PsyOp & Share & Tell with Mina Kimes, Dan, Pablo, and Elmo

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

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

Who will join Elmo in the revolution?

Because Elmo is tired of this shit.

Right after this ad.

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So we were talking about Elmo, which is going to be a topic today, and the Elmo voice.

And I said I could do an Oscar voice.

And then I remembered it's actually Cookie Monster is the voice that

I think I can do.

I'm not saying I'm the best at it or I'm Jeff Passin, Elmo, or I guess Chris Cody, who's kind of like Kirkland brand jeff passin here but i can try

let's hear it even though you don't know the difference between oscar and cookie monster let's hear what you've got don't put any pressure on it let it go let it fly

oh lord

oh no who is

okay

brock brock birdie isn't a game manager he's a game changer

that is good that is

that is bootleg yoda that's grover

It's something between Yoda and Grover giving football analysis for some reason.

Oh, Big Dad Nebitard thinks he's so much better than me on voices.

Let's hear your voice.

No, no, because the only impersonation I do, the only one, is one of the characters in Harry Met Sally talking about how they fell in love.

And I don't think

it holds up.

It's something that would have been funny in 2002 and would not be funny anymore.

I thought it was going to be a different scene from when Harry met Sally.

I thought we were about to get Dan Levittard's screaming female orgasm.

Yes, that's exactly what I was saying.

I could do Cookie Monster recreating the scene and when Harry met Sally.

I'll have what she's having.

I'll have what she's having.

All right, so I wanted to start the show with a little bit of sports, and I mean that very sincerely, because the Taylor Swift thing with the Super Bowl, we'll get into that to some extent, is one part of the whole like right-wing war on

America's biggest event.

But it's now gone beyond that, beyond Taylor Swift, into just football itself.

And I want you to listen to this as our first sound of the show today.

I mean, let's be real here.

This is Bread and Circuses on steroids.

Major league sports in and of itself is nothing but a psyop.

Get kids plugged into the cycle of going to public indoctrination camps, playing sports for their school, and going to games.

Many end up devoting their entire childhood to competing in various sports only to be cut from the team at which point they become brainwashed into supporting professional teams because they know their dreams of becoming a pro athlete will probably never happen.

So then they become obsessed with some grown man who gets paid millions of dollars every year to throw a ball around while promoting poison death shots and child slave labor through various brand deals and endorsements.

So sad.

Let's see who ends up winning the Super Bowl and if there's a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially, culturally propped up couple this fall.

Only time will tell.

But don't forget who warned you and predicted it before it happens.

So that is One American News Network.

And if I showed that to you in like 2015

and I blocked out the lower third, I think a lot of people would guess that that came from MSNBC.

The idea of sports being this scam, sports ball.

But suddenly, like we've gotten to this point, Mina, we've gotten to this point where the right wing, the movement, has decided to attack just sports as a concept, which to me is just the worst political strategy for that group of all time.

Yeah, there was a few things.

while that woman was talking that

made me react in the help I'm hit fashion because she was kind of nailing me.

But I think you're right.

It reminds me a little bit of,

I saw, I can't remember which network it was.

Somebody was criticizing Taylor Swift for flying private.

And it was pointed out that, wait, so now you're actually, this is a pro-climate change argument, right?

And I think that's similar to what you're describing, which is

you go so far right that suddenly you're flanking from the left,

is how I would describe that clip we just watched.

It's what I find fascinating about this is

sports and this is actually kind of a continuation on something i think we've talked about this us three sports and taylor swift are the closest things we have in modern society to monoculture like there's nothing else there's so few things now and this is actually another thing we're going to talk about it it gets about there are so few things that are almost you just I wouldn't even say universally liked.

They're just a universal

thing that products that everybody consumes.

Yes, they're enormous.

They're the biggest tent that everyone still walks into despite liking many other things otherwise.

Marvel movies are somewhere in there, right?

A distant third though.

A distant third these days, I would say.

Yeah.

My husband is a music producer.

You guys know this.

And I remember asking him a couple of years ago, do you like Taylor?

Like, do you appreciate her work?

And he looked at me and he was like,

It's like an iPhone.

I don't know.

It's just like every, you know,

I don't dislike it.

He wasn't pro or con.

His point was just that it is everywhere.

It is ubiquitous.

It is appealing to everyone or most people, it seems.

And that's what I find so fascinating about this and what Pablo said.

The fact that all these conspiracy theories and hate and

politics are being projected onto two things that are so wildly unobjectionable or wildly just normal

to generic extent.

