Pablo Torre Finds Out - An Ominously Utopian Share & Tell with Katie Nolan, Dan Le Batard, and Pablo

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Is the Sports Illustrated A.I. scandal dystopian, funny, or just plain sad? Depends whether you think art has a soul. Are champion athletes predisposed to addictive tendencies? Depends if you think you've gotta be a workaholic a$$hole to create great art. And what's with that commercial for a futuristic hostel on the NFL games? Depends if you're willing to live in a fake utopia. Plus: powdered wigs, Piña coladas, chum buckets, bone saws, flying cars, Faulkner, DiMaggio, the Michael Jordan of being present, and a parliament of owls.Further PTFO-approved content:Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers (Futurism)An Addictive Personality Can Facilitate Sporting Greatness — but What Are the Consequences? (The Athletic)This Is NEOM (YouTube)Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8FFp_wqjs5o 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. Are there 9 million people who would want an apocalypse bunker? I'm totally calling and seeing how much their pinocaladas are, and if that resort community is someplace I can retire. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraff Kings Network. So, like, is it a bunch of crows or a murder of crows? Of course, that's the one you start with. It's usually the reveal.

We're like, you know, a bunch of... We're building up to it. What are the other... Or a gander. They just want to go, hold on, animal. Animal... I'm not Googling animal plurals. Oh, there is a...

Okay. What? There is a collective term for a bunch of cats. And it is? A meow. Well, now we're going to build a this one. I'm not starting there. We know about an army of ants or a colony of ants.

Right. Of school of fish. School of fish. Heard. This is a good jeopardy shit, by the way. I'm glad we're doing this. Me too. A sleuth of bears

Oh, I love that. A sleuth. Very surprising. A cloud of bats. Love that. Yep. Love that. We're talking about these enough. Yep.

Wow. Love this one for ducks. It starts with R. This is a show. We should go to show where we just guess. A rip-roaring good time of ducks. A raft of ducks. Rast?

Like a boat? A raft. A raft? Yep, yep, yep, yep. Whoa, this is a good one, too. Whoa, this changes everything. Fox, okay, foxes. There are two of them.

One of them is troop, which is cool. Sure, fine. Respect them. Yep, there's another thing that's a troop of something. I believe it's actors. I think exactly right. Actors in a small theater. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep, yep.

An earth of foxes. No. No. For that reason, you are out. An earth? An earth. They have their own planet? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Are they Mormons? They're more Scientology. Zebra. Okay. This is a good one. Black, white, and less red all over these days. Mass head of zebras is good. Better, arguably, than the answer, which is a cohort of zebra.

Oh, I kind of like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seems like you're up to some stuff. Yep, yep, yep, yep. All right, cats. C. Ace. I'll give you the second letter.

Okay, yeah. L. A cluster. Oh, you're so. A cloister. You're less close, but still very close. A clump. Is it a word I've heard before?

Yes. Just say it. Okay. It's a synonym for like mess. Clutter. Yeah. Clutter. Cluster, one letter, different.

A parliament of owls. How cool is that? How cool is that? It makes me want to vote for one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A group of whites is called a podcast. I am fascinated as to how Dan processes this, let alone you, Katie. Hello, Katie.

You're here too. Hi. Hello. Because Sports Illustrated is involved in this scandal now, and it's a true scandal insofar as the cover-up has been brutally terrible. And the crime itself is one that is a crime against journalism. They have hired, and by hire, I mean they have... And humanity. Like, literally a crime against humanity. It's a very good point by you.

Because what SI has been doing is not paying, but just operating via some proxy. third party, a roster, apparently, of artificial intelligent writers, which is to say bots to do stuff. And they got caught by an outlet called Futurism. They did great reporting on this. I'm very jealous of their reporting on this, but they noticed, apparently, that a bunch of these articles were god-awful. They were, like, recommendations for, like, the best volleyball to buy. And they looked into this, and as they looked into it, asked SI about it. All of these pages were wiped. And so, just as a reminder, Sports Illustrated where I used to work as a fact checker. Oh, no.

Literally a person who would cross off every word on a printed page to make sure it was accurate. I was working for a magazine that was not just at the vanguard of sports journalism. It used to employ like William Faulkner, right? And now it employs or use the services of Sora Tanaka, who is a person who can be found also on an AI headshot marketplace, where she is listed as, quote, joyful Asian young adult female with long brown hair and brown eyes. You can just buy her face. Whose face is it? It's a completely computer generated face.

