Radio Better Offline: Pablo Torre and David Roth

25:59What is this format? Why does it work? Who else can compete with us in this category? Like in Silicon Valley, as you know, they talk about the moat a lot. Right. How do you build a moat around yourself? I am pleased to report that our moat is just our weird obsessiveness. And also the people, the literature, like you and you. Yes. No, it's do you obsess about this enough such that you want to spend money hiring people who are going to obsess about it even more? And that is, again, if you're going to start from scratch, it's not what I would advise anyone to do. I actually don't know if I agree.

26:33I like the high production. I think taking stuff seriously on the production level is good. But I don't know. I have put out a newsletter this morning, Monday, the 16th of June. And I'll probably do a new podcast about it as well. But it's like, I feel like they all want the Joe Rogan of the left. And they're like, how does this keep happening? We have this amicable oaf who's curious about everything because he knows nothing. Oh, and we also have this insanely high production thing. We make sure that everything's done really well and it sounds good and it looks good and it's well done on social.

27:06And the subject, he clearly has someone doing the research for him because if he has three hours of questions off the head, he may just be like a true. Oh, I don't know that he's doing any research. No, I mean for him. All right, yeah. For him. Like, I would not be surprised if he didn't know who was in front of him. Like, who's this, Jamie? That's Donald Trump. That's Donald Trump. Is he good? Is he? Is he any good? Yeah. Yeah. Hi. Like, it's, I mean, there's also Lex Fridman, which is just a mystery. But it's. Yeah, I have many follow-ups about Lex. Well, my first question is, why can't he say a sentence?

27:39He's just like, hello. Welcome. I was struck by this on those podcasts. Things that are like popular that are not for me. Yes. Like that's the story of my life. It's fine. It's just like it's way easier for me to even, you know, like seeing a few minutes of Ant-Man and the Wasp. And I'm like, nope, not that does not go, you know, in any of my. That makes sense. But it's also I'm just saying that it's like not for me. The idea of watching a podcast where like someone who is obviously either both unprepared or just like not good at talking. Like I don't get how that works He has mental latency Like he During the Donald Trump interview Which I only watch bits of Because I Don't want to die Right He goes Politics is a dirty game And he just pauses and goes How do you Win at that game This is the most popular tech podcast Really good And it's just Donald Trump's like Yeah this is very true Like it's just like So bad I love that he wears black tie Yeah Does he?

28:39He wears like He always wears like a black suit with a black tie and a white starch shirt. So cool. Like the cater waiter swag. That's a really solid. It's a real party down aspect. It looks like a guy that John Wick would kill.

28:55With stuff like that, I'm just insulted by the whole Lex Frippin thing. He's so bad. But aren't those podcasts also like six hours long? They're so long. He did one with Sam Altman for like four hours. He could have said anything. I can't watch it. I try to. My brain stops. my brain just like shuts down it's like i've been in a car accident that's an awfully long time to be spending with any two dudes let alone if one of them is sam all the same and he's just like yeah you know data centers will help build themselves now and it's like wow what is data how do you computer me up i wish i hope this is as long as the irishman no i want i want all of that i want to be on lex ripman so bad i should just be clear i'm gonna read him riddles like It's going to be amazing.

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32:41But you look at like Theo Von or Joe Rogan and you see their production. Theo Von is a good interviewer. Despite his insane name He has like an insanely long name Do you know his name? His real name? His real name? No Oh my Christ I am so happy to be the poet It's Dutch-ish It is Theophilus No Von something or other Like Burlingame Or whatever comes after it Theo Von's real name is Theodore Capitani von Kurnatowski III That's right One of the greatest names of all time And his whole thing's been like Yeah, damn Yeah I feel like this is a good decision by Theo Von to go by Theo Vaughn, given the proceeding.

33:20Yeah. Kurnitowski. It'd be so much funnier if he used this whole name though and kept doing the like, yeah, my name is Kurnitowski. Yeah. But his interview. Third of my name. But you don't get the sense from Rogan or Kurnitowski that they're condescending or that they have, like maybe they are in some way to like people of color. I don't know. But they have a genuine like, oh, I want to be here. I'm interested. I'm interested in getting good material out of you. And it's kind of like calm and effortless. And it's like maybe there is effort behind it, but it's just – it feels like a lot of that is just genuinely missing from media.

33:53It's something you both do in podcasts, and you obviously do way more podcasts, Pablo, as well. But it's just like let's get some interesting shit. Let's have a good conversation because I don't know. Several people who know each other discussing something interesting might have a good, interesting conversation like you could listen to on your phone in a podcast. It's not that hard. What's hard about it, though – I'll tell you what I found hard about it. I mean it's different. I don't mean it's not that hard. No, it isn't that hard. I mean, it's not hard relative to, like, we know that people like it, you know?

34:21And so, like, doing it well is a skill that you can learn. And we've enjoyed when Pablo's come on the Defector podcast, Distraction. Like, it's like getting to shoot around with, like, LeBron. Like, you've done a lot of this. You're really good at talking. You have less verbal junk than I do. Like, it's fun. You're a verbal junk baller. I'm just, yeah, absolutely. But beyond that, I think that, so that is, like, it's a learnable skill to be able to do. The challenge for me, though, is I want to be as good at talking or as knowledgeable as whoever is on. And for the most part, I'm not. And that's not a criticism of me.

34:54It just means that, like, you have to be willing to ask simpleton type questions. I actually want to put this in a more empathetic sense. Same with the listeners. Right. They're logging on to hear you tell them something. And maybe you, Pablo, telling you something that you don't know and you learning. Yeah. Maybe they too will learn. It's something Robert and Sophie early on said. It's just like if you don't know something, just ask every fucking time. Yeah, you have to ask. Because there will be a listener who's like – I believe – it's funny to mention like LeBron because oftentimes I have to do the exercise in my mind of like do I need to explain who LeBron is to people?

35:28Yeah. Like truly. Like I presume that the audience that comes to my show does not know anything about anything. And LeBron James is a basketball player. Oh, yeah. If you don't know him, one of the best. One of the biggest basketball men we've got. He's really good. Prominent as well. He's very strong. Space Jam 2. And he is so strong. Sorry. But what I would say about like what – about like meeting the listener wherever they are, it is – to me, it is about the exercise of can I make someone who doesn't give a single shit about this care about this story? And so we do stories about fencing corruption.

