"The Rehearsal" Is a Sports Profile, with Mina Kimes

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m.

Folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

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Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out.

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

Even your burns are so convoluted.

God, I was just going to say he looks like the guy from Shrek, Lord Farcot.

That's what I was thinking.

I was like, ooh, here's one I got for you, Pablo.

Hit him with this, the Shrek image.

Right after this ad.

It is hot in LA today.

What are we talking?

I actually haven't looked.

But I'm going to Nashville

where it's hotter because there's like a heat wave on the East Coast.

This is Nino's first flight since he started walking, which is a long time ago.

So we haven't flown very much.

And I am preparing for the apocalypse.

What's your strategy in the event of the apocalypse?

So the context is he is not only walking, he is incredibly squirmy and does not like being confined and is like very hard to wrangle.

I feel like

a high school football team that's going up against the perennial state champion and knows they're going to lose.

So I'm pulling out every trick play possible.

I have done so much research into ways to entertain your toddler on a plane at this point that I'm arguably overprepared for this trip.

The best play available

in my playbook, which has 100%

success rate,

is just give them an iPad.

Are you willing to do that?

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, please.

I am not one of those.

Oh, no.

I'm too good for iPads.

The problem is he is a little bit under iPad age.

So he is 21 months, right?

And I actually

started training him on the iPad for this trip about a month ago.

Like, I started giving him limited Elmo,

just like...

You've been micro-dosing him with Elmo.

Yeah, like a little Elmo.

To the point where he now thinks, he thinks the iPad is Elmo.

And he thinks the TV is basketball because that's the only thing I ever have on when he's allowed to watch it.

And so I've been giving him like little 10-minute, 15-20-minute increments of Elmo, also training him to wear his little headphones.

And I think I've created enough demand to where he can probably get like maybe an hour, maybe not all at once, of iPad.

It's a four-hour flight.

So

if he was a little older, I'd put him on that thing the entire flight.

Oh, yeah.

We're giving Violet that in any, any even vague emergency situation.

Do you realize, though, and this is maybe germane to what we're going to do at some point in this episode, are you aware that you've been Nathan Fieldering your son?

You've been rehearsaling Nina.

Oh, my God.

I have not put that connection together.

Yeah, you're right.

I have been.

We have been rehearsing, rehearsing this flight, essentially.

And Nathan Fielder and my son probably have the same level of social skills.

So it makes sense.

Before we get into what we're here to talk about today, which I think is going to be, I've been meaning to do this, just you and I talking to each other in a way where we can like fully brain dump.

But I do, because of Cortez, I do want to play something because speaking of toddlers, I have not seen this clip yet, but I am told that I should see it and maybe address it.

So could we please queue whatever Cortez queued up now?

All right.

I was at when I couldn't hear, I was having to keep myself occupied.

I was reading the latest glowing Pablo Torrey profile in the New York magazine.

So, Pablo is featured in a very prestigious publication.

I had not heard this.

New York Magazine.

And

as you could guess, it took one, two, three, four, five, 13 words before the P-bodies were mentioned.

And so that was good.

By the way, speaking of featured, I did think it was nice that Pablo kind of, because I didn't like Pablo and Bill feuding.

I thought it was nice that he went on the pod with Bill and stood his ground to his credit, didn't back down.

And if people didn't hear it,

we did a kind of super cut of it for him so they could hear the 90 minutes Pablo and 60 minutes Pablo and Bill spent hashing it out to podcast legends.

Go play it for us if you could.

Murrow and Peabody.

Peabody's Peabody nominated.

Edward Armuro Award.

Peabody Award nominated.

Peabody.

Edward Armuro.

Peabody.

Peabody.

Peabody.

Ward nominated.

Peabody.

Peabody's.

Peabody.

Peabody.

Edward Armuro Ward.

I imagine I have the relationship with Pablo that Pablo has with

Larsa Pippen.

Where like I'm, I don't have anything against him.

I'm kind of fascinated by him.

I don't totally understand

the, you know, the big deal, but there's no ill will.