Yeah, that's I it's fascinating.

I don't think it's strategic.

I think it's just

like throwing darts and they happen to land on the biggest possible bullseye.

But before the last few months of this, wouldn't you say that the single most objectionable thing about Taylor Swift was just that, that she's everywhere?

That that was the greatest trigger on anyone not liking her, that she's had too much success.

She's got too much of everything.

And then someone goes to her show and there are people outside the arena singing her song because they cannot get in.

And then they see the show, the people who are there, and and they're like, well, that's kind of amazing.

But what was objectionable?

She's like something out of Disney, but now Disney's also objectionable.

Well, it feels like what they've done is they've bullied Goliath into being a David.

And so the NFL and Taylor Swift are like this weird underdog against this political movement.

A political movement that I'll remind you used to be sports personified.

Like the reason why this is so funny to me is that like the Republican Party, the right wing, once upon a time, Gerald Ford, right?

Like playing football.

I think of all of these guys, these jocks.

It was the party of jocks.

It's the party of all these politicians who in the caricature from the left were like the, you know, the numbskulled, football-brained idiots.

And now what we've done is come all the way around.

It's just, it speaks to just the, I think, I agree with Mita.

It's just like.

a non-strategic decision, but it also just feels like

an incoherent one.

What you say is a weird one.

But you say this, Pablo, and Mina, help me with some of this because I keep saying, no matter how some of these arguments continue to stupefy me, the way that they go, I keep saying in this echo chamber, some version of this is funny to me or this is dumb.

But in the other echo chamber, it is not.

And I'm confused by how it is, even as it becomes more and more difficult to have moral consistencies along all of these lines before you find conflict.

I am confused that the other side would listen to what we're saying and just simply argue, no, you're funny and you're dumb the way that you're doing this.

I think

there's,

this is not strategic.

The AFC championship game just broke records.

People are still watching football.

This is not a calculated, let's take the side opposite football because it's not popular.

Football is as popular as ever.

I think, however,

what is happening is if there's any strategy, it's less about a coherent political

stance or an argument, but the strategy is to see, oh,

here are the two of the remaining things in culture that move the needle.

Let's ride that wave.

Because

right now,

there are so few things that everybody talks about.

And some of that is due to the

fragmentation of culture, as we're kind of talking about.

Some of it is if I hop on social media, I am directed to Travis Kelsey content, Taylor Swift content, and football content.

So naturally, people who are in the business of getting eyeballs, that matters to them more than

electing a candidate.

The people who we're talking about who are making this argument,

they want to get eyeballs.

They want to get attention.

They want to ride that algorithmic wave.

They are seeing, and this is the strategy aspect of it, oh, if I talk about these four topics that everybody is talking about right now, it doesn't matter what kind of boneheaded, insane conspiracy theory I graft onto it, I will go viral.

I will get attention.

I will join this movement.

And I think that is what is motivating this more than anything, Pablo.

Yeah, look, I want to, you know, a tip of the cap to Dan for pointing out that somewhere there's a different echo chamber and we should be acknowledging the ways in which we are talking to each other.

And we generally agree fundamentally on like the bottom line principles of this thing.

But what we're trying to do, also, as Mina just did, is sort of discern like what's really happening here and why.

And you're right, it is about engagement in any form.

And it also means that this party, which used to embrace sports, remember, like Colin Kaepernick used to be a campaign issue because he wasn't sticking enough to the thing that now the right wing is saying should not be stuck to as a general thing people should like.

And so the people who are invading who are like in this tug of war maybe for like the soul of the right-wing movement include this guy travis kelsey is this guy who also kind of out of the blue became this big time celebrity really rich really powerful why he's a tight end he's like a glorified lineman that doesn't make any sense tight ends aren't famous people in football what are you talking about What world are we living in?

Sure seems planned.

Sure seems like something that is like concocted in order to

accelerate the fame of these two people,

get them to the Super Bowl, the largest screens on earth.

Do you know how little you need to know about sports and talking to a microphone for me to feel like a jock in comparison to you?

Like, that's Benny Johnson, one of these influencers that is now very popular, Dan.

And that dude doesn't know shit about sports in any way.

And that's the party that, that,

you know,

former Grift that again campaigned on keep sports pure.

These guys just don't even like it even vaguely.

You say this, but I'm assuming that the two people we have shown have followings that probably aren't

here

to do anything other than end up in the comments and do the trolling that so many people enjoy doing because there are a lot of lonely people out there addicted to their devices who enjoy having a voice in these forums that perhaps they do not have in other places.

