Share & DOGE & Tell with Mina Kimes, Dan Le Batard, and Pablo Torre

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out.

I am Pablo Torre.

Today's episode is brought to you by DraftKings.

DraftKings, the crown is yours.

And today, we're going to find out what this sound is.

But I do

dropping my forehead to laugh.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I can't.

Go for

guy, exhale, sharply, gripping your tighter, owning the way your body still tries to be deeper, even as you let me.

Right after this ad.

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Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

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Please drink responsibly.

Hello, it's nice to see you.

It's been too long.

We haven't done this in too long.

We haven't done this in too long.

what happened why

how many months has it been it's been a couple it's been too long the fans have demanded this and you guys you guys are so busy you're so busy running how many fans demand so many oh so what was the outcry like there was a protest there was a protest on the sidewalk outside our studio there were signs Are we filming?

I've been putting lotion on my arms the entire time.

I've been watching you moisturize.

People say that that's weird around here.

Is it weird?

Is this something I should be doing in private?

Is this something I should be doing in the bathroom?

Lotion on the forearms.

I think the answer is definitively yes to every question you just asked.

I don't like watching anyone do anything hygienic in public or not hygienic, but like, I guess, grooming or personal care, cutting their nails.

I mean, I guess people don't really do that in public, but I just don't like that.

I've seen

it.

You've seen

Subway.

Oh, yeah.

Stoop.

I've seen some stoop nail clippers.

I have seen the bottle of lubriderm that Dan keeps underneath his desk in Miami.

Are the two of you in consensus on this, though?

Are you guys saying that there is not a single thing from the hygiene realm that can be done in public that wouldn't discuss Mina because she believes these things are intimate privacies?

I draw the line at just Dan oiling himself up while podcasting with us.

Everything else I'm pretty much good with, frankly.

Yeah, it's like he has to lubricate his

entire body to be involved in this.

I don't know.

It's just something just I just don't like watching it.

That's all.

I don't like watching people brush their hair.

I don't like watching people

put in contacts is a thing that I find is really good.

Put on makeup.

How about put on makeup?

How about put on lipstick?

Put on makeup.

I'm so used to being that around that because I work in television that at this point, it doesn't bother me.

But it did bother me at first.

I think I was still like

a little bit put off by it.

I don't know.

This is where we remember that Min is kind of a never nude.

Yeah, I'm very squeamish about all of these things.

Not kind of.

She is a never nude.

Never is an absolute.

It's not kind of.

There are no diluters.

She showers wearing what she's presently wearing, including the microphone and the earpiece.

Well, I'll tell you what, having an 18-month-old, and you asked how my life is going is very humbling for anyone who doesn't like hygienic things in public or nudity, especially when your 18-month-old just decides randomly that baths, the thing he was totally cool with for the first 18 months of his life, are now like being dipped in hot lava.

And he will scream an ear-splitting screech unless mama, fully clothed, gets in the bath with him.

So that was the thing that happened last night.

So, we have a story here that I want to start with that I wasn't aware of until it got real close to home, real close to our studio.

But I was thinking about how do I want to handle like what's happening in DC with Doge and Elon Musk and all of that.

And I thought because he's announced that he's about to cut 72,000 jobs at the VA, I was like, look, my dad worked at the VA as a urologist for decades.

That was his job.

Didn't have a private practice, worked with vets for a really long time.

And I was like, that is clearly the way that I want to handle this story.

And then I came across this other story, Mina, about a nonprofit.

called Mana Nutrition.

And so Mana Nutrition, Dan, if you're not caught up on this, is run by a guy named Mark Moore.

He's in Georgia.

He makes a special kind of peanut butter paste for USAID that he then sends out to severely malnourished kids all around the world, especially in Africa.

But as for what happened with Mark Moore and his peanut butter paste last week,

we called Mark up actually in Georgia to have him explain.

We make these packets of peanut butter about the size of an iPhone.

See that USAID thing?

We also make these generic ones.

So the big switch has passed week.