He got your ass.

too shit he got your ass let's just call it

i was i i have it has come to my attention that in in my attempt to uh reestablish what would have been called into question which is my journalistic credibility in general i maybe overdid it so um

sniped sniped

in a little misleading editing there i don't know but i can i can excuse me by the way i just did a panel and one of the questions at the panel was if i really hate nick wright and i this actually ties into what we're going to talk about with the rehearsal.

I could not believe that people didn't understand it was a joke.

Nick Wright is like a friend of mine.

I really like and respect him.

And yeah, we're going to talk about the rehearsal.

Oh, yeah.

What's the fact?

What's the difference?

Yeah, right.

What's wrong?

It's hard to tell.

It's hard for me to tell.

Is Nick Wright still banned from PTFO?

I think the answer must be yes.

Well, after that,

and also,

does Nick Wright have something in common with Larsa Pippen?

I would say yes.

Yeah, I would say they're both almost clinically obsessed with Michael Jordan.

That seems to be a through line.

So, yeah.

F ⁇ you, Nick Wright.

I thought he was a LeBron guy.

Well, he's obsessed.

He's obsessed in the way that he can't stop thinking about Michael Jordan.

It's okay.

Take some time.

You know,

maybe do a few rehearsals.

Some of you going after Nick Wright.

Just, we got to just call it, I'm a neutral observer.

I'm not a neutral observer.

I'm Team Pablo.

Thank you.

However, he got your S.

I'm sorry.

I have to call it like I see it.

He got your S.

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Hey everyone, I'm Robert Mays, host of the Athletic Football Show, and I'm excited to welcome you to the 2025 season and everything new we've got going at TAFS.

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So, what we actually came here to discuss is a thing that I just finished.

So, today, I just finished watching all of it.

In the last hour, I finally did something that I got mad at myself for waiting so long to do.

Because now that I have watched the rehearsal, I just want to tell you that I think it's one of my favorite things I've ever seen.

Okay, unequivocally, love is your

review.

With

questions and concerns, but my reaction, the greatest compliment I can pay it is that I think I'm going to be thinking about this for a very long time.

And it made me reflect on like

how to do what I do better.

We should probably just explain who Nathan Fielder is.

Probably.

If you're listening to this and you haven't watched any of his work, that's kind of amazing, I guess.

The original show that kind of catapulted him to fame was Nathan for You.

My name is Nathan Fielder, and I graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades.

Now I'm using my knowledge to help struggling small business owners make it in this competitive world.

This

is Nathan for You.

This went on for multiple seasons.

It kind of, I don't know if I would say it hit a wall because he became too famous, but a lot of those stunts were predicated on the people not knowing who he was.

And I think he has become a little bit famous.

So then he launched a show called The Rehearsal and season one.

This is season two that we're going to talk about.

But this, the rehearsal is based, it's a kind of a continuation of the same through line, which is people really struggle with awkwardness in real life and awkward situations and confrontation.

And some people struggle with it more than others.

What if we created these elaborate recreations, simulations of real world issues, conflicts, whatever, that allowed people to reenact these tense moments with the help of actors, things like raising a child, all the way up to like having a confrontation with a family member.

So that was season one.

Season two was much more focused.

I've been studying commercial aviation disasters sort of as a hobby.

Okay.

And I've been staging my own

recreations of these disasters to better understand what's really going on.

And I started to notice a disturbing pattern in the causes of these crashes.

The idea was this theory that he came up with.

This is revealed in the first episode, that a lot of plane crashes are caused by a lack of communication between pilot and the first officer.

First officer not being willing to speak up, the pilot shutting them down.

Again, the through line is, you know, all of his work is about human communication and why it's difficult.

So he comes up with this idea of like, let's apply the fielder method, the rehearsal, to this specific problem.

He goes on a journey of trying to recreate it, trying to get people in positions of power and the government to care, but it keeps hitting walls.

And then ultimately, it results in this finale where he himself flies the plane so we can get inside the cockpit.

How do you feel about me landing this thing?

I'm confident.

Yeah?

How about you?

Are you?

Yeah.

Based on what?

I don't know.

I feel like you can kind of tell.

This lands the same as the sim, right?

The simulator?