And I want to again press you guys on because I did some of this on our show this week and I am genuinely confused by it.

I thought Taylor Swift was just benign.

I don't think her telling people to vote is anything controversial.

I do feel and see the undercurrent of a party that seems to be anti-woman in a lot of very obvious ways going after a woman who has powerful young women in her influence and can actually be someone who uses that power in a way that is threatening because where we are right now, anyone who has power

right now in these calls for equality that I keep saying sound like threats becomes a threat to the people who are armed and are used to having that power.

So So, anybody in those instances can become Taylor Swift if they simply ride against you politically.

It doesn't even matter who they are.

They are simply a vessel for trolls to attack because it's on the other side of something.

And no matter who's talking about this, they all have their armies, and no one's coming to the other side.

No one's being persuaded.

No one's changing their minds.

There aren't even fence sitters anymore.

I think there are a lot of fence sitters.

They're just not online.

But I also think, Dan, you hit on something that we should acknowledge because Pablo and I were talking about sort of the creator side of it.

Like, why are these people making this argument?

And we're both very cynical.

We're talking about how they're just trying to surf pop culture waves and get eyeballs.

And I think that's true.

However, you have hit on something in your points about misogyny and why Taylor Swift in particular that I do think

we also, Pablo and I, we have to acknowledge, well, why does the argument work?

Like, why is it?

It works in part because of the fame and you're riding this wave, but it also works because of there, there are undercurrents of

misogyny and gatekeeping and this feeling of having masculine spaces invaded that I think do underlie a lot of the bad feelings.

And there are people who have bad feelings about seeing Taylor Swift for 0.5 seconds on their TV screens.

I don't think it's a straw.

Like,

it's so funny.

This thing is so

monolithic now that Colin Cowherd has become like the feminist icon.

This is so this is my

I don't mean to interrupt you like so many of these people would like to force Taylor Swift to stop talking, but that's exactly it.

No, like the

Colin Cowherd, okay,

has become this icon to Swifties

because he actually is seeing the marketplace clearly.

There's a lot of really weird, lonely, insecure men out there.

The fact that a pop star, the world's biggest pop star, is dating his star tight end, who had one of his greatest games ever, and a network puts them on the air briefly, that it bothers you.

What does that say about your life?

And this is where the fence hitter stuff, I think, is actually quite relevant.

I think there are a lot of people who love sports.

Okay.

There are a lot of people, forget about Taylor Swift.

They just love sports.

And when they hear a guy talking about a tight end, clearly this no-name has become an engineered product by the Biden administration.

They're like, oh, wait a minute.

I can't even swallow this bull.

Right?

It's not a political take.

It's not a conspiracy.

It's something that they know so intuitively and obviously as a fan of football that they're like, oh no, I think this is bullshit.

It's embarrassing.

But Mina, you can talk to what, I mean, you can have specific experience and knowledge how men or cavemen have reacted to you invading the man cave.

You particularly, you coming in to the football sphere and sitting next to Ryan Clark and Orlovsky and Dominique and having your opinion, looking the way you do, looking like most people don't look when talking about football over the last 50 years.

You've invaded this space and you've been made to feel welcomed by colleagues, but I think the constituency, the customer, has made that somewhat difficult for you.

That's been an obstacle course.

Yeah, I think though

you have pretty different dynamics at play.

I think for me,

a lot of the misogyny or resistance I've encountered over the years has been

men feeling

men feeling suspicious of

why is she here?

What credibility does she have?

I must know more, et cetera.

I think with the Taylor Swift

backlash, and it's not

universal, and maybe it's even being overstated.

I don't know.

But the impression I get is that

people are annoyed with the idea

of

the product, or rather,

other fans being allowed into their space.

I don't think most

men who watch football games are like really upset by the fact that they're showing Taylor Swift for two two seconds.

I think they're upset with the idea of what it signifies.

Oh, other people are now being allowed in here, or

you know, the product is being diluted in some ways.

I think that's kind of a different phenomenon.

That's normal with like bands and stuff, right?

That you're

attached to.

You think that's what's happening there?

You like this indie band, and all of a sudden they become more and more popular.

Football's a funny one to do this with because it's like the Rolling Stones or the Beatles.

It's not an exclusive club.

I feel like when men, when these morons, these misogynists,

frankly, when they get mad at Mina, they don't eventually get radicalized into hating football itself.

