Radio Better Offline: Pablo Torre and David Roth

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I'm Ed Zittron, and this is Better Offline.

Better Offline.

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Anyway, so today I'm joined by the incredible Pablo Torre of Pablo Torre finds out and David Roth of Defector, co-owner of Defecta and a turtle, I believe.

Yes, I do.

I am the co-owner of a turtle.

What's the turtle's name?

Turtle's name is Marvin.

Marvin.

And he is, well,

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

Oh.

Oh.

Yeah.

It's fine.

The other guy had a good long life.

George had a good long life.

And something you don't learn when a man sells you a turtle out of a bucket of drywall on Canal Street is that they live.

Oh, you got a Chinatown turtle.

Yeah, I got a Chinatown turtle on an impulse 24 years ago.

Oh, wow.

So you've had them a while.

Yeah, they live forever.

Like the people that, the vets that treat them are also the vets that treat birds.

And the lady that, when I took Marvin to the vet, because he'd been eating parts of the tank,

I was told this was normal, that they

whatever is around goes in and then it stays there until such time as he starts acting alarmingly enough that you take him to the vet.

She also treats birds.

And she was like, yeah,

this is a 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, I got this little pet.

I mean, he doesn't like me.

Like, that's pretty.

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 shoulder.

Does he appreciate your Bernie Sanders?

I do communicate with him in a series of accents.

Yeah, it's a lot.

He responds well to Bernie.

I mean, once again, asking that you eat this piece of Rodicchio, I lowered it to your tank.

Yeah, he, well, I guess that is how he responds to it, is by eating the piece of radicchio that I've lowered into his tank.

He loves chicories.

What's chicories?

Any kind of chicories, you know, your cabbages.

Oh, okay.

Castel Franco.

I know Pablo knows what I'm talking about.

This is a tank podcast.

I know this is a podcast.

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

back and forth with Rob.

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.

I'm greedy.

Not blowing smoke.

I don't give freebies.

But I think both of you have also done something really incredible with the format in the sense that it's not like it's about sports inso much as sports is part of the world and culture itself.

Even Pablo, your like Jordan Hudson thing and the Bill Belichick stuff, that was fascinating to me despite honestly wanting to know less about Bill Belichick as the former for the and the many non-sports.

I love the disclosures here.

Yeah.

Yeah, the many non-sports listeners are going to say, a sports episode?

How dare you?

Oh my God, do you want to hear me fucking talk about Kevin Roos again?

I'll do it in like one day.

I'll probably do it on this podcast.

You're already doing it.

I'm already doing it.

But it's fascinating because I need to underline that I could give you 90 minutes on the turtle.

We already know that that's true.

So that threat will hang over the rest of this podcast.

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

I don't have turtles.

Wait, well, I didn't even ask.

Have you?

So talking of

small, old, wretched things.

Bill Belichick is the coach now of UNC, University of North Carolina, football coach, and he was the coach of the New England Patriots.

And he has a girlfriend who is 24 years old.

So it's not really about the sports.

It's about that there's just this random woman who has ingratiated herself into Dunkin' Donuts commercials and the like.

And you kind of broke that story open in a very interesting way where it wasn't like just you on your own talking about a, I forget who else you had on the Katie Nolan and Michael Cruz King as my accomplices

in this journalistic act of alleged malpractice.

Oh, and some said.

Malpractice, according to Bill Simmons, who will explain shortly.

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

Most of your Upper New England bills have had some issues with it.

Your William problems.

Yeah, and

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

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.

I'm not.

I weirdly am familiar with Ryan's toys.

And I don't have children, and my niece and nephew do not watch that shit.

And yet, my child does not watch YouTube ever.

But this is just, it's a kid

for the channel.

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

He's 31 years old.

Remarkable.

He's been making like NBA max contract money beyond that.

Well beyond that now.

I mean, the second

stars.

But toys, Ryan's toys, his parents bring him toys that he then opens up and plays with.

And the audience is in the tens of millions.

He is an archetype on YouTube.

He is a genre unto himself that has inspired so many imitators, all of which spoke something fascinating because you're watching, again, take the, if you can put the pedophilia aside for a second.

Okay.

and you're just watching a kid open toys,

the question

is, legally speaking, Roth, you know what I do, you know what I have to do legally speaking.

I had a talk with you before we walked in.

You said you wouldn't call me out on

my disclosure.

I didn't think you were serious.

I thought you were bluffing.

I thought it was a power thing.

Listen, certain dominance.

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

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, spread throughout YouTube.

And so the whole idea of what if I could authentically surprise and delight a friend of mine, not with a, I don't even know if a Power Ranger is a reference that anybody talks about.

What about something you found?

But journalism, actually.

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?

Right.

And so I did exhaustive, insanely

exhaustive reporting into the Bill Balachek Jordan Hudson question, which is also a story about the highest-paid employee in the state of North Carolina, public employee who is also the archetype of a certain privacy, discretion, do-your-jobness, sun zoo, cosplay,

now being sort of the opposite, inverted by this woman who is now running his life beyond just the age gap stuff.

What if I could do that for Katie Nolan and Michael Cruzcan and surprise and delight them with what I had investigated?

Right.

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

And also kind of like a kind of radio show host as well.

You've got like quite an interesting setup as well.

Yeah, man.

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

You're editing it on your own.

We have a staff of a half dozen people who are on the editorial side.

But me, I always.

Yeah, I imagine you're editing it.

Just I was going to say, if you did that all your own, that sounds not connected.

Even Solderberg mode, just like five different credits, different names.

Just iPhones.

Everything on iPhones.

I am doing a pass, 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, it feels like they thought about a second.

Right.

But also, we are a three-camera setup in our studio, such that we are a YouTube show, so that nobody watching on YouTube thinks they thought about a second.

And so we are kind of torturing ourselves to be a fully-fledged product.

And already you can sense the sort of like the

discomfort viscerally 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.

Thank you.

Just with saying that.

Cannot say this more clearly, clearly.

But trying to be where people are with the knowledge that they probably won't switch platforms.

They're probably just going to, they'll live wherever we find them.

And

we just got to give them, hopefully, something that they can spend some time with.

And you're fully independent?

Or are you backed by someone like...

Is Dan Lebartard a corporate monolith?

I don't know who that is.

I love that.

Technically, he's a private equity entity.

Is that how you say that?

Do you know about the metal?

That's actually really interesting.

No, I don't.

But also, I thought he was was LeBartard.

Well, like the French for bastard, the French bread.

Yeah,

the French bastard.

Dan the bastard.

Dan LeBastard is my corporate partner.

Damn, that's a real disappointment.

A Cuban guy with a French name who looks white.

All of this is very

disappointed in his name, but beautiful.

You should.

I would love.

Pablo may be too modest to do it.

Metal arc is an interesting experiment.

You should talk about it.

Yeah, so basically, Dan LeBartard left ESPN, took his RSS feed with him, which is the key to starting a new business and microwaving a business, is have you're all

have your feed.

Right.

And so what he did was he partnered with John Skipper, who's a former president of ESPN.

Nice.

And they did not want to hire any ad salespeople.

And so their licensing partner wound up being DraftKings.

And DraftKings, you may know from...

every ad you've ever seen during a sporting event yeah and otherwise the point being that uh dan who wanted freedom wanted editorial uh

non-interference whenever possible,

found an arrangement in which, yes, the company got to choose its own editorial docket, got backed by this company in which, by the way, I don't know if you paid attention to sports or betting.