What?

this lands the same as the simulator right

yeah

nathan fielder flies an actual

commercial airliner filled with human actors who are playing passengers does it successfully we learned that he's been training as a pilot for two years simultaneously is just a production question which again i'm always fascinated by like structuring

how you structure a thing like this at every moment he is simultaneously proposing something and reenacting it in order to prepare for some execution that he is going to try and do, seemingly in what would count as the present tense of the rehearsal.

Yes.

That alone

is so interesting to me because the sort of threading of

you seeing him hiring the actor.

as well as the person who the actor is going to portray, all of it is intuitive enough to follow, but it's so complicated that I understand if people are also just like, this is trying really hard and I don't quite get it.

So, a lot of the complexity of it, I think, and that introduces like some mixed feelings in some ways, is it's a mix of actors and real people.

I think about like the episode where he has the sort of awkward, sweet, endearing pilot who has struggles asking women out on dates and working up the courage to kiss them.

That's a real man.

So, this scene will be mostly mostly improv, and your character is named Captain Powers in this.

Okay.

A little funny, right?

Yeah.

And he's called that because he actually has a power, which is that every date he goes on, he has no problem asking for a kiss and then doing it.

Okay.

And the other character is named Jennifer Kiss Me.

And Jennifer will be played by Emma.

Okay.

Okay.

Who's an actress, as you know.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, let me go get your scene partner then.

Okay.

And then he's putting actors in the situation with them.

And one of those actors is then being asked to just be their self, but she's still an actor.

And I think Nathan himself is the ultimate, like kind of potheosis of that, which is he is both an actor and he is himself.

And I think

something that's really tricky to unpack in all of this, and it comes to a head, I think, at the end too, is like how much of this is the real Nathan versus how much of it is him playing a role, which which is to say, it's presented, the sixth episode, it's just a six-episode series, as like a fact-finding mission.

Like you are being taken on this journey with Nathan where one thing leads to another.

He like hits a wall, so he tries another path.

That opens up something.

He finds out all these people on the internet are obsessed with him being autistic.

That leads him down another path, ties in at the end.

All of it ties together.

Yeah, Sully Sullenberger is in there too, by the way.

There's a whole third episode, it's like this insane unhinged thing where he recreates the life of Sully Sullenberger.

But the episode is presented as one thing leads to another, come along on this journey with me.

But that to me is all,

it's all structured.

This is all pre-that is not reflective of reality, which is what makes the finale, I think, such an achievement, like artistically, because the amount of work and planning and production to make all of these things feel like they weave together naturally and organically is insane.

Insane.

Also, very clearly, like I have to imagine that he started, he worked backwards, right?

And so, in

storytelling, in magazine journalism, Mina, you know that, like, if you're going to evoke the first person,

there is this device you can use where it's like, so I tried this and that didn't work, so then I did this.

And the presentation of it, I mean, it's sort of ethically, you are beholden to your own code of honor, right?

Like, it could be easy to say, this happened and didn't work, or this happened and did work, and therefore this next thing happened.

And you sort of put it into a chronology that makes it the most, let's just say, fun, palatable version of the complicated story you want to tell.

I have to imagine that what Nathan Fielder is not showing us is, in fact, that part of like, we got to land the plane literally.

Yeah.

And to get there, how do I get there?

And so that's, there's so much cleverness there, but it's also artifice.

A through line, the autism community on the internet has become like fans of him in this show because

of complicated reasons.

I think, like, it, it, it, there's,

uh, they like that it mimics this idea of like masking is the term they use, right?

Like, hey, if you learn to just kind of enact these emotions and social cues, you can start doing it in real life.

They also believe some of them, some people believe Nathan is autistic.

And, you know, this is introduced partway through the show, and then it becomes a through line, and it becomes a tension point when he's confronted with, like, am I, do I have to disclose this possibility to fly the plane?

And then at the end, you said he decides the interior

doesn't matter.

What matters is how I'm being received and my interactions with other people, right?

Like, this is the big conclusion.

But, like, that's not how it happened.

Like, this, I'm sure, you know, he's known about this forever.

I'm sure in working backwards, he thought it would be an interesting thing because of the connection to the, you know, conflicts between people in the cockpit, the challenges of flying a plane.

