real guy
as a fan of his, he's segning you know, I knew,
well we were friends, we were great friends, but we're
not friends anymore.

Speaker 6 (32:07):
Can die.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
But the the bit that I the dumb question thing,
the version of it that I sort of like, whatever,
this is like positive self talk that he was saying
into a microphone we had.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Bob mold On was Bob old uh hooskerdoo and sugar
like iconic punk rock musician man.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
And also very strong yes and a sweet yeah. Also
worked in wrestling and really just like one of the
most interesting guys in the listening as a writer, not
as a as a performer. But he uh, you know
those bands being a great deal to me. M he
is my co host Drew McGarry's favorite musician. And the
question that I asked him basically after you know he
had a new album out to listen to it and

(32:45):
I don't know enough about it helped that it was
about music, which is basically just a foreign language to me.
So I can't be like, when you made this decision,
your fretwork on the bridge here to like I can't
you know, like I even saying it here, I had to.
I had to do the dumb guy voice to put
it over. But I asked him like is it fun
to write a song?

Speaker 1 (33:05):
Like is it is it cool for you?

Speaker 2 (33:06):
That question?

Speaker 3 (33:07):
And I think I had to get past the anxiety
of like asking someone I respect a question that is
basically like something a seven year old would have asked,
and yet like we got a really good answer, and
also like I wanted to know, you know, like it's
better to admit what you don't know and ask the
seven year old question than it is to try to
like bluff and do the expertise thing along with someone

(33:31):
who's a real expert.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
And I have I have this theory that I will
never be able to prove, which is I think most
people forget stuff all the time, Like you will be
on listening to something and be like who's Lebron James
go fuck uh golf uh? You know, or like who
and like you will forget all terms, Like on the show,
I ownerous thing and people say you repeat yourself. I
repeat myself, like defining what generated AI's probabilistic, What does

(33:54):
that mean that? Because sometimes you will be listening to
an hour and a half of me talking, you might
fucking forget something. And also being empathetic I don't know
with like when I'm hanging out with my friends, people
don't know shit all the time. Part of the fun
thing of being in live is helping people know stuff
and having shared experiences. And I love that question of what,
like I want to ask And this is for somewhat

(34:15):
meaner reasons. My dream question to ask any tech executive
is are you happy? I want to ask sundarp As
Shy are you happy? Because it's a hell of a
question because you want to say yes, But you know
I've got a follow up what makes you happy? And
you know they don't have ship for.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
Him for all the stuff.

Speaker 3 (34:31):
He's the guy that gave the interview where he's like,
all day I'm just fucking asking questions of our AI.

Speaker 1 (34:36):
I talked to Gemini all day long.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
That's such a dela of micro That's what it was.
No similar gargoyle like yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
But it's just profiling on my part wrong. Remove it
from the.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Podcast profiling of like extremely rich asshole rooming products. I mean,
like you welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (34:52):
But there was something I think the idea of like
what is any of this four?

Speaker 1 (34:56):
Is that a good question to ask yourself? To bring
it back to Rogan for a second, though, it also
feels like anyone whose industry is seeing rates of ketamine
usage increase so dramatically cannot possibly what does that indicate
to you? It just it just feels like there is
a fundamental searching for something like fulfillment and a happiness.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
With lonely and by the way, like this the one
is like like everyone is more disconnected.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
And I find that in sports of course, Like if
there's any lesson to learn from Bill Balichick and Michael
Jordan and Tom Brady and every greatest of all time
and any category you want, it is that they wont
everything and are miserable.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Yes, completely, And and.

Speaker 1 (35:38):
So how do you fill the void that you thought
the trophies, the money the generative AI was going to fill?
You search for other things like the Silicon Valley thing. Again,
I'm not, by the way, something I'm frustrated by is
just how now uncool Joe Rogan made psychedelics? Yeah, and
maybe maybe I'm the least cool person to think of
it in those terms. The point being, though, that there

(36:01):
is something that is missing that people are trying to find,
and I think, are you happy? I presume that all
of them are actually quite on.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
And I would be this would be a hostile interview
technique that they will never because one of my favorite
things is that I grew up thinking I was stupid.
I thought I was stupid until like two years ago.
I'm deadly fucking serious. It's an incredible technique.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
Though no amount of you have like a real nice house, Yeah,
like there was no point where you were like damn,
non accidents keep happening.

Speaker 2 (36:31):
No, it's luck.

Speaker 1 (36:33):
Like I like how the thing where you have the
accent that makes you sound smart didn't work on you
as it did, But it means though.

Speaker 3 (36:40):
It's worked on me from the very beginning, Like, damn,
this guy really knows his Raiders football?

Speaker 1 (36:45):
How did he learn so much?

Speaker 2 (36:46):
Oh God, I'm gonna get emails about the writers. Do
you know? Looks good? I think broke anyway, But it
means that I've never walked into a room being like, oh,
I hope he doesn't think I'm stupid, which is actually
useful for the business as well. But in I need
give an interview, I feel like interviewers Neilipetel will go
in there and be like, I'm going to ask the
best fucking questions in the world, not the most useful,

(37:08):
not the most interesting, but the ones that make them
sound good and get the biggest, most self ingratiating thing done.
And I understand why, but it's you have access to
someone that people don't have access to. Can you at
least get something new? Can you at least not line
them up with the buffet of options. I don't know
if you get it as much in sports, just because

(37:29):
if someone lies about being good at sports and then
goes and plays poorly, you can notice.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
That, Oh but sports is full. We did an episode
actually that's kind of related to this, and it's about
kind of the tyranny of jargon in sports and how
lots of people are trying to perform the vocabulary of
a coach, which is kind of like, right, like a scout.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
What is the vocabulary of a coach or a scout?

Speaker 3 (37:54):
So there's a lot of phrases. Do you have like
a couple of like brown note like nightmare phrases?

Speaker 2 (38:00):
For me?

Speaker 1 (38:00):
Is impact winning? That's an NBA one?

Speaker 2 (38:02):
Does that mean it means it's a good basketball player.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
It's the most annoying way to say that. This is
all No, it's not.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
It's not like it that's that's like an it's almost like.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
An idiomatic just sort of like so they just say
someone's an impact. But there's also just like the Fighter
Pilot kind of like call sign stuff where it's like, yeah,
Spider to wy Banana, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a lot of what within sport?
Oh sorry, just within the game.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
So Spider too by Banana? Is this is a play
call that I will not even begin to summary. I
thought I thought you were literally Spider doing like a
plain thing.