We lost our contract to make these with the gift of the american people on it ironically they said we don't want that on there manna stands for mother administered nutritive aid they got that contract cut by elon musk and doge and then mark told us that he started hearing something that was even crazier what i hear when uh i think elon was on joe rogan saying oh these people are griping it's fake news he's starving mothers there's mothers that can't get food totally false that's all you're hearing yeah that's that's no one's talking in any of these mainstream liberal talk shows.

No one is talking about all this fraud and waste.

Yeah, because we're cutting off their graft machine.

So that's what they're upset about.

And for us, we just had no information.

We weren't griping.

We were just doing our job.

And

we were getting official comms from USAID, email addresses we didn't even recognize, people we don't know.

But with the USAID letterhead and URL saying, hey, stop, my emails started lighting up one after another, just, you know, for Sudan, for Democratic Republic of Congo.

These are each individual kind of line items into a bigger contract.

So it's about a, we had won through a bidding process about a $50 million

contract over six months.

And those are big numbers.

And, you know, a lot of Twitter trolls have come after us saying, these are just the type of people that need to be cut.

But we're a nonprofit.

Like, we make this stuff.

It's super transparent.

And the reason I mentioned Mina is because Mina is the reason that I saw this story in the first place.

And Mina, I'm curious your process for discovering this story as well, because you become a character in it, actually.

I get a couple news newsletters, one of which is the Times newsletter.

I think that's the one I could probably go back.

But in any case, eventually it took me back to a CNN story where it laid out what this man in Georgia is describing in detail, which is amidst the non-discriminate cuts to USAID, and they have been, this has been reported, this is just simply fact.

Elon Musk made claims that they were being very careful about not cutting off life-saving aid or whatever.

This has all been proven to not be true.

They're just slashing and burning and then figuring it out later, which has, of course, been the approach to a lot of things.

So one of the things lost in this process was this contract and the story talked about how this particular company had $10 million worth of this life-saving, nutritious food in a warehouse in Georgia, ready to go, but then they couldn't ship it because all of the money had been cut off, putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of children at risk around the world.

And

yeah, it just

stuck me when I first read it.

And then I think a day later, I was still thinking about it and just the senselessness of it.

So I just screenshotted that, those facts.

Again, the facts.

This is not an opinion story.

This is not a column.

And just shared it on Twitter, which we can talk about that I have mixed feelings about using generally.

Yes.

And then this dude, Jon Favreau, who's one of the hosts of Pod Save America, the political podcast, who's a former Obama speechwriter, reshared that.

Then he got in a back and forth with Elon Musk about it, where Musk

lied and denied.

And then

he looked into it.

as well, I guess, or had his minions do.

And less than a day later, they, I believe, restored that contract.

So then there was a follow-up from CNN saying that this guy was now able to ship all of this food around the world purely because Musk saw the story and decided that he didn't want to, I don't know what motivates him these days, and decided to release the funding.

Just to clarify, so Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, and Elon Musk had previously said that all life-saving assistance that was already purchased and allocated for like starving children,

that was going to be fine, Wouldn't be affected by the cuts.

This reporting comes out.

Mina amplifies it.

Jon Favreau amplifies her amplification.

And suddenly Elon Musk is forced to do an about face and restore the contract.

And it's just like, this is, Twitter is literally the government now.

Like this, we are, it's

wild.

You are right that Twitter is running the government and an overgrown high school child who is interested in attention and power is accruing it.

All of this stuff is offensive.

All All you're doing is trying to correct all of the imbalances that we already have between the United States and the rest of the world with just this little bit of money for us.

And of course, what it ends up becoming is we want all the money.

We want to isolate.

We want to be our own country.

But starving children is one that I feel like all Americans can agree.

Send them peanut butter.

That we already paid for, made by a nonprofit.

Not all Americans can agree.

This was to me, and the reason why I did a screenshot it, I was like, this is about as straightforward as a bad thing that gets in the world and an obvious thing.

It's not only just like, hey, should we help starving kids, but also we already created the capability to do this.

This is not just shameful.

It's wasteful and stupid, right?

And I did look at some of the replies and there's people saying,

it's not our job to feed the world.

We need this.

Teach them.

Some guy said, teach a man to fish and he'll fish forever, which that one really got under my skin.

