PTFO Sneak Preview Part Deux: Share & Tell with Dan, Pablo, and Mina Kimes

All right, so I'm just gonna level with you guys here.

I forgot to mention some key details in this test show you're about to listen to.

For instance, this test show you're about to listen to can be found as a video at our YouTube channel.

Yes, we have a YouTube channel.

Pablo Torre finds out is the name of that YouTube channel.

Also, can you guys hear that cricket?

I'm in New York City and I'm hearing a cricket.

My building maybe has crickets now.

Also, we have a podcast feed.

You can guess what the name is, but we're our own feed.

Exclusive stuff is going to pop up there starting on September 5th when we launch for real.

Until then, we're going to be trying stuff kind of like me standing on a sidewalk in front of my building talking into my cell phone like a crazy person.

Enjoy.

For the first time in my life over the last four years, our daily content load has me in a place where I don't, I'm an old man.

I don't have the stamina that I used to for this thing.

So that even though I'm doing something that has a great deal of enthusiasm for me, I'm like fucking dead at the end of the day.

And I was wondering if you doing everything you're doing now have noticed any stamina issues because of how much you're doing and how little no you say.

God.

Dan, I'm 36 weeks pregnant.

I'm fing tired all the time.

I mean, I get tired on Saturday.

I didn't, I literally had nothing to do.

Well, I, I guess I was watching preseason football all day.

That was, that was something.

So you were in, so you were in nirvana, in other words.

Uh,

yeah.

Uh,

no, I feel good.

It's good to see you.

I'm, I'm,

uh, I feel animated.

I feel like disagree.

Disagree on the good to see you because I'm looking at our video layout for those people who are only listening on podcasts.

And Dan has the big screen.

This is my show.

And still at this company, Dan must have the big screen.

It's in my contract.

It's in the MetalArc founding.

Yeah, there you go.

This would set up jokes that maybe we don't want to tell based on one of the topics today,

which is sort of wait.

I don't know if we want to start with that one, though.

No,

we should wait to do wait,

and we should probably get going

so i wanted to start with another off camera conversation that i was having with Mina because Mina called me quote the world's preeminent tank fan And I just want to object to this label because it makes me sound like I have a fetish for tank jobs.

And I don't.

I don't have a TJ fetish.

What I have is an appreciation for incentives, Dan.

I have an appreciation for when it is clearly the right move for a team, for an organization like the Arizona Cardinals, which feels like, by the way, Maybe the number one story that no one is talking about this NFL season, when it's obvious that that team should embark on maybe the most unapologetic tank job, the most obvious tank job in NFL history, which means, by the way, that their new head coach, Jonathan Gannon, cannot simply say, hey, I know we suck.

I know that Caleb Williams from USC is the closest thing to Patrick Mahomes since Patrick Mahomes.

the kind of singular franchise-saving superstar that justifies us losing as many games as we can to get the number one overall pick.

He has to say stuff like this in response to questions.

Well, I'm not going to name a starter because I think it's a competitive advantage for us going to Washington, but we'll know who the starter is.

Yeah, and when it's clear, by the way, that the options for that starter are either Clayton Toon, who is the rookie mean of the fifth-round draft pick they took, or Josh Dobbs, who joined the team less than a week ago, has not taken a single rep

in the postseason, a snap in the postseason, or in training camp.

You then get questions that are like this: it's not ideal if if Dobbs ends up being your guy for whatever reasons, that

you'd start a season with that guy who's taking a snap before you end up preseason cable and training camp.

How could it work if that ends up being the case?

I trust in what we're doing is to be the best thing for the team.

That's how it would work.

So this is obviously humiliating, right?

But this is also precisely what he has to do.

Mina, this is what Jonathan Gannon has to do.

He cannot admit that he's tanking.

The first rule of tank club is that you never talk about tank club.

He has to play dumb and only express the truth through how depressed he is in his vocal tone.

The rare white tank commander, by the way, in the NFL.

I just want to point that out.

That's a whole other conversation.

Yeah,

I find this story fascinating because

while this is hardly the first example of an NFL team doing an egregious tank, this might be one of the the most egregious I've ever seen.

And it raises questions to me.

It was already egregious.

I mean, going back to the draft when the Cardinals traded their first-round draft pick to Houston, a move that I applauded because of the return they got in the future.

