Share & Gossip & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Charlotte Wilder

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Charlotte Wilder and Pablo Torre, you are wonderful people.

Someone put some piano under this.

Right after this ad.

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Cool sweatshirt, Wyatt.

Thank you very much.

What is the chipmunk holding?

A golf ball.

Classic.

Duh.

I don't know anything about golf, but I do like the idea of little critters stealing golf balls.

Me too.

Yeah.

I'd watch that sport.

But it is the thing that Augusta does not not have squirrels famously is that true

true thanks damn it

oh this is gonna be a weird episode

but here's here's the here's the golf digest story about augusta there are no birds squirrels insects or any other living creature indigenous to planet earth at the masters nowhere on the property don't they bring in the azaleas too

i think they do i think they card in the flowers so like oh and they pipe in the bird sounds because they're no birds

wait there so here's the thing.

As I said, the only golf I'm interested in is critters stealing golf balls.

So I've never seen the masters.

I didn't realize that there's bird noises.

They pipe in the crowd noise like Lucas Oil stayed in with the cults, except it's birds.

That's true.

Augusta.

These are the things that rattle around in my brain from a decade of blogging.

It's like, are the bird sounds at Augusta real?

My column.

The whole birds are real movement.

Do you think that sort of was born out of people being at the masters and being like,

I hear birds, but I don't see any birds.

Birds aren't real.

A CBS spokesperson has insisted that, quote, the birds you hear are live and they are indigenous to Augusta, end quote.

But many remain skeptical on account of the lack of wildlife that anyone has ever seen.

Okay, so that doesn't necessarily say that

those are birds.

That could, they're just saying the birds you hear are live.

Like they're saying the sounds you hear are from a living thing.

Could it be,

could it be that those birds are just Michael Winslow from the Police Academy movies?

They've given him an apartment at Augusta National so that he is now indigenous to Augusta because he lives on the land and they just have him recording bird noises.

Right.

Really, that makes you think.

Yeah, I've been up for 72 hours.

So have you?

No.

Okay, good.

Also, one thing in defense, not in defense of Augusta, because good lord, but

it is harder to prevent birds from landing in trees than it is to smoke out.

I mean, they made a whole movie about this, didn't they?

Isn't Caddyshack a like?

You can smoke out groundhogs and stuff.

You can like get rid of squirrels more easily than like clearing the skies, I would imagine.

I know at the airport, they have something, I think it's called like a Zon gun.

Whoa.

Yeah.

A Zon gun?

A Zon gun.

And it's.

Oh, here we go.

Found it.

Yeah.

At birdbarrier.com.

Wow.

Zon scare gun, a lightweight, portable, propane-fired cannon amidst automatic thunderclaps that deter birds and other nuisance wildlife.

It's got real, real genocidal.

Yeah.

Real quick at the end of that sentence.

But also that, I feel like that probably wouldn't be good for golf to have like the sound of thunder.

Some guy's about to tee off and it's just like boom, boom.

Yeah.

And it's like, you just ruined Scotty Schiffler's day.

And that's saying something because he got arrested earlier.

Yeah,

he was totally fine with that.

It was the Zond gun that really just was like, that's the bridge too far.

$178.50.

That's how much a Zond gun costs?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

$178 or $178,000.

What a business.

What a business where it's plausible that it's $178,000.

Can you see it?

They've only sold three.

Yeah.

Yeah.

LaGuardia, JFK,

and Nantucket.

Well, I was going to say, $178 seems like too low a price point.

I'm surprised there aren't more people with Zong guns.

Like, if there are so many people with drones, I kind of feel like for $178, I'm sure you can buy a really nice drone.

Why aren't there people who are just like, I got a Zong gun instead?

Why has this episode of Share and Tell turned into a Zong gun ad?

Today's episode of Pablo Torre finds out has been brought to you by Zonguns.

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Wyatt and Charlotte, you have not been on Share and Tell together until now.

We did it.

All right, show's over.

No credits.

Okay, this has been fun.

I want to start with Wyatt.

All right.

Why would you bring us today?

So, today, I brought a story that I read in the New York Times.

I believe they call it the paper of record.

The old gray lady?

Yes, yeah.

What a weird

gray lady.

Yeah.

That's that's actually what this episode is about.

I like my newspapers gender neutral.

Also color neutral.

Like, why gray?

I mean, I get the newspapers were gray, but that also feels like, oh, it's dour, it's sad.

It's.

I just like the idea of an old lady in her attic who's like kind of sallow and she's just like doling out news.