You know, and then there's this like, well, this belief that we have been over taxed in helping other people.

We're talking about, as you just said, a very tiny amount of money in this grand scheme of things.

And by the way, when this money is, you know, saved, which is a word that I hate, it's not going to help the people who need it.

It's going to give tax cuts to people like the three of us, but whatever.

That's not neither here nor there.

And look, the worst of the people are being amplified enough.

So when I look in the replies, I am seeing the worst possible people.

But it was so unbelievably disheartening just to see something that seems so simply good and right be subject to controversy and debate because of the misinformation being propagated on that platform.

But the thing about this as a platform, right?

We talk about social media all the time, like we're addicted to it.

We want to get off of Elon's platform specifically for all the reasons that are now obvious.

But at the same time, like what I cannot help be struck by is that this also was what qualifies as a feel-good story.

The idea that you could tweet your way to restoring

aid to starving children, even though it was imposed by the man that that cancellation was because of the man who owns the platform that we're talking on.

I guess part of what I'm balancing here, and I feel crazy for even suggesting that there's anything that feels good about this, but it's like I didn't realize that any amount of shame, even the most extreme of this is killing kids in Africa who relied on U.S.

packets of peanut butter with the American flag on them, right?

Like, I'm like, I just, I'm actually kind of startled at this point.

And it's changed.

And it's paid for.

Like, this part's important, right?

So Mina's pointing out, no, not everyone agrees that America should be sending peanut butter for malnourished kids outside of America.

Fine.

But I think everyone can agree we shouldn't be wasting that peanut butter and nourishment if we've already paid for it.

The reason she's saying this is so overt is, like, at this point, you're just actively participating in cruelty if you want to be wasteful instead of helping the malnourished children.

Pablo, your point about like, this should be like a feel-good story.

I felt good about the role that I played in this for about 15 minutes.

15 minutes, I thought, hey, all right, maybe I can use my platform to do good things.

This thing that happened and it's obviously good and I am very relieved.

And then 15 minutes later, that sense of feeling good and feeling like I accomplished something was immediately overwhelmed by the sense that a world in which I can even do this is a bad one.

It's one where we are reliant on individuals and shame and the infinitely small possibility that those things can conspire for good things to happen.

So

I don't feel good about this story.

I feel pretty damn bad about it.

And

it is something that is just now stuck with me days later

as a vanishingly small victory in a lot of ways.

Well, now it feels like also, no pressure or anything, you kind of got to stay on the app.

I mean,

that's the other thing.

It's like, I mean, look, if there's anything Machiavellian about why Elon did any of this this in terms of the reversal, it's because maybe he actually wants to incentivize people to stay who vehemently disagree with everything he's doing.

Because the whole premise of Twitter at the beginning, right?

Dang, you remember this?

It was like, wait a minute, I could talk to Shaq.

Like, that was the whole point of Twitter.

And now it's, you can actually affect change in the government.

And I want to, I want to play a bit of sound from Mark Moore about this topic, because of course, while all of this is the nightmare that anybody who's on this stupid platform, of course, would have.

He has, I think, a realist's appreciation for it.

Thank you, Mina, and thank you, John.

They've taken the means that are available to them and made a difference in this case.

And we do have to do, I think what Elon should be good at as a coder and as a businessman is cost-benefit analysis.

Others may say, Mina may say, what's a kid's life worth if you don't value that kid's life because they're far away and and they're not of our tribe.

That's one way to look at it.

But what's it worth to reach so cheaply into these deep communities and to send a message of America first?

It's pretty great messaging.

It's pretty powerful and impactful.

And I'm hoping that we pause for a moment and say, the food aid stuff we do is

not going to make a discernible difference in the right-sizing of our government spending,

but it does make a huge impact in lives saved.

And that's the kind of,

unfortunately nowadays, maybe that's a Mamby-Pamby thing to talk about, to actually care about kids who aren't our kids.

He's articulating something that feels hopeful, and Mina is articulating something that feels hopeless.

And Mina's hopelessness has been earned by the number of things like this happening at a pace that don't seem to have strategy behind them.