I thought it was a major win for Arizona.

That pick, combined with their own pick, is going to be outrageously valuable.

But I think it raises questions about a couple of things.

In the NFL, does it work?

Which I really think it's worth getting into because...

Tanking in general, you're saying.

Does tanking work?

There's a lot of examples in recent NFL history of teams trying to do this and failing.

Most recently,

the

Houston Texans, who I alluded to, who

their

former head coach,

Lovey Smith, who did not embrace the tank commander job, committed the cardinal sin of winning that final game.

See what you did there.

Handing that first pick to his old team, Chicago.

But, you know, I think about New York was in position.

The Jets were in position to get Trevor Lawrence.

They won too much at the end.

A lot of times, because the NFL is so crazy and because games are so unpredictable and so many teams end up being worse than you think, you can go into a season with a clear intention to not win and still not win enough.

So there's that side of things.

And then there's the other side, which is

managing this, both from a fan base perspective, internally,

trying to keep things from totally spinning off the rails.

It's not easy.

And a lot of coaches have pushed back on it, Miami being an example.

So

I just want to say, like Arizona, what they're doing is very obvious, but the

sort of distance they have to travel to get from point A to Caleb Williams is not an easy road.

I don't think that people understand what you just said, though, because as Pablo is

out here actively advocating for not trying, for quitting, for being less courageous, it's a misrepresentation.

It's not.

You're streamlining efficiencies in a Wall Street way that has wrecked journalism and Hollywood, but you're not wrong.

Oh, yeah, I am doing that.

You're not wrong that it would be when, because Mina did say what she just said, We are looking at the possibility that the Arizona Cardinals in a sport that's salary capped and you have to find winning in whatever margins you can find them in by being bad for one year will have the top two picks in the next draft that has Caleb Williams and Drake May, where everyone wants the cheap quarterback that has value.

So the amount of draft capital, the amount of power they will have by being bad this year.

year is overwhelmingly incentivized.

Like this is a story that's not being covered enough that the Arizona Cardinals have figured out, the only team in the league has figured out, wait a minute, we can game this system by getting value at quarterback and having a ton of draft picks by having the top two next year if we're bad and if Houston is bad.

And you can't trust Houston to be bad because I only know the name David Culley because he won more than he was supposed to when he was handed a failure.

Brian Flores also won more than he was supposed to when Dominique Foxworth was out here saying that it was unethical for the Dolphins to feel.

It's a moral stain.

Yes, a moral stain that they would get physically trampled.

What are your thoughts on what they're doing in Miami?

It's unethical and morally reprehensible as far as I'm concerned.

If you're bad for one year and you get the top two picks, I think most franchises that don't have a quarterback would want to do that, but they also have a quarterback.

They also have nothing else but Kyler Murray, which I assume also has value.

Well, Kyler Murray, who tore his ACL, right?

Like there is this question of like, are they just giving up on him entirely?

Is Caleb Williams Williams really that good?

The consensus seems to be Caleb Williams is really that good.

Kyler Murray, not good enough.

And what Mina is saying there, too, I want to clarify, is that it's really hard to be as bad as you think you should be in the NFL, a sport where the ball is fucking oblong.

Like it's a small sample size.

Stuff happens.

You can't tell these guys to lose as much as I am now cast in the role of Wall Street villain, even though what I'm really doing is saying, you gave me these rules.

These rules may be unethical change them by the way side note this is the real me talking change the rules tanking can be a moral stain i understand the argument but if you're going to set teams up to do what's best for them organizationally then yeah go get caleb williams and make sure all of this is redounding to my larger point make sure that you're actually as bad as you want to be go dennis rodman on this be as bad as you want to be otherwise the worst thing mina the worst thing is what i've learned in the NBA and every other sport is to just be mediocre, in which case you get none of the things you thought you wanted.

A thought just occurred to me.

Did Dominique Foxworth cost the Dolphins Joe Burrow single-handedly with his

plea for ethics?

Yeah.

He might have.

Okay.

Put yourself in the shoes of a Cardinals fan.

You want to lose.

You don't want to win three, four, five games.

You want to lose at an old-time rate.

You want that pick.

You want those two picks.

This This is, you know, we can talk about,

I think,

I find the kind of ethics thing,

I don't agree with Dominique.