And that leads me to a question, Pablo, which is like, so there's this moment where he takes a test or he's in an office with a woman, a doctor, I believe, an expert, who explains to him like, oh, you know, people who are autistic have trouble like differentiating between like the emotions shown in other people's eyes.

So she's like, for example, and she's showing it to him and he is like, he gets it wrong twice.

Which one would you choose?

So you're saying these people have trouble with this?

You're saying

that's the point you're trying to make.

That's right.

Okay.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Choose what you think on this one.

Yeah, terrified, maybe.

Okay, so I'm set.

But this is a very difficult test because it's very, very subtle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

And even like we would disagree, perhaps, on this.

All right.

He's acting, right?

So, so, so, but is he?

I don't know.

I thought this is a man who's definitely acting.

This is a comedian.

He knows it's funny if he kind of like shies away from it.

But if he's acting, does that at all diminish the

inclusion of the issue?

Exactly.

Does it diminish it?

Is the thing that I'm grappling with?

Because what I see in comedy all of the time is a convenient retreat to comedy when it comes to, wait a minute, you're lying to us or you're not taking this seriously or you're not living up to the implicit premise of this all being real and true.

And it's like, no, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just a comedian or no, I'm just an actor, right?

This is a bit of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

This is also a thing that feels like a docu-style examination of human behavior that is actually on some level a theatrical production.

um and so you're right if i am nathan fielder what i know in my mind is me getting these questions wrong is the best thing for this scene yes and so in a world in which elsewhere in the show i believe it was episode two i wrote this down because they're little like winks that are kind of obvious but maybe i think they're worth highlighting anyway where nathan Fielder says, quote, I've always felt that sincerity is overrated.

It just ends up punishing those who can't perform it as well as others, which I think speaks to some of the certainly like reading of social cues, but also I think is a meta-commentary on like, am I lying or not?

Am I performing or not?

Am I the greatest performer of sincerity?

Or am I somebody who cannot do it?

And I think he benefits from being the guy who is guileless and also the most Machiavellian, right?

He is both seemingly a victim of the thing he is examining as well as the greatest practitioner of it.

And that's where it's especially, I think, tense.

It's so slippery.

Do you think it had interesting things to say?

Like, do you think,

because I think that's what I'm wrestling with is whether the ultimate like theses and the themes and the points are undermined by

the artifice and the fact that he is ultimately acting for most of the show.

That's a really good question.

I think it is undermined by the cleverness and the artifice because I'm thinking about like, what did I find out while watching the show?

It was entirely about the craft of making it to me.

Like, that's what I, again, we just spent a whole conversation talking about like strategy, ethics, structure.

Um, the way in which this is not something that is fundamentally about

a journalistic or truth-centric enterprise is that by the end, uh,

the whole thing of like Nathan finds out that communication with his fellow pilot is the thing that you need more of to successfully land planes and avoid crashes is

so far in the rear view in the service of fundamentally an amazing stunt, which is I flew a plane and landed it.

I've been agreeing with you.

I think it was much more about art than like any particular underlying message.

You know, his like the conclusion he comes to at the end, which is like the results of this test don't matter.

It doesn't matter if I have this diagnosis because I was able to do this incredible thing and I was received a certain way by people.

And it's actually these interactions with others that can be rehearsed and role-played that define who we are much more so than what's in our mind.

There's certainly some truth there to that.

And I think you can look at examples of, you know, like some of the rehearsals and some of the more heartwarming examples.

Maybe the pilot did earn a little bit of confidence by role-playing like a guy asking for a kiss.

I don't know.

But

I did feel that message.

I was like a little bit like, yeah, but you're not, you don't really mean this.

I didn't like you didn't really realize this.

You're just putting a button on your yeah.

So, so on that note, thank you for pointing that out.

Because what I think Nathan Fielder would say is that what he really found out is that, is that part, what you said, like what you need can be found in other people in ways that, again, maybe you misunderstood at the outset of your journey of self-discovery.

Like, that's basically the point, which is a lot like saying, what I found out

was the real championship was the friends we made made along the way.

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I think it naturally brings us to the next part of what I wanted to discuss.