Yeah.

She's the person.

She's tossing papes out the window.

She knows everything.

She's on top of everything that's happening in City Hall is just some old lady in her attic.

Yeah.

So I today I wanted to ask you all, do you know about a musician?

Are you familiar with the music of Matt Farley?

Of course not.

So Matt Farley is a musician, and I assume you both listen to music on streaming, on the Spotify's and a Zoom, perhaps?

A mini disc player for me.

Oh, okay.

You're a mini disc.

But for streaming music fans, Matt Farley has made,

I believe, over 24,000 songs that you can listen to, download, share.

And he's made a lot of money making 24,000 or over 24,000 songs.

Yes.

The number in this New York Times story indicates that in 2023, Matt Farley's music, looking this up, earned him just shy of $200,000.

But as Wyatt, I think, will explain here, one half penny at a time.

Yeah, making money on Spotify, not that easy.

It's way like people always talked about, oh, the music business in general, you didn't make a lot of money.

The idea was like record sales, you typically made a dollar on every album you sold.

If you were

an artist by yourself, you got that $1.

If you were in a group, you split that $1 between the five of them.

Wow.

The rate, though, on Spotify now, to be clear, is now apparently per Matt Farley, roughly a third of a cent per stream.

So now then keep that in mind, that a third of a cent per stream, and he still made 200K.

So that's a lot of streams.

What are the songs?

So the writer of this article is a journalist named Brett Martin, and he had discovered that there was a song about him on Spotify that was was titled, Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes.

And he listened to the song, which included a phone number

to call.

Brett Martin is my phone number.

603-644-0048.

And the phone number was the phone number of one Matt Farley.

And so being a journalist who has questions after hearing this song, and by his own admission, he listened to it a lot.

After hearing the song, he figured maybe I should call Matt Farley because he's trying to find me.

That said, he only discovered this 11 years after the song had been made.

So he was like, oh,

Matt Farley, he put a message in a bottle and I'm finally getting it.

He calls Matt Farley, who has no idea who he is.

No,

which is a real bummer if you're like the one person who has made a musical tribute to my image

has forgotten me over the course of 24,000 songs.

And by the way,

also

about 80 different pseudonyms that Matt Farley, it turns out, has made music underneath.

And that kind of gets into one of the things about both Matt Farley and this particular style of making music on Spotify, which is as one individual person,

if you made 24,000 songs, it would raise alarms over at Spotify.

Matt Farley is just one of many individuals who are making large amounts of music, just volume music makers, but they have to create all these pseudonyms to do it.

And the whole idea is that they're making this volume music with the idea to monetize it.

And so they have 60, 70 different pseudonyms making, in Matt Farley's case, he's making albums of 50 songs doing this monthly with the idea that, all right, all of my, my stable of artists who are all just me are bringing in all of this money.

So he is both the shady record label executive and the artists at the same time who are not making enough money.

Yeah, he is Joe Jackson, Michael, and also the record label.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

And so all of this, I want to be clear, all of this is about fundamentally search engine optimization.

Yes.

Which is the thing all of us know, we talk about on the show a lot, but just the idea of the internet was set up for discoverability on some level.

And in the world of music, streaming on Spotify, you have people entering search terms.

And then what comes back, of course, it turns out at a staggering statistical rate is Matt Farley's work.

Yeah.

And so he's written to just game the search engine of this, apparently 600 songs inviting different named girls to the prom.

Like 500 songs that are just marriage proposals, like proposal plus name that someone would find.

Do you know what this is?

This is the modern day equivalence of going to a gift shop on vacation and finding your name on the license plate keychain.

A thing I never did.

Wyatt?

They didn't have Wyatt?

Wyatt was never a popular name.

They never had Charlotte either.

They never had Pablo.

Never.

You know how many Pedro license plates I held in my hand wondering why my parents had to do this?

So many Charlie's I'm just staring at wistfully.

But that's sort of what this is, right?

Yeah, it's 100% that.

And that, yeah, and that is, but it's a weird thing where

we're not every day buying like little license plates.

Like that's not something that, oh, on my way to work, I need a shit little license plate.

Okay, that's a good point.

This feels so different where it's like, well, if you're in Atlantic City and you need a little tchotchki, you want a tchotchki with your name on it.

If you're on a road trip, you're not like, oh, you know, what's going to get us through this road trip is a stack of shit little license plates.

Speak for yourself, Wyatt.

This shit little license plates are woven into the fabric of my life.