Speaker 3 (38:34):
It is a John Gruden play. I know a listener
of the pod friend friend of.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
It friend, but I don't even know what a friend
Spider apocryphal or it's real not because Ed's been to
uh Gruden's quarterback. Yeah camp, you were doing squads with due.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Yeah, Jered Lorenzen coach. It didn't go well.

Speaker 1 (38:58):
R I p Yeah, briefs so yeah, but there is
there's all this vocabulary that sort of signals that you
have the fluency of a of a of of of
of a code that is so indecipherable, uh to the
outside person that it becomes a point of pride. And
so in sports there's just a lot of peacocking around

(39:20):
that language, a lot of like, oh, they're you know,
they're running cover three there, but they're doing a stunt
of them a gap to be just like stuff that's
meant to exclude. And so when you say, like a
person who asks a question that is intended to signal
their knowledge as opposed to help the listener understand anything,
I think of the ways in which people are cause

(39:41):
playing coaching all of the time. And also it's kind
of why as much as we have already been crapping
all over Joe Rogan and theo Von something that I
do appreciate generally speaking, I've not listen to all their episodes,
but what they do tend to do is not try
and perform over intelligence.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
And the thing is you can say, like I've seen
some THEOV and I've seen some Joe Rug and they
fucking host white supremacists in the open it fucking sucks.
You can still look at the format and learn, and
I think people have trouble separating those things because it
really comes down to they their questions are simple, and
then they get like Jordan pieces of prok. Have you
seen the Nightmaan Man? Yeah, like you just some insane shit.

(40:23):
And then he says nothing to that because he dru
rug is like, yeah, yeah, I met I knew a
guy like that.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
That happened to my buddy Eric. Yeah, yeah, there is
that sense.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
I think also there's a difference in sports discourse where
there's everything that you said about, like the sort of
ostentatious performance of expertise and like inside y you know,
like everybody wants to be plugged in. Yeah, it has
impacted in some ways, like the language. In fact, I
just used impact as a verse.

Speaker 1 (40:50):
It's clearly it's mainly something on an impact made an
impact on like a concussive. You used it correctly, yes,
I guess I did.

Speaker 3 (40:57):
But the way that that's like worked out, I think
that there's the way that people like Scoop Smith type
guys here, like Seamstrania dudes, like they write not in
like a syntax that is observable outside of text messages
from Russians to guys like him, that there's something very
like artificial and.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
Shouts just for the listeners. Is a guy who mostly
says a guy has been traded.

Speaker 1 (41:19):
Yes, he says it first, he exactly, he is five
seconds ahead of the actual public.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
And he also was the one that scooped Donald Trump
getting COVID.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
I hate that gets yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:30):
And what sucks is I found out through I was
speaking to someone at the time for some reason I
can't disclose, and they showed me a clip from the
barstool show the Yak when it happened, and when they
showed this guy on their Stephen Chay, and it's just
like the worst ten minutes of just like a guy
who made basically was like, yeah, I think Shams would
break World War three, and just these guys like wanting

(41:52):
him to be wrong, and they just hate every like
everyone's kind of miserable, like anyway, so Shams just breaks news.

Speaker 3 (41:59):
That's his only and that he's like there's a guy
that does it for the NFL. Yes, a guy they're
trying to make Jeff Passon, who's like an ace feature writer.
They're trying to make him that guy for baseball.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
And the incentives are to be a newsbreaker because you
are I mean, by the way, when Woj was doing this,
Adrian Morjenerowski, who I should disclose is a person who
now works for Saint Bonaventure's university. Yeah, he's the GM,
but was making you know, millions on millions of dollars
being the newsbreaker basically like the human Uh yeah, like

(42:30):
scoop machine that fielding texts and there was just a
bit n I don't know if you remember this, but
during the NBA draft one year when Woj I think
was at ESPN, so he was working for the broadcaster
of the draft, but trying to scoop the draft. You're
talking by five seconds ahead, and so in order to
get through the to thread the needle, uh, he ended

(42:50):
up just not saying the bulls are about to take
Jimmy Butler or whatever this is. You know, got reck
conning data or yes, but it's basically like the bulls
are targeting the phoenix, suns are circling.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
He kept coming up with new phrasing and it's hard.
There's like thirty two picks. So he'd be like, I'm
hearing that The bulls are in Source so Old by
Wendell Carter Junior.

Speaker 2 (43:16):
At the Spot, which is just, I mean, every single
better off line episode says walks you through Yeah, because
I cannot fucking think of another way to say it,
and I refuse, so I ge't miss the But.

Speaker 3 (43:25):
You can see all of what we're describing here. These
are not These are great paying jobs, and they do
tend to select for people who are like metabolically capable
of responding to text messages for twenty hours a day.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
But yeah, although when woj' that's me. When wod left
the job, he was basically like this sucks. I hate
it again. I'm having a hard time. Like who's like,
I'm unhappy? Yeah, was basically his press release and like, yeah, whatever,
the opposite of Michael Jordan, I'm back. He's just like Nope,
I'm not the whole thing.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
But like that is a function of all of this.
But I think the bit that is kind of missing
from it, and you see it when you know, like
when a podcast works, or if you're reading a story
that's written by somebody who is given the space and
the time to write something that they like, which is
increasingly rare all this shit is fun. Everybody's here because

(44:15):
it's fun. No one is here because it is important that,
like especially with sports, there are aspects of it that
you can use as sort of like a way into
seeing things about the broader culture that are important. But
none of this is like mandatory, right, you know, And
so the game and so to the extent that you
can talk about it in a way that is fun

(44:36):
and that is not either like actionable gambling intelligence or
part of some like endless barber shop set to that
where everybody's arguing about who's now or somebody's legacy or whatever.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Legacy.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
Yeah, that's one of the best topics to play fight
about with the fellas.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
So the thing is, this is something missing from the
tech industry, because most people in tech when you talk
to don't seem to want to talk about anything. You've
got this growth of who is it? I really should
know this one? Ryan Something. There's a former player who
has a really good podcast with a bunch of players,
Ryan Clark, Yes, Ryan Clark, and he just sits around
and he has very serious conversations, sometimes quite joking ones

(45:15):
with other people that have played games of sports for money.
And that's why It's interesting because you're hearing their experiences
and it's kind of rough and ready probably a little
bit cleaned up more than we know. I imagine some of it.
I don't know in his case, but I imagine there
are more harsh parks.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
Got like a real job to avoid losing. But I
do think that there's what you're talking about, though, is
that like people want something authentic.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
And the tech industry constantly tries to create it, but
it always ends up being a venture capitalist and three
of their investments being like you know, I was using
general if Ai the other day and it just changed
my life. How I were going to add break and
it's just like these fucking people pissed me off because
tech is so universal, whether or not you consider yourself technical.
Kind of the same way with the sport. It's like baseball.
One of my favorite Casey Kagawa, friend of the show,

(45:58):
once said it to me. It's like it's still a
child's game. It's still the same game. Aaron Judge plays
baseball a lot better than a kid playing little but
he's still hitting a fucking ball, And there was something
universal about that. I think tech's getting there. Perhaps we're
not they're quite I think most people are not accepting
it yet. But the fact is, I think there is
something deeply personal about tech that no one's fucking touching

(46:18):
in this way, and they should because it's interesting.