Oh, oh, oh. From a composite of, I guess, all joyful Asian young adult females with long brown hair and brown eyes. And Dan, this is just dystopian, man. And it's just, it's even more than that, though, it's sloppy. It's super sloppy to the point of, oh, this is hilarious if it weren't also clearly a symptom of the larger disease that is ruining everything that we used to care about as journalists. It'd be hilarious if everything that was happening didn't make me feel like everything that I believe in at my principal core wasn't being cheapened at every turn by a bunch of people being okay with it happening because I'm the loser in trying to stand for. Pablo was a fact checker to start his career. That job doesn't exist anymore.

I want to get into, before I get into the dystopian nature of this, explain to people, Pablo, how it is, why it is, Sports Illustrated, became the seminal journal in our times to Chronicle Sports, and before magazines died, the lengths they would go to, to pay people to make sure that something as simple as facts were correct. That's how Pablo got into the business. That job is the video researcher, on an NBA team who works 80 hours

and has to chase down everything because every syllable has to be true. Yes, I was a version and even sadder, but more Filipino version of Eric Spolstra grinding away in the cavern of Sports Illustrated there to literally

cross off every word to make sure it was true. And this was a point of pride. This was a point of, this is the point of Sports Illustrated was in a world of relative fluff, here was substance in here was accuracy. And so I would call up not just the writer, but the writer's sources to make

sure that everything was accurate. And the legions of people who came up through the ranks doing this, Dan, it was not coincidental. And it was not just like steerage class. It was the place up through which you rose because you needed to be trained in the discipline in order to like hang at this magazine. And so, dude, I don't know if people know the kids, kids definitely don't appreciate what SI represents, even though I think I can probably begin to explain it, but I don't think they'll ever appreciate the relative importance of it in sports media. I will try to explain it to the best that I can, but this was where the best work was done in the field that I cared about the most, because the people who were applying craftsmanship

and care to these things were the writers that I admired most, who were protected by the fact checkers who made sure and editors who made sure that their copy was the greatest stuff that was being birthed by sports journalism. But, Katie, imagine when Pablo says, I want to know how Dan feels about this, never mind as a journalist. How about just as an old person? To be met with when Pablo says proxy third party, and I'm going to read to you a sentence, Katie, from Sports Illustrated in reaction to the scandal. The proxy third party is called Adiasties. VON, okay? That's a futuristic terror.

Advon, A capitalized, V capitalized, D, lowercase. This is from the future. Advon has assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans. How is that a sentence that I am supposed to understand? 1980s journalist me growing up when they used to as a business model, what it was, let's throw yesterday's news on your lawn or in your bushes for 24. cents. How am I supposed to understand the sentence? Advon has assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans.

What do you mean they were? Wait, why am I questioning that? Katie, Katie. No, they've assured us. The robots have assured us. But they weren't. That they're not robots. But they weren't. You showed me that lady. Where's the discrepancy here? Are they lying? They are. I believe being dishonest, yes. Are these articles? Can I just ask? I'm devil's advocate. I know you guys are going to die on your big J. Journalism Hill. Gary Smith. Scott Price. If I met. Are these like the articles, like when you get to the bottom of an article and it's like it has a picture that's clearly to get you to click. And it's like 10 simple ways to cut belly fat. Are these those type of articles? Like the type that I feel like Yard Barker was probably first in doing was like all those served articles at the bottom of a.

Oh, anybody who's media literate knows not to click on? A chum bucket. Is that? It's a real term for it. Yeah, a chum bucket. Like the thing of like, you'll never, you'll never guess whose pimple this was. Yes, exactly that. So what you're asking, though, is the difference that no, you know, average American reading a thing on the internet is going to make a distinction between

credible news thing and infomercial thing meant to manipulate me. But here's my thing. I'm not saying that it is a good practice, but I am saying, and I do think those need to be, I think we need to get rid of those. I think we also need to get rid of ads that look like their TV shows. What? Who's pimple is it?

It's always my. It's always my pimple. If we find out that one of those companies is employing AI people to write their dumb articles that nobody's reading is less, a little less of a... than like if a front page, S-I article is written by AI.