But there is a tchotchki economy embedded in Matt Farley's.

musical career because the guy also, another thing he has figured out cleverly to do is perform 70 versions of the song We Wish You a Merry Christmas, but substitute foods for figgy pudding.

And he's just like creating iterations on iterations.

And apparently,

his work

in the realm of poop, because he has a whole like musical identity,

the odd man who sings about poop, puke and pee, he's earned almost half a million dollars from various platforms on just that specific content alone.

Yeah.

That's that's that's that's toddlers, right?

That's geared for toddlers.

That's toddlers who are like yelling poop into the Alexa.

I presume so.

But also what this reminds me of, of course, is like the way in which

every year, right?

What do Americans Google when it's time for the most watched and consumed cultural event of the year?

What time does the Super Bowl start?

Yes.

And so every, all of these publications will put out a blog that says the time of the Super Bowl because America is searching for this.

And so it is about like,

there is a logic to this that is find your audience where they are going.

Right.

As opposed to like try to convince people to come over here to watch perhaps an original.

curiosity driven podcast with journalism at its heart.

No, I want to go to where you're searching and I'll get my third of a cent there.

Right.

But what also feels weird about that is, again, it's not not a shitty little license plate.

It's a sort of landscape that is built on creativity and imagination.

And so there's, at least for me, this more larger philosophical question of

what is a song then?

If your whole goal is, okay, I know that people often shout out poop to the Alexa.

I'm going to write a song about poop and I'll write 500 other songs about poop that i can

grab i can just grab that little corner of audience is that a song well matt farley proclaims himself to be in this article the greatest songwriter of the 21st century

so i mean

you wyatt does he believe that's what he's doing or does he just it to me it seems like he has found a way to monetize things people are already doing.

He's making money off of things that are already happening that because of the internet and how smart, like everything's connected.

You Google something, you Google your name, this song comes up, you click.

Like he is, he is capitalizing on things we already do.

Well,

it's also kind of like algorithmic weird owl because he has these parodies, but in this case, it's almost it's more like, I think this is why it's point.

It's moving away from parody as an art form and parody as a way of fooling a search engine into playing something.

And so he'll have songs like This Girl is on fire, parentheses, quick, comma, grab a fire extinguisher, exclamation point.

Right.

You know, you also find Searching for Sugarman, which is a title of a Matt Farley song.

If you're looking for searching actually for a Sugar Man by Rodriguez, which is an actual thing.

Right.

And there's something about that that,

you know, I listened to the That Girl is on Fire quick put her out.

This girl is on fire and I'm really, really, really, really worried about her.

If I saw somebody on stage with a piano doing that, I would think, oh, that's a funny bit.

It's weird, though, when the whole thing is not, it doesn't feel like it's about the audience as much as it's about the algorithm.

And the algorithm is now the audience.

Right.

And not simply that the algorithm is the audience, but your

way to succeed isn't so much about pleasing the algorithm as it is finding this little loophole that you can exploit and monetize.

And so it's not, so in a world where like everybody else is like, oh, I'm making music because this is, I had a breakup and this is my song about my breakup.

And it's just me trying to get my feelings out through sound.

Here's a person who's like, oh, but there's a little, there's a little loophole in there where I could make a ton of money and if i just exploit that and there's now just an ecosystem of loop oil loop oil we all know loop oil loop oil yeah

olive oil's olive oil's cousin loop oil yeah yeah but it does feel like uh one of these one of these sorts of uh mining for resource dynamics online that is fundamentally toxic yes speaking of loop oils yes it's about who can be more clever clever than the rulemakers.

It reminds me of how CAPTCHAs work now that I think about it.

Are you familiar?

So you know how

I am not a robot?

Yes.

I'm not a robot.

Identify every motorcycle in these things.

You know what's really happening there, which blew my mind when I discovered this, is that we are not proving that we are humans.

The point isn't to validate only a human can come to this website.

The point is that they're getting free human labor to flag images, to train artificial intelligence and algorithms so we are teaching the computer double checking their work by saying motorcycle motorcycle motorcycle so we're doing labor for them under the guise of there's another function that you got to do a test you got to pass according to these rules to use this site those dirty little birdies the ecosystem it's so messed up that it rewards 24 000 songs about poop and yet like a struggling artist in nashville trying to make it can't get paid by people listening to their music.

Right.

And not only that, that struggling artist is now also being incentivized to make music to make poop songs.

Yeah, like that, if you want to be a musician today, and this kind of gets back to that philosophical question of what is music.