It's a rare case because no one is saying the players are tanking, although I think with coaches, it gets a little bit hairier when it comes to personnel decisions.

Organizations tank.

We know this.

Everybody agrees on this.

This is not controversial.

Players do the best they can.

They're given shots.

There are guys who are being given opportunities, the quarterbacks in Arizona, that they would not otherwise be given opportunities.

I do not find that unethical personally.

It's funny, though, Mina, it is funny to say that you are so terrible at football that playing you is unethical.

That does make me laugh a little bit because you're really being charitable towards guys that are only getting a shot that they would not get otherwise.

Well, it's like the cutting Colt McCoy was evidence of how bad they want to be, which is just a remarkable sentence, by the way.

I did think, I said this on the show earlier this week.

I did did think that usually playing Colt McCoy is something that was evidence of tanking.

Yes.

See, the idea that getting rid of him would reveal to all of us, oh, wait a minute, the Cardinals over under on four and a half wins this season might be too high because of how blatant they're being here, which is uncommonly blatant for this sport.

I have no problem with what the Cardinals are doing.

I think their fans should be.

I mean, it was a bit trollish of me, but I had to pick them as one of my draft winners.

It was clearly the right thing for them to do to trade that pick and get that haul.

And it was a win.

And, you know, I don't think this is an example of like, oh, man, the nerds are taking over football.

And, you know, you're playing with spreadsheets.

No, it's the right, you're going to be bad.

So be bad.

I just keep going back to the fact that it is unpredictable in football.

And that's where I want to introduce the wild card of this all.

And you alluded to this, Pablo, which is the Cardinals have a quarterback who has been good,

is currently on the PUP list, and is going to want to return at some point to remind people that he doesn't suck and he, his incentives might be in conflict with the organizations.

Well, it's dead.

This part is extra hilarious to me.

And why we're going to be talking about the Cardinals all season long.

Kyler Murray's rep has been he doesn't work enough.

He doesn't love the game enough.

He doesn't try enough.

And here he's in a position where he's being told told de facto, don't play, don't try.

We want you to be exactly the caricature.

Go play Call of Duty for a whole season is what every Cardinals fan should want Kyler Murray to do.

Or

come back.

with a team that has absolutely no talent and watch the most fun football you've ever seen from Kyler Murray trying to prove himself to get out of Arizona because he doesn't want to play bums.

We all know they're tanking, but he wins six games just running around out there because he can do that.

Because he's still, Mina, you'll help me out here, but I still think of him as a top 10 quarterback if he's healthy.

He has played at that.

He's one of the hardest quarterbacks to project in football right now because the highs have been so high and the lows have been so low.

Like there, it wasn't that long ago.

I think it was the first half of the 2021 season where he was like, I think the leader to get MVP.

That wasn't, you know, distant history, but the injuries certainly matter.

Last year when he played, he didn't look great.

It's just a remarkable dynamic.

Like, you know, Lovey Smith is the thing that steered the Texans tank at the very last second

off the highway.

Yes, gloriously crashing the car.

They run the risk of being undermined by their own quarterback.

I find that so fascinating.

And a quarterback, Mina, you mentioned this, and I do think people forget it.

It wasn't but a season and a half ago that Arizona had the best record in the league.

And look to me, like people forget this entirely.

They looked to me like a team that could absolutely win the Super Bowl when they were whatever it was, 10 and 2 or 9 and 1.

They started two seasons.

Hell, as of recently, they had to be as bad as they were last year.

Arizona had won more road games than any team in the NFL over a span of a couple of years.

Like that was a team with that quarterback that nobody wanted to play.

Let me pay you guys a picture.

It's week 18.

The Cardinals are down a touchdown.

There's, I don't know, maybe not Houston, but another horrible team.

I'm not going to throw out a team, but just some other team is losing.

They're getting their asses kicked.

The Cardinals need to lose this game to win

to get the number one pick and draft Kyler Murray's replacement.

The ball is in Kyler Murray.

Like, people, this is drama on a scale that I don't think is being appreciated.

Because here's the thing: even when Kyler Murray comes back, they're going to be bad.

They just don't have enough talent on this roster.

The defense is horrible.

But we're not talking about whether they'll be good or bad.