I have not, but they have the money now.

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

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

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, I wasn't aware of that.

You are devilry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But the short answer to where I am is that they funded, Meadowlark decided we want to start a new show from scratch.

We want to trust this guy that we are friends with and know and hopefully trusted.

Um, and uh, I got to create a show from scratch in now the vision that you have seen or heard.

But where I am now, to speed run through my trajectory briefly, is that uh, Publitori finds out is no longer in the licensing deal with DraftKings.

We are are now independent with Metalark as our co-owner, but looking for a partner.

Okay.

And so if you're listening out there,

and you have a maybe

OpenAI.

Yeah,

they're definitely very good.

Oh, they're good.

Oh, they got money now.

But

we just met with Palantir.

That's great.

Yeah, also

understand your audience.

You should know the social security stuff.

Everything about your audience.

The WWE is not presenting us, actually.

And Drill.

What is interesting to me about this, as somebody who also works in independent media, we'll talk about that in a moment, I guess.

The way that you spent the money that you got from the corporate partner was like, obviously, the show looks good.

It looks pro.

It sounds good.

Like, there are talented people working on it.

I have friends, Jeb Lund did, it was a guy that I do another podcast with, Hallmark movies, not sports.

Yes, but.

Like and subscribe.

Yeah, but did a feature with you guys and was

like, I'm not, I wouldn't say I was jealous exactly, but I was

very impressed with the

repertorial apparatus behind all of this.

That it's like, it was, it seemed more like working with 60 minutes than it would be like doing a story for Defector.

You're so much better at pitching my show thank you.

I don't know, man.

It's but what I mean by this was that basically, like, there were producers, there were people that were like, I'll file that FOIA for you.

I will do like we are trying to be an actual news magazine in an era in which news magazines are either compromised in various ways or just dead now.

We're just kind of given up on doing that.

Right.

So, so Jeb, by the way, who I cannot trust is enough, co-hosts a pod with David Roth about Hallmark's magic.

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

It's not even an exaggeration.

Every single episode, and I did three 30-minute breaks.

So sections even.

At the end, I was like, David, what podcast you do?

And every time, like joylessly, yeah, okay, so this is crazy.

I don't like promoting my shit.

And it also felt weird because I was not holding myself out as an expert, but the idea of, you know, I'm going off about like, there shouldn't be AI and vacuum cleaners, bitch, you know, and just trying to say that.

Trying to be big energy on it.

And then at the end, and if you like that, you're going to love me like breaking down the worst performances of Candace Cameron's career every two months.

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

Sometimes you do get Chad Michael Murray, but yes, it is like a, anyway, we're off, we're firefield.

Yeah, but what you said, just to catch people up, was we had Jeb Ludd as a correspondent looking into his alma mater, which happened to be the college in Florida that Ron DeSantis had taken over.

Oh, yeah, and

the new college of Florida.

And he had taken it over, it turns out, by basically bombing it with baseball players.

So they turned over the student body, repoliticizing it, replacing, you may even say, great replacement of worrying 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.

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

Yeah, it's all pranks, basically.

What if Christopher Rufo, 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 he could.

He could even have a shake, maybe.

That's not, yeah, sure.

That's nice of you to say that.

Certainly not.

No, no, no.

Just throwing it.

We are just riffing.

You don't know.

Just having fun.

He could be a piano in there.

He could do anything.

Maybe he flies.

We don't know.

Yeah.

But

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

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 with your time.

And the bit that I think you captured in that, 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 Balgernon bit where like for 90 minutes after you filed a story, you are an expert on a thing that you just did all this reading and all this reporting on.

And then if you're like me, slowly the curtain drops.

And then when it goes back up, it's just like a 1989 Dave Magaden 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.

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

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

Yeah.

Because the premise.

I'm angling for a job.

I mean, well, listen, mister.

Relayance PR.

You kill one more turtle.

You may have something on your hands.

To me, the idea here is that this stuff doesn't need to just be, you know,

a you ought to proposition.

It's like you want to actually hang out while we're doing journalism.

Right.

And that part of like, it is stupid, but smart.

It is highbrow, but lowbrow.

It is fundamentally silly and also nutritious in some meaningful way.

That's why I love, and I'm not yet tired by my job.

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

Thank you.

At least they have people reminding you.

Thank you.

Oh, there's a slight echo in the room.

There's a slight echo in my heart now.

Great notes.

But it's

you get to talk about this stuff that's very serious, but when you read objective, quote unquote, journalists, it's just this dry, fucking pallid list of stuff with some degree of context versus the very human reaction you can have.

to the news of the day, even if it isn't a conclusive thing, even if it's just OpenAI did this or the very strange things that constantly happen with the Bill Belichick thing, like

Jordan Hudson getting banned from UNC, like these moments, these moments are fascinating to discuss and lost in regular journalism, I find.

They just go, well, this happened.

Shit.

Well, I also think that so much of our magnetic field in journalism is the sun god of the algorithm that I was describing before.

And for me, I think, you know, Dave Magnet aside, there are just lots of pockets of sports that are so much more fun than what the block on a given talk show is that day.

And I am somebody who often might be participating in that A block of like, I love, look, and I'm not here to say, ah, 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 speak in the language of endless metaphor here, but like, what if there's a restaurant that also served the other things on the menu?

But even one of my favorite dining experiences I had recently, my dear friend Noah Ahrenstein, friend of the show, I went out with him to the Yemeni Cafe, which is exactly what it sounds like.

And he ordered it.

And there's this guy, Chris Crowley, there.

I think 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 went to the Long Island Bar, I think.

It's the place where we invented the cost porn.

And just having them regale with the stories of the...

Like the Long Island Bar down on Atlantic Avenue.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, good burger there too.

And it was just, no, try the cheese curts.

Let Let me tell you about that.

They're delicious.

Seeing around with someone who really loves and knows a shit ton about something and having a discussion about it is electric and fun.

It's the basis of all, well, not all podcasting, but it's the basis of why we like entertainment and why we have experts in general.

But I feel like it's something kind of lost on modern journalists.

Like you don't, oh, you know us.

I had a journalist the other day be like, oh, yeah, they don't want us to 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 error.

I also think that it's one of those things where, and I understand how if you work in a serious news gathering organization, like you would take this work seriously, but there's also something very useful about taking stupid shit seriously in this case, which is basically this is another bit of defector experience with this.

We were filing a bunch of FOIAs to UNC, everybody is, to try to figure out, you know, what are the emails exchanged between Bill Belichick and Jordan Hudson and the provost and whoever, whatever, just for yucks.

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

voice.

Yeah, it was

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

Who was doing this today, see what else people filed.

But I love that, like

the idea of, I mean, all of those cost a little bit of money, all of them take some time to do, and yet it is like

you're going to get a better product out of the other end of it.

But also, it's funny to spend time using the Freedom of Information Act for stuff like that.

It doesn't all need to be like...

He's chasing down this very bizarre,

turtle-esque man, and he is extremely young.

No, I'm not getting into the age discourse.

It's not worth it.

But 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 being rude to reporters, rude to people.

He wears like a hoodie with holes in it.

He looks like a business.

I mean, Donald Trump, I mean, he's someone that Trump spoke about at one dais or another, where he says there is this letter, this letter, this correspondence between Belichick and Trump.

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.

And 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 records requests.