Like that is where the ceiling on that as a coherent approach absolutely falls short.

And actually,

the coward thing was so funny to me, Mina.

Because it was just like the easiest layup of like, oh, wait a minute, one of the sportsmen are going to like elevate our queen.

And I just want to help Dan get a version of that.

How can we strategize on a take that Dan can say?

So Dan can tap into the Swifty audience.

You're doing the same calculus that Ben Johnson,

that Ben Johnson and that weird OAN lady did, by the way, in doing this.

Oh, but Pablo, I mean, Pablo loves the idea that the entire world has turned attention into currency.

Pablo, like, well, they'll take his shirt off.

He's like, yeah, slather it all over my chest, all over my nipples.

Attention, currency?

I'd love to be there.

You're trying to get me somebody that elevates me that way while secretly strategizing so that Pablo finds out has that particular viral appeal.

I mean,

I see through you.

I'll show a nipple.

I just think it's funny.

We're in a world.

Look,

you wake up in 2024 and the face of math is Dan Campbell.

And the face of ball knowing, relatively speaking, is me.

Because I know that Travis Kelsey is good at football.

Okay, but you guys see.

No, but you guys.

The part that we explored some on our show this week, when Mina's talking about fandom being earned, the idea of that, that I actually understand.

Jets fans looking over at the Swifties and being like, really?

You just got here.

You don't know who Travis Kelsey is.

You think Colin Cowherd's a Silver Fox and you get to play in the Super Bowl six minutes after you got here?

I know.

I know.

How did you literally, you just showed up and you're rooting for the best team in the NFL?

You won two road playoff games.

You think that's normal to go just, hey, let's go through the playoffs with the best quarterback and the best tight end.

And even though we're the underdog, we're going to win road playoff games.

A glorified lineman.

I just caught Dan

with acidity, say, Silver Fox.

And I think that's a solution.

That's the pivot Dan needs to make.

Don't seed Silver to Coward as his brand.

You can compete on that front, Dan.

Just go, just go get grayer, have more stress and death in my life.

Just go, go.

Yes,

good suggestion.

Perhaps I'll do that.

Excellent.

Yes.

My face has aged 20 years in the last two.

Yes, let's do more of that.

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

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The story that I sent to you guys

wanting to discuss it is from the New Yorker.

The title is How to Have a More Productive Year.

It's by Cal Newport, who is a professor of computer science at Georgetown, I think.

Yes, Georgetown University.

So it's about time management and productivity.

And he gives some advice.

He talks about the history of

productivity books, how-to books in a space over the years, how they have evolved.

And then, and this is really the focus of it, the unique challenges of productivity or of trying to be productive rather at a moment where

not only are we inundated with distractions because of the internet, we also people can reach us at any time, which also makes it very difficult to segment your schedule, to get things done, to be productive.

So he has some advice on that in terms of time management, to-do lists, organizing, being fluid.

And I brought it up to you guys because

you bragged on a text chain.

Because you bragged

unapologetically.

Listen.

okay, I'll just tell everyone what I said.

Please,

there are not many things that I feel very confident in, that I think I'm great at.

Very few things that I would to my own horn about, that I would view myself as being an expert in.

I am amazing at time management and productivity.

I have always been amazing at time management and productivity.

I

just,

I'm, I just get things done on time.

I don't know what to tell you guys.

I am not late.

I, this was in college.

I was, I'm going to lose a lot of people here.

I was the student who seethed whenever professors handed out extensions because I would be watching being like, well, some of us got this done two days early because some of us know how to do schedules and manage their time.

And here you are handing out extensions to everyone.

And the class is cheering because they got another 24 hours.

And meanwhile, I'm like, what?

You should have gotten your shit done on time.

So

I enjoyed this article because I think I thought his tips were good.

But I also think he was correct in

the writer and the New Yorker in

explaining how difficult it is right now to be productive, which is interesting because, you know,

people work from home.

They work remotely because of technology.

You have all these tools at your disposal to get work done on your own time and to organize that work.

But I think the challenges outweigh the pros of technology.

And I was curious to hear your guys' thoughts as inferior time managers.

Well, I'm curious what Dan hears.

When Mina is bragging about how she doesn't need the extension, and you, I mean, truly the worst, just the worst perspective to have is celebrating.

Celebrating.

No, just celebrating a gift that

basically means that everyone who could have used an extension is actually just playing the game wrong.

Like, come on.

Spoken like someone who got a lot of extensions, by the way.

Love a sudden extension.