What I'm saying about Sports Illustrated's front page, it's cover, right? Verses the chum bucket equivalent stuff, of like the best volleyball for you to buy in which there are sentences that are insane. Oh, could you have some? Yeah. I'd love to hear this AI article.

Hold on. Let me pull up just one of the... This is by Drew Ortiz. In this case, a very white Hispanic face being worn by a robot that then became an Asian woman. But Drew Ortiz writes sentences like this, quote, volleyball can be a little tricky to get into,

especially without an actual ball to practice with. And it's just like, all right. Not exactly Bill Nack. But okay, but in this case, right, this was, to your point, like advertorial shit. Right. Of like, here's a, S.I. Dan, didn't used to do this. And I think this is the point is that S.I was, it's licensed. So S.I used to be owned by Time Inc.

And Time Inc. Time Magazine's, People Magazine's owner, like, office at Midtown Manhattan where I used to work with, like, red pencils crossing off words and shit and folders and paper in a library. that's not the case anymore. SI was licensed to a company called Maven, which became this thing. Arena is now the company operating this thing. And so they infused sI.com with shit like this to the point where it's a valid question of like, Sports Illustrated does this now?

Like, what is this? And it totally dilutes the premise of we used to be the literary home of sports journalism completely. Sports Illustrated now also sells vitamins, sells an assortment of products. I don't know when you talk about that dystopian prison that it now is. If it's nine remaining people still writing,

most of those writers have left. Or been laid off. Yeah, laid off. Remember when they laid off all their photographers? They used to be a leader in that space. They always had the best photographs, Sports Illustrated. This is what's happened to journalism, correct? This is not just sports journalism.

This was best in its class stuff, and it's no longer that. But can you guys put that up again? Because that was some excellent writing. And I want to spend time with this, Drew Ortiz, because look at his life and the AI created life that we have. Drew Ortiz is someone whose other work I want to know. He grew up in a farmhouse surrounded by woods, fields, and a creek. He grew up in the wild.

It's partially true, it says, right there. He's spent much of his life outdoors. He's excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature. It's remarkable to be such an outdoorsy person, but to have a beard so cleanly lined. There is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn't out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents' farm. Damn, nepotism. Oh, my God. But this is where if there is any sort of upside to any of this, Dan, it is that currently, at least, we are collectively, and I think every.

Everybody is laughing at this on some level, albeit ruefully for many of us. And it's just establishing if you're using AI writers, it means you are dog shit, right? Like there is such a, so it's two things. It's number one, the contempt you must have for the idea of a human reader that no one's going to notice. No one's going to notice that this was written by a lot. But isn't this what's happening in Hollywood, too, where the CEOs are saying the writers and the actors and the creative soul of things, they don't matter. We can generate them. We can use information from the past in order through Google and funding to just create the tech companies that belch out writing not as art, but is just something that can be farted out because there's no discernment being made by the reader who doesn't actually Pablo care whether Sports Illustrated is the nostalgic, romantic thing we remember, or it's just some outdated piece of shit that their grandfather used to read.

And probably even scarier to me is that it's happening in schools, because if kids are not wanting to write a paper, which, look, I don't want to write papers. But if you don't want to write a paper and you just go to a website and you tell it to write your paper and then you hand that in, and this happens long enough. And then those kids that are in school end up coming into business and they don't know how to write because they really didn't learn how to because they didn't write any papers. They just had AI do it. It just feels like something we should probably figure out. And you own a media company. It seems a little bit scary though what you're talking about.

You have to care about it to be scared of it though. You know what I mean? Well, it's a really good point, Dan. Like, there is, okay, there's two sides of this aisle, right? One are the kids who loved writing papers. The other side is the kids who don't give a fuck about writing papers. And I think the good news, the second upside of this to me, if there is one, is that it is being labeled AI as so, like, just terrible. Like, it's just, it feels like a sign of cheapness.

And it is literally that. It's a company trying to increase its margins. of profit by driving costs down. But in the meantime, it's sort of like, my hope is that when people hear AI, they associate it with bad quality. And even if you didn't like writing papers, my hope is that you don't want to read shit. Containing sentences, like, luckily for you, we found some of the best full-sized volleyball in 2022 that are perfect for practicing your services and sets every day.