But that's like, to me, and I think that that all of the stuff that I remember most fondly reading has that element of like applying a great deal of rigor and work, like not just in terms of, and craft too, obviously.

Like you want it to read well and sound good and all that, but doing way more than you need to on a silly thing is, to me, like basically a hundred times out of a hundred that.

And everyone has a weird proclivity they can talk about for hours.

That's why I can't legally bring up JoJo's Bizarre Adventure on the show anymore.

I hot radio informed me this morning.

But it's just also, we all have our own things.

So watching someone else do that and put real love and effort and sincerity into it is a powerful and interesting thing.

And shooting the shit with some people that actually give a shit about it, who might not know everything.

So it's kind of like friends having a discussion, but taken seriously.

Yeah, it's like the sort of dynamic that I imagine makes Rogan work for people, which is basically like two guys just like, you know, going back and forth for a while.

But if like one of those people has to know what they're talking about, ideally another one of them would be funny.

Like the basically the armature is there.

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, one of the like legendary radio talents of her

that like, so you do that, and then like you make sure that you know the stuff like A to Z, like that's,

I mean, whatever, it's not revolutionary, like you said, but it is also like, that's just a product of doing a good job.

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 Lebatard'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?

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.

Like, how do you build a moat around yourself?

I am pleased to report that our moat is just our weird obsessiveness.

And also the people, the literal, like you and you, 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 going to start from scratch, it's not what I would advise anyone to do.

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 out a newsletter this morning, Monday, the 16th of June.

I'll probably do a new podcast about it as well, but it's like, I feel like they all want the Joe Rogan of the left, and they're like, how does this keep happening?

We have this amicable oaf who'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 the head, he may just be like a true.

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

No, I don't.

I mean, 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's this, Jamie?

That's Donald Trump.

It's Donald Trump.

Is he good?

Is he...

Is he any good?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hi.

Like, it's, I mean, there's also Lex Fridman, which is just a mystery.

But it's.

Yeah, I have many follow-ups about Lex.

My first question is, why can't he say a sentence?

He's just like, hello.

I'm always always struck by this on those podcasts.

Things that are like popular that are not for me.

He's like, that's the story of my life.

It's fine.

It's just like, it's way easier for me to, even, you know, like seeing a few minutes of Ant-Man and the Wasp.

And I'm like, nope, not, that does not

go, you know, in any of my,

but it's also, I'm just saying that it's like not for me.

The idea of watching a podcast where like someone who is

obviously either both unprepared or just like not good at talking, like, I don't get how that works.

He has mental latency.

Like, he

during the Donald Trump interview, which I only watch bits of because I don't want to die, he goes, Politics is a dirty game.

And he just pauses and goes, How do you win at that game?

This is the most popular tech podcast.

Really good.

And it's just, Donald Trump's like, Yeah, that's very true.

Like, it's just like so bad.

It's like I love that he wears black tie.

Yeah.

Does he?

He wears like he always wears like a black suit with a black tie and a white starch shirt.

So cool.

Yeah, like the cater waiter swag.

That's a really solid thing.

A real party down aspect.

He looks like a guy

who's a kid.

He's working a wedding and the way it was.

I don't, but with stuff like that, I'm just insulted by the whole Lex Friedman thing.

He's so bad.

But aren't those podcasts also like six hours?

They're so long.

He did one with Sam Altman for like four hours.

He could have said anything.

I can't watch it.

I try to.

My brain stops.

My brain just like shuts down.

It's like I've been in a car car accident.

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

One of them is Samuel, and he's just like, Yeah, you know, data centers will build themselves now.

And it's like, wow, what is data?

How do you computer?

I hope this is as long as the Irishman.

No, I want all of that.

I want to be on Lex Ripman so bad, I should just be clear.

I'm going to read him riddles, it's going to be amazing.

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But you look at like Theovon or Joe Rogan Rogan and you see their productions because Theo Von is a good interviewer.

He's got, despite his insane name, he has like an insanely long name.

Do you know his name?

His real name?

His real name?

No.

Oh my Christ.

It is so happy to be the Dutch-ish.

It is

Theophilus.

No, this is.

The von something or other, like Burlington,

or whatever comes after it.

Theo Von's real name is Theodore Capitani von Kernatowski III.

That's right.

One of the greatest names of all time.

And his whole thing has been like, you're damn.

Yeah, he's feeling like this is this is a good decision by Theo Vaughn to go by Theo Vaughn given the proceeding.

Yeah, Kernatowski.

It'd be so much funnier if he used this whole name though and kept doing the like yeah my name is Kernet like just yeah but his influence

but you don't get the sense from Rogan or Kernatowski that they um that they're condescending or that they have like maybe they are in some way to like people of color, I don't know.

But they have a genuine like, oh, I want to be here.

I'm interested.

I'm interested in getting good material out of you.

And it's kind of like calm and effortless.

And it's like, maybe there is effort behind it, but it's just, it feels like a lot of that is just genuinely missing to media.

It's something you both do in podcasts.

And you obviously do way more.

podcasts, Pablo, as well.

But it's just like,

let's get some interesting shit.

Let's have a good conversation.

Because I don't know.

Several people who know each other discussing something interesting might have a good, interesting conversation like they could listen to on your, on your phone in a podcast.

It's not that hard.

What's hard about it, though?

I'll tell you what I found hard about it.

And it's different.

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

No, it isn't that hard.

I mean, it's not hard relative to, like, we know that people like it, you know, and so like doing it well is a skill that you can learn.

And I, we've enjoyed when Pablo's come on the Defector podcast, a distraction, like, it's like getting to shoot around with

like LeBron.

Like, you're just, you've done a lot of this.

You're really good at talking.

You have less verbal junk than I do.

Like, it's fun.

You're a verbal junkballer.

I'm shit again.

Yeah, absolutely.

But beyond that, I think that, so that is like, it's a learnable skill to be able to do that.

The challenge for me, though, is I want to be as good at talking or as knowledgeable as whoever is on.

And for the most part, I'm not.

And that's not a criticism of me.

It just means that like you have to be willing to ask simpleton type questions.

I actually 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 will learn It's something Robert and Sophie early on said It's just like if you don't know something, just ask every fucking time.

Yeah, you have to.

Because there will be a listener who's like,

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

Yeah.

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

And LeBron James is a basketball player, if you don't know him,

one of the biggest basketball men we've got.

He's really good.

He's prominent.

He's very, he's very strong.

Space Jam 2.

Not a good movie.

Sorry.

But what I would say about

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 shit about this care about this story?

And so we'll do stories about...

fencing corruption.

We'll do stories, I mean,

I could waste your time mentioning all of the obscure things that I have, I think, conned people into listening to.

I mean, the Hankazaria interview is fascinating.

And that was like the furthest from what you Gilly do.

And he wasn't telling just stories about like the Olvis Simpson stuff.

It was like...

He was great.

And we tried to, the joke of my show is that we're a technically sports show, which just means that like somewhere, like as 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 compliment I want to pay him is that.

When it comes to like thinking about politics in a way that speaks so fluently the languages of hyperintelligence and utter stupidity.

No one is better at David Roth and diagnosing that in Donald Trump.

That's nice.

Like you need to be someone who is so brilliant that they're also a moron.