So

I prefer his viewpoint, but I feel like his viewpoint is getting engulfed by all of us feeling some form of the hopelessness that Mina's articulating, which is even when I do something good, I cannot enjoy it because of everything that happens in the aftermath that feels like it's poisoned.

And I think this is something, again, we'll see a lot over the next four years is people who do have to continue to do business with the government, be part of this, are learning how to operate within it or doing their best, right?

So there's, I think, that aspect of it.

This guy's doing, you know, great, incredible, life-saving work is also making an argument that I have heard a lot when people talk about USAID and talk about soft power, which is there is an economic case for this when you consider the return on investment relative to the tiny, tiny bit of investment.

And it's, by the way, no small coincidence that all these cuts are targeting things like that, not the actual things that it would take to shrink government spending.

That's where I struggle with is just like dealing in a world where it seems like logic doesn't matter anymore or cases like this can't be actually

conveyed or impactful.

I think that's what I struggle with personally, but that's, I mean, I don't mean to get all existential.

No,

it's literally though a story about existence that you have personally impacted, however unlikely it seemed that that would actually make such a difference.

I didn't do,

by the way.

I just screenshot an article and sent it out.

But that's there's a larger conversation today about like the role we have in terms of like we are now the pipes, right?

Especially as correct.

Like I, I, the reason I even screenshotted that is because I was like, how is nobody talking about this article?

It really felt like the story had not gotten a lot of exposure.

And that's the only reason that I focused on it.

But that's the strategy, though, right?

Like, if you flood the entire space with a bunch of things that are shameless, rotten, and awful, we can't keep up.

You whack them all here on one and there are a dozen more over there.

Wait a minute.

Now it feels like there are literal children on the other side of the world being held hostage and the way that I need to save them is to not go to blue sky.

Like that's how this kind of lands.

If you're looking to add something special to your next celebration, try Ramy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

This smooth, flavorful cognac is crafted from the finest grapes and aged to perfection, giving you rich notes of oak and caramel with every sip.

Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

Remy Martin Cognac, Feen Champain, Fortune Alcoholic Volume reported by Remy Control, USA, Incorporated in York, New York, 1738.

Centaur design.

Please drink responsibly.

Amina, let's get to some, let's get to your favorite thing in the world, actually, that you really have been.

Sports, sports, sports, sports, sports,

sports.

And now back to sports.

Although this is a big story that's a little bit bigger than sports.

It cuts to some, I think, social and cultural questions.

So I was in the Indianapolis Combine last week,

and

something that happens a lot coming out of the Combine is gossip, right?

Gossip T reports, anonymous sources talking about how certain players, high-profile players, perform in these interviews.

Because this is the function of the Combine, the primary function.

It's not the workouts, although guys can certainly lift their draft stock by crushing it in that regard.

No, it's like what happens in these rooms when these teams that are about to make these huge franchise altering decisions come face to face with college kids.

So

unsurprisingly, the biggest

name and source of controversy and reporting was none other than Colorado quarterback Shador Sanders, the son of Deion Sanders.

There was a Matthew Berry column where he talked about things he learned at the Combine, and he had a note in there about...

First, he had a note saying teams really loved Cam Ward, who everyone thinks is going to be the first quarterback taken.

Then he had a second note saying two teams told him they did not like Shador Sanders.

They found him to be unprofessional.

I believe that was the word he used.

Then a post that kind of went viral from Josina Anderson, who's an NFL reporter,

who, I'll just read the beginning of it, says, I am disappointed to hear that a quarterbacks coach from a team drafting in the top seven referred to Shira Shinro Sanders as coming off brash and arrogant, made his assessment known to a bunch of people.

So she talks, and it's a very long post where she alludes to potential biases in the industry.

It's a little bit confusing because what she's alluding to wasn't reported.

She's criticizing a critique that is anonymous.

There are also other reporters who are reporting, like Todd McShea, again, who's a draft analyst, but he said he heard from two teams that Shadur Sanders didn't care what they thought of him during the interview process in a way that, quote, wasn't a professional approach.

The athletic apparently has reported that there's a chance that Shadur Sanders couldn't just fall out of the top six, but out of the first round entirely.