Love a grace period when you show up late to your own show, potentially.

But, Dan, I hear discipline in that.

I hear Mina saying, like, ah, my superpower is discipline.

I can actually just do the thing that I say to myself I need to do.

And

I don't see you in that way necessarily.

You, I think this is fair to say, certainly compared to Mina, but maybe in general, I believe you to be Pablo, someone who is inclined to certain procrastinations, a lack of discipline.

Discipline

some people might call it lazy if they wanted to be pejorative.

I had never considered the question before Mina asked it.

It's not something I had ever thought about.

Am I good at time management?

And then I started thinking about it because my brother was an artist and I am in a creative field.

And both of us, coming from exile families, both of us never missed a deadline, ever.

It was not one of the options.

And it was unusual that it was sort of, I was surprised when I got to ESPN and ESPN the magazine that it was sort of understood that writers were going to blow the deadline because they're used to working with creatives.

And that's how that one goes.

But I also, when I started thinking about it,

Because I was made responsible by my parents at an unreasonably young age that you can argue might steal some childhood.

I would say that my punctuality, my always being aware of how much time there is, gets in the way of being present, gets in the way of just enjoying where you are at that moment because you're always cognizant of I've got this on the horizon.

And if you're a, if you're a task completer,

and I don't know if this is gender specific, but I know men like to fix problems and be task completers, generally speaking, if there is some of your identity wrapped up in that, you're not going to enjoy moments to moments because you're always off to the next one.

My mother used to say when I was little that the thing that she remembers about my imprinting as a child is I'm on it's a small world the ride and I'm in the middle of the wonder and discovery of that.

And I'm like, and what's next?

And what's next?

And I mean, if you get to 55 years old on what's next and you're on the it's a small world ride and you're not filled with wonder and awe and joy because you got to get to the next meeting.

I have so many thoughts about this.

So

I mentioned actually earlier: my husband is a music producer.

My husband is very creative.

He's an amazing writer.

He is not good at time management.

He has asked me for advice on.

He gets overwhelmed by schedules.

There have been moments where he's, at the end of the day, he's just like, I just couldn't get all of it done.

And I don't, and I went down this rabbit hole.

And I don't understand how you're done at 5 p.m.

every day.

And I'm happy to walk you guys through my system if anyone wants to know.

But

he gets really frustrated by it.

However, I also think a lot of his creativity, some of his best work stems from the fact that he is willing to go with the flow and go down those rabbit holes and, you know, emerge 24 hours later with a unique idea or he's seen something in a way that he didn't plan on because he let himself get lost in his work.

I have always viewed that actually as a limitation.

of mine.

And as much as I'm here bragging about time management and getting things done and my productivity, and I I do view those as strengths, I also feel that a negative side effect of that, Dan, is that I don't go with the flow sometimes.

I always,

you know, was really stressed about this as a writer because I was so hell-bent on meeting deadlines, getting things done.

And then I would turn in my work and then feel like, but maybe I missed out on something interesting or something unconventional or creative because I was so strict with myself about being productive.

And I I felt that way in school as well.

Like, you're always going to be, I always felt, Mina, you're always going to be, you're going to be good at enough to get it done and get it done well.

And the teachers love you.

But then I would look at someone else and be like, you don't really have that creative genius that, you know, Bobby has or whatever.

So, you know, I've, I, I've,

I think there's positives and negatives that come with being very productive.

There's a Ted's talk in there somewhere about the freedom to get lost, the freedom to just lose your way and find a new idea because you're painting outside the lines, outside of discipline and structure.

I, uh, I,

it's funny, like as a writer, um, I think I'm more uh like Nick, Mina's husband, in just like my capacity to get lost and literally lose track of time.

Um, but I remember as a writer, um, some of my own uh drawbacks are just about when my brain is good to move on.

Like, I think something I admire about Mina is like, it's good enough.

I'm going to move forward.

But Mina told me that.

Do you ever, forgive me, Pablo, but do you, do you ever, do you ever show up late or lose track of time?

Does that, because I rarely, if ever, and Pablo, let's come back to what you were saying there.

You get the drift, okay?

I get the gist.

I'm the one who's late on the show.

No, but I'm saying that almost with envy, though.

I'm not saying that it looks this, my responsibility has obviously gotten me some of the things that I want but one of them is not the the creative expressions of things that will be found because you've stumbled in a different direction than the one that was scheduled I think Dan you might actually share this quality with me I'm extremely regimented professionally And then outside of work, I'm very disorganized.

