Pablo Torre Finds Out - A Share & Tell About Nothing with Mina Kimes, Dan Le Batard & Pablo

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Is Jerry Seinfeld complaining about the culture wars, or just the fallout of mid TV? What's the deal with books? And what happens if Charles Barkley becomes a free agent? Plus: machetés, memoir titles and the return of Dan's favorite tile-matching castle video game.Further reading:The Scholar of Comedy (David Remnick)No One Buys Books (Elle Griffin)Charles Barkley: The Richest Free Agent in Sports TV History? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. I've only seen one episode of Seinfeld and it was the last one. Oh no, no wonder you think it's terrible. Right after this ad. You're listening to Draft King's Network. When I'm traveling, if you're coming at me with that snack basket, I'm taking at least three things. And I'm putting in my backpack like a squirrel storing their nuts for the world. winter because you never know when you're going to need it on the road.

That's my philosophy of napkins. Yeah, that's Asian. That's just being Asian. Is that just an Asian thing? Yeah, that's just Asian. That's our culture. You know, this is the big one. The bags of the earbuds you get with headphones.

I'm like, I might need them. I might need them. Even though the giant ones, I have tiny ears, I'll never use. But what if I'm desperate and I need them at some point? I will never throw these away. I like stealing pens from restaurants that they give me to sign the check What?

That's weird. What? What are you doing? You might need a pen. That's just theft. You just said the verb stealing. She accused you of a crime. I want to retract the verb choice now.

Well, you admitted to a crime is what just happened there. You confessed. I like to steal pens. In fact, you confess to kleptomi. is what you just did. No, I confess to being a writer at heart who just always wants to have the ability. Yeah, Dan doesn't save pens

because he has no reason to use them anymore. The Cuban-American delegation here, what is the thing that you and your family and your culture hoard and that you have in the drawers of your house? Let me think if this is any Cuban-specific hoarding. Some machetes, maybe. Got any machetes?

Whoa. Whoa, machetes? You think that a family heirloom, just let me understand what you have as a depiction of Cubans here. Let me see if I've got this straight. Problematic. Is this how it happens? Is this how Pablo meets his end? Let me seize on that for a moment.

There are more racist weapons than a machete. No, no, no, no, no. Let me seize on this for a moment. Cigars. Real quick. Yeah. All of my descendants, including the women, look like Danny Trey. That's correct.

They were all machete. You said it. No, you said this. You said this with this undercurrent of blind spot that you have about racism toward my people, where all of us just wander around putting machetes in the drawers. Did you say machete and then switch back to machete? Did I catch that? That was incredible code switching from. Well, ever since I put away the pen that used to allow me to write correctly, I was someone who used to be able to put work.

words together. We got to ask Val. Let's ask Dan's wife. And picked up the blade. I know what Dan's hoarding. Royal match coins. Oh, so many of them. Oh, I've got so many of them.

Oh, I forgot. We're starting with my topic. Because my topic is a topic that Mina has teased us about. That she has a thing that she wants to contribute to this conversation, Dan. That she would not disclose in our group chat. And the setup to this does not. feel like it's something that would spark such immediate glee from Meenekimes.

But the setup is Jerry Seinfeld is in the news again. He has a movie coming out about Pop Tarts or some shit on Netflix. But he has gotten in trouble because he said this to David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, on their New Yorker radio hour. Nothing really affects comedy. People always need it. They need it so badly and they don't get it. It used to be you would go home at the end of the day.

most people would go, oh, Cheers is on, oh, MASH is on, oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on, all in the family's on. You just expect it, there'll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight. Well, guess what? Where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people. When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups, here's our thought about this joke. Well, that's the end of your comedy. They move the gates, like in skiing.

Culture, the gates are moving. Your job is to be agile and clever enough that wherever they put the gates, I'm going to make the gate. So as a general principle, watching David Remnick figure out how do I give listening face and how do I do some, hmm, in that is very funny to me, a gust journalist. But this is a very familiar conversation that just makes me,

Again, I don't want to just do the thing of like Jerry Seinfeld, you 70-year-old man, which is literally true. You don't get it anymore. 70? Yes. Yeah, 70. That's shocking. Every time anyone says that, it's shocking, too. He's, whatever he's doing in life, he's figured out how to look like he doesn't look 70.

He looks great. Be extraordinarily rich, would be one step, I suppose. Yeah, that'll do it. And the second step is, I guess, have blind spots towards the other people directly in your sort of, circle of Hollywood friends who have figured out ways to make great shit even as time has marched on. I mean, Kirby enthusiasm, I guess, just ended. Is he saying that Kerb never got to do this because he wrote with Larry David on Seinfeld? I love Seinfeld, by the way, the show.