Speaker 3 (46:21):
This is one of the big edd points to me,
one of the ones that I think like you were
first to and should be repeating as often as possible,
which is that basically everybody that at some point everybody
liked all this stuff.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
Yeah, and now they don't, and they still.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
They like they like the stuff, they hate the tech and.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
Yeah, And then I think that like and so that
you know, you create this demand for people that they you.

Speaker 3 (46:42):
Know, it's cool to be able to like read anything
as it happens, Like it will make you insane, but
it's not bad, Like it's like kind of gratitude actually, yes,
And yet like that you take that interest and then
you use that to like sort of leverage ways to
make more and more money off of it and dilute
the experience more and more. And I think that that,

(47:02):
you know, when someone is doing that to you for
information that you need to understand the world around you,
I think that that is criminal. When someone is doing
that to you for sports stuff. I just think it's rude. Yeah,
I just think it's like a dick move basically.

Speaker 1 (47:16):
Well, I also think big picture that everything I mean,
this is this is going to sound profoundly unprofound, but
like everything is tech, yes, like sports is. It's impossible
to talk about everything we've basically talked about so far
has been filled through the lens of tech in ways
that it's different now that it used to be, in
ways that these characters are people that we now know

(47:36):
in a dimensionality that didn't previously exist. Because you know,
Jordan Hudson posted an Instagram thing of a philosophy textbook
that was autographed by Bill Belichick the day that they met,
which was turns out nineteen years old. I'm not important,
look again, a little bit important. Actually you know my disclosures, Yes,
you know my disclosures.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
Sometimes when you're looking at Jordan Hudson's Instagram account, it's
just for work, it's.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
Just because I'm a journalist. But look, my point being
that it's when it comes to like media, the future
of media, it's just impossible to disentangle every conversation I
ever have from the fact that we are working in
some direct or stochastic way for tech companies.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
You even mentioned the sun good of the algorithm.

Speaker 1 (48:23):
It's just impossible to not think about standard of success
through the lens of what a tech company has engineered. Yes,
and so it's it's yeah, it's omnipress. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:35):
But the challenge with this too, this is for Defector,
which is more of a it's a print product, ye,
you know, like it's a website that people subscribe to
and read, and we have a podcast and we do
videos every now and then, but most of what we
do is writing that. To Publo's point about the tech industry,
this has been like the challenge for us. I think,
like we've got a steady, loyal subscriber base.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
We're good.

Speaker 3 (48:55):
It's a good business. How you direct people to your
posts is not just I mean, it's the challenge that
we're talking about the most, but any place that is print,
as these sort of the tech mediated spaces through which
people used to discover this as they either dry up

(49:15):
or actively turned against their users.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
That idea of like I guess discoverability is I say
that word all the time. Yeah, I hate myself everything.
I mean, it feels bad because it's like it's a
fake ugly one feels like impact.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
But yes, it does feel it has that, but it
kind of goes back to the thing I'm saying about
the money side. It's like, I don't know this show
is quite successful in pomp because iHeartRadio put it on
the fucking rate. Yea, the actual show, but they put
a bunch of advertising behind it, which is awesome. I'm glad,
really glad they did it, But it's like a big pomp.
What a surprise A show has trouble finding new listeners

(49:48):
when they have no discovery and just.

Speaker 1 (49:50):
We are we every look the obvious sort of statements
of fact. It is harder to find anything now because
all of us are fragmented, silo not consuming the same things,
have personalized feeds. Again explained by the tech industry post
lines that standards absolutely and so true and and some
platforms are now like disincentivizing hyperlinks to places I mean

(50:14):
literally like this is this is why it's so hard
to get discovered. And so if the standard for just
success becomes do you know that this exists? The game
becomes I mean again, to return to another sort of
like axiom, it becomes an attention game because that counts
as something in a meaningful way, and so to have,

(50:36):
in Defector's case, a subscription driven site and by the way,
everything that wants to be a subscription yep. So kudos
to we were early kudos to journalism to start us
to start a.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
Premium feed on on you please subscribe any money, like,
so it costs me thousands a year to do that's nice.
What are you gonna put on the premium Iriday news?

Speaker 1 (50:59):
You said, dudes, nudes? I take artistic news.

Speaker 2 (51:02):
Yeah, you have to get all right, the mic magnifying
glass tool. Anyway, it's Friday news and WS. It's why
I can't say the word pawn either, a pawn because
you're watching porn stars.

Speaker 5 (51:14):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
I'm like, yeah, the show with Rick. Oh yeah, best
I can do. I'm sorry. Uh, it's just even doing
that felt dirty. But it was kind of like, yeah,
this cost me thousands of dollars a year.

Speaker 1 (51:27):
Like I'm contemplating the same thing. What are we going
to put behind our premium sort of.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
Value wall And it's just the only advantage I think
I really have is that I can write so much
so fast, and I'm pretty good at the writing, but
I can just fucking today.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
It was like, your like, average newsletter is my monthly
output in.

Speaker 2 (51:47):
Terms of word count, but I don't post it at
full fifty five pm on a Friday.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
That's that's a failure on your part. It's as editorial
best practice.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
That's that's what everyone loves and what they signed up for.
But it's it's fucked. But I also think it may
end up being something good because people are being way
more direct with what they actually want. I also think
this is something where legacy media really fucks up, because okay,
you've got the Daily. Actually I want to tell a
really fucked up story. So I heart Media Awards right,
which I did not win. To Kevin Ruce's very unfair.

(52:19):
When they did an announcement of the different someone was
in a category, it was they were saying, okay, we've
got this podcast and The Daily with Michael Barbara, and
is like and now I went outside and then there
was a politician there and I thought, does he do politics?
And someone goes, we love you, Michael. I want that
person found. I want that person in jail. No, who's

(52:40):
the Michael Barbara super fan like like the Japanese idols,
but for me, Michael Barb.

Speaker 3 (52:45):
I think if you did a live recording of The Daily,
you would have to do it at like the forum
at Madison's.