And Roth, like truly, it's being fluent.

at both sort of uh registers and the one of my favorite ones is like my good friend beetle juice yeah there's a lot of

just the idea of thinking about who you could convince him is a real guy and a fan of his he's just standing in front of a candy man yep

you know i knew walrio i knew

we were friends we were great friends but we're not friends anymore

yep

but the the bit that i the dumb question thing the version of it that i

sort of like am whatever this is like positive self-talk that i'm saying into a microphone

we had bob mould on uh who is bob mould uh hoosker doo and sugar like iconic punk rock musician man uh and also very strong yes and a sweetie yeah also had worked in wrestling like real just like one of the most interesting guys in the world as a writer not as a as a performer but he uh you know those bands mean a great deal to me he is uh my co-host drew mcgarry's favorite musician

and i gotta listen to this the question that i asked him basically after you know he had a new album out i listened to it and i don't know enough about it helped that it was about music which is basically just a foreign language to me so i can't be like when you made this decision your fret work on the bridge here like i can't you know like i even saying it here in a friendly space not either i had to do i had to do the dumb guy voice to put it over but i asked him, like, is it fun to write a song?

Like, is it cool to do that?

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 who's a real expert.

And I have, I have have this theory that I will never be able to prove, which is I think most people forget stuff all the time.

Like you will be listening to something and it'll be like, who's LeBron James?

Go, fuck,

golf.

No.

Or like, who?

And like, you will forget or terms.

Like on the show, I onerously and people say, you repeat yourself.

I repeat myself, like defining what generative AI is probabilistic.

What does that mean?

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 alive is helping people know stuff and having shared experiences.

And I love that question.

Like, I want to ask, and this is for somewhat meaner reasons, my dream question to ask any tech executive is, are you happy?

I want to ask Sundar Peshai, are you happy?

Because it's a hell of a question.

Because you want to say yes, but you know, I've got a follow-up.

What makes you happy?

And you know they don't have shit.

For him, it's

all the stuff.

He's the guy that gave the interview where he's like, all day, I'm just fucking asking questions of our AI.

I talk to Gemini all day long.

Not such an adello of Microsoft.

No, no, that's what it was.

No, but similar gargoyle.

Yeah.

But it's just profiling on my part.

Wrong.

Remove it from the podcast.

Profiling of like extremely rich asshole ruining products.

I mean, like, welcome to the show.

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

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

What does that indicate to you?

It just feels like there is a fundamental searching for something like fulfillment and a happiness.

We're lonely.

And by the way, like this.

Everyone is.

Like men, women, like everyone is more disconnected.

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

Yes.

Completely.

And so how do you fill the void that you thought the trophies, the money, the generative AI was going to fill?

You search for other things.

Like the Silicon Valley thing.

And again, I'm not, by the way,

something I'm frustrated by is just how now uncool Joe Rogan made psychedelics.

Yeah.

And maybe, maybe I'm the least cool person to think of it in those terms.

The point being, though, that there is something that is missing that people are trying to find.

And I think, are you happy?

I presume that all of them are actually quite un and I would be, this would be a hostile interview technique that they will never, because one of my favorite things is that I grew up thinking I was stupid.

I thought I was stupid until like two years ago.

I'm deadly fucking serious.

It's an incredible technique, though.

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

Yeah.

Like there was no point where you were like, damn, these accidents keep happening.

No, no, no.

It's luck.

All right.

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

musician.

It's worked on me from the very beginning.

I was like, damn, this guy really knows his Raiders' football.

How did he learn so much?

Oh, God, I'm going to get emails about the Raiders.

Gino looks good.

I think Brock.

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 PR business as well.

But in any given interview, I feel like interviewers, Neil Patel, will go in there and be like, I'm going to ask the best fucking questions in the world.

Not the most useful, not the most interesting, but the ones that make them sound good and get the biggest, most self-ingratiating thing done.

And I understand why, but it's you have access to someone that people don't have access to.

Can you at least get something new?

Can you at least not line them up with the buffet of options?

I don't know if you get it as much in sports just because if someone lies about being good at sports and then goes and plays poorly, you can notice that.

Oh, but sports is full of.

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

What is the problem in basic?

What is the vocabulary of a coach or a scout?

So there's a lot of phrases.

Do you have like a couple of like brown note, like nightmare phrases?

The one for me is impact winning.

That's an NBA one.

What does that mean?

It means it's a good basketball player.

It's the most annoying way to say that this is a healthy player to have on your channel.

No, it's not, it's not like that's like that's like an almost like an idiomatic, just sort of like.

So they just say someone's an impact win.

But there's also just like the fighter pilot kind of like call sign stuff where it's like, yeah, Spider 2, Y Banana.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's a lot of

people within sport.

Oh, oh, sorry, just within the game.

So Spider 2, Y Banana is this, is a play call that I will not even begin to summarize.

Oh, I thought you were literally talking about planes.

No, Spider 2 Wanna.

I thought you were doing like a plane thing.

It is a John Gruden play.

I know a listener of the pod, friend of his,

friend of your pod.

And I don't even know what it is.

Not a friend.

Spider-They's playing.

It's

apocryphal or is it real?

It's real.

No, no, no.

Me and Deuce.

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

You were doing squats with Deuce Gruden.

Yeah, Gerald Lorenzen coached me.

It didn't go well.

R.I.P.?

Yeah, I believe so, yeah.

R.I.P.

legend, really.

But there's all this vocabulary that sort of signals that you

have the fluency

of a code that is so indecipherable to the outside person that it becomes a point of pride.

And so in sports, there's just a lot of peacocking around that language.

Right.

A lot of like, oh,

they're running cover three there, but they're doing a stunt,

the A gap, the B, just like stuff that's meant to exclude.

Right.

And so when you say, like, a person who asks a question that that is intended to signal their knowledge as opposed to help the listener understand anything, I think of the ways in which people are cosplaying coaching all of the time.

And also, it's kind of why, as much as we have already been crapping all over Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn, something that I do appreciate, generally speaking, I've not listened to all their episodes, but what they do tend to do is not try and perform over intelligence.

And the thing is, you can say, like, I've seen some Theovon, I've seen some Joe Rogan, they fucking host white supremacists in the open.

It fucking sucks.

You can still look at the format and learn.

And I think people have trouble separating those things because it really comes down to their questions are simple.

And then they get like Jordan Peterson's going, have you seen The Nightmare Men?

Yeah.

Like you're just some insane shit.

And then he says nothing to that because Joe Rogan's like, yeah, yeah, I knew a guy like that.

That happened to my buddy Eric.

Yeah, there is that sense.

I think also there's a difference in sports discourse where there's everything that you said about like the sort of

ostentatious performance of expertise and like 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 verb.

So it's clearly made

something on

like a concussive.

But you used it correctly.

Yes, I did.

Yes, I did.

But the way that that's like worked out, I think that there's

the way that people, like Scoop Smith type guys, you're like Shams Trania dudes, like they write not in like a syntax that is observable outside of text messages from regions to guys like him, that there's something very like artificial.

And Shadis, just for the listeners, is a guy who mostly says a guy has been traded.

Yeah, signed a car.

He says it first.

Exactly.

He is five seconds ahead of the actual public.

And he also was the one that scooped Donald Trump getting COVID.

I hate that Shams get scooped.

Yeah, 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 bastard show, The Yak, when it happened.

Oh, wow.

And when they showed this guy on there, Stephen Che, and it's just like the worst 10 minutes of just like a guy who

basically was like, yeah, I think Shams would break World War III.

And just these guys like wanting him to be wrong, and they just hate every, like everyone's kind of miserable.

Yeah.

Like, anyway.

So Shams just breaks news.