I want to say that, too. I love Seinfeld. I love Seinfeld. The comedian. I think Seinfeld, the comedian is also incredibly sharp and funny. It just is the thing that's so unsurprising me, you know, where, like, the seven-year-old guy who made one of the most successful TV shows in history, who has many friends who made Veep,

Julia Louis Dreyfus made Veep. Of course, that's God now. But I don't think PC culture is the reason why, like, Jerry Seinfeld feels like, actually, he's not laughing anymore. It just feels convenient at this point and lazy on that level. Yeah. I mean, I think the bigger, the far bigger driver behind the absence of the kind of shows he's bemoaning the loss of

is the fact that we don't have 40-episode sitcoms anymore. I guess the one that is successful that people point to is Abbott Elementary, which I haven't seen, I've heard it's very funny. But they just don't make those kinds of shows for technological business reasons, not because of cultural reasons. I think that, you know, people would point to Kirby and Theisans being on HBO. Veep was on HBO. Yeah.

But the structure of those shows is different. And actually, you know, you don't really see many seasons of television that are 10 plus episodes at all anymore. That's not because of woke culture. That's because of the economics and industry. It is why the writers went on strike, right? Because of that, because it's harder to make a living, doing that kind of thing. So I just saw Seinfeld last night.

It went to, it was like the Netflix as a joke fest. It was a guy who I can't remember his name. He was Mancallo, Mancallo or something. Sebastian Manuscalco? Yes. Yes. He was first. How dare you?

Nick Bargazzi was. second. Jim Gaffigan was third. Holy shit. What a lineup. Good guy. Why is Mina pronouncing Sebastian Manascalco's name like a 90-year-old woman? I don't know his name. I don't know.

Mina, don't feel ignorant there, incidentally, because I found on our show that Manascalco occupies a space where some of us just love him and know exactly who he is, and some of us can't believe that the others don't know who we're talking about. Do you love, is, are you a fan, Dan? all of the comedians you just mentioned.

That's a hell of a show. I don't think you had the right order in terms of how that lineup should have laid out. But perhaps, well, I don't know. Gaffigan seemed a little high there with the company he was keeping. Wow. No offense to Gaffigan.

That's a murder's row. That is a murder's row of comedians you watched last night. So Gaffigan is why we went. We were a guest of his. I had not seen any of these people, except for Seinfeld, I had seen once. And the one time I had seen Seinfeld, it was inadvertently.

I went to Nick's co-workers' improv show. We went to in New York, which is the kind of thing you do when you're in New York. It's not really... Anyways. I love improv in New York, for the record here. I'll disclose my priors here. Yeah. I don't.

So I went and Seinfeld did the thing where, like, you know, you're a comedian. You're like, I'm just popping into the comedy store or whatever to work material, so people went nuts. And so this was the second time I saw him. wasn't really my thing? I'll start by saying. You know, it was a lot of jokes about like, wives, am I right? Marriage is miserable, you know.

Gulf. They should call it. Get out, leave family. It was one of the joke. I'm sorry. Well, I will say the last time that I saw Seinfeld, this is not a joke. I'm not making this up.

I found it alarming. The number of canes I was stepping over in the audience to get to my seat. I'm not even joking. Like, I wish I were joking. I'm not. What's the deal with Keynes? And in the way that comedy doesn't

tend to age well, it's very hard to be a 70-year-old comedian who keeps up with things. The last few times I've seen him, the acts have been about nothing, as they always are, but they haven't been bad, Mina. So it might not be your thing, but as a

sculptor, he's a very good comedian. Mina, I guess what we're saying is that Seinfeld has been a master of observational comedy specifically. And what he's observing, the sharpness of his observations are what you're now, of course, taking some issue with. It just, I would contrast it with, again, I'm not a great critic of comedy, but Bargantzi, who went second, who I had seen before, was much more my speed personally. And I think actually falls in the same category of Seinfeld very, very.

inoffensive humor. It's not edgy or politicized at all. It's jokes about his upbringing in Tennessee. He joked about his wife as well and being married. But for some reason, I found it a lot sharper. I'll just say that. He's less of a performer. His humor is more dry. I think that seems to be more of the generational thing. But yeah, I guess I don't want to say Seinfeld isn't funny as a comedian because I I feel like I don't have, I can't base that off of one set that I saw. And I don't want to be like a, you know, cast judgment about what that says about how he views the state of comedy as a whole now. I'll just say it felt a little dated. Seinfeld, I do not believe that as you're mentioning all the things you're mentioning, because I do think there's a number of funny things here, including the fact that he was putting up that as criticism.

and then what came at the end was a TikTok thing that is about 50 years removed from the kind of age stuff that he's afflicted with here that might make him look at young people and say, don't tell me how to do comedy, look at my history in comedy, do you have any idea what it is that I've done in this business? However, there has never been a time

in the 25 years that Jerry Seinfeld has been making television or jokes where he's ever made any kind of jokes, that was so edgy that would get him canceled. He has never existed in that space. I don't know. Like, he's never, he's always been PG. Yeah.