We're talking about, will you, again, to quote Pablo, will you be bad enough?

And that might be in the hands

of a guy who's trying to save his own job.

Kyler Murray

doing something to win the game and being booed by his fan base for doing it, unless they are playing the Houston Texans, in which case they get either pick is the only way that this does not end in deep therapy.

For, by the way, a guy who has become Dan, I don't know if you've noticed this.

Kyler's been in Mina's mentions.

Kyler Murray's kind of a Mina Times reply guy now.

I think we should say this out loud.

Can you guys please help me figure out what the scenario is with game 17, the hypothetical scenario you've put out there he's i'm assuming your highest paid player you have to organizationally step forward and say you cannot play in this game clayton toon is the answer to everything that we're doing here you will not play but if you do that dan you break the number one rule of the tank club which is you don't talk about the tank like like that if they were to actually make that decision

They can you I mean do you remember how outright Duck Peterson got fired because the Eagles did this?

Do you remember this?

Duck Peterson, Super Bowl winning head coach, now universally seen as one of the best coaches in football at Jackville.

He got fired because he did this in Philadelphia.

The good news.

Yeah.

The good news is that I just looked it up.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 will be released on November 10th, 2023.

So if that game's good enough, you might get Caleb Williams.

But speaking of

losing to a dangerous degree, I think Mina has a topic for us.

Not funny.

It's

such a bad segue.

That's so bad.

I mean, do you know how much we're paying this person to host things like this?

Like, that's what he learned at ESPN.

He learned, I mean, it was just a terrible segue.

It's going to reveal itself to be a great segue as soon as Mina explains herself, which is the easiest joke.

This is the easiest joke that gets told around us.

It's about losing stuff.

The subject that I am bringing up for today's show, my obsession,

last time we spoke, it was artificial intelligence.

Right now, it is Ozempic or Rigovi or these weight loss drugs.

I find this all very fascinating.

Sent you guys a couple of articles that were in the Times recently.

There's been many great articles.

There was a really excellent New Yorker long feature by Gio Talentino about it, I think, earlier this year.

New York Magazine did a great story.

But these latest stories highlighted a couple of things that I think are fascinating when it comes to the fact that there's now this new crop of weight loss drugs that are very, very effective, which is,

you know, never happened in modern or in history.

One article in the Times basically can be summed up as we don't actually know how these work, which I think is so terrifying and weird and

significant because I think nobody really knows how to feel and talk about these drugs.

And the fact this massive sea change in healthcare is upon us.

Nobody knows if we're supposed to be morally outraged or if it's a good thing.

Nobody knows if we should condemn them or be happy because of what it means for public health.

And apparently nobody knows how they actually freaking work other than the fact that there's a hormone that tells your brain to not be hungry, basically.

And the other article I sent was about how predominant they are in wealthy communities in New York and that breeze side, which I do think factors into the moral side of all of this.

But I read everything about this that comes out.

And I still find that I,

and this, you know, maybe this is my brain being broken by the fact that because of our jobs, I feel like I have to have the take.

I don't know what the right take is on this.

So I'm hoping in talking to you guys a little bit, I want to hear what you think.

I assume you've all been following it as well and reading these stories.

And yeah, it strikes me as a very nuanced and complicated subject and not one that can be easily be reduced to good or bad.

And will be reduced to just fat jokes at my expense, I'm sure.

Well, hold on.

But I do want to set this up before we get, because I think we should, we should, again, there's just so many puns here, jokes, but like we should look in the mirror at ourselves and be uncomfortable about this.

But I do want to set up the story a bit more, Dan, because the big revelation here scientifically is that losing weight is not just a matter of willpower anymore.

Like that was the conventional wisdom across science and across society was that this was because obesity was because you didn't try enough.

You didn't have enough mamba mentality.

And so there was shame because there was no other scientific solution to losing weight.

And now,

Wagovi Ozempic, Wagovi is a drug that might be surpassing Ozempic now in popularity, even.

The median weight loss experienced per these articles that Mina sent, it's about 15%.

And so this is revelatory.

Like doctors are saying, like, this has radically changed how we think about just the concept of what being obese is.

And so too has it landed

heavily with me and Mina as we do jokes still while trying to talk about how we shouldn't do jokes anymore.

We're paying for these jokes.

This is Pablo Torrey.