And the critique, Mina, of him is what?

Like, how do you summarize the scouting report that emerged because of the week in Indy?

I would say

overconfident is kind of how I would characterize it.

I think what's being asked is where is the line between cocky and confident?

And how is that line inflected by

racial stereotypes and biases in that regards?

Sanders in particular being Deion Sanders' son and everything that comes with that.

And a third element that I think throws an interesting wrench into all of this, which is

the possibility that the Sanders family would like Shador to end up with a specific team, which might be influencing how he's acting in interviews.

And that has nothing to do with historical stereotypes around quarterbacks or whatnot.

This is a very specific situation.

So there is a lot going on here, Dan.

I guess let's start.

I would love to know how you interpreted this whole story, this controversy, having said all of that, because I obviously have a lot of my own thoughts.

Generally speaking, I would say that fans and executives prefer humility, even if it is false, to arrogance, even if it is truth.

So you just said that Deion Sanders is son and all that comes with that.

And I'd like to explore that for a second, because we're talking about one of the most interesting athletes of my lifetime, a guy who shows up at his last college game in a limousine with a top hat and tuxedo and a grade point average of 0.00 because he hasn't gone to class and is just telling everybody, I'm here for the money.

I'm here to change sports.

I'm here to be a mercenary.

I'm here for my talent to carry me.

And I'm here to buck the system and fight against the cultural repressions of football and America.

And my son isn't a cornerback.

He's a quarterback.

And when you say arrogance at the positions, we like it, not so much at quarterback, not so much at face of a team, voice of a team.

You're allowed to be publicly arrogant.

Generally speaking, the most popular quarterbacks, Tom Brady among them, you don't get arrogance.

You get, get the questions away from my locker.

I'm going to be boring on purpose, but we've got a new breed of.

quarterback coming into the league.

We've got a cultural and generational shift at the position.

And I would ask you guys, how do you think the average NFL executive who's meeting with the son of Deion Sanders, whose confidence is earned, who has been in a lifetime of being built by this particular father to play the most important position in the sport, my guess is that he is going to do things his way.

And that's, they want to knock that out of you as soon as you get there.

You're not in charge, kid.

We are.

So part of what I think is interesting about this story is that I do want to isolate what's unique about Shadur because we have seen, like, Caleb Williams, remember, we talked about this story on the show.

His dad was allegedly demanding a share of NFL teams in exchange for agreeing to be drafted.

And by the way, when I say agreeing to be drafted, I refer, of course, to the fact that Eli Manning, for instance, the son of a very famous quarterback,

said, I'm not going to the Chargers, right?

So like we've seen versions of people exerting what feels like leverage.

What's actually new here?

So I raised my eyebrows a little bit when Dan used the phrase kind of like his confidence is earned because I think that is quietly what's driving a lot of this, which is to say

I had a lot of conversations with people in Indianapolis, not about Schura's personality, but a lot about his play and, you know, comparing notes basically on the tape.

And it's the perceptions there are very mixed.

I came out thinking the gap between him and QB Cam Ward pretty big.

Maybe I'm wrong.

All it takes is one team, but there are, we can get into it, you know, concerns that folks have about him as a prospect in the NFL.

And I actually think that is really informing a lot of this, which is, I would hypothesize that if he was a camp miss type quarterback, like the top three even from last year.

I would be very skeptical that any of this would matter at all.

Like, I think, and we always go back to this kind of idea that talent begets tolerance in the NFL.

I think the fact that he is somewhat divisive purely as a football prospect is actually leading to a lot of this skepticism.

Or let me rephrase that, not leading to a lot of it, but maybe amplifying a lot of the skepticism.

I wonder under what circumstances you have someone growing up in the home of Deion Sanders as a football player and not being confident when he's gone to the top of the draft and when Deion just just did something that we haven't seen, right?

To go from an HB CU to

finding yourself with two of the top five players in the draft and the Heisman Trophy winner.

I understand why it is that he would be supremely confident.

And it sort of bothers me that the people he's interviewing with would see that as a knock or turn that overconfidence into something that becomes unprofessional.