That's his only thing.

He breaks news.

And that is like...

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

There's a guy they're trying to make Jeff Passen, who's like an ace feature writer.

They're trying to make him that guy for baseball.

The incentives are to be a newsbreaker because you are.

I mean, by the way, when Woj was doing this, Adrian Mojanarowski, who I should disclose, is a person who now works for St.

Bonaventure University.

General Richardson.

He's the GM, but was making, you know.

millions upon millions of dollars being the newsbreaker, basically like the human,

yeah, like scoop machine.

Yeah.

Just fielding texts.

And there was was just a bit, Rob.

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.

I know what you're talking about.

By five seconds ahead.

And so in order to get through the, to thread the needle, he ended up just not saying the bulls are about to take

Jimmy Butler or whatever.

This is, you know,

God, retconning dating or something, I guess.

Yes.

But it's basically like,

the Bulls are targeting.

The Phoenix Suns are circling.

He kept coming up with new phrasing, and it's hard.

There's like 32 picks.

So he'd be like, I'm hearing that the Bulls are in source old by Wendell Carter Jr.

at this spot, which is just I mean, every single Better Offline episode says walks you through because I cannot fucking think of another way to say it, and I refuse.

So I get Mr.

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

But although when Woach, that's me, when Woach left the job, he was basically like, this sucks.

I hate it.

Again, I'm having a hard time.

He was 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 back

the whole thing.

But like, that is a function of all of this.

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

Everybody's here because it's fun.

No one is here because it is important.

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 it's a game.

And so to the extent that you can talk about it in a way that is fun and that is not either like actionable gambling intelligence or part of some like endless barbershop set to

where everybody's arguing about who's now or somebody's legacy or whatever.

Legacy.

Yeah.

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

But the thing is, this is something missing from the tech industry because most people in tech, when you talk to them, don't seem to want to talk about anything.

You've got this growth of, who is it?

I really should know this one.

Ryan something.

There's a former player who has a really good podcast with a bunch of players.

Ryan Clark.

Yes, Ryan Clark.

And he just sits around and he has very serious conversations, sometimes quite jokey ones, with other people that have played games of sports for money.

And that's why it's interesting because you're hearing their experiences and it's kind of rough and ready, probably a little bit...

cleaned up more than we know i i imagine in some of the i don't know in his case but i imagine there are more harsh people got like a real job to avoid losing but i do think that there's but what you're talking about though is that like people want something authentic and the tech industry constantly tries to create it but it always ends up being a venture capitalist and three of their investments being like you know i was using generative ai the other day and it just changed my life how i i were going to ad break and it's just like these fucking people piss me off because tech is so universal whether or not you consider yourself technical kind of the same way with the sport it's like baseball one of my favorite casey kagawa friend of the show once said it to me it's like it's still a child's game it's still the same game aaron judge plays baseball a lot better than a kid playing Little League, but he's still hitting a fucking ball.

And there is something universal about that.

I think tech's getting there.

Perhaps we're not there quite.

I think most people are not accepting it yet.

But the fact is, I think there is something deeply personal about tech that no one's fucking touching in this way.

And they should, because it's interesting.

Yeah, this is one of the big Ed points to me.

It's one of the ones that I think like you were first to and should be repeating as often as possible, which is that basically everybody that

at some point everybody liked all this stuff.

And and now they don't.

And they still

they like the stuff, they hate the tech industry.

And then I think that like, and so that, you know, you create this demand for people that they, you know, it's cool to be able to like read anything as it happens.

Like it will make you insane, but it's not bad.

Like it's like kind of gratifying, actually.

Yes.

And yet like that, you take that interest and then you use that to like sort of leverage ways to make more and more money off of it and dilute the experience more and more.

And I think that that, you know, when someone is is doing that to you for information that you need to understand the world around you, I think that that is criminal.

When someone is doing that to you

for sports stuff, I just think it's rude.

I just think it's like a dick move, basically.

Well, I also think big picture that every, 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 filtered through the lens of tech.

Yeah.

In ways that it's different now now than it used to be, in ways that these characters are people that we now know 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 he was, turns out 19 years old.

It's not important.

Look.

It's a little bit important, actually.

You know my disclosures.

Yes.

You know my disclosures.

Sometimes when you're looking at Jordan Hudson's Instagram account, it's just for work.

It's just because I'm a journalist.

But look, my point being that it's when it comes to like

media, the future of media, it's just impossible to disentangle every conversation I ever have from the fact that we are working in some direct or stochastic way for tech companies.

You even mentioned the sun god of the algorithm.

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 omnipresent.

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

Yeah.

You know, like it's a website that people subscribe to and read.

And we have a podcast and we do videos every now and then, but most of what we do is writing.

That to Pablo's point about the tech industry, this has been like the challenge for us.

I think like we've got a steady, loyal subscriber base.

We're good.

It's a good business.

How you

direct people to your posts is not just, I mean, it's the challenge that we're talking about the most, but any place that is print, as these

sort of the tech-mediated spaces through which people used to discover this, as they either dry up or actively turn against their users,

that idea of like, I guess, discoverability is I say that word all of the time.

Yeah, I hate myself every time.

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

It feels like impact, but history.

Yes, it does feel it has that.

But it kind of goes back to the thing I was saying about the money side.

It's like, I don't know, this show was quite successful in part because iHeartRadio put it on the fucking,

not the actual show, but they put a bunch of advertising behind it, which is awesome.

I'm glad, really glad they did it.

But it's like a big part.

What a surprise a show has trouble finding new listeners when they have no discovery.

And just we are.

Look, obvious sort of statements of fact.

It is harder to find anything now because.

All of us are fragmented, siloed, not consuming the same things, have personalized feeds, again, explained by the tech industry.

Personalized by their standards.

Absolutely.

And so, truly, and some platforms are now like disincentivizing hyperlinks to places.

I mean, literally, like this is, this is why it's so hard to get discovered.

And so, if the standard for just success becomes, do you know that this exists?

The game becomes, I mean, again, to return to another sort of like axiom, it becomes an attention game because that counts as something in a meaningful way.

And so, to have, in Defector's case, a subscription-driven site, and by the way, everything now wants to be a subscription.

Yep.

So, kudos to we were early.

Kudos to journalism to

start a premium feed on Where's You're At.

Please subscribe.

Any money.

Also, it costs me thousands a year to do.

That's nice.

What are you going to put on the premium?

I do a

Friday news.

You said nudes?

Nudes, yes.

I take artistic news.

Yeah, you have to get

the

magnifying glass tool.

Anyway, no, it's no, Friday News, N-E-W-S.

It's why I can't say the word porn either at P-A-W-N, because

you're watching porn stars, huh?

I'm like, yeah, the show with Rick.

Rick.

Oh, yeah.

Best I can do for you.

No, no.

Sorry.

It's just, even doing that felt dirty, but I was kind of like, yeah, this cost me thousands of dollars a year.

Like, is that true?

I'm contemplating the same thing.

What are we going to put behind our premium sort of?

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 take today.

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

But I don't post it at 4.55 p.m.

on a Friday.

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

That's what everyone loves and what they sign up for.

But it's...

It's fucked, but I also think it may end up being something good because people are being way more direct with what they actually want.

I also 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, iHeart Media Awards, right?

Which I did not win to Kevin Roos.

Very unfair.

When they did an announcement of the different, someone was in a category.

It was a, they were saying, okay, we've got this podcast.