Speaker 2 (52:50):
That's so sad.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
Yeah, it's tough, man. This is a real hard thing
to get your head around.

Speaker 2 (52:54):
But this is like, but this is the thing with
these kids. It's a Buddhakana.

Speaker 1 (52:59):
He's gonna do a live episode.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Opening up the fucking pit about Daily about.

Speaker 1 (53:03):
How the subway is too scary. Now, that's gonna be
the episode that they're gonna perform.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
And that's when I'm here and with the wheelbarrows, that's
when I'm just fucking spinning. And the legacy media people

(53:28):
are pissing it away because they have the discovery discoverability part.
Don already The New York Times could do so much
interesting shit, but they're so afraid of this vague objectivity thing.
I know, probably you have to do your like disclosures
and shit, but they're just like, nah, instead of doing
the disclosures, well just too a really boring and hitty job.
What if it was just really dull? And so they

(53:48):
already have the hard part done and they choose not
to do anything extra because they're like, oh, well, people
want this. Have you fucking tried? Have you tried even once?

Speaker 3 (53:56):
I'll say this with sports too, that this is an
advantage that we have in this space over a place
like The Times. I mean, The Times has got to
report on things that are not fun, like so a
little bit of whimsy, And anytime The Times attempts wimsy,
there's this sort of like dog walking on its hind
legs thing where you're like, we shouldn't be doing that.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
Like that you don't experience, but also you're like impressed.
You're like, well, I didn't know you could do that,
like please stop. Like the the.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
Thing with sports that does sort of like move you
in a direction where like you could do more of
that type of stuff, like you don't need to talk
about sports in any particular way. The challenge for you know,
I think for sports talk radio, which is something that
I can't imagine an audience that overlaps less in the

(54:42):
audience of this podcast than the people that listen to Wfan.
But there are like there's guys whose job it is
to just go sit in a studio for five hours
every day and like every day like this is a
weekly thing, and just somebody calls in and they're like,
I don't think the island you should do that, and
then the guys like wrong, and that goes on for
an extended period of time. That is like it's a

(55:05):
grim way of doing it, but it also is like
it's not. There's very little in that space where you
see people like sort of trying to do something different. Yeah,
there are other ways of doing it. How it all sort.

Speaker 1 (55:16):
Of defaulted to this like sourpuss play fighting shit is
a mystery to me other than the fact that it's like,
if you had to sit and do something into a
microphone for five hours a day, you'd probably come out
of it pretty crusty too.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
So I actually the reason that I like doing the
talking with the micro front thing is actually Penn State.
I was on the Lion FM. If you are a
Lion FM listener who heard me on college radio, email me.

Speaker 1 (55:42):
You doing talk or play music both okay, And I
was co hosting with Joe Paterno. He did the weekly
call in show.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
I didn't know who he was. I just thought he
lived there.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Elderly Italian man from the community.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
No, I did crazy shit. I had like a band
on this go called Epileptic Pete was epileptic. He had
his own eight string bass and they played like video
game music. People fucking loved it. You just have some
fun with it. But talk radio is extremely interesting. It's
extremely when it's done well. It's I hope that this
is kind of the format I'm going for here.

Speaker 1 (56:11):
Yeah, that was the idea of Vegas. I know.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
Yeahs fun.

Speaker 1 (56:13):
I'd never really done that before, and people.

Speaker 2 (56:15):
Because talk radio is actually magical when done right. But
done right is having a host that sounds like they're
just talking but has thoughts about everything and they've been
thinking about it to ask questions in some way. Pablo,
you do this excellently. And it's like it pisses me
off because it's like they don't want to try anything
other than the exact standard. But I think the answer

(56:35):
is it's the fucking algorithm. It's that they want to
normalize and fit into what they think will go viral.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
Baby, which it generally is stuff that makes you mad, right,
I mean, I feel like that's the idea of like
that kind.

Speaker 2 (56:46):
Of stuff that's already big. It's that or you already
work for a big newspaper, it's already a big brand
other than the top of the iTunes podcast I don't
know what's going with everyone is called like the Smile
Hour with Dr Janine Benin, and it's like each episode
is sixty minutes long and it's like how to smile more.

(57:06):
I've brought smile exper Jesus to fat and he will
tell us all about smiling. And they have like ten million,
like five star reviews like this podcast change and you
listen to them and it sounds like it sounds like
what I imagine they'd listened to in the sound Goden
video of Black Hole Sun.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
It's what's coming out of the radio and the ladies
about to chop the fish.

Speaker 5 (57:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:28):
So I think my overarching theory of the future of
media and everything is that we're all only fans now,
which is to say that nudes yep, which is to
say that like, there's a bunch of stuff that's wildly
popular that's just not my kink.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:45):
Now, I can also access the hyper specific thing that
is mine, or create it and monetize it. But it's
that thing of like in an era in which scale
of the level of the New York Times or any
incumbent publication is now impossible to recreate. For various reasons,
including by the way, like to get back to Joe
Rogan or Bill Simmons, like the first mover advantage of

(58:06):
like being one of the first podcasts cannot be replicated anymore.
There's just too much competition. Uh, and short of having
I'm trying to get the genealogy right, short of having
someone who's husband's sister dated Taylor Swift or something. No,
I'm just like there are certain ways to like speed

(58:27):
run growth, Taylor Swift, adjacent Rogan and Joe Rogan, cross
pollination being another. In general, Yeah, we're aspiring to smaller arenas,
but we are also aspiring for the people in those
arenas to give us money. Yes, and that only fans

(58:48):
economy of like, hey, if I show you some ankle,
will you pay me for my increasingly bold takes or reportage?
Or I can't stress this enough Bernie Sanders impressions. Yes,
it turns out they will. Yeah, I mean that's the
the thing that and I try to.

Speaker 3 (59:04):
Like sort of count my blessings with this with the
factor because like it is, it's a good business, right,
Like we're not we're growing, and yet like I think
that the challenge withere that you know, we're going to
turn five in September as a website, and that like
more or less by website standards, is like middle age.
And I don't think anybody like we all love it,
we all love working with each other, like it's not
going to change. And yet there's a part of it

(59:26):
where like we don't all want to just like get
old and die with our readership either, you know that,
Like we want to be able to do new stuff
and we want to be able to hire more people
and change sort of the perspective of the site over time,
and all of that costs money. I think, just because
we want to feel like we're growing and not repeating ourselves.

Speaker 2 (59:46):
Why do you want to grow?