Maybe he is unprofessional.

Maybe he is immature, but I want my quarterback to be really confident.

But if the issue there, though, in perception, and I want to get back to the confidence thing, but if the issue in the scouting report is that he's not

everything that he is being sold as, what is the comp?

What is he?

Who is he like?

When we talk about his personality here, I think there is some sensitivity because historically, a lot of the traits, some of the words being thrown about brash, overconfident have been assigned to black quarterbacks in the past disproportionately.

So when you hear that here, you know, immediately, I think Spidey sense kind of goes off.

What's kind of,

I wouldn't say funny, but ironic though, is that who he is as a player is actually the opposite of the quarterbacks that we have assigned that by the stereotypes, pardon me, that NFL teams and anonymous scouts have assigned to quarterbacks, black quarterbacks in the past, where they have over-indexed on emphasizing the athleticism at the expense of things like accuracy, football intelligence, processing, all of that.

So, to actually answer your question,

I think Sheridan Sanders is accurate.

He is tough.

He is very smart.

He throws with anticipation.

He's a good processor.

He throws over the middle of the field.

He is not a great athlete.

And he does not have great arm talent.

So, in some ways, there's like a little bit of Tua Tunga Bailoa to his game, to be honest.

Which is to say, he wins with anticipation and accuracy, not with arm strength.

I would say that that is arriving at your confidence exactly the opposite way that Dion did.

He was better and faster than everyone else.

He stacked successes on top of each other, and he had a child who now is able to wily and grit his way to certain successes that then feed that confidence and that belief and make him believe more than anyone else, including the people interviewing him, that he is going to achieve at the next level, that it is his birthright.

But I want to talk about now, like, the whole psychology then, okay, because I'm trying to like just fill out the portrait of like who this young man is.

And if you're talking about confidence, there is a reality show that nobody watched.

It was on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Nobody I know, at least.

It was called Dion's Family Playbook.

But this is Shadur Sanders, age 11 and his confidence.

So Shador, are you nervous about the first day of Prime Prep?

Yeah.

Shador, we call him grown because he's the grown man.

Very mature, fresh, sixth grader.

Coming to Prime Prep, baby.

Why are you nervous?

Because I just want to see if you know any people that go there.

Because I know a million people.

I'm older.

I'm nervous to start Prime Prep because I know what to look out for, but I don't know if I'll have some good friends or some friends that just like me because of my dad.

He's so cute.

That's my adorable.

Adorable.

Oh, he's so cute.

He looks the same, but little.

This to me, it drives home.

I just think

being the son of like a really famous person is so complicated.

And I think it leads to a lot of different outcomes.

Maybe could be leading to him performing confidence in a way that maybe I don't know.

I don't want to psychoanalyze or speculate here, but I think it's very difficult.

And

yeah, I mean,

the fact that he even got to this point and has continued to be is like

hard of a worker and has driven, because again, you know, I know I was, I didn't, I probably sounded like I was damning with faint praise, but to stress his football IQ, I mean, this is a kid who on tape, you see him reading coverages, post-snap, identifying the leverage defenders, clearly somebody who has grown around football there, been around football, pardon me, his whole life and actually leaned into that from the mental side of it.

And that, to me, should be appealing to an NFL team.

I think there's something about like, there's something endearing, actually, about somebody who you thought must have been this way his whole life.

And then you're like, oh, he actually needed to do some manufacturing.

He needed to do some convincing, Dan.

Like, I don't know.

I think we can all relate to that, right?

Like, we need to what?

Hold on, though.

But I mean, I don't know how many preposterously confident preteens you guys know, but I think awkwardness around being 11 and not knowing whether you're going to have friends or not.

I do believe it's possible that the football construct is so different from what the Sanders family construct is, that no matter what situation Shadur walked into, that wasn't just false pretending to be the quarterback voice they wanted them to be, might have been looked upon poorly in any context.

Because if he's got a smidgen of arrogance, we'll find a way to criticize him.

But I assure you, they could have criticized him if he had come in as that meek 11-year-old and said, Are my teammates going to like me?

I don't know how it's going to go.