36:04We'll do stories – I mean I can waste your time mentioning all of the obscure things that I have I think conned people into listening to. I mean, the Hank Azaria interview was fascinating. And that was like the furthest from what you do. And he wasn't telling just stories about like the Simpsons stuff. It was like. He was great. And we tried it. The joke of my show is that we're a technically sports show, which means that like somewhere like an Easter egg, you'll see a sports reference. I don't think anybody cares enough to check the box, but I'd check the box. I mean Roth by the way just to the thing the compliment I want to pay him is that when it comes to like thinking about politics in a way that speaks so fluently the languages of hyper intelligence and utter stupidity.

36:47No one is better at David Roth and diagnosing that in Donald Trump. That's nice. Like you need to be someone who is so brilliant that they're also a moron. And Roth like truly it's being fluent at both sort of registers. And one of my favorite ones is like my good friend Beetlejuice. Yeah, there's a lot of – because the idea of thinking about who you could convince him is a real guy and a fan of his. He's just standing in front of a candy man. Yep. Candy man. You know, I knew Wario. We were friends. We were great friends, but we're not friends anymore. You can die. Yep. But the bit that I – the dumb question thing, the version of it that I sort of like – whatever, this is like positive self-talk.

37:27Yeah. I'm saying into a microphone. Go for it. We had Bob Mould on – Who is that? Who is that? Who is that? Who is that? Husker Du and Sugar, like, iconic punk rock musician man. And also - He's also very strong. Yes. And a sweetie. Cool. Yeah. Also, he worked in wrestling. Like, real, just like, one of the most interesting guys in the world. Fascinating. As a writer, not as a performer. But he, you know, those bands mean a great deal to me. He is my co-host, Drew McGarry's favorite musician ever. And - I gotta listen to this. The question that I asked him, basically, after, you know, he had a new album out, I listened to it.

37:57And I don't know enough about - It helped that it was about music, which is basically just a foreign language to me. So I can't be like, when you made this decision, your fretwork on the bridge. Like, I can't, you know, like I even saying it here. I had to do the dumb guy voice to put it over. But I asked him, like, is it fun to write a song? Like, is it cool to do that? And I think I had to get past the anxiety of like asking someone I respect a question that is basically like something a seven year old would have asked. And yet, like, we got a really good answer. And also, I wanted to know, you know, like, it's better to admit what you don't know and ask the seven-year-old question than it is to try to, like, bluff and do the expertise thing along with someone who's a real expert.

38:43And I have this theory that I will never be able to prove, which is I think most people forget stuff all the time. Like, you will be listening to something and be like, who's LeBron James? Go, fuck. Golf? No. Or like who? And like you will forget all terms. Like on the show, I onerously in people say you repeat yourself. I repeat myself like defining what generative AI is. Probabilistic. What does that mean? Because sometimes you will be listening to an hour and a half of me talking. You might fucking forget something. And also being empathetic. I don't know with like when I'm hanging out with my friends, people don't know shit all the time.

39:17Part of the fun thing of being alive is helping people know stuff and having shared experiences. And I love that question. of whatever like i want to ask and this is for somewhat meaner reasons my dream question to ask any tech executive is are you happy i want to ask sundar pishai are you happy because it's a hell of a question because you want to say yes but you know i've got a follow-up what makes you happy and you know they don't have shit for him it's all the stuff he's the guy that gave the interview where he's like all day i'm just fucking asking questions of our ai i talked to gemini all day long that's such an adela of microsoft that's what it was no but similar gargoyle like yeah but it's just profiling on my part wrong remove it from your podcast profiling of like extremely rich asshole ruining products i mean like welcome to the show but there was something i think the idea of like what is any of this for is a good question to ask yourself to bring it back to rogan for a second though it also feels like anyone whose industry is seeing rates of ketamine usage decreased so dramatically cannot possibly what does that indicate to you it just it just feels like there is a fundamental searching for something like fulfillment and a happiness we're lonely and by the way like everyone is like men women like everyone is more disconnected and i find that in sports of course like if there's any lesson to learn from bill balichek and michael jordan and tom brady and every greatest of all time in any category you want um it is that they won everything and are miserable.

40:48Yes, completely. And so how do you fill the void that you thought the trophies, the money, the generative AI was going to fill? You search for other things like the Silicon Valley thing. And again, I'm not, by the way, something I'm frustrated by is just how now uncool Joe Rogan made psychedelics. Yeah. And maybe I'm the least cool person to think of it in those terms. The point being, though, that there is something that is missing that people are trying to find. And I think, are you happy? I presume that all of them are actually quite on. And I would be this would be a hostile interview technique that they will never because one of my favorite things is that I grew up thinking I was stupid.

41:31I thought I was stupid until like two years ago. I'm deadly fucking serious. It's an incredible technique, though. No amount of you have like a real nice house. yeah like there was no point where you were like damn no accidents keep happening no no no it's luck all right like i i like how the thing where you have the accent that makes you sound smart didn't work on you as it did not work on but it means that it's worked on me from the very beginning i was like damn this guy really knows his raiders football how did he learn so much oh god i'm gonna get emails about the raiders gino looks good i think brocco anyway um but it means that i've never walked into a room being like oh i hope he doesn't think i'm stupid which is actually useful for pr business as well but in any given interview i feel like interviewers neil um will go in there and be like i'm gonna ask the best fucking questions in the world not the most useful not the most interesting but the ones that make them sound good and get the biggest most self-ingratiating thing done and i understand why but it's you have access to someone that people don't have access to.

42:32Can you at least get something new? Can you at least not line them up with the buffet of options? I don't know if you get it as much in sports just because if someone lies about being good at sports and then goes and plays poorly, you can notice that. Oh, but sports is full of... We did an episode actually that's kind of related to this and it's about kind of the tyranny of jargon in sports and how lots of people are trying to perform the vocabulary of a coach, which is kind of like... Yeah, or write like a scout. What is the vocabulary of a coach or a scout? So there's a lot of phrases. Do you have like a couple of like brown note, like nightmare phrases?

43:11The one for me is impact winning. That's an NBA one. What the fuck does that mean? It means it's a good basketball player. It's the most annoying way to say that this is a helpful player to have on your team. No, it's not. That's like an... It's almost like an idiomatic to sort of like... So they just say someone's an impact player. But there's also just like the fighter pilot kind of like call sign stuff where it's like, yeah, Spider 2 Y Banana. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a lot of play calling. What's an example within sport? Oh, sorry, just within the game. So Spider 2 Y Banana is a play call that I will not even begin to summarize for you.