Well, look, the other part of it, too, just to put a button on, I guess, the culture war aspect of this, which is very familiar, I think, to all of us in various other contexts, is like, it's not like Hollywood is demanding, like, hey, can you give us smart, thoughtful, slow-paced art films, you know,

like, that do satisfy the liberal elite? Like, that's not exactly happening either. I think this is an industry thing in which criticism feels like the market's speaking to you, and you can confuse the two when the market is shrinking and people are criticizing you. They're not necessarily the same thing. Bad polling doesn't mean that the gears of Hollywood are suddenly aligned against you in a conspiratorial way because you're too edgy as a comedian. Do any of us think he has a point?

I just wanted before I move on to my revelation here. That it's getting harder to do comedy today, because people are more sensitive? I don't know that anyone could disagree with that point that it's getting harder to do comedy because the corporations are involved. And people, like, what's, can we disagree with that? What do we invite doing comedy?

Are we talking about stand-up? Are we talking about sitcoms? Because I think we all agree that the sitcom thing, it's much more about economic forces and the industry than it is about the actual underlying nature of the comedy, which seems to be his point. As far as stand-up goes, I feel like there are comedians who are edgy

and are just more successful and contemporary. I mean, I watched the Shane Gillis special on Netflix, which is very edgy and very offensive. I imagine to a lot of people and much funnier to me than anything I saw from Seinfeld. But, you know, it felt much more finely tuned to the moment, perhaps, much more modern Pablo?

Yeah, I have, and I found it funny. Despite previous things that we've talked about on this show that I have at least with Dan, too, about how Shane Gillis was somebody that I think I was not trying to like and then realize he's funny enough where I have to admit.

I think that this guy makes me laugh and I want to acknowledge that. Despite his history of saying things that, again, I've been characterized as like caricatures and insults towards Asian people that, again, different episode, different topic. But Seinfeld does draw a distinction

and dance clarification is useful. Seinfeld draws a distinction in this interview between stand-up and sitcoms. And I think this is kind of what's the heart of the story is like, if you want to say things that make corporations uncomfortable in all sorts of ways, you do it independently. And there is so much reward there.

And I think the question is about television, which is gate-kept by TV companies. I do think there, of course, the appetite has changed because of economic forces. And of course, I think there is a risk aversion. Although I would imagine that the risk aversion, Dan, towards like, can we get away with this joke? Feels like a pendulum that swings back and forth all of the time. Oh, but wait a minute. There can be so much truth in what Seinfeld is saying about corporate interference and fingers getting involved.

with a product that's being made right now at this time. I will tell you as somebody who's involved in the business of this, negotiating with an Apple over things that are going to get made, the corporations are absolutely scared of offending people and then take a team of executives in so that what you're watching, perhaps you've noticed this on Apple television, Mina, is stuff that's not going to offend anybody, that the corporate creative choices,

once you get into the corporation of funny, you're finding a lot of content makers are running scared. I believe that that is true based on my experience. I guess, I don't know. I just read an interview with Netflix, which is really probably the biggest purveyor of comedy right now, right? Like, that is a huge part of their business. The thing I went to last night down was part of a Netflix,

that Netflix is a joke festival in LA. They're a little different, though, I would say, than some of these other. I would say they've been supporting comedy more ferociously for profit than any of these other entities. Yeah, because it's cheap and they can make a ton of money off of it. And these comedy specials do really well. It's not out of some, you know, higher, like, that's not that they're braver, whatever.

It's cheaper. And this interview, anyways, they talked about, they didn't talk about Gillis, but they talked about this comedian Matt Rife, who was, made some really offensive jokes about domestic violence. I've only been to Baltimore one time I ate lunch there, and the hostess who, like, seat you at the restaurant had a black eye. A full black eye. And it wasn't like, what happened? It was pretty obvious what happened. And we couldn't get over the fact that we're like, this is the face of the company?