If the idea is that success in music is to be like Matt Farley and just be a volume shooter, then

the notion of being a musician is be a volume shooter.

There's a musician named Damon Krakowski.

He is in this band called Galaxy 500 and

he writes a lot about this stuff because one day he discovered what his most popular song on Spotify was.

It doesn't sound like most of their music.

It was something that to hear him tell it, they kind of wrote it as a joke because somebody at the label was like, oh, could you make something that's a little more like radio friendly?

So they made this radio friendly song.

It was put on an album.

They never thought anything of it.

He then goes on Spotify and sees that that is their biggest song because it winds up being the thing that when you put on like whatever sort of Spotify radio, that song gets lumped in with other like pop songs that fit that kind of that thing.

And the way he talks about it is like, if you're an up and coming musician, you could then say, out of desperation, well, I'm not going to be true to myself.

If that's what is succeeding, I should just make that.

I should just make a bunch of music that sounds like it could be

whatever radio, like Kings of Leon radio or whatever the hell it is.

Like, I should just make something in that vein.

Or, better yet, you should be making like Matt Farley and producing a song about Wyatt Senak.

Get out

Wyatt Senak, you are a wonderful talented comedian

and actor and writer.

And I

really respect you, oh my goodness,

Wyatt Senak,

you're all-time world famous man,

Dennis Sho,

funny guy,

wonderful dude.

Oh,

yeah.

I take back everything I said.

I take back everything I said.

I'm like, this slaps.

Yeah, this is music.

This is the philosophical question, no, this is, Matt Farley, you should be making more Wyatt Sanak songs.

Where is my 50-song album?

Okay, an important question I have about this whole thing, is this, is Matt Farley making this Wyatt Sanak song, or is this AI too?

Or is he making and singing every single song?

Because that, like, that took him maybe 10 minutes, which is still 10 minutes.

How dare you presume that?

Yeah, I think he

went to the bottom.

I know how much craftsmanship it takes to make a license plate like that song.

Okay.

You're making it sound like he simply just changed out the letter.

I'm just jealous I don't have one.

Okay, I'll say it.

We did look.

Neither of us have a Matt Farley license.

Charlotte Wilder and Pablo Torre, you are wonderful people.

Someone put some piano under this,

and I like you very much.

Put this on Spotify and let's all get rich.

It doesn't matter if it rhymes or not.

Thank you.

Yeah, I really appreciate that.

It means a lot.

That is worth at least two-thirds of a sub.

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Charlotte does not have a song named after her,

but she does have a new podcast.

Thank you so much.

It is called The Sports Gossip Show, hosted by Madeline Hill and I.

Madeline, we both.

That's a theme song because I know a guy.

Yeah,

tell Matt Farley to get on it.

She has an amazing substack called Impersonal Fouls, which is sports gossip.

And we connected and realized that we both care about the same thing, which is who are these people that you're watching?

Because you know they've got families, you know, they're dating people, you know, and a lot of times because they're famous, they're dating other famous people, or there's just all of this stuff that goes on around games.

And I have a few questions for you guys just about the news peg for this is that Bravo is developing a reality show about the wives and girlfriends, wags, as we say in the sports gossip biz.

The sports goss.

Yeah, the sports goss universe.

Which is just a group chat with you, me involuntarily, my part, and Ryan Cortez.

Yeah, right.

Just like it's just me and Cortez talking about Love is Blind.

The people.com headline, by the way, is in big text, Bravo developing reality show about Kansas City Chiefs' wags, comma, still determining final cast members, parentheses, exclusive source.

Yes.

All of that sounds like search engine optimization.

It would have been search optim, whatever, if they had put in Taylor Swift and Brittany Mahomes will not be in it because Taylor Swift dating tight end Travis Kelsey and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Brittany Mahomes, wife of Patrick Mahomes, both figures who are very interesting to a lot of people.

But what I think is so interesting about this and really smart of the people who are going to be involved, which is Micole Hardiman's partner, Shariah Gordon, is that she has done a very good job of, as all this attention has come to the Chiefs because of Taylor Swift, because she is bringing in this new audience to football, she is taking this spotlight and making it something of her own,

which I think is very savvy.

Absolutely.

But look, it is hilarious that it's like, you searched for Taylor Swift.

You're getting McColl Hardman.

Look,

it's smart.

No,

it has.

It's the loophole a little bit.

Yeah.

Correct.

We're in the loophole era.

This is our loophole era.