And we can sort of like jump back and forth through all of this, if that's cool with you.

Because the question of like how you tell a story in sports journalism, in magazine writing, to just focus on like what we used to do and really pride ourselves on doing, it was always about what's the bigger idea here.

You know, like there would be a profile, but then ideally you would find a bigger idea, something bigger to say that the

profile subject or the feature subject would allow you to kind of engage with.

And I actually, I don't want to presume that.

I always aspired to that.

Was that something that you were hunting for when you wanted to do

a piece on someone else?

Like, what is there beyond famous person is like this?

So, yeah, we both used to write sports profiles for magazines.

And

I'm interested in also talking to you about kind of like whether or not those are still a thing to the same degree.

Yeah.

And which has come up like amidst the NBA finals, right?

We need to tell more stories about these guys.

But profiling, I was thinking about it while watching the rehearsal a little bit.

I always felt like.

You had to kind of dual track it.

Yes.

When I was spending time with someone, I genuinely wanted to be open to the possibility, like learning new things at every step of the way, not just the beginning, learning things through being around them, observing them, reporting and whatnot.

But at the same time, while I was doing that, I was also looking for a thesis,

a point.

Every profile has to have a point.

Then you have to be open to also that point being challenged.

Sometimes I would go into stories with a belief of what the point was and it would change completely.

I can think of a few examples like that, honestly, over the years.

So it was, I always found

kind of, you had to have two ideas in your head at once, probably not too dissimilar from what we were just describing.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

No, I mean, for me,

look, as so

the best, the things I'm most proud of were dual tracks.

One track was I am reporting and meeting somebody that I do not know otherwise.

And I've researched and I'm open to, as you say, like finding out all the things that I could not pre-write.

The second track, I'm always on guard for like, what is this actually saying about anything beyond the narrow vantage point of you care about this guy because you're a sports fan.

So the example I'll use briefly is just one of the things I really enjoyed doing, even though it was very hard, was a profile of James Harden that I did for USP in the magazine.

But this piece, part of it was like this question.

And again, James Harden was not a good quote, not a good interview.

He was dating Chloe Kardashian at the time.

I went to Houston, incidentally, to visit them, and she was hanging around, went to the basketball camp.

You do the stuff that makes you feel like Nathan Fielder, right?

Like you're just like creepily following somebody with a laptop strapped to your chest, figuratively speaking, like taking notes and creeping around and just like watching and observing.

And so I related to that part, right?

There's some journalistic kind of vibes

in the rehearsal as well.

Yeah.

But in this case, sort of the premise ended up being like James Harden was just signing this giant Adidas contract, the nine-figure contract with Adidas.

He was now like the face of the Rockets.

And there was this question of like,

who actually likes James Harden?

Who wants to wear his shoes?

Who wants to be him?

Right.

Like, he seems like this, you know, he's this guy who has a beard, but that seems engineered.

Like, what is his deal?

And by the end, like, the dual track thing, like, so one track was profile, gonna tell you about him and how he got to be this way.

But the parallel track ended up being like this question that was inverted by the end, which was,

look at the way the attention economy has been structured.

Look at how people are competing to be famous and to get rich and to, again, manipulate algorithms in all these ways.

The better question for James Harden is actually, who doesn't want to be like him?

Because he is a guy who has every lever of like, again, dating a reality star, growing his beard for branding.

you could argue flopping to to get points and more money like he is exploiting every rule available to him including those of the internet the attention economy as well as basketball itself so second track comment on like what the is celebrity now first track who the f is james harden did you feel like there was a point in your reporting where you pivoted a little bit yes yes because uh when the guy that you sort of like show up to a profile i think and you're hoping that the subject just gives you everything and is just like very reflective and at a certain point you realize and this is, I think, where I'm curious for your take, like at a certain point, you have to wonder, when am I going to micro-dose like a think piece?

You know, like, when am I going to be the person who's observing stuff in a, in, in a sort of like, here is my view, my perspective personally on what's happening here, versus here is a story in which there is a plot and I am telling you what I've seen as opposed to I am interpreting what I'm seeing.