And they went, The Daily with Michael Barbara.

And it's like, and now I went outside and then there was a politician there.

And I thought, does he do politics?

And And someone goes, we love you, Michael.

That's nice.

I want that person found.

I want that person jailed.

Michael Barbarossa.

No, who is the Michael Barbaross Super fan?

Like the Japanese Idols, but for me, Michael Barbarossa.

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

That's so sad.

Yeah, it's tough, man.

This is a real hard thing to get your head around.

But this is the thing.

With these people.

It's at Boudicon.

He's going to do a live episode.

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

About how the subway is too scary now.

That's gonna be the episode that they're gonna perform.

And that's when I'm hitting with the wheelbarrows.

That's when I'm just fucking spinning.

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And the legacy media people are pissing it away because they have the discovery discoverability part done already.

The New York Times could do so much interesting shit, but they're so afraid of this vague objectivity thing.

I know, Pablo, you have to do your like disclosures and shit, but they're just like, nah, instead of doing the disclosures, we'll just do a really boring and shitty job.

What if it was just really dull?

And so they already have the hard part done and they choose not to do anything extra because they're like, oh, well, people want this.

Have you fucking tried?

Yeah.

Have you tried even once?

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 whimsy, there's this sort of like dog walking on its hind legs thing where you're like, we shouldn't be doing that.

Like, that doesn't experience this.

But also, you're like impressed.

You're like, well, I didn't know you could do that.

Like, please stop.

Like,

the thing with sports that does sort of like

move you in a direction where like you could do more of that type of stuff, like, you don't need to talk about sports in any particular way.

The challenge for, you know, I think for sports talk radio, which is something that I can't imagine an audience that overlaps less with the audience of this podcast than the people that listen to WFAN.

But there are, like, there's guys whose job it is to just go sit in a studio for five hours every day.

And like every day, like this is a weekly thing.

And just somebody calls in and they're like, I don't think the islanders should do that.

And then the guy's like, you're wrong.

And that goes on for an extended period of time.

That is like, it's a grim way of doing it, but it also is like, it's not, there's very little in that space where you see people like sort of trying to do something different.

There are other ways of doing it.

How it all sort of defaulted to this like

sour puss play fighting shit is a mystery to me.

Other than the fact that it's like, if you had to sit and do something into a microphone for five hours a day, you'd probably come out of it pretty crusty, too.

So I actually, the reason that I like doing the talking with the microphone thing is actually Penn State, I was on the Lion FM.

If you are a Lion FM listener who heard me on college radio, Email me.

Are you doing talk or playing music?

Both.

Okay.

And I was co-hosting with Joe Paterno.

That's me and Joe Peterno.

He did the weekly call-in show.

I didn't know who he was.

I just thought he lived there.

This elderly Italian man from the community.

No, I did crazy shit.

I had like a band on this guy 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,

I hope that this is kind of the format I'm going for here.

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

This is fun.

I'd never really done that before.

And people, because talk radio is actually magical when done right.

But the done right is having a host that sounds like they're just talking, but has thoughts about everything.

They've been thinking about it to ask questions in some way.

Pablo, you do this excellently.

And it's like, it pisses me off because it's like they don't want to try anything other than the exact standard.

But I think the answer is it's the fucking algorithm.

It's that they want to normalize and fit into what they think will go viral, baby.

Which generally is stuff that makes you mad, right?

I mean, I feel like that's the idea of like.

It's not stuff that's already big.

yeah 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 on every one is called like the smile hour with dr janine benin and it's like each episode is 60 minutes long and it's like

how to smile more i've brought smile expert jesus to fat and he will tell us all about smiling and they have like 10 million like five-star reviews like this podcast chain and you you listen to them, and it sounds like

it sounds like what I imagine they'd listen to in the Sound Garden video of Black Hole Sounds.

It's like what's coming out of the radio when the lady's about to chop the fish.

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

Yep.

Which is to say that, like,

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

Yeah.

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 like being one of the first podcasts cannot be replicated anymore.

There's just too much competition.

And short of having, I'm trying to get the genealogy right, short of having someone whose husband, sister dated Taylor Swift or something,

is this our Bill Simmons?

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

Oh, yeah.

Taylor Swift adjacent is.

Theo Von was on Rogan and they all cross-pollination.

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 OnlyFans economy of like, hey, if I show you some ankle, will you pay me for my increasingly bold takes or reportage?

Or

I cannot stress this enough, Bernie Sanders impressions.

Yes.

It turns out they will.

Yeah.

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

Like we're not.

We're growing.

And yet, like, I think that the challenge with it, 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 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.

Why do you want to grow?

So I think that's the problem.

I like the Alta slogan, democracy dies with us.

Yes, right.

But that, I feel like, is the cultural moment that we're in, not to get too depressing about it, but you can see this with like, this is the apex of Trumpism.

Like, he wants all of America buried with him like a fucking pharaoh.

This is not a culture that is built to last beyond his like last breath because what happens after that is none of his business.

He doesn't care.

But I actually think it's grimmer than that.

I think it's one step further and it's everywhere.

It's the rotten economy, the the growth at all.

It's the cost thing.

People don't know why they want to fucking grow.

They just want to grow.

Everything in our society tells us to grow.

What do you want to do?

I want to be a CEO.

I want the biggest thing ever.

It's not about the product.

It's about the position.

This is where I'd put

an emphasis on the difference for what.

Defector does not want to become Fox Spring.

But even then, you should.

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

But you feel like it's a good thing.

Like, we need the allure of growth still.

And this is not a growth.

Mostly is just to, like, because we want to have like new people and do new shit.

The challenge with it, too, though, is that like the ways in which you can make money there, and we've had new revenue streams, and we're making more money.

We have ads for people that aren't signed in.

Like, they see that now.

We've got the podcasts.

Those have ads in there.

We sell those cell phones, those gold plates.

We sell gold-plated cell phones.

Oh, my God.

Those are great.

And we're looking forward to making those right here in the United States.

We're going to make them into

a cell phone.

Oh, yeah, there is one of those, right?

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

What is MVNO?

I forget what it stands for.

It basically means you can have a sub-same thing as

Mint Mobile.

Yeah, you can run your skin

a network.

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

Can that possibly be?

Thank you, Daniel, our producer.

Mobile virtual network operator.

Oh.

I knew that.

Yes.

Daniel, thank you.

But it's that

really, there's a great slate piece on it as well that was just really echoed echoed how fucking sad it was.

Because these guys are like super rich already and super popular,

but they needed a cell phone.

Growing for the sake of just being like, there's more money out there to be made is, I think this is an area where like everybody at Defector wants to fucking blog.

That's our job.

That is what we want.

And that's why I fucking pay.

Yeah.

And I think that like, and it's why I feel happy in this work in a way that I haven't felt before.

I worked at all different types of sites in the past with all different types of funders.

I don't know what Vice was.

I guess that's a Ponzi scheme.

I worked for places that were owned by private equity.

That wasn't great.

I worked for places that were owned as part of some sort of like venture-backed attempt, you know, at Vox, basically, whatever it was that Vox was trying to do.

Yeah.

I was briefly a part of that.

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

Yeah.

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 would arrive as 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 organized one workplace at Vice.

I worked at a very strong union workplace at Deadspin.

In all of those instances, the, I mean, obviously it's much, much better to organize your workplace than not.

And I advocate anybody that wants to do it should try to do it.

But at some point, the people that you're working for don't want what you want.