And if you can take that loophole and make some money off it, and look, maybe the show is going to be really good.

Like, I will watch it.

I also think that something that has always been fascinating to me

is that sports is, for a long time, I've said, socially acceptable gossip for men.

Yes.

But that has been confined to.

talking about it using language that makes it sound more mathematical, more scientific, much more complicated than it actually is, so that it still sounds important and serious.

All of the gossip stuff that Madeline and I talk about on

the show is stuff that First Take is talking about.

We're talking about Aaron Rodgers crawling during the Vikings Jets game.

We're just also talking about all of the things that surround that outside of it in a way that can be inviting to people who don't know what triple coverage is.

There is a song by Matt Farley about that, I presume, about triple coverage.

Definitely.

I'm going to explain triple coverage now.

Yeah, great.

I do think, though, another way of seeing it is these celebrities who are really only known to dudes, demographically speaking, like this obscure football player, Micole Hardman, right?

Now he's a character with a new demo to access, a new quadrant to access because the Taylor Swift effect and because the big tentization of sports has made it so that these guys are just celebrities in general, as opposed to our version of soap operas for men.

But even that, when you say our versions of soap operas, the sort of male version of soap operas, my mind immediately goes to professional wrestling.

And I feel like so much of those like 80s storylines, 90s storylines in pro wrestling, it was always,

there were so many that were wrapped around love and relationships where it was like Macho Man Savage is going to marry Miss Elizabeth.

And you have these guys who are posturing on this idea of like, oh man, I'm macho, but are so invested in like, they're gonna get married?

And is he gonna wear tight pants?

Like, like, he's in his, he's literally in his underwear with a tie, and she's in a dress, and it's just like, this is the most beautiful thing ever.

Pro wrestling, which has a very male audience, is evidence that men also want this information and these storylines.

And I think that it's often seen as a very feminine trait to want to know who these people are on the field.

Is that a good guy or a bad bad guy?

But the idea that, like, Stefan Diggs and Josh Allen are on the outs right now and have been is a function of a behind-the-scenes interpersonal conflict.

Yes.

Rumors suggest that it may even involve, I don't know, some romance in some way or another.

As a journalist, I shouldn't explain further.

I'm not a journalist if you want to explain it.

Yeah, text it to me.

I'll explain it in a song.

Poop.

But the point is that we just saw the Bills and the Texans flay each other and the backdrop and the post-game, the analysis of look at the side ice Stephon Diggs is giving to his former quarterback.

Look at the stakes of this game.

That was actual soap opera shit on sports programming.

Yes.

And it reminded me of my favorite video, I think, of any sort of sports, even vaguely sports extraction, which is when Stefan Diggs, who is just a fascinating character, it turns out, was on the Vikings.

The Vikings did one of those like uh team locker room sort of polls and it went like this what guy on this team would you least like to date your sister what the hell

diggs why diggs

man

no

we're gonna leave it like that no what guy on this team would you least like to date your sister oh stefan diggs why diggs he's he's just he's crazy he's just outrageous.

Don't know what he's going to say.

Just don't know what to expect every day.

So

he couldn't date my sister.

What guy on this team would you least like to date your sister?

At least I should date my sister, Diggs, 100%.

Why Diggs?

Because he's just, he's not a guy that you want to bring home to your parents.

Like, you don't want your sister to bring him home to your parents.

Therefore, she can't date him.

What guy on this team would you least like to date your sister?

And I might add,

you're starting to be the runaway favorite for this.

Would nobody want me to date a sister?

I'm a great guy.

I'm actually a great guy.

There's actually, there seems to be a few guys that don't think that.

Feel differently about me?

Yeah.

You just don't know me well enough.

That's what it is.

Just to embarrass.

All right, who knows I want to date you about sister?

Weatherly.

Why Weatherly?

Because he's ugly.

I knew that was coming.

That was the problem.

I mean, that's the caddiest stuff I've ever heard.

Also, none of those players were like, you know what?

I got to be honest.

My sister's her own person.

She has her own agency.

I trust her to make the decisions that are best for her.

If there is a player on this team that she connects with and they love each other and support one another, then who am I to stand in their way?

She's an adult.

She makes her own decisions.

I'm not some dictator telling her how to live her life.

There is still an undercurrent of that masculine role you play where you protect your sister.

Like

she's not you.

You own her.

She's not her own woman.

But something throughout all of this still, even as, you know,

these sports shows are talking about, is there a fight between Josh Allen and Stephon Diggs?