43:41Oh, I thought you were literally talking about planes. No, Spider 2 Y Banana. I thought you were doing like a plane thing. It is a John Gruden play. I know a listener of the pod, friend of it. Friend of the pod. but I don't even know is Spider-2 wide banana apocryphal or is it it's real it's a real play me and Deuce Ed knows because Ed's been to Gruden's quarterback boot camp you were doing squats with Deuce Gruden yeah Jared Lorenzen coached me it didn't go well R.I.P. yeah I believe so R.I.P. the legend but there is there's all this vocabulary that sort of signals that you have the fluency of a of a code that is so indecipherable to the outside person that it becomes a point of pride.

44:29And so in sports, there's just a lot of peacocking around that language. Right. A lot of like, oh, they're running cover three there, but they're doing a stunt of the A gap, the B, just like stuff that's meant to exclude. Right. And so when you say like a person who asks a question that is intended to signal their knowledge as opposed to help the listener understand anything. I think of the ways in which people are cosplaying, coaching all of the time. And also, it's kind of why as much as we have already been crapping all over Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn, something that I do appreciate, generally speaking, I've not listened to all their episodes, but what they do tend to do is not try and perform over intelligence.

45:13And the thing is, you can say like, I've seen some Theo Vaughn. I've seen some Joe Rogan. They fucking host white supremacists in the open. It fucking sucks. You can still look at the format and learn. And I think people have trouble separating those things because it really comes down to their questions are simple. And then they get like Jordan Pizzo going, have you seen the Nightmare Man? Yeah. Like you're just some insane shit. And then he says nothing to that because Joe Rogan's like, yeah, I knew a guy like that. That happened to my buddy Eric. Yeah. Yeah, there is that sense. I think also there's a difference in sports discourse where there's everything that you said about like the sort of ostentatious performance of expertise and like insidey, you know, like everybody wants to be plugged in.

45:56Yeah. It has impacted in some ways like the language. In fact, I just used impact as a verb. So it's clearly made something on – Made an impact. Made an impact on like a concussive. But you used it correctly. Yes, I did. Yes, I did. But the way that that's like worked out, I think that there's – the way that people like Scoop Smith type guys here like Shams Trania dudes, like they write not in like a syntax that is observable outside of text messages from agents to guys like him. That there's something very like artificial about it. And Shams, just for the listeners, is a guy who mostly says a guy has been traded or signed a contract.

46:31Yes, he says it first. Exactly. He is five seconds ahead of the actual public announcement. He also was the one that scooped Donald Trump getting COVID. I hate that Shams gets COVID for this. Yeah, and what sucks is I found out through, I was speaking to someone at the time for some reason, I can't disclose, and they showed me a clip from the Barstool show, The Yak, when it happened. Oh, wow. And when they showed this guy on there, Stephen Che, and it's just like the worst 10 minutes of just like a guy who basically was like, yeah, I think Shams would break World War III. And just these guys like wanting him to be wrong, and they just hate every, like everyone's kind of miserable.

47:07Yeah. Like anyway, so Shams just breaks news. That's his only thing. And that is like a function. There's a guy that does it for the NFL. There's a guy, they're trying to make Jeff Passan, who's like an ace feature writer. They're trying to make him that guy for baseball. The incentives are to be a newsbreaker because you are, I mean, by the way, when Woj was doing this, Adrian Wojnarowski, who I should disclose, is a person who now works for St. Bonaventure. Winshaw University. General manager. He's the GM, But was making, you know, millions upon millions of dollars being the newsbreaker. Basically like the human, yeah, like scoop machine.

47:42Just fielding texts 24-7. And there was just a bit, I don't know if you remember this, but during the NBA draft one year when Woj, I think, was at ESPN. So he was working for the broadcaster of the draft but trying to scoop the draft. I know what you're talking about. By five seconds ahead. And so in order to get through the – to thread the needle, he ended up just not saying the bulls are about to take Jimmy Butler or whatever. This is, you know, retconning. Retconning. But it's basically like the bulls are targeting. The Phoenix Suns are circling. He kept coming up with new phrasing, and it's hard.

48:20There's like 32 picks. So he'd be like, I'm hearing that the Bulls are ensorcelled by Wendell Carter Jr. at this spot, which is just amazing. I mean, every single Better Offline episode says walks you through because I cannot fucking think of another way to say it. And I refuse. So I get Mr. But you can see all of what we're describing here. These are great paying jobs. And they do tend to select for people who are like metabolically capable of responding to text messages for 20 hours a day. But although when Woj left the job. he was basically like, this sucks. I hate it. Again. I'm having a hard time.

48:55He was like, I'm unhappy. Yeah. Was basically his press release. And like, yeah, whatever the opposite of Michael Jordan, I'm back. He's just like, nope. I'm gone. The whole thing. But like, that is a function of all of this. But I think the bit that is kind of missing from it, and you see it when, you know, like when a podcast works or if you're reading a story that's written by somebody who is given the space and the time to write something that they like, which is increasingly rare. All this shit is fun. Everybody's here because it's fun. No one is here because it is important. Especially with sports.

49:30There are aspects of it that you can use as sort of like a way into seeing things about the broader culture that are important. But none of this is like mandatory. You know, and so it's a game. And so to the extent that you can talk about it in a way that is fun and that is not either like actionable gambling intelligence or part of some like endless barbershop set to that where everybody's arguing about who's now or somebody's legacy or whatever. Yeah, that's one of the best topics to play fight about with the fellas. But the thing is, this is something missing from the tech industry because most people in tech, when you talk to them, don't seem to want to talk about anything.