And so when James was not a great quote, it sort of like shunted me to prioritize that second track more.

And I think it made sense for him, but it doesn't, I'm sensitive though, to the way in which you can overdo the second track as well.

Yeah.

I think you're describing something that we used to encounter a lot with profiles, which is

how much you actually show of a person

is constricted by access, how much you actually get to see them and be around them, which has dramatically changed over the last 10, 15 years.

And also, whether they have something to say, right?

Like, if you're around somebody who's like incredibly soft-spoken and uninteresting, or maybe just not open, you end up having to over-index another thing.

You have to do right around them.

You have to interview, you have to do

outside reporting.

And also, you are more likely to kind of not vamp, but like explore ideas versus like, I think in my own experiences, there were stories like that.

But there were also stories like I was around i did a lot of football player profiles i was around the martellis and michael bennett very little me required in that story because they were just so funny and weird and interesting guys so i was like let me just spend like a few days with them and what it's described to be what and all you know i've i had some theses about how unique they were and why it worked and but but it was mostly just like hey this is what it's like to be about these dudes jalen ramsey was a similar one where i spent three days i think two days with him in tennessee um and ended up just being like, here's what that was like for the most part, because he was just so interesting and funny and whatever.

Versus like a guy like Justin Herbert.

I went into that thinking, that was one of my last profiles.

I went into that with a thesis and a theory about what the story would be about.

And it kind of ended up being what the story was about, which is what is it like to be an introvert as a quarterback in the NFL.

And boy, was he an introvert.

So a lot of it, and that was one where I had tonight, I had a ton of access.

He just is not a talkative dude and is very private.

And

that was reflected in the story.

And so I think you have to be kind of open to where the reporting takes you a little bit, but it's definitely

a product of like what actually, like, you know, the person and how much of them you get.

I remember talking to you about this when both of us were towards the end of our runs as like full-time magazine writers.

And effectively begging for access is really depressing.

Oh my God.

Stories I could tell.

How would you describe it?

So you can anonymize it if you want.

But like, how would you convey to someone who doesn't know what it's like to try and profile a celebrity athlete?

Like what it's actually like?

That's not in the piece.

I don't have to anonymize this one.

When I went to, I did the profile on Luka Doncic and I went to Spain and I was there for four days and I spent three of the days just waiting to see Luka Doncic to the point where like I had to basically like jump into his car in Spain to like, cause I was like, I need time.

I need to see this guy.

So much of being a

athlete profile writer was like, I think it's gotten way, way worse.

Now, well, maybe it's flicked around and I don't know.

I actually can't speak to it with terms of access.

But like we were writing from like 2008-ish, seven-ish through 2016-ish or whatever.

And it was, it's, it's kind of like a turning point, I think, in how athletes are covered and written about generally, which is to say, before that, access profiles were everywhere.

It was just a thing.

It was like part of being a famous athlete was like a big,

you know, Capital J journalist would come write about you and spend time with you.

And then around that time, I think some athletes thought, well, do I really need this?

Because I have my own social media.

I might have my own documentary company.

I'm in charge of production.

Why do I want to make myself vulnerable to this annoying, you know,

kid from Harvard who's talking about his pea buddies when I can just put out my own access program?

Why is this investigative journalist from Yale who used to do things about like, you know,

serious financial crimes asking me how many nachos I eat?

There was an NFL player who flaked on me in two states.

I was supposed to hang out with him.

And one state just ended up sitting there in a hotel room, didn't write back.

Then they said, okay, well, you know, he's in this other state, flew to the other state.

dipped on me then.

I mean, it's just, it's humiliating.

The boxers were the best.

Boxers were the best because their sort of like constitution was naturally to sell and they had no concern about PR because they were basically effectively uncancelable.

Like boxers didn't give a shit.

It was great.

Although I did get thrown out of a gym by Floyd Mayweather once, which was, I think, just a generally sad experience,

a huge waste of my time.

But when it comes to like what athletes need from, what they want, what they could use from a magazine or certainly magazines are less and less the thing, but just from a profile writer.

It does occur to me that like the real estate on a publication really was

a utility that they could monetize and benefit from.

Now it's sort of like it's all tiles on their Instagram page, you know?