They don't care about what you do.

And they don't read it.

And they don't read it.

That is, 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.

Right, a new book, I think.

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

She's going to come on the show at some point.

Good.

I should pay to Oscar.

Megan, if you hear this.

But we were talking about the experience of trying to convince the private equity concern that had bought

was Gizmodo media now it is geo media and basically unrecognizable

spanfeller jim spanfeller bad guy come on the screen man

questions but he uh great head of hair though i hate to say it but it's like it's amazing yep he's got a a a quiff what do they call yeah

yes anyway he looks great uh he's been getting by in his looks for years though but we were trying to like go to them with the information that we had which is like

we're making more money than we're spending people read this these people comment on everything.

These blogs get passed around.

It's this many, you know, millions of unique readers for stuff.

They just didn't give a shit.

It wasn't a business they wanted to be in.

And the difference with Defector, and I hope that this is the case for you all at Metal Art too, because it is like

as similar as something that is that much bigger and more popular can be, that there is like...

You're doing the work that you want to do, and you're doing it without somebody's hand in your pocket or trying to fucking ratatouille you around in editorial ways.

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

Yeah, I think so

to get back to the misery of Michael 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.

The point of getting the money is to do the job that you want to do.

And it is not the other way around.

It is not to contort and develop some sort of content dysmorphia, such that you've convinced yourself

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.

I just, what pisses me off is I'm pretty sure that if you just did everything we're discussing, it would be insanely profitable profitable because no one's fucking trying.

So just if you just did it at the broadsheet types, I'm sure that there are people who are desperate to have Michael Barbaro like tell them that the subway standards.

Many millions of people.

No accounting for taste.

But what if instead of that, it was someone entertaining?

Do you think that they would get scared?

Or do you think they'd be like, I'll give this a go?

I think that there's, I think that a lot of that stuff could be better or it could be different.

I think the more important to me is the idea that like

you should be able to pick more widely what experiences.

and if the you know the times isn't going to offer you they could uh you know but the times isn't going to offer you like here's a version of the daily where the guy doesn't sound medicated like or you know some of these things that are it's just a different energy maybe try this out see if you like it that like it doesn't it shouldn't be just one platform offering all of this stuff but i do think that there's enough ways to enjoy things that like, you know, and the difference with sports, I mean, there's like ways to be a fan.

Maybe you like like to shout about legacy, or maybe you are somebody that likes to grind tape, whatever.

Yeah, you're all working off the same text.

Everybody fundamentally understands what they're talking about.

There's just a lot of different ways to talk about it.

It should be a healthier ecosystem than it is for that reason, I think.

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 Ray over at The Globe.

You had Eric Benderoff over at the Tribune.

You had all of these, like David Polk, one of the most well-known tech reporters, cut his teeth.

And every week, and he would sometimes just be like, yeah, I tried a new e-reader.

It sucked.

It's my first interaction with him, actually.

And it was like, people didn't read David Polk.

He was kind of like your weird uncle and then had some stuff that happened, which made you really potentially not like him.

But nevertheless,

there was a level of entertainment that came from these personal voices talking about something that was very personal to people that worked in the New York fucking time in major broadsheets.

I just think that they've got safer, but I also wonder if that's not me just being kind, or maybe they're just fucking lazy.

Yeah, this is a, this is an incurious as well.

Another Ed point that has been instructive to me, this kind of like the rot economy idea, and I've sort of

I mean, I, it's hard to not spiral when you think about this, but like, what are you gaining by, like, you are getting some small savings by eliminating the tech columnist from the Houston Chronicle from your ledger.

You're not paying a guy $90,000 a year or whatever it is.

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

Well,

there is that.

They used to get paid shit tons of money and they were on there for years.

Yeah, presumably they were adding some sort of value.

To me, this is the bit that I don't get is like when you drain a company and kill it.

and you get some money from it, the private equity model of basically like

piling a bunch of debt onto something, you take take from this company what is valuable, you leave them with the debt, in a few years they go away.

So, you have all this money now that might otherwise have gone into that company.

We can understand that that's bad and that it's unfair to a lot of people.

Also, what do you do with that money?

This is the bit that I've always sort of wondered about.

Like, what is Jim's?

Is it you just like you book nothing fucking chain smokers to play RV at the same weekend?

I must be clear, the answer is nothing.

So, is that the cheap, it sits there on the bottom?

You have some like transparency into the sea of super wealthy.

It's nothing, it's absolutely fucking nothing.

They sit on it.

So, by the way, this is where, again, the metaphor sort of becomes the reality, right?

So, sports is currently grappling with the influx of private equity.

The leagues are now passing rules to allow shares of teams to be bought by private equity firms.

And part of the

looming sort of storm cloud here is the idea that, actually, as with content, as with grocery stores, as with any industry, there's a conflict between what that thing is meant to do and its actual standard of success and

growth,

profit, right?

So the whole idea of like the part of sports that is seemingly elemental is here, our goal is to win.

Yeah, everybody's trying to win.

If when that breaks.

Winning isn't always profitable.

Right.

So that 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 outlined.

Yeah.

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

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

Pittsburgh Pirates are a baseball team.

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

Yeah.

How?

So, and probably you're 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 and then I think eventually sovereign wealth is going to be.

Sovereign wealth is also being legislated in to buy shares,

Abu Dhabi or something.

Yeah, and so that's like all international sport is all that it just hasn't really happened in the united states yet but it's coming i mean a team like the cowboys or the giants their valuation based on what the number is it's like no person could buy it right it's too many billions of dollars like whatever like elon or jeff bezos could buy it but they're not going to because they

buy like the pirates this is i considered above

calling him out on that like being like you coward buy the a's

like prove it prove how smart you are maybe when elon was like i'm a fan of the eagles and the Steelers.

And I was just like, oh, Lord.

Classic.

Like, it's like somehow, like, you took a Hillary Clinton line and you made it sound really similar.

They call me the boss of tech.

Anyway, so here's how the Pirates make it work.

It is not expensive to run a major league baseball team if you don't pay anybody.

But you can not pay people and still make money.

There is no salary floor.

So the product that you put out there basically needs to be minimally competitive.

Like you can't have people coming coming to your house and burning it down but minimally competitive for the pirates means losing a hundred out of 162 games basically every year

the other way that you make money off of it though is like there's tv deals that money is guaranteed there's like you know parking there's concessions there's a million different ways to make a little bit of money at a time and then the big thing that makes it work is that because this structure that baseball has a revenue sharing system.

So that basically this is money coming from the biggest.

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

It is only within that system.

So a team like the Yankees that makes all this money and plays in a big market and has this huge TV deal that the Pirates could never get because Pittsburgh is so much smaller than New York.

They pay money into a system that it is then reallocated to the Pirates.

The idea being that this would create some sort of parity because that money is supposed to be used on either major league payroll or player development, or there's ways that you can use it too, that are more responsible than others.

Like using it to pay a big league 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.

Good teams do both.

The Dodgers do both.

You don't have to do anything.

The parents do neither.

You don't have to do any of that.

And yes, you don't.

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

Right.

And think about it also, not merely, because I think there's, yes, there's a philosophical approach that is overarching here.

There's also just like the edge cases of like, you have a choice.

You can re-sign the player that will make your fans not merely happy, but feel on some level fulfilled as part of the allegedly civic trust here.

Right.

Right.

You got a star player that's about to ask for more money and everybody wants to keep him.