50:14You've got this growth of, who is it? I really should know this one. Ryan something. There's a former player who has a really good podcast with a bunch of players. Ryan Clark. Yes, Ryan Clark. And he just sits around and he has very serious conversations, sometimes quite jokey ones, with other people that have played games of sports for money. And that's why it's interesting because you're hearing their experiences and it's kind of rough and ready. probably a little bit cleaned up more than we know i i imagine some of the i don't know in his case but i imagine there are more harsh cuts he's got like a real job to avoid losing but i do think that there's what you're talking about though is that like people want something authentic and the tech industry constantly tries to create it but it always ends up being a venture capitalist and three of their investments being like you know i was using generative ai the other day and it just changed my life how i i we're going to ad break and it's just like these fucking people pissed me off because tech is so universal whether or not you consider yourself technical kind of the same way with the sport it's like baseball one of my favorite casey kagawa friend of the show once said it to me it's like it's still a child's game it's still the same game aaron judge plays baseball a lot better than a kid playing little league but he's still hitting a fucking ball and there is something universal about that i think tech's getting there perhaps we're not there quite i think most people are not accepting it yet but the fact is i think there is something deeply personal about tech that no one's fucking touching in this way and they should because it's interesting yeah this is one of the big ed points to be one of the ones that i think like you were first to and should be repeating as often as possible which is that basically everybody that at some point everybody liked all this stuff yeah and now they don't and they still like they like no they like the stuff they hate the tech industry yeah and then i think that like and so that you know you create this demand for people that they you know it's cool to be able to like read anything as it happens like it will make you insane but it's not bad like it's like kind of gratifying actually yes and yet like that you take that interest and then you use that to like sort of leverage ways to make more and more money off of it and dilute the experience more and more and i think that that you know when someone is doing that to you for information that you need to understand the world around you i think that that is criminal when someone is doing that to you for sports stuff, I just think it's rude.

52:25I just think it's like a dick move, basically. Well, I also think big picture that everything, I mean, this is going to sound profoundly unprofound, but everything is tech. Yes! Like, sports. It's impossible to talk about. Everything we've basically talked about so far has been filtered through the lens of tech. Yeah. In ways that it's different now than it used to be in ways that these characters are people that we now know in a dimensionality that didn't previously exist because, you know, Jordan Hudson posted an Instagram thing of a philosophy textbook that was autographed by Bill Balachek the day that they met, which he was, turns out, 19 years old.

53:01Cool. Not important. Look. It's a little bit important, actually. You know my disclosures. Yes. You know my disclosures. Sometimes when you're looking at Jordan Hudson's Instagram account, it's just for work. It's just because I'm a journalist. But look, my point being that it's when it comes to like media, the future of media, It's just impossible to disentangle every conversation I ever have from the fact that we are working in some direct or stochastic way for tech companies. You even mentioned the sun god of the algorithm. It's just impossible to not think about standard of success through the lens of what a tech company has engineered.

53:43Yes. And so it's – yeah, it's omnipresent. Yeah, the challenge with this too, this is for Defector, which is more of a, it's a print product. Yeah. You know, like it's a website that people subscribe to and read. And we have a podcast and we do videos every now and then. But most of what we do is writing. That to Pablo's point about the tech industry, this has been like the challenge for us. I think like we've got a steady, loyal subscriber base. We're good. It's a good business. How you direct people to your posts is not just, I mean, it's the challenge that we're talking about the most. But any place that is print as these sort of the tech mediated spaces through which people used to discover this as they either dry up or actively turn against their users.

54:29That idea of like, I guess, discoverability is I say that word all of the time. I hate myself. Yeah. I mean, it feels bad because it's like it's a fake, ugly word. It feels like impact. Yes, it does feel it has that. But it kind of goes back to the thing I was saying about the money side. It's like, I don't know. This show was quite successful in part because iHeartRadio put it on the fucking – not the actual show, but they put a bunch of advertising behind it, which is awesome. I'm really glad they did it. But it's like a big part. What a surprise. A show has trouble finding new listeners when they have no discovery.

55:00And just – We are. Every – look, obvious sort of statements of fact. It is harder to find anything now because all of us are fragmented, siloed, not consuming the same things, have personalized feeds. again, explained by the tech industry. And personalized by their standards. Absolutely. And so true, and some platforms are now like disincentivizing hyperlinks to places. I mean, literally like this is why it's so hard to get discovered. And so if the standard for just success becomes, do you know that this exists? Yeah. The game becomes, I mean, again, to return to another sort of like axiom, it becomes an attention game.

55:43because that counts as something in a meaningful way. And so to have, in Defector's case, a subscription-driven site, and by the way, everything now wants to be a subscription. Yep. So kudos to – Yeah, we were early. Kudos to journalism to – You want Musk to it. Just start a premium feed on Where's Your At At. Please subscribe. I need money. Also, it costs me thousands a year to do. That's nice. What are you going to put on the premium feed? I do a Friday news. You said nudes? Nudes, yes. I take artistic news. Yeah, you have to get the magnifying glass tool. Anyway, it's Friday News, N-E-W-S. It's why I can't say the word porn, either P-A-W-N, because you're watching porn stars, huh?

56:26I'm like, yeah, the show with Rick. Oh, yeah. Best I can do. I know it's work. Sorry. It's just even doing that felt dirty, but I was kind of like, yeah, this cost me thousands of dollars a year. Dude, I'm contemplating the same thing. What are we going to put behind our premium sort of day wall? And it's just the only advantage I think I really have is that I can write so much so fast. And I'm pretty good at the writing, but I can just fucking take it. Your average newsletter is my monthly output in terms of word count. But I don't post it at 4.55 p.m. on a Friday. Well, that's a failure on your part because that is editorial best practices.

57:04That's what everyone loves and what they sign up for. But it's fucked. but i also think it may end up being something good because people are being way more direct with what they actually want i also think this is something where legacy media really fucks up because okay you've got the daily actually i want to tell a really fucked up story so i heart media awards right which i did not win to kevin roose and the case of you very unfair um when they did an announcement of the different someone was in a category it was uh they were saying okay we've got this podcast and they went the daily with michael barbaro and it's like and now i went outside and then there was a politician there and i thought does he do politics and someone goes we love you michael that's nice i want that person found i want that person in jail barbaro no who is the michael barbaro super fan like like the japanese idols but for michael barbaro thousands i think if you did a live recording of the daily you would have to do it at like the forum at madison that's so sad yeah it's tough man this is a real hard thing to get your head around but this But this is the thing.

58:08It's at Budokan. He's going to do a live episode. I'm opening up the fucking pit of the daily show. About how the subway is too scary now. That's going to be the episode that they're going to perform. And that's when I'm hitting with the wheelbarrows. That's when I'm just fucking spinning.