Great. Lucky me. Full-size. But you say that it, but how long do we think it's going to stay being a sign of poor quality? because I feel like these types of things grow exponentially. And AI feels like a couple years ago we were talking about it would be a thing. Now it is a thing. You can just access chat GPT and all that other stuff.

There are consumer products that are AI-based, which means that behind the scenes the stuff consumers don't have access to is probably much more advanced than this, which means that that will trickle down eventually so that AI will no longer be a signal of bad quality, potentially. But it will mean that the person didn't care, didn't have human consideration or connection to a story, that's what's scary, but I do think it's not always going to be that quality.

Aren't you talking about there, Katie, basically, whether art has a soul or not, and whether you can create it artificially. Whether giving something soul at Sports Illustrated, through writing, through art, can computers do what humans can? I've always thought of that as the opposable thumb for us that makes us different from the computers,

that it can't be recreated, but I'm less convinced of that than I used to be. Look, once you accept that the next step of human evolution is that we're just going to become machines, it all kind of makes a lot more sense. You know, it does feel, if you want to throw up the Drew Ortiz photo again. This haughty. It does feel like Drew Ortiz is somebody

who's just like walking around in the background of Dan's office in Miami. I mean, that looks absolutely. If right now I were to go to John Skipper and say, make a computerized version of Clay Skipper, your son, I want them to put up there on the screen, Play Skipper's face next to Drew Ortiz, and you guys will see that Play Skipper looks a little bit like the robotic prodigy

and progeny of a media mogul. Just incredibly handsome. That guy's not in the shipping container? I have to create yet another white Latin here called Clay Ortiz. Dan, what do you bring us today on Sherantell? Is it nice? Is it uplifting?

It is interesting, is what I will say. It's stimulated me. It's an article from The Athletic, and it's something about sports that I had never actually considered this completely. I've written in the past about how I've believed that athletics would be more ripe for, say, gambling addictions than other places because you have people whose identity is tied up in competition, and they're going to go seeking other action, other ways to be competitive because of whatever the high of being identified. as a winner is. But this article in the athletic, it's making it seem as if there isn't much of a difference between the character traits required to be a champion

and required to be an addict. That basically the same things that get you the rewards of athletic greatness, the obsessive compulsiveness of a crazy lunatic like Kobe Bryant, if not harness into sports, might not be able to be contained in greatness and then results in all sorts of kinds of addiction because part of your identity is being obsessive-compulsive. You're sculpting a single thing

to the lopsided detriment of a bunch of other things in your personality. You almost can't be as great as Kobe is unless you've run every other thing off. And so I just wanted to explore with you guys the idea that an athlete or a champion, specifically, might be more predisposed to addictive type of things because their identity is intertwined in. When I compete, I get all of the rewards.

And when I get all of the rewards from high school, whenever I get in the pipeline, gymnast, tennis, wherever it is, I'm getting love, I'm getting applause, I'm getting things that feel like happiness, but there are also things that are rewarded for addictive tendencies. Rhythmic gymnasts, even. Gold medalists like Katie Nullen. It's me doing the ribbon, but they're not attached.

Gold medalists, rhythmic gymnast. Yeah, look, it's an interesting. idea. It's an interesting examination of personality traits. You know me. I love anything that's like diving in on the humanity of the people who do the stuff like sports that we that we love so much. But I also, I hesitate because it feels like similar to, like almost like a cousin to, this conversation we've had before about like some, and you've got to be an addict, a bad person. You've got to be, you've got to have the negative things to make great art. It's like I think people have always been like, you have to be in asshole. Or like, well, this guy beat his wife. Well, yeah, but that's why he made this great greatness. Comes born of the negative sides of who you are as a person.

These feel very closely related. Like you cannot be a champion if you aren't an addict. It just, it makes me go, mm-mm. Obsession, right? I mean, but it does feel about, it feels like sports is a place where a vice can be recast as a virtue. Because to Katie's point, the idea of, man, I'm so obsessive, all I care about

is winning, therefore, my personality trait, which would be maladaptive, which would be something that's clinically needing to be addressed in life finds sort of safe harbor in a hyper-competitive environment where everyone is a member of the Dark Triad. Shout out to the Dark Triad test, which we all

variously failed, incidentally. But the point about the sports of this Dan... Because we're losers, that's why. Winners would win the Dark Triad and winners would beat us at competitive things. That's right. The medal stand. We didn't make the Dark Triad Medal stand, unfortunately.