One thing nobody does is

speak in a way that lets in casual viewers who might be interested.

It is very hard to find a sports show where, like, if you're my mom who follows sports because I work in sports, but might, but doesn't have the encyclopedic knowledge of who everybody is, nobody identifies the characters.

And it is as simple as saying

Chief's quarterback Patrick Mahomes instead of just saying Patrick Mahomes.

And all of this language, I feel, is built to keep people out, to keep casual fans out.

And I think we saw this more than anything with when Taylor Swift started dating.

Travis Kelsey.

And like, there isn't a show people could really listen to and know what's happening because so much of the way we talk about sports and sports media, at least, is based in the lore and the knowledge that we already have, which has to be built over decades.

And I know this because when I started working in sports, I had not been a sports, I was not a fanatic.

I was, I liked my teams.

And so I remember what it felt like.

to try to have to learn this.

And I was blogging for USA Today at the time.

I would blog for like 12 hours straight.

It would be like, Carmelo Anthony's wife had a baby, post the Instagram.

And I'd be like, okay, Googling Carmelo Anthony, Googling his wife, Googling.

Like, there is no way that the barrier to entry is so high.

So part of what I hope this show does,

the sports gossip show, is let people in in a way that they can then start to become a part of those news cycles.

Because I think a lot of people in this business just assume that everybody knows what's going on all the time.

It's an interesting sort of wrinkle, right?

Because when I remember like the Red Sox and other baseball teams selling like pink hats to appeal to female viewers, and it was sort of like condescending.

It was like, why does it have to be pink?

Can't you just give like the normal product?

And I think, yes, that is true.

That was just sort of like very textbook and rote.

But at the same time, there is a way to invite people who are not versed in the

sports canon to appreciate and to join this group of people that is already without them, the lone monoculture left in America.

But it's not only girls.

I know a lot of men who are like, I don't follow sports.

How am I supposed to?

Like, I think the gendering of it isn't even always fully accurate.

And it's very simple.

You just qualify people.

Like, instead of saying Andy Reed, you say Chief Sed Cook.

You know, like it's these little things.

Something I think about as you're talking is when I first started on the daily show, I felt similar to you in that I remember going into the writers meeting

like my first week.

And, you know, there are 20 plus people in this room,

but everyone's talking about politicians and people on Fox News and MSNBC and CNN.

And they're saying all these names all very much to one another as though like, we all know who this is.

We all know.

And it was just like.

Mitch McConnell and they're and they're talking like kind of like the DBs of politics, you know, and all apologies to Dominique Foxworth, but it's like, oh, yeah, I don't know the DBs.

I'm sorry.

I just can't get over the fact that Mitch McConnell and Dominique Foxworth are both quite similar insofar as they are both

turtles?

Turtles.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Let's go, terps.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

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So my topic

is

also

the first topic.

What does this mean?

I'm glad you did not ask me that.

There is a technology that Google has released that is jarring even to people who've like done episodes as I have about AI and voice spots and all of that stuff.

It's an article in the Wall Street Journal that I actually want to introduce to you by playing you the podcast technology product

that it is about.

So

press play.

Okay, so picture this.

You've got this stack of stuff to read, right?

Articles, reports, the works.

But what if instead of, you know, slogging through it all, you could just sit back and listen to a podcast about it.

Well, that's kind of the idea behind this whole AI audio thing.

And it's already causing a stir.

Yeah, and get this.

We're not just talking about like summarizing an article.

This is about AI actually creating engaging audio from any information you feed it.

I read this piece in the Wall Street Journal by Ben Cohen.

Oh, yeah, I saw that one.

It's pretty wild.

Yeah, he got to try out this experimental tool from Google called Notebook LM.

Notebook LM, yeah.

It's like having this AI that can turn, well, anything into a podcast style conversation.

Right.

It's not just reading it back to you.

It's actually creating a back and forth like we're having right now.

It's really remarkable how it pulls out the key points and turns them into this engaging dialogue.

And this deep dive feature, that's where things get really interesting.

Oh, yeah, the deep dives.

Apparently, even Andresh Karpathy is hooked on them.

And this guy knows a thing or two about AI, right?

Exactly.

If it's got him hooked, you know it's got to be good.

And we're not just talking tech stuff either.

He's listening to deep dives on everything from Wittgenstein to

get this, pomegranates.

Pomegranates, seriously.

Seriously.

I guess even AI needs a break from the heavy stuff sometimes.

I guess so.