Like, this is where you have greeting people? And my boy who I was with was like, yeah, I feel bad for her, man. I feel like they should put her in the kitchen or something where nobody has to see her face, you know? And I was like, yeah, but I feel like, yeah. like if she could cook, she wouldn't have that black eye. The internet did not like it, and Netflix was supporting him in a big way and continuing to throw their weight behind him and give him a big audience. And let me tell you, that dude is fucking not funny. I mean, I, I, because I was, I went down the rabbit hole and I had the exact

opposite experience from watching Shane Gillis, where I was like, okay, Shane Gillis, this happened. Let me watch him. I was like, ooh, this is pretty funny. He's going to be. pretty funny. Matt, right. Same experience. Went down. I was like, let me watch some of his clips. And literally, I could not have laughed any less than if I was at a funeral. It was so unfunny. He's so untalented. You can recreate this. I don't know if he has shooters. All the other people defending him. If they are, they have terrible taste because he is untalented and unfunny and does not clear the bar for if you're going to be edgy, you've got to be really, really funny in the way that Gillis is to back it up. And Dan, this interview, Netflix was

like he's got an audience man he's got a fan base he's huge on tic-tok uh so i don't think at least just talking about netflix i don't know about all these other companies for me it seems to be that these companies are just motivated by the you know the bottom line all of that can be true and there can be a dollop of fear in it too because executives are going to executive and if they can fear something instead of leading so that they won't be blamed for why it is that money's not being made, it can be said that there might be a dollop of fear in there as well, just because we have a lot of people in business who are in power to do things who shouldn't be, who think they're the reason that they make hit television when sometimes the way that hit television gets made

isn't with an algorithm because you don't know formulaically how some of this stuff actually gets popular. Yeah, which Brave Network Comedy Exec will give us the sitcom that's like, what? Am I right? They spend so much money on vacation and your family just fights the whole time. I mean, we're out on these boats on the water just yapping at each other, screaming at each other.

And I'm like, man, this feels like work. I just hate that the three of us are out here, the three of us, three of us on sports cable television saying one of the great comedians of all time isn't funny. Not saying you're wrong, I just hate having my face in the middle of it. What I want to know is what Mina was going to tell us. We've gone...

I'm sorry. Do that. We did. There was a great tease. She's been teasing us, Mina. There was something you wanted to tell us that we're not going to believe. What's the deal with the tease? This is going to come across so poorly after what I just did.

The joke I just did. Perfect. Okay. Here it is. I've only seen one episode of Seinfeld, and it was the last one. Oh, no, no wonder you think it's terrible. I don't think the show is terrible.

I'm talking about it, is stand-up, which I believe is different. Oh, but no, it's not, that's the worst representation of him. And you guys don't even know how many times in my life. How did you avoid it? I have pretended like, yeah, when people are like, classic Kastanza, right? I'm like, totally. Or like, like, just so many references to over the years. that I have festivists,

man hands, don't know what the man hands are, a man purse, I'm like, yeah, nodding, the Elaine, the dancing. Kramer? Is Kramer as a concept? You're just like, yeah, definitely.

Love a Kramer. She does need to be careful, I think, not knowing and giving double thumbs up to master of your own domain. I think she's got to know what she's saying there instead of just giving the double thumbs up in agreement, there's some dangers here. The soup Nazi, that's a...

Less dangerous, I think, for you than masters of your own domain, I think. So the soup Nazi, as I understand it, again, never having seen it, just a man who doesn't want people to buy this soup? Yeah, aggressively. No, he has his own set of rules for where and how you can get his delicious soup, and he berates people. Wait, Mina, do you know... Wait, let's see.

Mina, do you know the soup Nazi's famous catchphrase? No soup for you. Yes. Wow. Yes, well done. She can fake her way through a Seinfeld conversation, having only seen the worst of its episodes. Here's my understanding of the character of Kramer.

He is kind of a hobo, but he lives in their apartment, and his big, his move is just coming into rooms and, like, almost falling. Sliding in. He lives next door. He's not a roommate. He lives across the hall, and he just, there's an intimacy. to see among these young people that allows him to just come in,

slide into the room with a grand entrance and big hair and racism. Later in life. Later. Does he, like, he, I don't know. He has many jobs, none of which I think qualify as a job. I feel like Mina has a pretty good handle on this show.

Really? She really does know everything that there needs to be known. That's true. You've seen one episode. You're an expert. All right, Mina. Should we go to your topic,

the topic that segues off of this one? It does, actually. I didn't think it would, but I think there's a lot of continuity because it sort of cuts to why is certain content made, what does well, what is funded, you know? And it was this piece I read about the book industry, and it was like a viral substack piece in Elysian press. No one buys books is the name of the substack. So there was a, I'm playing up my notes because I want to get this right. There was a big trial from 2022 and Penguin Random House, which is one of the five major publishers tried to buy Simon Schuster, which is one of the other five major publishers for $2.2 billion and the just DOJ blocked it because it would be monopolistic or I might be

misrepresenting the exact case. But the point is, because of this trial, all this data came out on the, book industry. And a slate piece pointed out that the publishers have an incentive to cry poor to justify the purchase. So I think that's important context as we talk about this. But some of the data was like shocking to me as someone who buys and reads books. Just top line over 90% of books sell fewer than a thousand copies. Half, according to this, sell fewer than 12. Again, that's pretty stunning. Most of these big houses

spent almost most of their money on celebrity books or people like, you know, Stephen King and James Patterson and whatnot. Yeah, franchises. Most of, yeah, so 2% of all books are in advances over 250,000.