Speaker 1 (59:47):
So? I like, I like the look it democracy dies
with us, yes, right, that's but that I feel like
is the cultural moment that we're in. Not to get
too depressing about it, but you can see this with
like this is the apex of Trump, like he wants
all of America buried with him like a fucking pharaoh.
This is not a culture that is built to last
beyond his like last breath, because what happens after that

(01:00:11):
is none of his business.

Speaker 2 (01:00:12):
He doesn't care but I actually think it's grimmer than that.
I think it's one step further and it's everywhere. It's
the rock on me. It's the growth of the cost thing.
It's people don't know. I know why they want to
fucking grow. They just want to grow. Everything in our
society tells us to grow. What do you want to do?
I want to be a CEO. I want to I
want the biggest thing ever. It's none about the product,
It's about the posiness.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
This is where I put the the emphasis and like
the difference for what like Defector does not want to
become Fox, but like we don't want like to televise
a bowl game.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
We need a llure of growth still and this is
not grossly.

Speaker 3 (01:00:44):
Is just to like because we want to have like
new people and do new ship. The challenge with it too, though,
is that like the ways in which you can make
money there And we've had new revenue streams and we're
making more money. We have ads for people that aren't
signed in, like they see that now we've got the
podcasts those have ads, and we sell those.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
Cell phones, those gold plated oh my god s.

Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
Which are very those are great and we're looking forward
to making those right here in the United States.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
We're gonna make them.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Cell phone Oh yeah, there is one of those. So smartness.
One of the biggest comedy podcasts in the world, Listeners,
has made a MV and O so a cell phone
network that lives on top of T mobile. What is
V and L I forget what it stands for. It
basically means you can have.

Speaker 1 (01:01:23):
A suba things mobile. Yeah, you can run your yes
a network.

Speaker 3 (01:01:30):
Ryan Reynold's gonna lead to the collapse of the telecommunications industry?

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
Can that possibly be?

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Thank you Daniel our producer Mobile Virtual Network Operator. Oh
I knew that, Yes, Daniel, thank you. It's but it's
that really There's a great Slate piece on it as well.
It was just really echoed how fucking sad it was
because these guys are like super rich already and super popular,
but they needed its cell phone.

Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
Growing for for the sake of just being like, there's
more money out there to he made is I think
this is an area where like everybody at Defector wants
to fucking blog. That's our job, that is what we want.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
And that's why I fucking pay.

Speaker 1 (01:02:08):
Yeah, and I think that like.

Speaker 3 (01:02:09):
And it's why I feel happy in this work in
a way that I haven't felt before. I worked at
all different types of sites in the past, with all
different types of funders. I don't know what vice was.
I guess that's a Ponzi scheme. Or for places that
were owned by private equity that wasn't great. I worked
for places that were owned as part of some sort
of like venture back to tempt you know.

Speaker 1 (01:02:27):
At Vox.

Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
Basically whatever it was that Vox was trying to do,
I was briefly a part of that. In all of
those instances, everybody that I worked with just wanted to
do our work, and yet you were subject to the
I mean not even just like the whims kind of
like cheapens it. I mean it was whatever it was
that they wanted to do was what you were going
to wind up, you know, downstream that would arrive as

(01:02:48):
an avalanche when they rolled the snowball from the top
of the mountain where they were. But the thing with
all of that, I never felt safe in any of
those jobs, including the ones where you know, I I
organized one workplace advice. I worked at a very strong
union workplace at Deadspin. In all of those instances, the
I mean, obviously it's much much better to organize your

(01:03:09):
workplace than not, and I advocated anybody that wants to
do it and should try to do it. But at
some point the people that you're working for don't want
what you want, they don't care about what you do,
and they don't read it, and they don't read it.
That is and which is extremely important that I think that,
like in any of those there's this wish and I
remember this. I was talking to Megan Greenwell, who is
my editor in chief at Deadspin, has a new book

(01:03:32):
about private equity called Bad Company that is very good
and I recommend it's.

Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
Just going to come on the show at some point. Goods.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
But we were talking about the experience of trying to
convince the private equity concern that had bought was Gizmoto
Media now it is Geomedia and basically unrecognizable.

Speaker 1 (01:03:51):
Spanfeller Jim Spanfelder, bad.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
Guy on the question.

Speaker 3 (01:03:55):
But he great had a hair though I hate to
say it, but it's like it's amazing. Yep, it's got
a quiff. Yeah, yes, anyway, he looks great. He's been
getting by and his looks for years though. But we
were trying to like go to them with the information
that we had, which is like we're making more money
than we're spending. People read this, These people comment on everything.

(01:04:19):
These blogs get passed around. It's this many, you know,
millions of unique readers for stuff. They just didn't give
a shit. It wasn't a business they wanted to be in.
And the difference with Defector and I hope that this
is the case for you all at metal Arc too,
because it is like as similar as something that is
that much bigger and more popular can be that there

(01:04:39):
is like you're doing the work that you want to
do and you're doing it without somebody's hand in your
pocket or trying to fucking ratitude you around in editorial wiz,
and that is when you remove that interference from the equation,
it feels as fun as it actually is.

Speaker 1 (01:04:55):
Yeah, I think so to get back to the misery
of Mike Jordan and every tech executive and blogs that
aren't run in the way that I think Roth is describing,
I think that's all the time at work, Like the
point of getting the money is to do the job
that you want to do, and it is not the
other way around. It is not to contort and develop

(01:05:19):
some sort of content dysmorphia such that you've convinced that
you're sucking good, that oh, this is what beauty is. Now,
it's like, no, trust your own. We got into this
because we have a sense of taste around what we
want to do and what's good and what's bad. The
more that we can actually earnestly believe and act on
that is the whole reason to try and to try
and engage with the market in whatever way we're allowed to.

Speaker 2 (01:05:41):
I just what pisses me off is I'm pretty sure
that if you just did everything with discussing, it would
be insanely profitable because no one's fucking trying. So just
if you just did it at the broadsheet types, I'm
sure that there are people who are desperate to have
Michael bob Ura or like tell them that the subway.

Speaker 1 (01:05:57):
Is many millions of people no accounting for tastes one.

Speaker 2 (01:05:59):
If instead of that it was someone entertaining, do you
think that they would get scared or do you think
they'd be like, Oh, I think that.