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1:01:39The legacy media people are pissing it away because they have the discoverability part done already. The New York Times could do so much interesting shit, but they're so afraid of this vague objectivity thing. I know, Pablo, you have to do your, like, disclosures and shit, but they're just like, nah, instead of doing the disclosures, we'll just do a really boring and shitty job what if it was just really dull and so they already have the hard part done and they choose not to do anything extra because they're like oh well people want this have you fucking tried yeah have you tried even once i'll say this with sports too that this is an advantage that we have in this space over a place like the times i mean the times has got a report on things that are not fun like so a little bit of whimsy and anytime the times attempts whimsy there's this sort of like dog walking on its hind legs thing where you're like we shouldn't be doing that like that you don't experience but also you're like impressed you're like well i didn't know you could do that like please stop like the the thing with with sports that does sort of like move you in a direction where like you could do more of that type of stuff like you don't need to talk about sports in any particular way the challenge for you know i think for sports talk radio which is something that i can't imagine an audience that overlaps less with the audience of this podcast than the people that listen to wfan but there are like there's guys whose job it is to just go sit in a studio for five hours every day and like every day like this is a weekly thing and just somebody calls in and they're like i don't think the islanders should do that and then the guy's like you're wrong and that goes on for an extended period of time that is like it's a grim way of doing it but it also is like it's not there's very little in that space where you see people like sort of trying to do something different like there are other ways of doing it how it all sort of defaulted to this like sourpuss play fighting shit yeah it's a mystery to me other than the fact that it's like if you had to sit and do something into a microphone for five hours a day you'd probably come out of it pretty crusty too so i i actually the reason that i like doing the talking with the microphone thing is actually penn state i was on the lion fm if you are a lion fm listener who heard me on college radio email me were you doing talk or playing music uh both okay and i was co-hosting with joe paterno that was me and joe he did the weekly call-in show i didn't know who he was i just thought he lived there elderly italian man from the community no i did crazy shit i had like a band on this guy called epileptic pete was epileptic he had his own um eight string bass and they played like uh video game music people fucking loved it yeah you just have some fun with it but talk radio is extremely interesting it's extremely when it's done well it's i hope that this is kind of the format i'm going for here yeah that was the idea in vegas i know it was fun i'd never really done that before and people because talk radio is actually magical when done right but the done right is having a host that sounds like they're just talking but has thoughts about everything they've been thinking about it to ask questions in some way Pablo you do this excellently and it's like it pisses me off because it's like they don't want to try anything other than the exact standard but I think the answer is it's the fucking algorithm it's that they want to normalize and fit into what they think will go viral baby which is generally is stuff that makes you mad right I mean I feel like that's the idea of like stuff that's already big yeah it's that or you already work for a big newspaper it's already a big brand other than the top of the iTunes podcast I don't know what's going on everyone is called like the smile hour with Dr.

1:05:13Janine Benin and it's like each episode is 60 minutes long and it's like how to smile more I've brought smile expert Jesus to fat and he will tell us all about smiling and they have like 10 million like 5 star reviews like this podcast chain and you listen to them And it sounds like what I imagine they'd listen to in the Soundgarden video of Black Hole Sun. That's like what's coming out of the radio when the lady's about to chop the fish. Yeah. So I think my overarching theory of the future of media and everything is that we're all OnlyFans now. Yep. Which is to say that like – You get those nudes.

1:05:52Yep. Which is to say that like there is a bunch of stuff that's wildly popular that's just not my kink. Yeah. Now, I can also access the hyper-specific thing that is mine or create it and monetize it. But it's that thing of like in an era in which scale of the level of The New York Times or any incumbent publication is now impossible to recreate for various reasons, including, by the way, like to get back to Joe Rogan or Bill Simmons, like the first mover advantage of like being one of the first podcasts cannot be replicated anymore. There's just too much competition. uh and short of having i'm trying to get the the genealogy right short of having someone whose husband's sister dated taylor swift or something is this is this bill simmons no i'm just like there there's certain ways to like speed run growth oh yeah taylor swift adjacent is one of the of them was on rogan and they all cross pollination joe rogan cross pollination being another.

1:06:49In general, yeah, we're aspiring to smaller arenas, but we are also aspiring for the people in those arenas to give us money. And that only fans economy of like, hey, if I show you some ankle, will you pay me for my increasingly bold takes or reportage? Or I cannot trust this enough, Bernie Sanders impressions. Yes, it turns out they will. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that and I try to like sort of count my blessings with this with Defector because like it is, it's a good business. Like we're not, we're growing. And yet, like, I think that the challenge with it, you know, we're going to turn five in September as a website.

1:07:28And that like more or less by website standards is like middle age. And I don't think anybody, like we all love it. We all love working with each other. Like it's not going to change. And yet there's a part of it where like, we don't all want to just like get old and die with our readership either you know that like we want to be able to do new stuff and we want to be able to hire more people and change sort of the perspective of the site over time and all of that costs money i think just because we want to feel like we're growing and not repeating ourselves why do you want to grow so i push back i like the ultimate slogan democracy dies with us yes right that's but that i feel like is the cultural moment that we're in not to get too depressing about it but You can see this with like this is the apex of Trumpism.

1:08:13Like he wants all of America buried with him like a pharaoh. This is not a culture that is built to last beyond his last breath. Because what happens after that is none of his business. He doesn't care. But I actually think it's grimmer than that. I think it's one step further. And it's everywhere. It's the raw economy. It's the growth at all costs thing. People don't know why they want to fucking grow. They just want to grow. Everything in our society tells us to grow. What do you want to do? I want to be a CEO. I want the biggest thing ever. It's not about the product. It's about the position.

1:08:43So this is where I'd put an emphasis on the difference for what? Defector does not want to become Fox Sports. But even then you feel - We don't want to televise a bowl game. But you feel the allure of growth still. And this is not a criticism. The growth of it mostly is just because we want to have new people and do new shit. The challenge with it too, though, is that the ways in which you can make money, we've had new revenue streams and we're making more money. We have ads for people that aren't signed in. Like they see that now. We've got the podcast. Those have ads. You sell those cell phones.

1:09:13Those gold-plated cell phones. Oh my God. Which are very, those are great. And we're looking forward to making those right here in the United States. We're going to make them in New Jersey. Did you see the Smartless cell phone? Oh yeah, there is one of those, right? So Smartless, one of the biggest comedy podcasts in the world, listeners, has made a MVNO. So a cell phone network that lives on top of T-Mobile. What is MVNO? I forget what it stands for. So it basically means you can have a sub. It's the same thing as like Mint Mobile. Yeah, you can run your network on another. A network. Is Ryan Reynolds going to lead to the collapse of the telecommunications industry?

1:09:46Can that possibly be? Thank you, Daniel, our producer, mobile virtual network operator. Oh, I knew that. Yes. Daniel, thank you. But it's that. There's a great slate piece on that as well that was just really echoed how fucking sad it was. because these guys are like super rich already and super popular but they needed a cell phone growing for for the sake of just being like there's more money out there to be made is i think this is an area where like everybody at defector wants to fucking blog yeah that's our job exactly that is what we want and that's why i fucking pay yeah and i think that like and it's why i feel happy in this work in a way that i haven't felt before i worked at all different types of sites in the past with all different types of funders.