But I think it's fascinating when you read this article in The Athletic, and it gets to the idea. They focused a lot on soccer and in England. And it's a lot of reporting about how all of these psychologists got hired initially to make these guys better players, better athletes, better at scoring goals and so forth. And then they realized as they were doing these jobs, like, oh, wait a minute. Like the performance improvement aspect of this is not really the job.

The job here is getting these people to feel healthier mentally. Because as much as it's about, oh, score more goals, it's about people realizing that they were crying out for help without realizing it. And it's fascinating that in 2011, English, England's Football Association produced a 117-page document on Academy Restructuring as part of its elite player performance plan, and just half a page, seven bullet points, was devoted at all to player welfare. The rest of it was all about, like, how do we get these guys to be better? And meanwhile, these guys are, like, going out, as Dan was saying, and many, many nights,

they're gambling addicts, or they are just obsessed with things that they had been given the green light to be obsessed about in their job that they then, we're unable to disentangle from the rest of how they use their brain. I remember the first time I thought about this was talking to Michael Irvin, who had all of these problems off of the field, but always in the offseason, always in a time where he wasn't, you know, he was being criticized for a general recklessness and lack of discipline.

And one of the things that he explained to me that I had not considered, He says, yes, I am an addictive personality. And when I'm doing football, I'm so addictive about it, then my workouts are I throw up twice is when my workout ends. Not the first time I throw up, the second time. And that takes all of me during a football season. But when football is then gone, I get addicted to other things. Other things that are less good for me than this creative outlet that gives me all of the ability to have the offseason and the money that gets me into the temptations. And once you start becoming the person who's getting all the rewards at every turn through childhood that feels like some form of love, right?

It may leave you empty wherever it is. I'm not even judging addicts and saying it's not always brain chemistry, but some of the things in your imprinting from your environment that always reward success when you are so obsessive that your workout's not over until you've done the second throwing up. And when you define discipline, not the way others might, but you say this is what discipline is. It isn't whether I get in a cocaine scandal in the off scene. It's the fourth quarter. I'm exhausted. I'm really tired. And the other guy across from me has been stronger than me all game.

But I have the discipline to not jump on the hard count because I'm disciplined and I'm in that kind of shape. And I have tuned myself and sculpted my skills so much that my routes have to be a half yard better than the other guys. And he's fighting that hard too. and I got to stay ahead of him for 10 years. And I'm not that fast. I'm not that physically fast. I got to stay ahead of him for 10 years. When that's the addiction and it gets rewarded,

where do you put it when the season's over? So I think this is an argument we've been making for a really long time that we still don't seem to be investing in, which is that like mental health for athletes is incredibly important. That teams provide mental health services to their athletes is like a responsibility that they have that we do not hold them to. We really don't make sure that, when they are done using this person for their skills that apply to this industry that can make

owners of teams money, we don't make sure that they then release them back into the world in a way that's like they are equipped to deal with the way the real world works, which is not the way that the world works when you are a successful athlete, like you said, getting rewarded with things at every turn from a very young age. And so it just feels like until we can prove or somehow tie that idea in with profit for a team, they're not going to do it. And what scares me about articles like this is it, not that the article itself scares me as well written,

it's very interesting, it's thought-provoking, but the discussion, I don't want to get to a point where people think that that part of an athlete, the addict part of an athlete, without that, if that's treated, without that, they won't be great. To your point, it's not just that owners are making a lot of money off of these athletes.

Athletes themselves are incentivized to be this sort of obsessive to blur the line between, oh, I have a personality trait, and, oh, I am struggling with a disease, which is what addiction is. And for me, there are some parts of this, too, that are not just about sports. Some parts of it are relatable. The idea of being a workaholic, you know, the idea of, like, the idea of my big, it's what you would say in a job interview as a fake answer. I work too hard. I care about work too much.

And it's like, well, that's seen as virtuous. And I relate to it as somebody who is perpetually thinking about work. I have content brain, as Dominic Foxworth has alleged. That's true. But I think it raises the question of what happens when you are imbalanced? And I think there are costs associated that do not get paid so clearly until the profits you're making monetarily in terms of the ego. scratching the ego fluffing that certainly athlete, public facing people, all can feel superficially.