Speaker 3 (01:06:06):
There's I think that a lot of that stuff could
be better or it could be different. I think the
more important to me is the idea that like, you
should be able to pick more widely what experiences, yes,
and if that, you know, the Times isn't going to
offer you. They could, you know, but The Times isn't
going to offer you like, here's a version of the
Daily where the guy doesn't sound medicated like or you know,

(01:06:27):
some of these things that are just a different energy.
Maybe try this out see if you like it that
like it doesn't. It shouldn't be just one platform offering
all of this stuff. But I do think that there's
enough ways to enjoy things that like, you know, and
the difference with sports, I mean, there's like ways to
be a fan. Maybe you like to shout about legacy,

(01:06:49):
or maybe you are somebody that likes to grind tape whatever.
You're all working off the same text. Everybody fundamentally understands
what they're talking about. There's just a lot of different
ways to talk about it. It should be a healthier
ecosystem that it is for that reason.

Speaker 2 (01:07:01):
So this is dating me a bit, But there's a
crazy thing. They already tried this with the tech media
and it worked really well. There used to be like
seven different tech columnists. You kind of used to have
like Dwight Silverman over at the Houston Chronicle, I think,
or Dallas Morning News. Forgive me, Dwight. You had like
hiwath Bray over at the Globe, you had Eric Benderoff
over at the Tribune. You had all of these, Like

(01:07:23):
David Pogue, one of the most well known tech reporters,
cut of Steve and every week, and he would sometimes
just be like, yeah, I tried in u E reader.
It sucked. Yeah, it's my first interaction with him actually,
and it was like people didn't read David Poe. He
was kind of like your weird uncle and then had
some stuff that happened which made you really potentially not
like him. But nevertheless, there was a level of entertainment

(01:07:44):
that came from these personal voices talking about something that
was very personal to people that worked in the New
York fucking time in major broadsheets. I just think that
they've got safer, but I also wonder if that's not
me just being kind or maybe they just fucking lazy. Yeah,
this is a this is an in curious as well.

Speaker 3 (01:08:01):
Another ed point that has been instructive to me. This
kind of like the row economy idea, and I've sort
of I mean, it's hard to not spiral when you
think about this, But like, what are you gaining by Like,
you are getting some small savings by eliminating the tech
columnists from Houston Chronicle from your ledger. You're not paying
a guy ninety thousand dollars a year or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
These guys used to get paid shit tons of money.

Speaker 1 (01:08:25):
Yeah, well that which there is that.

Speaker 2 (01:08:26):
No, but they used to get paid shit tons of
money and they were on there for years.

Speaker 3 (01:08:30):
Yes, usually they were adding any sort of value to me.
This is the bit that I don't get. Is like
when you drain a company and kill it and you
get some money from it. The private equity model of
basically like piling a bunch of debt onto something. You
take from this company what is valuable, You leave them
with the debt.

Speaker 1 (01:08:50):
In a few years they go away, So.

Speaker 3 (01:08:52):
You have all this money now that might otherwise have
gone into that company. We can understand that that's bad
and that it's unfair to.

Speaker 1 (01:08:58):
A lot of people.

Speaker 3 (01:08:59):
Also, what do you do with that money? This is
the bit that I've always sort of wondered about.

Speaker 1 (01:09:03):
Like, now it's Jim's is it? You?

Speaker 3 (01:09:05):
Just like you book nothing fucking chainsmokers to play the weekend.

Speaker 2 (01:09:09):
I must be clear, the answer is nothing. So is
that it sits.

Speaker 1 (01:09:12):
Theres some like transparency into the.

Speaker 2 (01:09:14):
Scene of super wealthy. It's nothing, It's absolutely fucking nothing,
so they sits on it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:19):
So, by the way, this is where again the metaphor
sort of becomes the reality.

Speaker 2 (01:09:23):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:09:23):
So sports is currently grappling with the influx of private equity.
The leagues are now passing rules to allow shares of
teams to be bought by private equity firms, and part
of the the the looming sort of storm cloud here
is the idea that actually, as with content, as with
grocery stores, as with any industry, there's a conflict between

(01:09:44):
what that thing is meant to do and it's actual
standard of success and growth profit. Right. So, the whole
idea of like the part of sports that is seemingly
elemental is here are goal is to win. Yeah, everybody's
trying to win. If when that breaks.

Speaker 2 (01:10:03):
That winning isn't always profitable.

Speaker 1 (01:10:06):
Right, So well, and that breakage between winning and profit,
that's where you are inviting a corruption that has been
visited upon every other thing in American life that we've already.

Speaker 3 (01:10:18):
Out yeah, and this is I mean true as a fan,
but I think that anybody that participates in the culture
in any way, like there's you don't have to know
what the Pittsburgh Pirates specifically are like to understand that, like,
this is a team that is owned by a billionaire,
that is part of the system that is.

Speaker 2 (01:10:35):
Created and to explain for the listeners who don't listen to.

Speaker 1 (01:10:37):
Spoil Pittsburgh Pirates are a baseball.

Speaker 2 (01:10:39):
And also but specifically, the fact that they can be
a bad team and make a shit ton of money.

Speaker 3 (01:10:45):
Yeah, how so, and probably welcome to jump in when
I get anything wrong. A couple of things built a
great ballpark with some public money. It is a great
place to go and hang out and drink beers. Even
if the team is bad, which the team reliably has
been for more than a decade. The owner has a
lot of money, enough money to buy a baseball team,
which you need. This is another area where private equity

(01:11:07):
and then I think eventually sovereign wealth is.

Speaker 1 (01:11:09):
Going to be is also being legislated in buy shares good. Yeah,
and so that's like all international sport is all that.
It just hasn't really happened in the United States, but
it's coming.

Speaker 3 (01:11:21):
I mean a team like the Cowboys are the Giants
their valuation based on what the number is. It's like
no person could buy it. It's too many billions of
dollars like whatever, like Elon or Jeff Bezos could buy it,
but they're not going to.

Speaker 2 (01:11:34):
Because they must to buy the Pirates.

Speaker 3 (01:11:36):
This is I considered calling him out on that, like
being like you coward by the A's like, prove it,
prove how smart you are.

Speaker 1 (01:11:45):
E was like, I'm a fan of the Eagles and.

Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
The Steelers, and I was just like a classic, Like
it's like somehow like you took a Hillary Clinton line
and you made it soundly.

Speaker 2 (01:11:55):
They called me the bus of tech anyway.

Speaker 3 (01:11:58):
So here's how the Pirates make it work. Extremely it
is not expensive to run a major league baseball team
if you don't pay anybody, but you can papers get
there is no salary floor. So the product that you
put out there basically needs to be at least to
be minimally competitive, like you can't have people like coming
to your house and burning it down. But minimally competitive

(01:12:20):
for the Pirates means losing one hundred out of one
hundred and sixty two games basically every year. The other
way that you make money off of it, though, is
like there's TV deals that money.

Speaker 1 (01:12:28):
Is getting paid.