But, you know, it makes you think: if this AI can make pomegranates sound fascinating.

Right.

Imagine what it could do with something actually interesting.

Is this AI right now?

Charlotte.

They keep saying, and get this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so I hate this.

I hate this so much.

I feel creepy.

I hate robots.

What's remarkable about this is that Google has developed this technology that has sort of hit upon a fundamental human interaction that I think is key to how we like to consume things.

And it actually kind of is a through line from topic one, Wyatt and this SEO thing, and topic two, about like characters and human drama.

It realized that you actually want the simulation of human imperfection in a conversation between two podcast style archetypes such that you you heard them stutter make mistakes catch themselves like that's now part of what the robots are doing that was the most disturbing thing because i could because something was wrong something was off i could hear it

and i feel i feel i feel duped but i also feel like i'm in the truman show even though I am because there are cameras everywhere in this world.

Forget this.

No, that's.

we fed it.

We fed it the Wall Street Journal article about the technology.

So you just did that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was, I thought.

Oh, no, no, that was not like a pre-packaged thing.

And in fact, in fact, this stuff can turn around in minutes.

You feed it audio and a transcript, and it'll create a conversation summary that has taught people about, I mean, has allegedly been used to teach people about philosophy and complicated topics in a sort of like summary, in a conversation-style spoon feeding that we're familiar with, given how podcasts generally tend to be.

Did you make one of those that was

about what Pablo Torre finds out the podcast is and who Charlotte

and Pablo are?

Well, to prove the point, what we did was something even better, which is I had Cortez behind the glass, while we were taping our first segment, no,

no, make this.

Ever gone down a Spotify rabbit hole?

Like really specific playlists?

Medieval loot music for cats, anyone.

Well, today's deep dive is about someone who didn't just ride that rabbit hole.

He built the whole dang theme park.

Meet Matt Farley, a musician with over 24,000 songs on Spotify.

24,000.

And here's the kicker.

He's making surprisingly good money doing it.

So how is he pulling this off?

What's fascinating is that Farley treats Spotify almost like a search engine.

He's tapped into a hyper-specific musical version of SEO.

Okay, SEO for songs.

I think I need a little explain, like like I'm five on this one.

You got it.

Think about how you use Google.

You type in best pizza near me and boom, Google delivers.

Farley's doing the same thing, but with song titles.

He likely analyzes popular searches, prom proposals, potty training songs, you name it.

Then crafts titles designed to appear in those results.

So he's not waiting to be discovered.

He's making sure the algorithm leads listeners directly to him.

F you, Cortez.

But we just had, why would you listen to that when you could listen to the actual podcast that was that?

I haven't heard this.

I'm like listening to they just been out in minutes like that's not clever that's not clever robots that's terrible they're not funny the robots are not funny you're incentivizing the wrong things robots similarly to how people who watch sports want to know who the characters behind the athletes are i believe that people want to know who the people behind the podcasts are that there are real people talking that you can look them up and that maybe you could run into them on the street someday because this is how the parasocial revolution begins sure but that's better than like listening to those robots.

Oh, yeah.

And it's not even, you don't even have to know who we are.

You just have to know we're real.

Oh, my God.

But also, why, like, why are we incentivizing this?

Like, that's the part of it that feels so bizarre.

Let's have AI

like just crater the podcasting industry.

Like, let's.

Let's have it eat our vomit and then regurgitate it and feed it back to us.

Yeah.

And, and here's, again, where it kind of goes back to the top, where it's like, okay, there are actual people who enjoy making music, who enjoy just like, they don't need to make 24,000 songs, which I will say, one of those songs, really amazing.

But they don't need to make 24,000 songs.

They are just making music for the sake of making music.

There are people who make podcasts because they enjoy making podcasts.

What this seems to incentivize is don't enjoy it, monetize it, capitalize on it, and then, okay, you cut out the human element.

What are we humans supposed to do?

That's what I mean.

Well, I think we're supposed to listen to this.

It's a per-stream model.

So even if each stream only generates a fraction of a cent.

Multiply that by 24,000 songs and a potentially huge volume of very niche searches.

Exactly.

It starts to add up, especially since Spotify emphasizes playlists, which often group songs based on themes or moods rather than just big-name artists.

Which is where Farley's strategy really shines.

He's not competing with Beyoncé for playlist space.

He's dominating the songs about toilet paper category.

Speaking of which, some of his song titles are, well, let's just say they're memorable, like this girl is on fire.

Quick, grab a fire extinguisher.