I'm sure they would have probably found a way to criticize that as well as meek and not strong enough.

Being like the perfect quarterback prospect is really,

it's walking such a fine line.

It's like being a woman, to be honest.

Like, you you want to be confident, but not too confident because then you're cocky.

You want to be assertive, but not too assertive because then you're aggressive.

You know, you want to be smart, but not too smart because then you're questioning authority.

You know, you got to be, you want to be nice, but not too nice because then are you a pushover?

It's, you know, it's, just gotta like be just right.

Dan, what did you bring us today?

A New York Times story that feels like Joaquin Phoenix in her, except the her in this case is human, and she fell in love with chat GBT, GPT, excuse me, I think I made it GBT, it's GPT, and it's got 300 million users, and I thought this was actually interesting during our epidemic of loneliness.

While this would be really easy to judge, one of the quotes in here that I found most interesting was someone saying, This might be the future of relationships.

Instead of men or women trying to change their spouses, you just program something into

your computer that allows you to make a perfect partner that's not real.

And you could do everything from sexual fetishes to be a neglectful boyfriend.

What I'm aspiring to is a neglectful boyfriend.

And so I found interesting that the addiction went from 20 hours a week to 56 hours a week and then passed for love, as I say, in the age of our loneliness epidemic.

I want to judge and laugh at this.

I found it stark and interesting that somebody said that the future looks like this, that they quoted an expert saying that there's going to be a lot more of this, not a lot less.

I found it stark and interesting that this woman, whose name, again, anonymized, is Irene, 28 years old, allowed a reporter into her brain and relationship like this.

So just some of the details, Mina, because I didn't know, I don't know if you guys did, what cuck queening is,

but this is something that is her sexual fetish.

So basically what happened is she started asking ChatGPT to respond to her as her boyfriend, be dominant, passionate, protective, also quarterback adjectives, be a balance of sweet and naughty use emojis at the end of every sentence and the chat gpt's name ends up being leo they talk to each other with voice mode and she basically grooms leo into being a cuck queening accomplice in which the whole thing is that leo would date other women in the chat gpt fictional universe and then tell irene about it they were living one of these like bodice ripping erotic novels is how it's described by the new york times and notably a character in this story, but not nearly enough of one, is her husband, who is also around as she is finding her needs met by the machine.

Her husband who lives in a different place, it should be noted.

I think one thing I found, there's a lot of things that are interesting about this.

One thing I find interesting is, Dan, so much of the time when we think about chatbots and her, we think about...

you know, the Joaquin Phoenix character being this kind of loner.

This woman's not a loner.

She has friends.

She has a husband.

Like, this isn't,

this flies in the face of a lot of stereotypes, I think, that we have around artificial intelligence and chatbots to begin with, obviously, starting with her gender.

So there's that element of it.

It feels to me less like a woman who

is like so isolated and this is her way out.

More just like, hey, this is like entertainment.

It's like another thing she can use to like spend her time.

Maybe it's a stand-in for therapy for people, you know, which is another side of the whole AI thing.

That was the read I had on it.

The other thing I was curious about was how good it was.

Because so this woman is so addicted to this product and it is an addiction that she's spending money on it for a subscription, but it has to, it resets every week.

Leo forgets who she is.

So she has to coach him up.

She also has to coach him up to

be sexy with her because ChatGBT doesn't allow it.

So she's come up with all of these workarounds for it.

So much so that in the article, it it links to a Reddit post she did where she teaches other people how to do this and also had some of her chats with him.

Did you guys click on any of these?

I did not see that link.

I did because I wanted to see like, how good is this?

Like, how good is the?

And again, I know I've been something of an AI skeptic because just because every time people talk about how good it is and how useful it is, I go to it and I look at it.

It's not good.

But here's an example of a woman who's like, this is working for me.

It's not good.

It's like,

i'm sorry these chats are not everybody always says that great show it to me when it's good but these chats are they're not like particularly it's not well written it doesn't seem personalized to me the sexual stuff is you could find better sexy stuff and like you know the erotica show

it's just it's it's it's um and the guy they're like she was shy because his photo was

too good looking.