1:10:30I don't know what Vice was. I guess that's a Ponzi scheme. I worked for places that were owned by private equity. That wasn't great. I worked for places that were owned as part of some sort of like venture back to template, you know, at Vox, basically, whatever it was that Vox was trying to do. Yeah. I was briefly a part of that. In all of those instances, everybody that I worked with just wanted to do our work. Yeah. And yet you were subject to the, I mean, not even just like the whims kind of like cheapens it. I mean, it was whatever it was that they wanted to do was what you were going to wind up, you know, downstream that would arrive as an avalanche when they rolled the snowball from the top of the mountain where they were.

1:11:05But the thing with all of that, I never felt safe in any of those jobs, including the ones where, you know, I organized one workplace at Vice. I worked at a very strong union workplace at Deadspin. In all of those instances, the – I mean, obviously, it's much, much better to organize your workplace than not. and I advocate anybody that wants to do it should try to do it but at some point the people that you're working for don't want what you want they don't care about what you do and they don't read it and they don't read it that is which is extremely important that I think that like in any of those there's this wish and I remember this I was talking to Megan Greenwell who is my editor-in-chief at Deadspin brand new book I think has a new book about private equity called Bad Company that is very good and I recommend it she's gonna come on the show at some point good you should I'll speak to Oscar the Megan if you hear this But we were talking about the experience of trying to like convince the private equity concern that had bought was Gizmodo Media.

1:12:01Now it is Geo Media and basically unrecognizable. Fucking Spanfeller. Spanfeller. Jim Spanfeller. Bad guy. Come on the show, man. I got some fucking questions. But he – great head of hair though. I hate to say it but it's like – Love gross. Yep. He's got a quiff. What are they called? Yeah. A quiff. Yes. Anyway, he looks great. He's been getting by on his looks for years though. But we were trying to like go to them with the information that we had, which is like we're making more money than we're spending. People read this. People comment on everything. These blogs get passed around. It's this many, you know, millions of unique readers for stuff.

1:12:37They just didn't give a shit. It wasn't a business they wanted to be in. And the difference with Defector, and I hope that this is the case for you all at Metal Art 2 because it is like as similar as something that is that much bigger and more popular can be. That there is like you're doing the work that you want to do and you're doing it without somebody's hand in your pocket or trying to fucking ratatouille you around in editorial ways. And that is when you remove that interference from the equation, it feels as fun as it actually is. I think to get back to the misery of Michael Jordan and every tech executive and blogs that aren't run in the way that I think Roth is describing.

1:13:19I think that's all the time at work. Like the point of getting the money is to do the job that you want to do. And it is not the other way around. It is not to contort and develop some sort of content dysmorphia such that you've convinced yourself that, oh, this is what beauty is now. It's like, no, trust your own. We got into this because we have a sense of taste around what we want to do and what's good and what's bad. The more that we can actually earnestly believe and act on that is the whole reason to try and engage with the market in whatever way we're allowed to. I just – what pisses me off is I'm pretty sure that if you just did everything we're discussing, it would be insanely profitable because no one's fucking trying.

1:14:03So just – if you just did it at the broadsheet types, I'm sure that there are people who are desperate to have Michael Barbaro like tell them that the subway seems sticky. Yeah, many millions of people. No accounting for taste. But what if instead of that, it was someone entertaining? Do you think that they would get scared? Or do you think they'd be like, oh, give this a go? I think that there's – I think that a lot of that stuff could be better or could be different. I think the more important to me is the idea that, like, you should be able to pick more widely what experience is. And if the Times isn't going to offer you – they could, you know, but the Times isn't going to offer you, like, here's a version of the Daily where the guy doesn't sound medicated.

1:14:39like or you know some of these things that are it's just a different energy maybe try this out see if you like it that like it doesn't it shouldn't be just one platform offering all this stuff but i do think that there's enough ways to enjoy things that like you know and the difference with sports i mean there's like ways to be a fan maybe you like to shout about legacy or maybe you are somebody that likes to grind tape whatever yeah you're all working off the same text everybody fundamentally understands what they're talking about there's just a lot of different ways to talk about it it should be a healthier ecosystem than it is for that reason i think so this is dating me a bit but there's a crazy thing they already tried this with the tech media and it worked really well there used to be like seven different tech columnists you kind of used to have like dwight silverman over at the houston chronicle i think or dallas morning news forgive me dwight you had like herewith ray over at the globe you had eric benderoff over at tribune you had all of these like david poke one of the most well-known tech reporters cut your teeth and every week and he would sometimes just be like yeah i tried a new e-reader it sucked yeah it's my first interaction with him actually and it's like people didn't read david poke he was kind of like your weird uncle and then had some stuff that happened which made you really potentially not like him but nevertheless there was a level of entertaining that came from these personal voices talking about something that was very personal to people that worked in the New York fucking time in major broadsheets.

1:16:03I just think that they've got safer. But I also wonder if that's not me just being kind, or maybe they're just fucking lazy. Yeah, this is a this is an incurious as well. Another Ed point that has been instructive to me, this kind of like the rot economy idea. And I've sort of I mean, it's hard to not spiral when you think about this. But like, what are you gaining by like you are getting some small savings by eliminating the tech columnist from the Houston Chronicle from your ledger. You're not paying a guy$90 ,000 a year or whatever it is. These guys used to get paid shit tons of money as well.

1:16:38Yeah, well, there is that. No, but they used to get paid shit tons of money and they were on there for years. Yeah, presumably they were adding some sort of value. To me, this is the bit that I don't get is like when you drain a company and kill it and you get some money from it, the private equity model of basically like piling a bunch of debt onto something you take from this company what is valuable you leave them with the debt in a few years they go away so you have all this money now that might otherwise have gone into that company we can understand that that's bad and that it's unfair to a lot of people also what do you do with that money this is the bit that i've always sort of wondered about like what is jim's is it you just like you book the fucking chain smokers to play the party at the weekend i must be clear the answer is nothing so is that so it's literally it sits there you have Some like transparency into this scene of super wealthy people.