That segue in those jokes probably cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars

as a company.

But I feel bad about it.

I feel bad, Dan.

And I'm wondering, in a real way, absent any of the wordplay,

I think Mina and I are both curious, like, how does a story like this strike you as we've been striking you for, you know, the jokes that you've been making?

This is the greatest insecurity of my life.

It has been since sixth grade when I had a puka shell necklace and a double chin.

And I still think of that photo as a kid who did not have a lot of confidence.

I thought my shirt was also a velour that was burgundy colored.

It's an image seared in my sixth grade

brain because I've always been a fat kid.

And when you mention the idea of willpower, I also have not just a thyroid condition, but when I exercise, my body doesn't make a distinction between the cortisol release that you would get from being chased by a bear.

So the last year of my life, I've inflated and swollen, even though I eat according to blood allergies.

I eat only a handful of ingredients.

I know exactly how to eat, how to exercise.

And I didn't have to read those articles because my endocrinologist and another doctor have both offered those things as a solution.

Would you like to?

And recommended it.

This is perfect for you.

An injection that will curtail your appetite.

And I'm like, my appetite's not a problem.

What I need is something that allows my metabolism to work correctly.

And they're like, no side effects.

And it's just an injection.

And it's been recommended to me twice.

And I'm scared.

Because when it was recommended to me 10 years ago, just take some human growth hormone.

The only side effect was if you have an unknown unknown tumor it's going to grow much faster in your body and i'm like no thanks i'm not going to do hormones but now they're telling me no side effects they're not telling me we don't know what this does or how it works they're telling me use this it's no problem it'll kill your appetite period beyond like the you so there's the fact the aspect of this that's personal for you you're like trying you're actually trying to figure out if you're willing to do this and and um

how it might affect you and the uncertainty that comes with with that.

Dan, like you just told a story about how

you are very acutely aware from personal experience of how weight in this world, weight gain, obesity, et cetera, are heavily

stigmatized contrary to scientific evidence.

And this has been the story for years.

This is, in fact, why I've been reading some of these articles.

It took so long for these drugs to be developed and come out because doctors were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's a willpower thing.

And scientists were like, no, we have evidence.

Do you feel like upon reading this and seeing and

listening to scientists and doctors talk about it, that this will change that stigma at all?

Or is it just simply going to shift to, oh, you're cheating now, you're taking this drug?

Oh, but I just think this is some, this is just somehow one of the last places.

This is the universe's final funny joke on me as I, you know, deal with the mortality of my brother and, like I said, inflate from the pressure of the last year.

Dan Woketard is in the unsafe purgatory where I'm the only acceptable thing to make fun of anymore in today's culture.

The fat man.

The fat man can still be made fun of.

And I don't believe, actually, Mina, that this reduces the stigma, but people will say you cheated.

You weren't meritorious and willful in your loss of weight.

You injected the rich Hollywood drug.

Well, it's going to be rich, is the operative word to go back to the other article.

This is just going to be, you can now buy your way out of it.

It's going to be a two

weight is going to be even more tied to class than it was before.

That's the thing that probably, you know, the science of it, I don't know, man.

I can't weigh in on that.

But the money side of it, it seems like at least for a while until the prices come down, maybe because of supply and demand dynamics, this is going to be a class thing, which is

dystopian.

Yeah, dystopian.

That perfect word.

Oh, but we're just starting there.

We're about 10 years from old people, rich people just being able to buy the youth of poor young people.

Like we're going to be able,

yes, you're right.

Yes.

An app is going to be formed.

Hey, young person, are you willing to sell three years of your youth in exchange for $11,000?

We're going to be able to do that in the dystopian future.

So I've been contemplating two things listening to Dan kind of bare his soul about this.

One is that it'd be very funny if Dan Lebetard was not allowed, like Barry Bonds, into the sports casting hall of fame because he went on Ozempic.

That would be very funny to me.

The second thing, though, is that it does feel like the other person, based on what you just said, who we might still be able to make fun of in this increasingly sensitive culture, is that guy who's like 50, who's been transfusing his son's blood into his body and doesn't look younger.

Have you seen the photo of this guy?

He's like trying to do the vampire thing, but he still looks old.

I want to ask you this.