Until that goes away to Dan's point, you don't realize, oh, my God, I am ill-equipped to live as a balanced person in my life. Oh, but Pablo, I don't believe, like, I believe if we get down to the core of this, it's one of the reasons that I thought the article was so interesting. Balance isn't a part of the success equation in the sports pipeline. That's not something that's being talked. That's not something that's being practiced. That's not something that is part of the ingraining of the fabric.

When Katie says that all of those pages are devoted to the business must maximize the profit of the athlete's body, and none of the pages are devoted to. And what about the athlete's mind when the body is no longer of use to us or whether it's doing other things that aren't in service of us? Like, where is balance part of the measurement of success? I think it's life success as I've gotten older, but I don't think in sports they're asking you for, balance unless it's balance between offense, defense, and special teams.

Or a balanced beam in gymnastics. The point of balance, right? Like, I think, Dan, the reason why, and I've, when I was at Sports Illustrated doing stories about, like, why isn't there a better mental health program in professional sports, an answer I would get back was because if you were trying to inject balance into the brains of these athletes, you might make them worse. That's what I'm saying. But I don't think that's the case.

I don't think that's the case. I don't think that's saying you can either be an athlete or like a properly adjusted human who knows how to... Like, look, everybody makes... Everybody has the early stages of their life where their development happens, where they get their thing... They either have their nature and their nurture.

Some combination of those things make them into the person that they are in their adulthood. And then in your adulthood, you can look back and solve those things, learn those lessons from your life, apply them to your life, and then continue living in a balanced way.

And so I feel like the things that they needed to get them to the peak of being an athlete, if examined, will not just take out of them the things they've learned. They'll still have that knowledge. They'll still have that discipline. You don't need to continue with the thing that caught. That's why the addiction thing, I don't know, because I feel like you can't just learn how to stop drinking so much. What if what you're addicted to is the feel good? Like, why can't we, I understand the distinction that you're making.

And it's a nuanced one, Katie, because, yes, we shouldn't be absolute about this. But if in service of the addiction you get all sorts of feel good, then how is it different from whatever it is the body responds to in liquor or drugs or heroin? If it's chasing the cheering in the middle of a stadium or the life that is riches or whatever you imagined your insecurities were in high school with boys or girls, and all of a sudden you have access to a dating pool. you did like why wouldn't you or how couldn't you get addicted to a variety of things if you're not being self-aware about the things that make you who you are yeah the athletes in this story attest

to that too they talk about how nothing beats the feeling of scoring a goal in front of thousands of people right i mean this is the it's that line from uh an old story an old magazine story uh joe demaggio is talking to marylin Monroe and they're both like you know joe damaggio is long retired such a good story this is such a good story it's one of it's a haunting quote Marilyn Monroe says, after coming back from, like, a tour of some place where she's, like, adored by the crowd. No, she's on a, she's on a services ship. Oh, it's a U.S.O. It's a U.S.O.

It's Marilyn Monroe on a boat filled with servicemen, yes. Yes. And she says to Joe DiMaggio, Joe, you've never heard such cheering. And he very ruefully says, yes, I have. And it's just like, ugh. Right. Like, he's feeling the part of his brain that used to light up. And it's just impotent now.

And I feel like what Medalloc Media needs to do, Dan, I'm realizing I want to be solutions-oriented here. To Katie's point about, like, why are we incentivizing addiction? We're glorit. We're mythologizing it as a function of discussing it. There needs to be a last dance, but for a guy who's super boring. A last dance for a guy, like, a docu-a-do-series for a guy who gets home to put his kids to bed and is all so good. And it's just like not interesting. And how did that make you feel?

And you're like, it was fine. I took a couple deep breaths and I realized I had to. I had to take a trash out. The guy who says, you know what? I didn't take it personally. No, I didn't. I forgot about it. I actually forgot even until you just brought it up just now.

Wow. No grudges. It's a guy like that. We got a guy like that? Can you think of a guy like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Incredibly boring story about an asshole who wasn't that successful, but is just bland and obsessed.

Yeah, and it's like a pretty good dad. Yeah, present. He's very present. Oh, he's so present. He's the Michael Jordan of being present. Katie, it's been pretty bleak so far, I admit, on Pablo Torre finds out. So what did you find out about? Well, so I brought a story that, look, if, I'll be honest, if this had been a light and fluffy podcast up until now, we could take this to a dark place.