And I will get lost in like hanging out with a friend.

And suddenly I'm like, oh my God, it's, you know, been four hours.

What are we doing?

So it's interesting.

Maybe my capacity for organization only goes so far because I think a lot of people who would describe themselves as organized, it is totalistic, right?

They're like, I'm just, this is how I am.

Everything is regiment.

It's really just work with me.

Me too.

Me too.

Yeah.

Like if I showed you guys the other side.

If I just spun the camera around and you saw the office, it is appalling right now.

I like how Mina's office looks like my inbox, which is

5,000 unread emails.

Mina is an inbox zero person, but now she's spinning us around on YouTube and the DraftKings Network to...

Yeah.

Oh, man.

There it is.

So literally, the order is only in this one little box of her life.

This one little box where this hermetically sealed

a couple of televisions per person.

It's like a shoe hanging upside down somehow.

You were saying, though, Pablo, I interrupted you.

I'm sorry.

No, no, it's

something I've told you about before, which is like, for me, I almost need to give myself permission.

Like, I've checked the box on this being as good as it could be.

I am

kind of just OCD in that way.

It got to the point where when I was in a Google Doc writing stories and I was a magazine writer, I realized far too late that the only way I could really feel comfortable moving on to the next paragraph was for the previous paragraph to feel like a rectangle.

Like it needed to be evenly weighted.

So like I hated if the last line of

yes,

if the previous line of that paragraph, if the last line of a paragraph was just like a dangling word and a period, I could, I, I would literally change the paragraph.

That's like bringing architecture arguably architecture school to like the circus.

Like, what are you doing?

Yeah.

That's no,

it was, it was deeply unhealthy and admittedly

revealing about like what I need to feel like, okay, good enough to move on.

And I ended up conceiving of an entirely artificial counterproductive rule, which was it needs to feel geometrically symmetrical.

And I, I, like, it's just, I am that guy, but also the guy with 25,000 unread emails.

Like, that's what's happening in here.

This,

you know, me, I'm an inbox 20 or less person.

Are you able to manage like the understanding and acceptance needed with your husband to sort of tolerate that he's the opposite of this?

Or not, not even tolerate it, just meet it with compassion at all times, even though it's not you at all.

I have, although we've had to

communicate through it and

so that I can meet him where he is and he can meet me where I am.

This is probably the most I've ever talked about my marriage and my husband, but

what you know, this might be helpful for anyone who where one person is very time, time.

My wife, I should say, my wife is, is, is the opposite of me.

Super regimented, always on time, highly organized, type A in that regard.

So,

something that we would sometimes, like, that would bother me is if he'd say he'd be home at a certain time and then would be home late.

And

what

I had to explain to him was: I'm not not upset because you're late or because you're working or whatever.

I'm upset because you set incorrect expectations.

No, this is, if I can give one piece of advice, like this is it for people who have these types of relationships.

All you have to do is just not say you're going to be home at the wrong time.

Just tell me, be like, I don't know when I'm, and I'll be like, fine.

In my to-do list, I will change that to reflect that.

My expectations will be set and I will be happy.

I don't care if you're late.

I just don't want to have my schedule fed with.

And once we realized that and started communicating about it better,

we never have any issues about punctuality.

I just personally hate that I've created a podcast where I get nagged by my wife through the vessel of my friends.

I cannot imagine how frustrated your wife is daily that you are a professional communicator and you've definitely...

You didn't learn this lesson from her where I'm guessing you are constantly failing to meet expectations that you've raised to an unreasonable level.

I am constantly home in five minutes.

25 minutes ago.

Exactly.

It is hard to love that, Pablo.

It is hard to love that.

She should be allowed a physical leash on you, is what she should be allowed, given how frustrating that must be.

You will forgive me after we've talked about discipline and organization that the article I was supposed to have in front of me to tell you who wrote it and what it's about is not in front of me because I left it near a sandwich outside.

However, the article

points out in the New York Times that what happened when Elmo simply asked the internet on what used to be known as Twitter, How's everyone doing out there?

The response,

the clinginess of the internet responded with a sadness, an acidic well of unhappiness that basically told Elmo that everyone is in a deep, deep, acid pit of despair.

And I know that this isn't surprising.

I know that

many people

on the internet are not merely addicted to the internet, but are also addicted to the ability to show some of their personalities on the internet, have a voice they might not have in other parts of their life.

And the part I wanted to talk to you guys about, because I believe social media is the single largest untreated addiction.

that we have in the globe where people aren't paying attention to the fact that we kind of like this thing even though it makes us unhappy.