That one's not super surprising. But most of these books are not profitable. The CEO of Random House said the top 4% of books strive 60% of the profitability for all of it. That was the stat that jumped out to me. I was like, oh, this is, books are a handful of very successful things, funding seemingly

a lot of failure, economically speaking. Even these big celebrity books don't do particularly well. A lot of them don't do well. I mean, they mentioned like the Billy Elish book didn't sell a lot, Justin Timberlake's book, sold 100,000 copies in three years. 85% of books with these major advances, don't earn back their advances, according to one of these CEOs. So the money's all made off of a few big books, children's books.

And I say that now as someone who's buying children's books. It really is the same stuff we were reading, which is kind of crazy. Like the very hungry caterpillar is just continuing to dominate sales. And then stuff like encyclopedias, Bibles, backlists, basically. But so for these book companies, you know, they really are trying to target people. This is kind of what I was alluding to when I was talking about Matt Wright, who are, Matt Reif, who already have big existing audiences because they don't want to market these books. And they don't really want to take too many risks with a lot of money because so often it doesn't pan out.

This was depressing. I was really depressed after reading it. It's one of those, Dan, it's one of those stories where I'm like, I wish I didn't know this because it kind of ruins the illusion of what a book is. Because books in sort of real life are physical objects that you see in bookstores. And when you see it in the wild, it's like, oh, I assume, therefore lots of other people are doing this. And you just realize how unbelievably small the audiences for the overwhelming super, super majority of all books are. And it just makes, and look, I want to know what Dan thinks because Dan,

has been making noises for years about how his pens actually do work and how he wants to write a book. And I wonder how this article actually landed on you, Dan, as somebody who still obviously cares about books. And it's interesting to talk to the two of you, right, having seen what your careers have become and the choices that you two particularly have made when you would have graduated in previous incarnations of our business into writing books. because that's where the career track went for journalists on the stuff that we were doing before we chose some of the other stuff we did. And what's interesting to hear Mina's perspective on this is, I have seen a couple of these things burned down in front of me with such pain and sadness that this one is less surprising

than the previous ones that have made me feel this way. I felt this way in general and feel this way with newspapers, but I also remember being for the first time on the set of PTI and Matt Kelleher, who we love, I was showing him a long-form piece that I had done with Edrin James and ESPN the magazine that at that time would have become something like a book if I had pursued that path. And Matt Kelleher, who's one of the producers at PTI, just looks at me and says, yeah, nobody reads long stuff anymore. And so that was the second time that I felt what you're feeling now,

which is like, of course, the hardest and the most fulfilling of these arts, this lovely thing from a bygone time that you would hold in your hands and have a relationship with over months, of course that would die too at the altar of Kindle or just not reading because we're all doing what Pet Sajax says. You don't have to learn anything anymore. You just have to know how to find it. And so the discovery that would come with a book or anything else,

that some of the mysteries of the things that you love about books from your childhood, they die for this generation because the artifact dies. Well, it's also sort of... What I don't know from this article, in fairness, is like, how it used to be, how much better it used to be, right?

So I imagine pre-internet, of course, the economic pressures, again, which recur throughout this episode, were not the same. That is very clear. The idea of, like, we need authors who have audience because that saves us on marketing budgets.

Feels like a familiar desperation that wasn't available as sort of like a hack because people didn't have social media platforms. And you couldn't have someone like, let's just pull it at random. Pierce Morgan, who has 8 million Twitter followers and 2 million Instagram followers, selling just 5,650 U.S. print copies since his book was published. So the point being that even when you try to hack the system, most often the recurring message here is, it fails. And so Dan mentioned something with Kindle where, like, the apocalypse for the bookseller,

Mina, in this seems to be subscriptions. Like they are living in fear that you will buy a service that will let you read all of the books you want. And in fact, these publishing houses are fighting to never let their titles be in such a service. Yeah, which is, I mean, I think they saw what happened to the music industry, right? And which should not, or should have. have been much more proactive about what would eventually become the streaming model. And the book industry is like, nope, we're not doing this because it would kill us to their credit. It seems like what they live in fear of actually is less of that and more the idea of an Amazon publishing their own books, kind of like the grocery store, putting out the private brand cereal or whatever.