1:17:29It's nothing. It's absolutely fucking nothing. They sit on it. So by the way, this is where, again, the metaphor sort of becomes the reality, right? So sports is currently grappling with the influx of private equity. The leagues are now passing rules to allow shares of teams to be bought by private equity firms. And part of the looming sort of storm cloud here is the idea that actually, as with content, as with grocery stores, as with any industry, there's a conflict between what that thing is meant to do and its actual standard of success and growth, profit, right? So the whole idea of like the part of sports that is seemingly elemental is here.

1:18:12Our goal is to win. Yeah, everybody's trying to win. When that breaks. Except winning isn't always profitable. Right. And that breakage between winning and profit, that's where you are inviting a corruption that has been visited upon every other thing in American life that we've already outlined. Yeah. And this is, I mean, true as a fan, but I think that anybody that participates in the culture in any way, like there's – you don't have to know what the Pittsburgh Pirates specifically are like to understand that, like, this is a team that is owned by a billionaire, that is part of a system that is created – And to explain for the listeners who don't listen to sport – Pittsburgh Pirates are a baseball team.

1:18:52And also, but specifically the fact that they can be a bad team and make a shit ton of money. Yeah. How? So, and Pablo, you're welcome to jump in when I get anything wrong. A couple of things. Built a great ballpark with some public money. It is a great place to go and hang out and drink beers, even if the team is bad, which the team reliably has been for more than a decade. The owner has a lot of money, enough money to buy a baseball team, which you need. This is another area where private equity and then I think eventually sovereign wealth is going to become a big part. Sovereign wealth is also being legislated in by shares from Abu Dhabi.

1:19:28Yeah, and so that's like all international sport is all that. It just hasn't really happened in the United States yet. But it's coming. I mean, a team like the Cowboys or the Giants, their valuation based on what the number is, it's like no person could buy it. Right. It's too many billions of dollars. Like whatever, like Elon or Jeff Bezos could buy it, but they're not going to because they – Elon Musk to buy like the Pirates. This is – I considered a blog calling him out on that, like being like, you coward, buy the A's. Like prove it. Prove how smart you are. The very thing with Elon was like, I'm a fan of the Eagles and the Steelers.

1:20:01And I was just like, oh, lord. Like, it's like somehow, like, you took a Hillary Clinton line and you made it sound worse. They call me the boss of tech. Anyway, so here's how the pirates make it work. It is not expensive to run a major league baseball team if you don't pay anybody. But you can not pay people and still make money. There is no salary floor. So the product that you put out there basically needs to be minimally competitive. Like you can't have people like coming to your house and burning it down. But minimally competitive for the Pirates means losing 100 out of 162 games basically every year.

1:20:37The other way that you make money off of it, though, is like there's TV deals. That money is guaranteed. There's like, you know, parking. There's concessions. There's a million different ways to make a little bit of money at a time. And then the big thing that makes it work is that because this structure that baseball has a revenue sharing system. So that basically this is money coming from the biggest. Socialism. It is socialism for rich guys. Exclusively for rich guys. Awesome. It is only within that system. So a team like the Yankees that makes all this money and plays in a big market has this huge TV deal that the Pirates could never get because Pittsburgh is so much smaller than New York.

1:21:14they pay money into a system that is then reallocated to the pirates the idea being that this would create some sort of parity because that money is supposed to be used on either major league payroll or player development or there's ways that you can use it too that are more responsible than others like using it to pay a big league ball player is good using it to develop a player development program that teaches a raw high school kid that you drafted how to throw a pitch that he doesn't know how to throw. Right. That is also extremely cost effective and works. Good teams do both. The Dodgers do both.

1:21:51You don't have to do any of this shit. The Clients do neither. You don't have to do anything. Yes, you don't. Because you can just sit there and the money comes in. Right. And think about it also, not merely, because I think there's, yes, there's a philosophical approach that is overarching here. There's also just like the edge cases of like, you have a choice. Yes. You can re-sign the player that will make your fans not merely happy, but feel on some level fulfilled as part of the allegedly civic trust here. Right. Right. You got a star player that's about to ask for more money and everybody wants to keep him.

1:22:20And in fact, it makes sense for you to keep him because your goal here is to win a title. Instead, what you will do is let him go because he is now too rich for your blood. And you don't need him to run your business. You don't need him to make the margins. Exactly. Yes. That, in fact, you could still make without him. That's exactly the point. The margin thing is to me like it's and this is the sort of short term thinking that you see. attack a lot. Which is why I brought it up. Now, if you think of the business that you have as something that you're going to own for the rest of your life and then you're going to leave to your kids, now that's a little bit perverse.

1:22:51I don't think you should necessarily be able to do that. But if you're thinking of the business that way, the free agent that you resign is essential to the survival of your business because it shows people that are fans now that you care about them and you care about the team in the future. And when those people bring their kids to the games, they're going to be watching that player at the end of his career. they're gonna so that idea of like any of this stuff being built to last in any meaningful way i think is gone and i think and it's everywhere the reason i wanted you to go through that is i think listeners really understand the basics of like how you have tech companies that will do as little as possible to keep the service running to make the most amount of money i think it's important for people to know this is everywhere the rot economy is everywhere it's insane how endemic it is to baseball though you could just run a shit team forever yeah well look at google not to make it the whole thing about tech but it's like it is very fucking depressing seeing how these people work but i think that one thing will work in tech that doesn't work as often in sports but does a bit is attacking the owners yeah because dick monfort from the rockies who i email with occasionally he has stopped responding to me can't tell it oh really no that's i think it was emailing him about a lot of people email with dick monfort like if you email him he'll email you back yeah he didn't email me back about jojo's bizarre adventure which i think was what broke him maybe a bridge too far okay well he might not be ready delightful show uh but you can't really humiliate someone like that but the pressure on owners has changed things in the past like they don't want to be despised by an entire town i don't think enough people know who sunday pishai or sam oldman is and i think the more people who learn and mock them because they're so rich they don't have anything other than their names and unlike sports teams they don't have anything cool So I think one difference with sports than tech is, in fact, the broad cultural popularity inherited over generations such that you are invested in this team in a way that you could never really be invested in the same way when it comes to even the device you use all of the time.

1:24:50So I've talked to owners about this, NBA owners who are like, yeah, my day job as multi-billionaire is like to obsess over the price of like polypropylene or some other, you know, material that I monetize. None of that is as resonant, is as much of a pain point in my life as the guy on the street who is actively booing me when he sees me. But imagine if they fucking like them. Yeah. Like a beloved owner, like if the product was really good, people used to fucking love Google. So the Mets have a great example of this in that they are owned by what you can only call a prolific financial criminal.