And if you live in this thing and addicted to your devices, you will find more and more unhappiness.

Why are you laughing, Mina?

Because this is a story about Elmo and I've gone dark on it.

No, because while you were talking, I picked up my phone to look at the article because you didn't remember it.

And then my fingers, like literally, it was like an out-of-body experience, switched over to Twitter.

Just your addiction.

I literally just instinct drove them.

This is a podcast and also an intervention.

I want to talk about what's happening.

happening all over the globe in a way that we all understand.

If we were all wandering around addicted to heroin, we would understand that there was a health consequence to this.

And if we're wandering around addicted to something that foments so much unhappiness that it metastasizes when an Elmo character merely asks, How you're doing, this has to be treated.

Unhappiness, mental health combined with an addiction, all of this, even through a cartoon character, should alarm us on what's happening in the world right now, where people are everything from broke to broken.

And I just find it all disheartening.

And I have found, because I can't frisbee my iPad into the ocean and just be done with it, that I am consistently with a feeling of a film of anxiety on me that's not normally there.

Because

are you doing it again, Mina?

Are you back in?

Are you the only person I know who uses their iPad to look at social media?

Am I?

I'm the only person.

You're not frisbeeing your own iPad.

Sam is at a concert videotaping it with an iPad.

It's just a bigger screen.

I need a bigger screen because I'm not just old.

I'm not just old technologically.

I need a bigger screen with bigger fonts.

The phone's too small.

My hand's too big.

Whenever he sends texts, and it's always an adventure to whatever, what account is it going to come from?

I assume if it comes from your email, you've typed it

in.

And all you got to know about his email is not what this is about.

This is not what this is about.

Oh, stop it.

I've got a Metal Arc Media email now.

I've got a Metal Arc Media.

I've graduated from AOL, but occasionally I'll slip in there if I'm on the iPad.

That's not what this is about.

That's not what this is about.

Stay on point.

Do not point your finger at me and laugh at me.

Do not do not point and AOL.

God damn you.

We're interrupting Dan's presidential campaign speech.

I'm just by laughing at him.

Am I wrong?

Did you not read this?

No, sorry, but MO stories don't make me sad.

They don't make me sad.

This one made me sad.

It's just very on the nose.

Like all of this is clearly the thing that I talked about sports before is like sometimes you do something often enough such that you immediately know what's bullshit or not.

You don't have to fake being informed about it.

We all know this is real.

And it does take a cartoon character to be like, yeah, the

what?

The accidental therapist where everybody's actually saying the truth while joking.

Earlier, I was talking about time management.

I think we have to say, everyone has to be very, like, everybody.

If you are concerned about time management, you have to explicitly reckon with the way time management affects your, or sorry, social media affects your productivity and strategize around it.

I think the same thing applies with mental health, sadness,

the way being on our phones affects our brains.

There needs, we, there needs to be more education around this.

There, we need to be strategic around it.

It feels like for the last 15 years or so, it's kind of been the Wild West where this thing has slowly taken over our lives, but nobody has, we haven't had that many conversations about how to deal with it, how to regulate it, how to be more careful with it.

And I feel like now it feels like we're kind of beginning to think about it.

Like, Pablo,

I have a kid kid now.

I hope that in school

this is taught.

Like, I hope that teachers are thinking about it.

I hope that mental health people are thinking about it because

everything is different now.

Uh, and you can't just take it for granted that you can go on living your life the way we did before when the way we interact with the world is so different.

Well, the scary, Dan, the scariest thing that happens, um, as the father of a daughter, um, is, is just how immediately obvious

operating an iPad is to her, right?

It's old people and little kids who love tablets, and it's just intuitive.

And it's intuitive.

And that

belies, I think, the larger truth, which is that human beings, despite that ease, we're not meant neurologically to consume information like this.

I just can't come up with any other answer other than we weren't meant to be like this.

But it is.

Even the most time-managed people like Mina, we're not meant to manage all of these morsels of information.

I think that's revealing about who can handle this.

Beyond that, though, right?

Because if you have a

parenting blind spot, and I don't have kids, but I would imagine that these devices are excellent babysitters and you should be disciplined about how early you put this in a child's hands.

But when we were talking about this a moment ago, and I was thinking of the effect that it has had on me as someone from the AOL age who is a formed adult, if it's this corrosive and contaminated to someone who knows what he wants and needs at this age, what is the impact of this thing on teenagers?