The company that runs the pipes and a lot of success in the book industry is being able to successfully manipulate those pipe pipes. There's some pay for play type stuff, getting on lists, all that kind of placement, all that stuff. But if Amazon was suddenly like, we're going to put out books and because of their ability to put those books in front of everyone at the expense of others, that would be a much bigger antitrust issue than one of these mergers.

So it would be interesting to me to see if, you know, the government or something would get involved in, that because and that's the thing with Amazon generally, right? Because they control so much distribution in the economy right now, they have the ability to crush many industries. I do want to point out there was an article in Slate that actually questioned some of the findings in this substack said that they didn't account for e-reading, which is a way a lot of people purchase books now, and that it was very focused on profitability and sales in a calendar year. Books take a while to earn back money. The other thing it said, Dan, that I thought was interesting was reading doesn't

actually seem to be down. Like, this isn't happening because people aren't reading. It's happening because of the technological aspects and the economics of it and the, you know, but people still read books, which that gave me a little bit of comfort. Problem is, like so many things we talk about all the time just because people are still interested in something doesn't mean the industry can find ways to be profitable the way it used to. Dan, how do you feel about this? Do you still want to write a book? It has been my biggest professional wrestling demon that the thing that would be the hardest that I would normally gravitate to just because it's the hardest and the most things, you know, most things that are most fulfilling. It's because they're the hardest. I've always wanted to do it and never been able to

conquer it because of how lonely and exhaustive it would be. The only times that I've been able to summon the spirit to do so is when I'm at the height of feeling inspired, which isn't a plane that I can keep. I do like the idea of like Dan naming his autobiography, something like one word, one of those like dramatic one word things. I don't know what it would be. All of my... I'll filibuster here. as you can see the wheels turning in Mina's head as she's going to get the clever title to the book. I see the wheels. What happened?

I put too much pressure on you. I figure you're always looking for those openings. You cut me at the beginning of this by reminding me that I never used these pens to write anything anymore. Gas bag with a giant, like zoomed in, like he does on Twitter with other people get it by his own face.

I feel like I would read a Dan book. I would read your memoir. I would read still sweaty, colon the Dan Lebitard story. Yeah. Do you guys read? I do read. Not as often as I would like to.

Right now, Valerie has just given me Stephen King's book on writing because she believes that this is the... She's trying to nudge me in the places that need nudging. Wow, that sounds like a... Dirtier than I meant. Yeah, I was going to say, wait a minute. Hold on.

I read for the show. I read for the show now. I interview authors and I read their books and I'm like, oh, I should actually just like lean into it. But Hanifa Burakib's book was excellent. So you read for utility. I read for work because I don't have time I tell myself to read for pleasure anymore. So I almost entirely read for pleasure. I read literary fiction.

I do not read much nonfiction. I read books that have absolutely nothing to do with sports, with my job. and books that don't really, I don't really talk about them anywhere. And it is one of the very rare things in my life I do that has zero professional utility. It is not something that I do for even something like, I don't know, like I run every day, right? And I like it. But there's, you know, I run in part to stay in shape because I am on television and I'm a vain human being. Right.

But there's nothing like that with reading for me. And that's why it occupies such a special place in my life because it is that rare hobby that is just for me and not for social capital. Yeah, I don't know. And that's why I think I treasure it so much because it's really unusual for me that way. That's intimate and I'm surprised that you don't share with others

because of how much you enjoy talking about the artistry of well-made things. I'm surprised that you don't seek other people who have read some something that you've read to see if they have observations that you don't have. I have some book friends who I talk to about books that I'm reading. My friend Greg Rosenthal at the Anfell Network and I have shared books. And I do try to like sometimes I promote books on my podcast, mostly just because I want people to read them or if I have a friend who's written a book, I have a friend who wrote great book called Real Americans that's out.

Now you guys should check out as beautifully written. You should get it right now. Do the promotion correctly. If it's right behind you there somewhere. grab it and promote the book correctly so that this person can get the shout of. Maybe we should have Mina's listening or reading recommendations here. We should start a new segment at the end of this.

What are you reading these days? You're corrupting the thing I just said, which is I do this just for me. What I would like to promote is... You just turn it into content. You just started it into... That's right. Take your greatest intimacies, these unshared things, and sell them at our merch store.

Levitartaf.com is where you go to get all LevittartMert merch. I'm going to promote perpetual bestseller, The Bible, keeping all authors working for 2,000 years. Stugatsbook.com, Stugats' personal record book. It is filled with... Are there words in there? No, not until you guys write them. You guys better hurry up and write them.