Because when I sent this story to Pablo, I mentioned something, which is upon joining the universe of the show a few years ago and seeing that your weight was one of those, it was fair game.

It was something that you guys have entire, elaborate, multi-year built bits built around.

So I jumped in and I know, and this is back when I used to read my replies more, I saw that it bothered some people.

They said, I really don't like it when you do this.

And I actually kind of stopped doing it.

I don't, probably didn't even notice it because everyone else does it.

I didn't do it, but I stopped doing it not because I felt like it was bothering you and you've never ever said anything to me or anyone, but because it bothered other people.

And that, I thought, you know what?

That's totally reasonable.

You're saying all this.

Like, do you feel

I've had to get comfortable with it?

There wasn't a choice.

But you do have a choice now.

Oh, but

what I'm saying, well, but why stop it?

First of all, that's my question for you.

Trying to stop it doesn't actually stop it.

So you might as well join in on the fun.

It's not like, hey, social media, I'm vulnerable here.

You won't be cruel about this, right?

Like,

that's not really the way that one works.

So might as well jump in on it.

But I...

I don't think it, I mean, at this point, I'm an adult and I'm not pretending to not be bothered.

What bothers me is that my body doesn't function correctly correctly so that I can lose the weight.

And my choice in my 50s is now

to either be unhealthy that comes with obese because your organs aren't going to work if you keep being 250 pounds, or as I like to say, 6'3, 215.

Or an injection, or an injection that doctors don't know how it works and are telling you no side effects.

And I don't trust no side effects.

Like I don't, it is, I mean, it's a very Miami dynamic, though, what the doctors are saying it's like we don't really know how this works but you know i'm sure it'll no but there's still help but they're still put it to a poll should then take the drug

and you gotta do it

I see you clearly.

So when one of you wants to talk, like, it's not that hard to see if you've got something.

You're a pretty damn good job of not interrupting each other, I gotta say.

I agree.

Well, that's what brings us to our next subject, which do you want me to lead it, Pablo, or do you want to lead it?

Yeah, no, it's my show, but this one I actually want to give you custody of.

Okay, I just loved so much.

I really did, that

Skip Bayless in now feuding in his 70s to try and take the mantle from industry sports leader Stephen A.

Smith.

20 years, they've dominated debate culture and really changed the face of the sports media critic and

in debating everything created an acid of cruelty around the way we treat athletes because it's all entertainment and we say nasty things and it's all sports radio and it's all supposed to be content.

And Skip Bayless is trying to keep up with changing times in his 70s by opening the gates of hell.

to three generations, three generations of this is the loudest black guy who played football during his generation.

Three generations of it.

Michael Irvin, Teeshon Johnson, and Richard Sherman.

And of course, when they get together, because they all want to be throwing the damn ball, all of them are talking at the same time.

And Skip Bayless shrinks to the size of a postage stamp on his own show because how the hell are you going to get in the way of those three personalities?

And I'm just really enjoying.

the idea that Skip Bayless's last evolution is, all right, bleep it.

Let's let everyone have at it on my show.

I'm going to allow Richard Sherman, Michael Irvin, and Keyshawn Johnson to debate me for the remainder of my career.

That again, I will say, I don't mean this as ageism.

He's 70 years old.

This is not the game for 70-year-olds, but he's going to try it with three different really cartoonish loud guys.

We need to play a sample of this because Dan poetically described it, but we should just snort this.

Learn to catch this ball in your body.

So, so in your hands, you tighten up, ball goes through you, or you tighten up, ball hits the ground.

Catch it with your body.

I'm only one of the best to ever do it at playing that game.

What I'm saying, you know what?

I don't know how you can say,

not your hands.

And it ain't championships on every level.

What I'm talking about doing, I want championships on every level doing.

I don't know how you want to ask bad advice.

You don't say I was that bad advice.

I mean, you'll notice zero words spoken by Skip Bayless.

And what is actually a representative clip from the many clips we had to choose from?

You know, the

Christmas episode of the bear?

The feast of the fishes.

Don't throw that fork.

Watching these clips.

That's how I feel.

There's so many questions that come out of this.

One is,

do you think Skip Bayless feels that he's made the right decision, consigning himself to the life that Dan described?

Second is, is this good television?

That I think is interesting because, you know, Dan, I've seen some of your criticisms of debate shows and debate culture.