And in fact, it makes sense for you to keep him because your goal here is to win a title.

Instead, what you will do is let him go because he is now too rich for your blood.

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

You don't need him to make the margins

that, in fact, you could still make without him.

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 tech a lot.

Which is why I brought it up.

Now, if you think of the business that you have as something that you're going to own for the rest of your life and then you're going to leave to your kids, now that's a little bit perverse.

I don't think you should necessarily be able to do that.

But if you're thinking of the business that way, The free agent that you re-sign is essential to the survival of your business because it shows people that are fans now that you care about them and you care about the team in the future.

And when those people bring their kids to the games, they're going to be watching that player at the end of his career.

So that idea of like any of this stuff being built to last in any meaningful way, I think is gone.

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 to baseball, though, that you can just run a shit team forever.

Well, look at Google.

Not to make it the whole thing about tech, but it's like...

It is very fucking depressing seeing how these people work.

But I think that one thing that will work in tech that doesn't work as often in sports, but does a bit, is attacking the owners.

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

I can't tell if he's not.

Oh, really?

No, that's not.

I think it was emailing him about Jojo.

A lot of people email with Dick Montfort.

Like if you email him, he'll email you back.

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

It'd be a bridge too far.

Okay, well, he might not be ready.

Delightful show.

But

you can't really humiliate someone like that, but the pressure on owners has changed things in the past.

Like, they don't want to be despised by an entire town.

I don't think enough people know who Sunda Peshai or Sam Altman is.

And I think the more people who learn and mock them, because they're so rich, they don't have anything other than their names.

And unlike sports teams, they don't have anything cool.

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.

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 of that is as resonant, is as much of a pain point in my life as the guy on the street who is actively booing me when he sees me.

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.

So the Mets have a great example of this in that they are

owned by what you can only call a prolific financial criminal.

Steve Cohen.

Like, it's just a guy that was banned by the SEC from trading because of all the insider trading that he did.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, I know.

Guy can't have friends.

I know, right?

They're mad at him.

They're jealous.

I would love Francesa on this topic specifically.

Who is that?

That going over his art collection, you know, there's a lot of Modiglianis, you know, and I don't like them.

You know, they're too skinny.

We love Modigliani jokes here on the

also.

Who is that?

He's a sculptor.

Oh, okay.

And they are very skinny.

But the

more Brancusi guy.

So Cohen, though, like bought the Mets.

This is the team that he was obsessed with as a fan, as a kid.

And basically, this is what he's going to do with the rest of his life.

He went and he took a team that was owned by a fail family, not just fail sons.

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 and they need to be sort of like treated as such.

This is like the story, such as it's told, about how the Mets managed to outbid the Yankees for Juan Soto.

Part of it was that the Yankees were dicks to him.

They were dicks to his family.

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

He's been a little bit of a disappointment.

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

Yes.

And so it's like you have to pay the money, but then also if you want to win that person over, the generational talent that you give that amount of money.

you and in the Mets case, it was basically like they have a really nice family room for the kids of the players at the stadium, which is not something that they did underwent this ownership.

Yeah.

And so Steve Cohen, who is a guy that is like the definition of a class enemy of mine, everything that I want this country to be, he is in the fucking way of it being that.

And yet he does own my favorite baseball team, and he has done a pretty good job hiring pitching coaches.

And at some point, you like.

This is all true.

It's all true.

It's real.

You can soften your opinion on a guy for that reason.

Absolutely.

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

Yeah.

And he's not a fake fan, is a real fan as 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 so i hate to wrap it up there i'm just gonna say steve cohen if you're listening come on better offline let's talk about the match can i say one more thing about steve cohen absolutely so this is why i think he is game and why i think he will be on this do you know about steve cohen this is more for pablo because i know

do you know about his guy fieti fixation who is that so guy fieti diners drive instantaneous oh sorry i yeah i've just never heard it said like that that's how he says it oh guy fieri i'll say it the way that it's written how i would say he's the medigliani

television

Yeah.

Yes, I think that's fair.

For all Europeans, 5,000 calorie meals.

Yes.

And Yangi sauce.

He looks like Smash Mouth.

Yeah, he's a crazy.

He looks like

everybody from Smash Mouth made into one meal.

Smashed into one meal.

Yes, it is.

Smash Mouth burger of sorts.

Exactly.

No one has resembled the term Smash Mouth more than Guy Fee.

Even the band.

Diners, Drivens, and Dives really is good, though.

I've never eaten any of the best of the best.

He looks like a good guy.

Anyway, so the show is him driving around the country, going to some place, eating a hot dog, and being like, 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 in kind of like a weird.

I saw one.

He just like sneaks in.

Yeah, there's one in Los Angeles of him just eating a Luganiga sausage, and he's not like a handsome man.

He's just like a guy, but he's at some place.

He doesn't have any lines.

But then he did apparently pay Guy Fieri $100,000 to hang out with him for a day and go to all of his favorite restaurants, like

the hot dog places in Connecticut that he lives lives.

That's exactly what I'm saying.

See, to me, that is actually like, that's an inkling of that person might do a good job of being a baseball team.

There's a follow-up episode that maybe I need to do on my show where I find out who's actually good at being rich.

Yeah.

Please have me on.

That sounds amazing.

That actually sounds like an incredible.

There are always guys that are good at being owners.

Honestly, it's just not

being unhappy about everything.

Right.

And a through line that you established.

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

That fucking rocks.

It rocks.

It's great.

I have no doubt.

I wish more people

regret to confirm it rocks.

So we wrap up here and I will say another thing about all of this is that two wonderful men I'm here with, actually Daniel as well.

It's like we all fucking love our jobs and we're truly like deeply into them.

I talked to Danil about random fucking production stuff.

It's a joy to do.

And I think that that is actually the real solution to a lot of these problems: is give people who actually give a fuck money and let them do cool shit.

David, where can people find you?

I mean, now the pressure's on because we already know that Ed is very critical of my promos.

Defector.com is the website.

It is a subscription site, but you can read a few articles for free and decide if you like it.

The podcast I do there is The Distraction.

The podcast I do about Hallmark movies is it's Christmastown.

Yeah.

And if you like Pablo and Ed, you can hear them on the distraction.

Neither one of these guys has been on the Hallmark podcast yet, but it's a long, it's a long process.

It's hard.

Yes, indeed.

And then I don't mind the blue sky, I guess, David J.

Roth.

I'll have the links in that, Pablo.

Pablo Torrey Finds Out is the show.

It is on YouTube and it's a podcast.

And I have a sub stack.

It's at www.pablo.show.

And I aspire to

talk about some Hallmark movies with a guy who's only killed one of two turtles that he so far.

God killed that turtle.

And I'm Ed Zittron.

You can find me on a podcast that's called Better Offline.

Yeah, God killed that turtle.

God smote my turtle.

It's like, well, God friended me?

Anyway, I'm Ed Zittron.

You've been listening to the podcast Better Offline.

We talk about technology or some such business.

Wonderful producer, of course, Daniel Goodman here in the beautiful New York City, Nevada.

Please, please subscribe to my newsletter as well.

Where's your ed.at?

And what's great is this is going to end.

You're going to hear exactly the same shit again, and you're going to email me and say, Ed, re-record it.

No, don't do it.

Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matosowski.

You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com.

M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

I also really recommend you go to chat.where's your ed.at to visit the Discord and go to r/slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit.

Thank you so much for listening.

Better Offline is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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