I wrote mine. They're in there. I'm receiving zero dollars for that. I'm surprised he hasn't asked me to promote it, too. What a scam. What a scam. am. So now at the end, I want to figure out what we do, Dan, you and me, because I think my version of reading books for pleasure and not for content is my vast collection of houseplants,

which I tend to lovingly. They're all alive. They've been alive for now since pre-pandemic. I water them. I untot them. I tend to them. They're doing great. I almost never photograph them, but I live in this state of constantly gardening in my home, and it gives me joy. It's only for me, and Liz and Violet. And yeah, there is no sponsored. I may have tried at one point to see if anyone would sponsor this habit. No one would. But that's what I do.

And what do you do, Dan? What do I do that is solely for me? Just for you and you alone. I'm going to have to think about that for a second because I don't know that I have something that's exactly like that. Well, we all know. We all know what it really is. Yeah, we know what it is. It is absolutely 100% still royal match game, you total freak.

You got me. I've forgotten that I'd shared that intimacy with you. I can't believe you've resurrected it. I thought it was still a secret shame. I'd shaken it off. Speaking of people with large followings, Dan, speaking of someone who has survived the changing climate of our media economy, what have you brought us today?

It's a Charles Barkley story, because I think we can reasonably argue that outside of Howard Cosell, Charles Barkley, has been the greatest broadcaster in the history of all of sports, most award-winning, several decades of success, doing what Draymond Green is trying to do in a way that will never be replicated. I was told again and again by him at every turn that he was retiring at 60. They made it impossible to retire at 60. and now he has a 10-year contract clause in which there are out that allow him an extension that allows him to get out

if it, and it looks like this might happen, if he's no longer working for the group of people that he presently works for at TNT, the executives, if all of the streaming rights end up changing so that your broadcast experience with the NBA has Charles Barkley working for people other than the people that he presently works for. And I just wanted to talk to you guys in general about him becoming a free agent or the idea that Charles Barkley makes everything so good by being Charles Barkley that he will never be replicated again as a broadcaster.

I've never seen anyone exist in the space that he does where he's both controversial and likable and perpetually trending. And I will say again, and likable. It's a charisma unlike any I've ever seen in the history of sports media. Yeah, I want to get to Mina Dan's personal relationship with Barkley because it is intimate. Guarantee. Fat Dan Levitart and your fat daddy, sweet Miss Lourdes. I'll see you a Saturday. Garanty!

Barkley getting away with stuff all of the time is fascinating to me because everybody, no one has been more influential on, I think, athletes trying to be broadcasters. And it's funny because Barclay's whole sort of schick, you could argue, is that he never want to ring. And so he's perpetually sort of beset by this criticism that he failed. And yet nobody has one more in an arena that every athlete who has one wants to get into more. So Tom Brady wins all of the rings and he wants to be Charles Barkley. All of these players, LeBron, has a podcast now. Because on some level, Charles Barkley's coaching tree extends to every, every, every, every superstar who's ever done this. And the idea of, like, Mina, you know, you.

thought about this, I'm sure. Like, what does charisma mean as an analyst on television? What do you have to do to have credibility? Barkley feels like a unicorn who everyone wants to try to emulate, and no one probably should, because he does a thing where his lack of knowledge is endearing. His insults to others wind up being Chuck being adorable. There's a segment on Inside the NBA, the greatest studio show for my money of all time in any sport in which who he play for is the premise. And spoiler alert, Charles does not know who that player plays for. He gets away with stuff,

and he would be the biggest free agent, I believe, in sports media bidding history because of what's happening potentially with TNT losing the NBA. I do wonder how all of our habits are going to be changing in the next 10 years of broadcasting changes because what they have there is, a unique thing where all of the people who work on that show clearly love each other and have real chemistry,

not televised chuckle-fest chemistry, the kind of chemistry that Mina has with her colleagues on NFL Live, real chemistry. But also, and I don't know how much this has changed with management, he's always worked with people who he is grateful for to be around, and so I don't know how interested he would be at this point, given that he's been talking for a long time

about retiring at 60, working with different people. Like, I think that contract clause isn't there necessarily to give him freedom as much as it is to give him the freedom to not work with anybody he doesn't want to work with. Yeah, I mean, that show gets brought up constantly, right, in the context of, is it replicable? How can other shows emulate it? What can we learn from it? And I think it's debatable how much can be learned from it because it is, I mean, the lesson is obvious is what Dan said,

but how much that can be copied is really, really, really, really difficult. I like watching it. It's funny, though, to probably kind of go back to your first point about Berkeley, which is, you know, he doesn't really follow the week. No, it must be infuriating for lots of people who want to do what he does.

Let me, let me, you know, I'm listening to that. I'm thinking, God, if I even on one day was like, yeah, I don't know about something. I would get obviously destroyed because of... But that's fine. That doesn't... I think I get it. Compared to someone like Berkeley.