So I don't, I, I, it's hard for me to blame them for being less and less open to this stuff.

It's a tough sell now for the reasons you described.

And

I still think there's a lot to be gained by letting someone else tell your story and

present it in a like deeply considered fashion you see that with some documentaries for sure still i think that's kind of although there's now a lot of that's the one field where this a lot of it is athlete made and we can that's a whole other thing but um herbert who i mentioned like that obviously was not his idea his part of marketing people were like hey would you want to do this and i would argue it's like the only real

glimpse people have gotten into justin herber it made a lot of people understand him and talk about him and like him in a way because he's just extraordinarily quiet and private.

And I think,

you know, the goal is not to do propaganda for them or whatever, but I think in terms of like helping people understand him, it was,

you know, kind of the only thing that's been done on him in that fashion.

But that's a tough sell.

Like, hey, like, yeah, you can market van commercials and you can post and you could do podcasts.

But if you really want people to like you, let somebody think about you for a long time and write about it.

That's a tough,

that's a tough pitch.

I get it.

I'll tell you what.

He did not like being interviewed and he did not like having me hang around.

I went to his, he had like a golf tournament.

So I spent time in Oregon for the piece and

his family was so lovely.

And I got to like, there was, you know, I talked to a lot of his teammates because I was like, all right, this dude's not.

not really like a talker.

Let me talk to like Keenan Allen and stuff.

And he, Herber himself did not like being interviewed, but whenever he would see me interviewing like his teammate, he would be like the shack hiding behind the telephone pole, trying to figure out what was going on, this like six foot six quarterback.

And I'd be like, it's fine, Justin.

And he'd be like, why did he say that?

And I'm like, dude, you could talk.

It was very funny.

But yeah, it's, you're giving up control in a way that I think is, is scary.

Yeah, I think the most you can hope for is, and this is sort of like the pledge.

And maybe this brings us back to Nathan Fielder towards the end, which is just that like, you kind of hope that the person you entrust with your vulnerability kind of sees your story the way that you do.

And you hope that they represent it ethically.

Like that's kind of, you know, like, because look, as anybody who is telling a story, there are two things.

One thing is

One thing is don't talk about your Peabody nomination.

That will come back to bite you.

The second thing, though, is

be extraordinary.

I mean, it's sort of like if my mom called me up one day and was like, guess what?

I just got a call from the New York Times or from GQ magazine and they just talked to me for an hour.

I'd be like,

oh God, no.

Right.

Like, you don't want, I would, I would, I would advocate always like discretion unless you have done enough thinking where like you're strategic.

Like, I don't, I don't blame people for being careful, right?

Like, I just, I get it because what I'm trying to say is the storyteller's foremost obligation is to the best story.

And so, all you can really hope for ethically is for them to hear your side of the story such that you influence

truthfully as the subject, the story that you want told.

And maybe you'll get there and it'll be perfect and great.

But sometimes you are playing defense from the start.

And that is something that it's it's hard for me to spin.

It's just, it's kind of just how it works.

Let me ask you one more question about profiles.

And this is kind of from the perspective, I guess, of the athlete as we talk about like why they're a dying thing.

And they really are, right?

Like we should start there.

Like there's less and less of these written all of the time for a litany of reasons, starting with people who don't read anymore.

And by the way, we should start there.

And also, like, links being deprioritized on various platforms like Twitter that you're talking about.

Well, that's that, that's, that's what I'm actually going to ask you about: is like, do can they still make an impact though?

Like, I, because that's kind of,

you know, um, what's impact?

I feel like during, yeah, that's that's the other question because I think

definitely you don't see profiles take over the internet in the way they did 10, certainly 15, 20 years ago, right?

Like you, it's not, it did feel like 15 or so years ago, there'd be like a big story coming out and everyone was talking about it.

Like, oh my God, did you read J.R.

Moringer on Alex Rodriguez or whatever?

And that doesn't feel like the case anymore.

And I don't think it's the fault of, it's definitely not the fault of the writers or the athletes, I think even it's just that's the internet has changed.

So in a world where people don't read and people don't talk about things things on social media to talk about stories, I certainly know why we think they should still exist.