Speaker 3 (01:12:29):
There's like you know, parking, there's concessions, There's a million
different ways to make a little bit of money at
a time. And then the big thing that makes it
work is that because this structure that baseball has a
revenue sharing system, so that basically this is money coming
from the biggest It is socialism for rich.

Speaker 1 (01:12:48):
Guys, exclusively for rich guys, because it is.

Speaker 3 (01:12:52):
It is only within that system. So a team like
the Yankees that makes all this money and plays in
a big market has this huge TV deal that the
Pirates could never get us Pittsburgh is so much smaller
than New York. They pay money into a system that
it is then reallocated to the Pirates. The idea being
that this would create some sort of parody because that
money is supposed to be used on either major league

(01:13:14):
payroll or player development, or there's ways that you can
use it too that are more responsible than others, like
using it to pay a big league ball player is good.
Using it to develop a player development program that teaches
a raw high school kid that you drafted how to
throw a pitch that he doesn't know how to throw
that is also extremely cost effective and works.

Speaker 1 (01:13:36):
Good teams do both. The Dodgers do both. You don't
have to do neither.

Speaker 2 (01:13:39):
You don't have to do anything, And yes you don't,
because you can just sit there and the money comes in.

Speaker 1 (01:13:43):
Right, And I think about it also not merely because
I think there's yes, there's a philosophical approach that is
overarching here. There's also just like the edge cases of
like you have a choice. Yeah, you can resign the
player that will make your fans not merely happy, but
feel on some level fulfilled as part of the allegedly
civic trust here right right, you got a star player

(01:14:05):
that's about to ask for more money, and everybody wants
to keep them, and in fact it makes sense for
you to keep them because your goal here is to
win a title. Instead, what you will do is let
him go because he is now too rich for your blood.

Speaker 2 (01:14:17):
And you don't need business.

Speaker 1 (01:14:19):
You don't need him to make the margins exactly. Yes,
that in fact you could still make without them. That's
exactly the point. The margin thing is to me, like
it's and this is the sort of short term thinking
that you see.

Speaker 2 (01:14:29):
Attack a lot, which is why I brought it up.

Speaker 3 (01:14:31):
Now, if you think of the business that you have
as something that you're gonna own for the rest of
your life and then you're gonna leave to your kids,
now that's a little bit perverse. I don't think you
should necessarily be able to do that, But if you're
thinking of the business that way, the free agent that
you resign is essential to the survival of your business
because it shows people that are fans now that you
care about them and you care about the team in
the future. And when those people bring their kids to

(01:14:53):
the games, they're gonna be watching that player at the
end of his career. They're gonna So that idea of
like any of this stuff being built to last in
any meaningful way, I think is gone.

Speaker 2 (01:15:03):
And I think that and it's everywhere. The reason I
wanted you to go through that is I think listeners
really understand the basics of like how you have tech
companies that will do as little as possible to keep
the service running to make the most amount of money.
I think it's important for people to know this is everywhere.
The rot economy is everywhere. It's insane. How endemic it
is the baseball though, you could just run a shit

(01:15:24):
team forever.

Speaker 1 (01:15:25):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:15:26):
Well look at Google. Not to make it the whole
thing about tech, but it's like, it is very fucking
depressing seeing how these people work. But I think that
one thing will work in tech that doesn't work as
often in sports but does a bit is attacking the owners.

Speaker 1 (01:15:40):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
Because Dick Mondfort from the Rockies, who I email with,
he he has stopped responding to me.

Speaker 1 (01:15:45):
Oh really, I think it was people email with dick
Man for like, if you email him, he'll email you back. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:15:51):
He didn't email me back about JoJo's bizarre adventure, which
I think was what broke Hi.

Speaker 1 (01:15:55):
Maybe a bridge too far. Okay, well he might not
be ready the.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):
Delightful show, but you can't really humiliate someone like that.
But the pressure on onners has changed things in the past,
like they don't want to be despised by an entire town.
I don't think enough people know who Sundapaeshio Salonment is,
and I think the more people who learn and mock
them because they are so rich, they don't have anything
other than the names, and unlike sports teams, they don't

(01:16:18):
have anything cool.

Speaker 1 (01:16:19):
So I think one difference with sports than tech is,
in fact the broad cultural popularity inherited over generations, such
that you are invested in this team in a way
that you could never really be invested in the same
way when it comes to even the device you use
all of the time.

Speaker 5 (01:16:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:16:38):
So I've talked to owners about this, NBA owners who
are like, yeah, my day job as multi billionaire is
like to obsess over the price of like polypropylene or
some other you know, material that I monetize. None, none
of that is as resonant. Is as much of a

(01:16:58):
pain point in my life as the guy on the
street who is actively booing me when he sees me.

Speaker 2 (01:17:04):
But imagine if they fucking like them, yeah, like a
beloved owner, Like if the product was really good. People
used to fucking love Google.

Speaker 3 (01:17:11):
So the Mets have a great example of this, and
that they are owned by what you can only call
a prolific financial criminal, Steve Cohen. Like it's just a
guy that was banned by the SEC from trading because
of all the insider trading that he Oh my god, yeah,
I know, and guy kind of friends, I know, right,
they're mad at him, they're jealous.

Speaker 1 (01:17:31):
I would love I would love FRANCESSA on this topic, gahly,
who is that going over his art collection? Meal, it's
a lot of Modigliani's, you know, and I don't like him,
you know too skinny. Uh but the we Lovegliani jokes here?

Speaker 2 (01:17:45):
Also who is that?

Speaker 1 (01:17:46):
He is a sculptor? Okay, and they are very skinny,
but the uh Brakouzi guy but uh so.

Speaker 3 (01:17:55):
Cohen though, like bought the Mets as the team that
he was obsessed with as a fan as a kid,
and basically this is what he's gonna do with the
rest of his life. He went and he took a
team that was owned by a fail family.

Speaker 1 (01:18:07):
Not just fail sends.

Speaker 3 (01:18:08):
There's a whole multi generational thing, and did the stuff
that I was talking about in terms of like basically
investing in the little things that make an organization work better.
In this case, it's people that help your pitchers pitch better,
coaches that actually help in an individual way, and then
also executives, executives that like understand that these are people

(01:18:28):
and that they need to be sort of like treated
as such. This is like the story such as it's
told about how the Mets managed to outbid the Yankees
for wan Soto. Part of it was that like the
Yankees were dicks to him, they were dicks to his family.

Speaker 2 (01:18:40):
And Wansto is an extremely good player.

Speaker 1 (01:18:43):
You have not been you know, he's been a little
bit of a disaployment. But he was paid the biggest
contract in the history of sports.