Like, yeah. It's not just like, oh, he played the game. It's like, no, no, no. What he's bringing to the table, it's not really even about credibility for me. It's the force of personality. Yes. He is amazing on television,

not because of his intimate knowledge of the league. I respect that. And it doesn't mean that it doesn't mean that it's unfair that I don't get the same benefit of the doubt because I don't have that talent that he has. Well, likeability, what that means is the secret to Charles Barkley. And it's, Dan, I'm curious if you foresaw this, right? Because Barclay, to me, part of why he is this epic character in the history of sports

is that he has now, decade after decade, been more at the forefront of a sport that he never won a title in than guys who did. And Charles Barkley, not just that, seems happier. Like, likability to me feels like a question of, do you want to hang out with this guy? Do you want to keep hanging out with this guy? Do you want him around? And the answer with Charles Barkley seems like the most unanimous bipartisan yes, despite all of the ways he stuck his foot in his mouth that would have torpedoed other people. You just see that Michael Jordan won everything and is miserable. Charles Barkley won zero rings

and is the face of a sport because people just want to hang out with him. And that's an incredible, like, legacy in its own way. He carries himself with a great deal of gratitude and even though he throws people through windows if they disrespect him, I've also seen him be better about kindness in public than anyone who has grabbed at like him I've ever seen.

Like, bar none, he's the best to being kind to people. you know, making sure to find when he's at a roulette table in Vegas, the guy who's sweeping the floors nearby because he consistently tries to make everybody feel special. But he carries himself with a gratitude. And this part is kind of amazing when we talk about what they've done with that show, the greatest in the history of sports studio television. I mean this as no slight to Ernie Johnson,

who's as good as anybody at what we do, Kenny Smith or Shaq. But if Barkley leaves, that shows over. And that's a crazy thing to say. Like that, because it is a great show and all of those people are really important, but there is one star, one person who is not like any person

who's ever been before him, and he sits at the center of that. Or off to the side anyway, but symbolically at the center. But I also think you could plug Barkley into a place like, I don't know, Dan's wedding, and he would thrive. which is curious because this happened.

And Dan, how? It's been very nice, buddy. It's been very nice. Uh-oh, Stu Gutz is going to get you mad again with another question here. Charles, where were you? Like, why we thought you would be at the wedding? What happened to you, Charles? Oh, oh, Dan, why don't you tell Stu what happened?

I'm not totally sure what happened, actually. Oh, say, Stu, yeah. They don't cause me like the week of his wedding. And he says, yo, man, I just found out they forgot to send you an invitation. And I'm like, Dan. And I said, Dan, how did you, how could you forget me?

You called me three times they give me an address to send you the invitation. I did do that. I did do that. And they didn't send me an invitation. And I was pissed. Yeah, you had every reason to be pissed. I mean, I could tell you, Lefco was killing it

at that wedding, man, cutting up the dance floor. Charles, good catching up with you. We'll see you soon, buddy. Hey, Dan, you know what they say about marriage? It's like a walk in the park. Jurassic Park Take that one from Jerry Seinfeld I agree

I think he's been making that move for weddings that he hasn't gone to I'm pretty sure that's just a giant lie I'm pretty sure that he's just telling a giant affable, warm, likable lie We're at the end here We're at the end, okay? We're going to say what we all found out today

And Hulmsd wants to go first I'll go first I found out that Dan doesn't have enough things that he does just for himself aside from Royal Match and I'd like him to find some hobbies that are just for him and you don't have to talk about it on the show you don't have to grow a plant put in your radio show just for you

I was trying to be clever and try to circle around and put a ribbon on the show by making some sort of master of my own domain joke there but it didn't feel appropriate or that it would be funny enough. And so I just sort of got stuck and then slowly sank into the quicksand of just silence,

which is the worst of all of the things you can do in an audio and visual medium. Yeah, it does feel also appropriately masturbatory that you told us that. So thank you for taking us inside. It was supposed to be my own secret. Yeah, it was supposed to be my private. So is Jerry the master of his domain?

Is that the... There was a contest. It's also dead. humor now in retrospect. I can't believe you flamed Seinfeld is unfuny. Yeah, you're really... I hope that gets subsumed by my flaming Matt Rife. That's the hive that I want to come after.

I did not foresee Mina Kimes having the sharpest machete on today's show. Truly. But as for the people who hack through the underbrush of Pablo Torre finds out, we are produced by Michael Antinucci, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Belindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rachel Miller Howard, Ethan Schreier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tuminello, and Juliet Warren. Our studio engineering by RG Systems, our post production by NGW Post, our theme song, as always, by John Bravo. Have a good weekend. I got to go 10 to about 25 different plants.