But do you think like from the perspective of athletes and sort of this industry,

there's a case to be made for them?

So doing this show has made me think about this because we basically try and pre-aggregate ourselves.

Where it's like, what do we think the clips are going to be?

Let's make sure that we send them out.

Because really what you're doing, what does impact mean?

Does it mean that you got aggregated by like NBA Central?

You know, does it is at Legion hoops or whatever?

Are they

does getting to the aggregators mean that you made a sound?

Like, is that actually what sort of like internet currency feels like?

MLF football misrepresents you while you're blocked.

Does

do you still get the

want to use your writing to fund an entirely fraudulent internet empire?

If so, then maybe there's hope for us yet in the world of profiles.

But it's look, it's also telling to me that when it came to the rehearsal, that this was two years to do six episodes.

You know?

Probably more than two years.

Probably more, but at the very least was training to fly a plane for two years.

It does feel like the incentives of everything are leading us to,

you know, outside the genre we're currently speaking inside of, in which we are chained to the furnace of content.

content.

If you want to do this ambitious, sort of creative, arty, like we're telling stories kind of stuff,

you're doing it less often, but hopefully more impactfully.

Bigger swings, but fewer of them.

Precious big swing projects like Nathan Fielder, like Wright Thompson, by the way, who just had this Aaron Judge profile, which you didn't get to, but like he's still doing it.

at a really high level in this way, X times a year, a couple times a year.

And then there's what do you do inside of a world in which you're always on?

And that's where we are living, you know, in various media.

And that's how we try to, you know, I guess the answer is like do meta commentary.

That's how you can still keep profiles alive.

I think where I come down on the rehearsal, I know we heard it for a long time.

And certainly where I come down on pieces like the ones Wright did,

which is really excellent.

People should go check it out.

Speaking of, I mean,

we talked about profile writing.

Aaron Judge, not a great quote.

Oh, yeah.

yeah, you can see great story.

He falls into the command F.

Judge said, or Judge says, you'll see how much access right now.

But you learn a lot about him and what he means to the organization and baseball and the pressure of it.

And the history of

the business.

Yeah, it's great.

The part about him honing his swing, I thought, was so interesting and his perfectionism is really interesting.

So, anyways, people should go read it.

What I feel about both these things is I'm just really glad they exist.

That's kind of how I felt after watching the rehearsal.

Like, you know,

so much of what you make now is so ephemeral and requires such low effort.

The effort to impact

proportions of making art have never been worse.

And I'm complicit in that too.

You know, I put out dumb clips all the time.

So to see someone make something that took such an obviously incredible amount of effort and then to see it resonate with people.

the way it has, to be a topic of conversation, such an insane, bizarro,

unhinged piece of art.

I'm just happy that that's happening and that people like him are doing stuff like that,

regardless of how much of it was him playing a role versus being himself.

Yeah, no, I think that's a really good way of putting it.

And I guess what I found out today brings us back to where we started, which is that, yeah, I mean, look, I think you're right.

I need to workshop this Nick Wright metaphor.

Nick Wright's like saying, you know, it's a real, it's a real Pablo Torrey-Lars Pippin dynamic.

I think it's actually to circle everything back to

its most symmetrical sort of conclusion.

I just think that Nick Wright and I

are both jealous of people who are more ambitious and more creative than us.

And that's how I feel about the rehearsal.

And that's clearly how he feels about this show.

So the ultimate compliment, the ultimate compliment.

is that I want to be more like

more like the rehearsal, I think.

Even your burns are so convoluted.

God, I was just gonna say he looks like the guy from Shrek, Lord Farcraft.

That's what I was thinking.

I was like, ooh, here's one I got for you, Pablo.

Hit him with this, the Shrek image.

You've been spending this entire episode thinking about how to get back at Nick Ray.

And meanwhile, I'll just quote tweet him with like the Shrek guy in a loop.

People will go crazy.

That's also a better strategy.

Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Aberoma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Dawig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McRae, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, Chris Tuminello, our studio engineering by RG Systems, our sound design by NGW Post, our theme song, as always, is by John Bravo.

We will talk to you next time.

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