Speaker 2 (01:18:48):
Yes, and so.

Speaker 3 (01:18:49):
It's like you have to pay the money, but then
also if you want to win that person over the
generational talent that you give that amount of money. You
and the Mets case, it was basically like they have
a really nice family room for the kids with the
players at the stadium.

Speaker 1 (01:19:03):
Which is not something that he did ownership.

Speaker 3 (01:19:05):
Yeah, and so Steve Cohen, who is a guy that
is like the definition of a class enemy of mine.
Everything that I want this country to be. He is
in the fucking way of it being that. And yet
he does own my.

Speaker 1 (01:19:17):
Favorite baseball team, and he has done a pretty good
job hiring pitching coaches. And at some point you like.

Speaker 3 (01:19:23):
This is all true. You know, it's all true, it's real.
You can soften your opinion on the guy for that reason.

Speaker 1 (01:19:28):
Absolutely. And Steve Cohen authentically is also a guy who
like listens to sports talk radio. Yeah, and he is
not a fake fan, is a real fan as.

Speaker 3 (01:19:35):
Well, and not even in like always the most flattering ways,
like he sometimes will get on Twitter and like recommend
some like lower tier Mets prospect guy and it's like
talk to your own fucking prospect guys, dude, Like they
definitely know more than this guy does.

Speaker 2 (01:19:48):
So I hate to wrap it up that. I'm just
gonna say, Steve Cohen, if you're listening, come on better
off line, let's talk about the Matt.

Speaker 1 (01:19:55):
Can I say one more thing about Steve Cohen?

Speaker 2 (01:19:56):
Absolutely?

Speaker 3 (01:19:57):
So, this is why I think he is game and
why I think he will be on on this. Do
you know about Steve Cohen? This is more for public
because I know do you know about his guy Fiertti fixation?
Who is that guy Fierti Diner's drives?

Speaker 2 (01:20:09):
Sorry, I've just never heard it said like that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:11):
That's how he says, oh, guy Fieri. I'll say it
the way that it's television.

Speaker 2 (01:20:18):
Yeah, he's yes, I think that's fair for Europeans. Five
thousand calorie males, Yes, and sauce. He looks like smash mouth.

Speaker 1 (01:20:26):
Yeah, he's a crazy he looks like everybody from smash
Mouth made into one smashed into one. It is. In
factly no one has resembled the term smash mouth more
than Guy. But so Diners, drivings, and dives really is
good though, yeah, never eaten a good guy anyway, But
so the show is him driving around the country going
to someplace eating the hot dog and be like, that's

(01:20:47):
that's crazy, brother, that's a crazy hot dog. Steve Cohen,
super fan of the show, appears in a couple of
episodes as a diner and kind of like a weird
I saw one just like, yeah, there's one in Los
Angeles of him just eating the Luganiga sausage and he's
not like a handsome man. He's just like a guy.

Speaker 3 (01:21:04):
But he's at some place. He doesn't have any lines.
But then he did apparently pay Guy Fieri one hundred
thousand dollars to hang out with him for a day
and go to all of his favorite restaurants, like the
hot dog places.

Speaker 1 (01:21:16):
In Connecticut, And that's exactly see to me, that is
actually like, that's an inkling of that person might do
a good job bending a baseball team. There's a follow
up episode that maybe I need to do on my
show where I find out who's actually good at being rich?

Speaker 4 (01:21:31):
Yeah, what I would please have me on it sounds amazing.
That actually sounds like it incredible Always guys that are
good at being owners. Honestly, it's just not being unhappy
about it, right, And a through line that you established
you woudn't.

Speaker 1 (01:21:44):
Tell jim Irsay, you wouldn't tell anyone to be more
like jim Irsay rip. And yet like jim Irsay, spent
the last years of his life with like a touring
band of notable blues musicians, traveling venues across the country
and doing the worst versions of Neil Young's songs you've
ever heard, and he.

Speaker 2 (01:22:00):
Would sing it rocks.

Speaker 1 (01:22:02):
It's great. I have noticed. I wish more regret to
confirm it rocks. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:08):
So we wrap up here, and I will say another
thing about all of this is the too oneful minium
here with actually Danealds was like we all fucking love
our jobs and were truly, like deeply into them. My
talk to Daniel about random fucking production stuff is it
joy to do? And I think that that is actually
the real solution to a lot of these problems is
give people who actually give a fuck money and let
them do cool shit. David, where can people find you?

Speaker 5 (01:22:29):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (01:22:29):
I mean, now the pressure's on because we already know
that Ed is very critical of my promos. Defector dot
com is the website. It is a prescription site, but
you can read a few articles for free and decide
if you like it. The podcast they do there is
the Distraction. The podcasts they do about Hallmark movies is
It's Christmas Down.

Speaker 2 (01:22:45):
Yeah, And if you like.

Speaker 3 (01:22:48):
Pablo and Ed, you can hear them on the Distraction.
Neither one of these guys has been on the Hallmark
podcast yet. But it's a long it's a long process.
It's far, yes, indeed, and then I don't know the
blue sky I guess David.

Speaker 1 (01:22:58):
J Rothblo Pablo Tory finds out as the show. It
is on YouTube and it's a podcast, and I have
a substack. It's at www dot Pablo dot show. And
I aspire to uh talk about some Hallmark movies with
a guy who's only killed one of two turtles that he's.

Speaker 2 (01:23:17):
So far you know, God killed that. But and I'm
at ZiT Tron. You can find me on a podcast. Yeah,
God killed that.

Speaker 1 (01:23:27):
My turtle.

Speaker 2 (01:23:29):
It's like, well godfriended me. Anyway, I'm at Zitron. You've
been listening to the podcast Better Offline. We talk about
technology or some such business. Wonderful producer of course, Daniel
Goodman here in the beautiful New York City, Nevada. Please
please subscribe to my newsletters. Well where's your head? What's
great is this is gonna end. You're gonna hit exactly

(01:23:49):
the same ship again, and you're gonna email me and
say re record it.

Speaker 6 (01:23:53):
No, don't do it. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

Speaker 2 (01:24:04):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
T O S O W s ki dot com. You
can email me at easy at better offline dot com
or visit better offline dot com to find more podcast
links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend

(01:24:26):
you go to chat dot Where's youreaed dot at to
visit the discord, and go to our slash.

Speaker 6 (01:24:30):
Better Offline to check out our reddit.

Speaker 2 (01:24:32):
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 5 (01:24:34):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (01:24:39):
Visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us.

Speaker 5 (01:24:42):
Out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. The whole Spanish

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Episode Transcript

Host

Ed Zitron

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