What is the impact of this thing on younger people?

When you talk about not having the tools, the education to properly identify this, if I told the audience right now, do you realize that everyone listening to this that you know is addicted to something we know is at least in part unhealthy?

If it was anything other than social media, there would be alarms going off all across the globe on this is a huge crisis.

This is a crisis for future generations because this is so corrosive and it is so unknown in spots that we are rotting our young people because I'm telling you, I have difficulty with it when I'm a, you know, otherwise confident formed adult that finds myself plagued by certain anxieties that weren't there before.

They just weren't there that this thing is responsible for.

It is

still unappreciated, I think, how significant of a problem it is to your point, Dan.

And I, just speaking for myself, like I, there have been points, there was a point last year where some people were making videos about me or whatever, and I was looking at it and I broke down in tears.

I remember I was about to go for a run and I sat down and I opened my phone and I looked at it and I started crying.

And then I remember I called my friend Mike Golick Jr.

and he kind of talked me down.

And

after that, I changed it so I could no longer see what people I don't follow say about me.

And I

you not,

it probably like increased my happiness for from that point on by like 25%

in real life.

And I bring up this example to say, to sort of,

I guess, get at where I think we have to go, which is we need

people,

experts, teachers, parents, whatever, to develop these types of strategies for everyone.

That's just a concrete example of something I had to have like an intervention in how I use the internet because it was affecting my mental health.

I think those sorts of strategies are needed for children, teenagers, adults,

because

it feels like a crisis to me.

It makes me long to come full circle here for the days of AOL.

Where there were like walls around our audience.

One of the issues, of course, is that like everybody's perpetually talking to people they don't mean to talk to.

And we're now also overhearing conversations that in Mina's case were deliberately meant to torture her.

But even the ones that aren't targeted at us can be exhausting and affect how there is that chart recently that was staggering about Gen Z men and women, boys and girls, just the political divergence of boys becoming conservative, girls becoming liberal along these standard political axes.

And I have to imagine that just the way that the algorithm is sorting us, like an evil sorting hat,

we don't want that.

We don't want that degree of difference.

And it reminds me that, like, Mike Oleg Jr.

is a great person to call in that circumstance.

And

he's maybe second only to this person.

Elmo wants to know why everyone is so angry.

Elmo has been pondering the secret sadness hiding inside everyone living in modern society.

And what Elmo wants is everyone to be happy.

But we live in a dystopia where everyone assumes everyone is lying.

And the only thing I believe is that everyone is sad.

It makes Elmo regret capitalism.

Elmo wants to burn capitalism to the ground.

Who will join Elmo in the revolution?

Because Elmo is tired of this.

Whoa,

whoa.

Chris, nail that.

I mean, sorry, Elmo.

Yeah, thank you.

My bad, yeah.

That was really good.

That was shockingly good.

Shockingly good.

Not as good as my cookie monster.

God.

Ten takes.

It only took 10 takes.

So at the end of every episode of Pablo Tor, I find that we go around this table and we say what we found out today.

Who wants to go first?

I'll go first.

I learned more about Mina's marriage than I have ever known before.

We got up in there and

we found out about what a functional union Mina has in the chaos of trying to raise a little shit monster.

You know, Dan, I was watching you and I could see you had a little bit of hunger in your eyes, so I threw you a few few emotional morsels.

Oh, my God.

They were so good.

That'll keep you satiated for a while.

Just throw a little bit your way.

Well, speaking of marriages, I learned that Pablo's wife is a saint, and God knows what she is dealing with.

I couldn't even imagine.

God Almighty.

I know her.

She's great.

Yeah, Liz, what I found out today is that I need to text my wife right now before she hears this episode so I can show proof of change before she realizes that it was just content.

He'll forget.

He will forget.

You're not going to do it.

Surely forget.

He will not do it.

I'm not going to do it.

I'll do it in like five minutes.

Cookie Monster.

So hungry for emotional truths.

Tear down those walls.

What?

Did Cookie Monster become Ronald Reagan at the end?

Burn the wall.

Tear down the wall.

I don't know.

Don't co-opt me for your politics.

It's not Cookie Monster.

It is Yoda.

It's Yoda.

But speaking of people that I need to immediately say thank you to, Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Michael Antonucci, Ryan Cortez, Sam Dawig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rachel Miller-Howard, Ethan Schreier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tumanello, and Juliet Warren.

Studio Engineering by RG Systems, post-production by NGW Post, our theme song by John Bravo, and we will all talk to you next week.