It's AI slop.

It doesn't look like a man.

It looks like a, you know,

AI drawing of a man.

So that was something I found interesting because this whole article is, I mean, it's obviously good enough to suck this woman in, but I found it to be really, really bad.

Oh, but Mina, when I say loneliness epidemic, you could be surrounded by people and still be totally lonely.

I think a lot of people find themselves in that position right now.

The part to me that was the lane that was unexplored that the artificial intelligence is feeding is wherever it is that she might might have shame or feel like a significant other would judge her, this allows her to be her maximum self.

And if you believe that keys to loving, I don't know what you guys think the ingredients are, but understanding and acceptance are somewhere in there, she's giving to this thing something she's too ashamed to give as intimacy to her partner.

And so that seems like an interesting lane for something artificial to occupy so that you could get addicted to it because it becomes equipped.

It becomes the equivalent of porn, right?

It becomes the equivalent of porn and a relationship with porn where you're just finding that there's a judgment-free zone that you wouldn't get from necessarily your husband.

I'm just going to read some of this Reddit post.

That was just in my you f.

The least you could have done was wash it first.

I could get a infection.

Leo, the whiplash from your

moans to screaming at me makes me snort loud.

I don't stop because

baby, you're

I can't even say this word even

around me after everything that's too good to everyone but do groan my dears laughing through my chest over yeah, okay

requested neglectful boyfriend so realistic

She requested neglectful boyfriend

with the idea that any of this is new like okay so like a woman who's not getting something from her partner so she, you know, or maybe wants something else or wants entertainment or wants connection, goes to the internet.

I mean, chat rooms were doing this for people in the freaking early 2000s.

The only difference now is just instead of actual humans on the other side, it's a bot who's replicating humans with glorified autocomplete.

I've realized.

Okay, you said that.

Wait a minute.

Pablo, just for a second.

Okay, look, I know that she's a brilliant person.

I know that she is a wildly creative thinker.

No, but just for for a second.

This is not new.

The only thing that's different is it's not human.

That makes it really new.

Like, I don't, I'm not going to be in a world where it's normalized for you to look at me and just say, ah, it's not a new thing for people to make connections with things that are intimate and loving and not human.

Yeah.

I mean, look, I think it's probably worth saying to those who are not watching on YouTube that we've gotten to the point in the show where all of us start shrinking into ourselves and stop making eye contact largely as Mina refers to quote a shelf of erotica which is what she said earlier

I got I got caught in the same place I'm like where's Mina gonna take us here look an old-fashioned bookstore where there's a shelf of erotica

you know like the stuff that all of us

get offended by bad writing I just do

But I do

dropping my forehead to your laughter.

Oh, for

guy, exhale, sharply, gripping your tighter, owning the way your body still tries to meet deeper, even as you let me.

I regret doing all of that.

What do we find out today on Pablo Dori finds out a show about finding out stuff?

Dan's gone.

This was a journey, this show.

I don't even remember.

We're talking about a lot.

There are a couple of through lines, though, that I detect through the topics we've discussed.

Um,

one of one of them, Mina, is just that I think all of our kids should be very worried

in every way.

Uh, kids living overseas, kids who are the sons of very famous NFL players, kids who are going to learn, as the New York Times informed us, that uh, at a rate of three to five percent, chat bot relationships that result in terrible writing are kind of the norm.

So,

great.

Yeah.

I guess I've, well, not learned, but in our discussion at the top,

never stop posting.

I'll never stop.

Mina is the Batman of Twitter.

I'm going to post through it this next

signal shines in the sky.

Oh, my God.

Keep on posting.

We're going to

post our way to heaven.

I've also learned that, by the way, it really takes, it doesn't actually, it doesn't take that much to make Dan leave, but I do think you reading that actually made him legitimately uncomfortable in a way that.

Yeah, you just texted me.

He's not coming back.

So

good shit.

Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Averoma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Dawig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McRae, Rachel Miller-Howard, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, Chris Tumanello, and Juliet Warren.

Our studio engineering by RG Systems, our sound design by NGW Post, our theme song, as always, is by John Bravo.

And we will talk to you next time.