I mean, you have to admire the commitment to the bit, right?

But jokes aside, this really highlights how Farley's using humor and absurdity to further exploit those algorithm quirks.

It's like he's figured out the musical equivalent of clickbait.

And as outlandish as it might seem, it works.

That element of surprise, the I can't believe this is a real song factor, probably encourages people to click to listen, which then feeds back into the algorithm, boosting his visibility even more.

It's like he's hacked the system.

Like, we did this better, right?

They're not funny.

I'm not laughing.

You know what?

The one thing robots aren't funny.

The robots are lame, not funny.

I would not want to be friends with them.

I also feel like there's a weird part of this that, yeah, it feels uncomfortable because it feels like we're just saying,

oh,

journalism is a thing.

It's not a craft.

It's just a thing.

And anybody can do it.

And not just anybody can do it.

The computer can do it.

Can I end on one note of hope?

Please.

The one thing that makes me hopeful as we talk about all of this is I think that the one thing robots are not is alive.

One thing humans are is alive.

And I think

for

a lot of us,

that feeling of joy comes from the feeling of connection.

That feeling of delight comes from surprise.

And I think that

even if these things I'm not saying, you know, they'll never take our jobs.

They could, but there is a part of us.

They're trying.

But there's a part of us that will always, as people, want to feel something.

And these robots don't make us feel those things in the same way.

Maybe for some people they do, but I think that as long as we are still wanting to make things and wanting to consume things that other people made, that will keep happening because that's the whole point of being alive.

The thing that being alive.

You're alive and you're being.

I really, I, I, this, this, if anything, this has maybe charted a new career path for me.

Robots are never going to be funny, though, because if the algorithm is based on making connections that already exist, humor is based on connecting things that seem completely separate and making those together, putting them together in a surprising way that someone laughs.

Okay, maybe they'll be able to do it.

I don't know.

But Charlotte, you want to end on a note of hope?

No, I did already.

Well, I tried, and then I said, maybe computers can be funny.

Well, let's see if this computer can be funny while summarizing an article that you've written on Substack that we just fed into it.

No.

Okay, so we're diving into this whole Taylor Swift Travis Kelche thing.

Kelchie!

Aha!

It's like when she showed up at that Chiefs game, right?

Right.

This article we've got, it's saying it wasn't just her, like, you know, just being a fan.

They're saying it was like a calculated thing.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it was definitely like to make a statement.

Right.

And like, it was a big deal, right?

It wasn't just like a casual thing.

It was huge.

Like, the internet exploded.

Everyone was talking about it.

No, that's the opposite of what I said in the article.

Everyone was talking about it.

Thanks for this nightmare fuel, Pablo.

I really appreciate it.

Is that what your new podcast is like?

I have no words.

No, it's not.

I can feed some into a company.

No, please.

Please.

Oh, my God.

I'm going to be at home just like feeding stuff in, being like, the robot messed up here.

Kelche.

Travis Kelche.

Travis Kelche.

God.

What do we find out today, guys, at the end of a show about finding stuff out called Pablo Torre finds out?

I feel like I today found out one that

Matt Farley needs to make more songs about not just just me, but

everybody.

That to me feels like if he really, if he truly cares about the art, he needs to open the phone book and get to fing work.

Get to Pablo.

I learned that robots can talk like people, but that they aren't funny and I will die on this hill.

What I really found out today is that

there is no free shipping on the Zon scare gun I just ordered.

You ordered it?

Yeah.

No free shipping.

Come on.

Did you use it?

Not even Pablo?

Yeah, even with Code Pablo?

Oh, also, I've been informed that it's actually $500

and that I'm currently the owner of a new timer for a Zon gun,

which has set intervals between detonations anywhere between two minutes to 30 minutes.

I knew $178 was too cheap.

Yeah, that seemed a little, but wow.

So now you've got to buy the Zong gun because

it's weird to just have a timer.

The tripod is $213.

You need a tripod for this?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can't just hold it?

No.

Put it on a cinder block?

Instead of the end of say anything where he's holding a boombox, it's just Pablo and Zong gun.

Automatic thunderclaps, deterring birds and other nuisance wobblers.

See, a robot would not have put that together.

They wouldn't have been like, oh, say anything in a Zong gun.

No.

And if they did, that image of Pablo would have seven fingers.

There you go.

Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Michael Antonucci, Walter Ravaroma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Dawig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCrae, Rachel Miller-Howard, Ethan Schreier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, 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 all of us will talk to you on Tuesday.