And I think that there's

the thing that I find very hard to parse personally is,

well,

is this good television?

Is it good, good television or bad television?

What makes good and bad television in the argument format?

The ratings kind of speak for themselves with some of these shows.

That I feel like, though, hits a wall where it's not good for me personally.

Like, I cannot watch, I find that unwatchable.

I find it's very challenging for me to listen to.

And it's very different from, I guess, I'll weigh in here with the personal experience first take, which I do during the NFL season, because that show is very much Stephen A.

Smith's show.

That does not happen on that show.

There's like

you go into the arena knowing that you're being incentivized to attack, but there's limits to it.

You know,

it's very clear who the boss is.

Wait a minute, hold on, Dan.

Dan, are you hearing what I'm hearing on this?

I mean, it's she's not speaking.

She's not speaking between the lines.

That wouldn't happen on Stephen A.

Smith's show.

But also, what wouldn't happen is he wouldn't have three personalities bigger than him on his own show.

Like, because if I were to encage Richard Sherman, Keyshawn Johnson, and Michael Irvin trying to make a statement in front of the lights on any unsuspecting host throughout the history of time, they would all have trouble containing whatever that became.

But the word unsuspecting is the word that was circling my brain as I was listening to Mina basically say that she's pulling punches because she knows there are some things that she shouldn't say because it would be to render the host of the show unsuspecting.

I would actually say, it's not that I'm pulling punches in terms of the content of what I say, but the way that I say it.

Now, granted, I don't think it's in my nature to talk about.

But that's why you stink at the take.

You've stunk at the take since you got here.

I've gotten better.

Okay.

No, but no, but you got to be obnoxious.

It's got to have a condescension and an arrogance in it.

It has to be something that has an an affect that is rude.

Like it's obnoxious.

It has to sound a little more like this.

You went to corner because it was much easier to do.

You didn't cut that ball or something.

Well, you don't even cut that ball between.

All you got to do is run with somebody.

Yeah, there it is.

Just that grunt.

No, because people love JJ on first take, and he has positioned himself, I think, very successfully as the reasonable one.

Here I am, I'm going to do my reasonable take.

I'm not going to sound aggressive or condescending or talk over people.

And when I watch those clips, which by the way, Stephen A.

loves too.

Stephen A., like,

there is a bit of an egolessness, I think, to the way that show is produced that's different from Skip being crowded out of his own show.

I find that to be really good television.

And I think a lot of people do.

I think it really works.

Oh, but it's rare.

But it's also rare, Mina, because it stands out at least in part.

Because, oh, look, J.J.

Reddick is a lot smarter smarter than most of the people who are talking around him and the points that he's making more informed he sounds more informed like JJ Reddick keeps going viral at least in part because he sounds super smart well that's what that's that's where I see this through that lens is

the attention of this the virality of it the attention economy of what it means to be good at anything Because when you get a clip, and I want to play one more clip here, the clip where Skip Bayless kind of forlornly has to just acknowledge that he doesn't even have the oxygen on his own show to be Skip Bayless.

Here's my problem.

All year long, they did not have a closer.

I don't know how closely you watch their games, but I can, we don't have time because you guys talk too much.

And so I, I can't, I'll run out of time.

I'm not.

I did.

Yes, you talked too much.

Just like

that part.

That part is funny and it goes viral in part because it feels like Skip Bayless is not in on this, right?

Like what we're watching, let's just come to the core of this.

What we like is that Skip Bayless is being drowned out as the ultimate sports TV villain, even more than Stephen A has ever been, by the way.

Skip Bayless embodies that for all these reasons.

He cannot win on his own show.

He has stepped onto a giant rake shaped like Michael Irvin and Richard Sherman and Keyshawn Johnson.

That's why this is going viral.

And that's why I am snorting all of it.

It's, it's funny for that specific reason.

Nina, can we answer the question that you're asking though?

Because when you say, is it good television and is bad television good television, ratings do dictate all of that.

Ratings are the ultimate decider on something like this.

And

the modern currency, whether you're 70 or on TikTok, is attention.

And all of these clips that Pablo just played, millions of views, which these shows do not have when they're on television.

Not hundreds of thousands, millions of views just because it's messy.

And that's good for Skip Bayless, is it not?