1:25:32Steve Cohen. Like it's just a guy that was banned by the SEC from trading because of all the insider trading that he did. Oh, my God. Yeah, I know. Guy can't have friends. I know. Right. They're mad at him. They're jealous. I would love Francesa on this topic specifically. Who is that? Going over his art collection, there's a lot of Modigliani's, you know, and I don't like them. You know, they're too skinny. But the – we love Modigliani jokes here. So who is that? He's a sculptor. Okay. And they are very skinny. But the – I'm more of a Brancusi guy. So Cohen though like bought the Mets as a team that he was obsessed with as a fan, as a kid.

1:26:13And basically this is what he's going to do with the rest of his life. He went and he took a team that was owned by a fail family, not just fail sons. It was a whole multi-generational thing and did the stuff that I was talking about in terms of like basically investing in the little things that make an organization work better. In this case, it's people that help your pitchers pitch better, coaches that actually help in an individual way. And then also - Executives. Executives that like understand that these are people and they need to be sort of like treated as such. This is like the story, such as it's told, about how the Mets managed to outbid the Yankees for Juan Soto.

1:26:50Part of it was that the Yankees were dicks to him. They were dicks to his family. And Juan Soto is an extremely good player who's not been as good as he's shipping. He's not been – he's been a little bit of a disappointment. But he was paid the biggest contract in the history of sports. Yes. And so it's like you have to pay the money. But then also if you want to win that person over, the generational talent that you give that amount of money, you – And in the Mets case, it was basically like they have a really nice family room for the kids and the players at the stadium, which is not something that they did under previous ownership.

1:27:19Yeah. And so Steve Cohen, who is a guy that is like the definition of a class enemy of mine, everything that I want this country to be, he is in the fucking way of it being that. And yet he does own my favorite baseball team and he has done a pretty good job hiring pitching coaches. And at some point you like. This is all true. Yeah, it's all true. It's real. You can soften your opinion on the guy for that reason. Absolutely. And Steve Cohen authentically is also a guy who like listens to sports talk radio. Yeah. And he's not a fake fan, is a real fan as well. And not even in like always the most flattering ways.

1:27:51Like he's sometimes we'll get on Twitter and like recommend some like lower tier Mets prospect guy. And it's like, talk to your own fucking prospect guys, dude. Like they definitely know more than this guy does. So I hate to wrap it up there. I'm just going to say Steve Cohen, if you're listening, come on better offline. Let's talk about the Mets. Can I say one more thing about Steve Cohen? Absolutely. So this is why I think he is game and why I think he will be on this. Do you know about Steve Cohen? This is more for Pablo because I know Ed. Do you know about his Guy Fieri fixation? Who is that?

1:28:20Guy Fieri, diners, drive-ins, and dives. Oh, sorry. I just never heard it said like that. That's how he says it. Oh. Guy Fieri. I'll say it the way that it's written. How I would say it. He's the Modigliani of television chefs. Yeah. Yes. I think that's fair to say. And for our Europeans, 5 ,000 calorie meals. Yes. And donkey sauce. He looks like Smash Mouth. Yeah, he's a crazy, he looks like everybody from Smash Mouth made into one guy. Smashed into one mouth. Yes, it is. Like Smash Burger of sorts. No one has resembled the term Smash Mouth more than Guy Fied. Even the band. But so Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives really is good though.

1:28:53I've never eaten at a restaurant there. And he's also like a good guy. Anyway, good point. But so the show is him driving around the country, going to some place, eating a hot dog and being like, that's crazy, brother. That's a crazy hot dog. Steve Cohen, super fan of the show, appears in a couple of episodes as a diner in kind of like a weird – I saw one. He just like sneaks in. Yeah. There's one in Los Angeles of him just eating a Luganiga sausage. And he's not like a handsome man. He's just like a guy. But he's at some place. He doesn't have any lines. But then he did apparently pay Guy Fieri$100 ,000 to hang out with him for a day and go to all of his favorite restaurants.

1:29:27Like the hot dog places in Connecticut that he likes. that's exactly see to me that is actually like that's an inkling of that person might do a good job of owning a baseball team there's a follow up episode that maybe I need to do on my show where I find out who's actually good at being rich yeah I would please have me on it sounds amazing that actually sounds like an incredible episode it's not always guys that are good at being owners honestly it's just not being unhappy about everything right a through line that you established you wouldn't tell Jim Irsay you wouldn't tell anyone to be more like Jim Irsay, R.I.P.

1:30:01And yet, like, Jim Irsay spent the last years of his life with, like, a touring band of notable blues musicians traveling venues across the country and doing the worst versions of Neil Young songs you've ever heard that he would sing. That fucking rocks. It rocks. It's great. I have no notes on that. I wish more people like that makes it. I regret to confirm it rocks. Yeah. So we wrap up here. And I will say another thing about all of this is that two wonderful men I'm here with, actually, Daniel as well. It's like, we all fucking love our jobs and we're truly like deeply into them. I talked to Daniel about random fucking production stuff.

1:30:32It's a joy to do. And I think that that is actually the real solution to a lot of these problems is give people who actually give a fuck money and let them do cool shit. David, where can people find you? I mean, now the pressure's on because we already know that Ed is very critical of my promos. Defector.com is the website. It is a subscription site, but you can read a few articles for free and decide if you like it. The podcast I do there is The Distraction. The podcast I do about Hallmark movies is It's Christmas Town. Yeah. And if you like Pablo and Ed, you can hear them on The Distraction.

1:31:03Neither one of these guys has been on the Hallmark podcast yet, but it's a long process. It's hard. Yes, indeed. And then, I don't know, Blue Sky, I guess, David J. Roth. I'll have the links in that. Pablo Torre finds out is the show. It is on YouTube, and it's a podcast. And I have a substack. It's at www.pablo.show. and I aspire to talk about some Hallmark movies with a guy who's only killed one of two turtles that he's so far, you know. God killed that turtle. And I'm Ed Zitron. You can find me on a podcast. It's called Better Offline. Yeah, God killed that turtle. God smote my turtle. It's like, well, God friended me.

1:31:45Anyway, I'm Ed Zitron. You've been listening to the podcast Better Offline. We talk about technology or some such business. wonderful producer of course daniel goodman here in the beautiful new york city nevada please please subscribe to my newsletters as well where's your ed dot at what's great is this is going to end you're going to hear exactly the same shit again and you're going to email me and say ed re-record it no don't do it

1:32:15thank you for listening to better offline the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is Matosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

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