Like, whether he's happy about it is a different question, but of course, that's good television.

Certainly, television that Fox and ESPN will take at every turn, will they not?

Because it's money, it's just numbers.

So, Skip was the number one trending topic on Twitter when this started, whenever the new lineup debuted.

You're right, those clips went viral.

I think

he is undoubtedly a short-term winner because attention in our industry is absolutely a barometer of success, but whether it's sustainable will determine whether or not this is actually successful.

I mean, first of all, you know,

not to be like an industry analyst, but like

Shannon Scharp hasn't made his debut on first take, right?

And I think Pablo's point

was really astute, which is these, these all went viral, not because of the content of what people were saying or because people enjoyed it, but because everybody loved watching Skip be humiliated or whatever.

Yeah, but Floyd Mayweather is one of the great businessmen of our time just because people would tune in to watch him get knocked out.

Like, I can't believe that there is an evolution for Skip Bayless at the age of 70 in a game this competitive.

But if he's willing to accept, all right, I'll be the fool, that's a great evolution.

I just don't think he would ever accept that.

It feels short-term to me.

I feel like if they're to have any success, you'd have to have, you know, like Richard Sherman break out as a voice that people want to hear or more like interesting debates.

That particular dynamic that you are both literally reveling in,

that doesn't feel like something people, that is going to go viral.

every week and get that kind of attention.

It felt like a like, this is novel.

Have you noticed that?

We're seeing this guy cast in a relevant place.

You don't think Michael Irvin on television, who multiple times I have thought to myself, I don't know if this is cocaine, but there is cocaine in his past that wouldn't make it an unreasonable leap to say this person behaving at this rate of speed is really amped up.

And always, I think, Mina, always good television.

I don't think,

I think Michael Irvin is better at television than all three of us.

Well, he's great at television.

You, but Dan, you covered Michael Irvin.

Like on some level, did you foresee?

I want to ask you this question because you had a front-end.

It was obvious when he was 18.

He was the most charismatic player on all of those University of Miami teams that ended up having a personality type that the country embraced because it was loud, obnoxious, fun, ridiculous.

Let's just be very honest about what's happening.

Michael Irvin has been.

plugged in to like every conceivable talk show format because someone out there is like, we need him to make this sound at us.

You went to corner because it was much easier

the excerpts from that show sound like when you play like pink floyd backwards looking for signs for the devil or something like you know it is it is absolutely what echoes and sounds like the sound made by something crawling the walls of hell absolutely

you don't think it's sustainable that's what it is that you're arguing why i don't think they're it what i don't think that's going to continue getting this level of attention they have to do other things i do not underestimate these gentlemen's ability to find other ways to get attention though dan So I just, I just meant that particular dynamic.

It's, it's, it's like watching, you know, a, like a dog walk on its legs.

You're like, whoa, haven't seen that before.

That's what it felt like watching Skip Bayless be quiet.

It's back legs, you meant, right?

Because all I've seen is dogs walk on their legs.

Okay, so I'm noticing a through line here.

We're talking about people losing things, but maybe getting better in the process.

That feels like the theme of today's show.

I feel like I found some poetry there, Dan.

So what did you learn?

What did you find out today on Pablo Torre finds out?

I found out that when three people have worked together for a long time, they can hit exactly the perfect musical notes, never talking over each other because they have chemistry, having discourse that can be a symphony as long as three parts, ingredients that have worked together before are graceful, unlike what it is that Undisputed was doing where everybody was talking over each other and the host of the show couldn't get a word in edgewise, I am arguing, Undisputed style, that what we're doing around here has more chemistry than the average podcast.

I thought you were going to set me up first, Pablo, so that you could end the show with Dan.

I don't understand.

I don't know.

Sorry.

That's the kind of chemistry I'm talking about right there, Pablo.

That's what I'm talking about.

No one is

going to end on a failed bit.

I was, I was, I, I thought I was setting up Dan for meaning to interrupt.

You're on a show where we're judging another show for yelling over all of that.

That's the kind of content that I'm talking about.

This show would never be

actually told me at the same time.

That's me

not happy.

That it met a lot of members.

All that money for those magical professional sets.

Because I care about production.

Both of you.

Sweating balls.

Finally, finally, Koogler hits the sound

woo sweating balls on Pablo finds out.