I think what we should do is we'll just air on the silly of it, right? For the sake of everybody who's been listening to this, like, futuristic dark. Do not underestimate my ability to take it right into the darkness. The griefy. I am ready to pounce. This has been one of my favorite podcast episodes of all the time. A weaving tapestry of a journey through the dark, dark underbelly of the mental stuff that plagues us. Yeah, Dan wants to cry.

Katie wants to laugh because what were you up to? I was watching a football game, as I am wont to do, on Sunday. I believe, I don't know, because it gets dark so early now that it was like dark when this commercial aired. So I thought that it was in the primetime game, but my fiancee swears this. it happened in the game, the game that was before, the Eagles game. There was this commercial that was dystopian looking. It was like out of a movie, some big tall towers in a desert and like a car all by itself, driving on a lone road with the road lighting up as it drives by it in this vast desert. And then I'm like watching it, like, what is this?

It's so strange. And then at the end it says like epicon. And then it like shows this logo that says neom neom. And it said neom.com. And I said, what the F? And since that, I have not stopped learning things about neom. We have an ad. It's not the one that ran during an American sporting event. N-E-O-M.

N-E-O-M. And we can play the ad that has more talking in it that'll be helpful for the listeners. I think we have it. What is Neon? This is Neon. Or here to be more precise. in the northwest of Saudi Arabia. But Neum is more than a place.

It's a home for people who dream big. Bigger than that. That's more like it. It'll be a hub for innovation, an entirely new model for sustainable living. The vision for a new future. In fact, that's how it got its name. But what will be there?

There's Oxagon, a thriving city at the crossroads of the world, where advanced manufacturing will enable industries of the future. nature. Trojanah, a year-round mountain destination. Just remember to pack your skis when you visit. Or skiing's not your thing. There's always Sindala, one of Neum's many beautiful islands. Perfect for some R an hour. And the line. A 500 meter high, 200 meter wide, 170-kilometer long city in the shape of, well, a line. No roads, cars, or emissions.

And everything its 9 million residents could ever need. need within a five-minute walk. But best of all, the entire region will offer unparalleled access to nature and will be powered by clean energy. All within easy reach of the rest of the world. I don't trust it. I don't trust it. I know it's a lot.

I feel like it's a promo for a futuristic hostel, like the movie Hostel. As soon as I get there, I'm going to be enslaved building stadiums and kept in a prison near a prison toilet. I don't trust any of that. 2030, this is supposed to be finished by. I just want to stress for everybody who did not see that on the Drafings Network or on YouTube. There were high production values. You've got to look it up.

You have to look it up. We laughed at the AI being terrible at Sports Illustrated.com. This was like big movie budget. The good stuff. They have a media studio already in Neon. I've heard it Neon and Neon. So I'll just say whichever one comes out of my mouth. It'll probably be two different ones throughout this entire thing.

Just say it oil money. Just say it's oil. So it's funded by, well, it's a pet project, obviously, of MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, who is the Prince. Crown Prince. Yeah, crown prince, thank you. Funded by the public investment fund, which is a sovereign wealth fund of the Saudi government. You may remember them from movies such as the Live Tour.

Yeah, exactly. It's money that we've seen recently, quite a bit, in our sports world. It's unbelievable. Like, you gotta be kidding me. The budget at one point was $500 billion. It's now last I saw at $1 trillion. Look, there are people who have known about this. It was announced in 2021, I believe.

So if you, like, know a ton about this, you should probably just turn off the podcast. If you're a linehead. We're about to learn about it all kind of for the first time. And I did just, like, one page of notes. Katie, Dan, Katie has a, that fluttering sound was a notebook piece of paper. There's a lot going on here. Okay, but how, Katie, that, you're just. You're fascinating. You've done, you have become obsessed. You saw this commercial and you're like, how are people not talking about this? It feels to me like you saw this commercial the same way that I saw the first crypto ad before I'd even heard of crypto and there was a celebrity. I'm like, what is this? Why is this here? You saw something. Why aren't more people talking about this incredible amount of money clearly being poured in to building a fake utopia?

No, less that. It was less altruistic and more like, what the fuck is this? It is a crazy looking idea. It's the big debate is whether it's just like a Vanity project that will like many in the past that have come before it never get completed Be all vision all sizzle no stake It won't ever turn into anything and it'll just like go to ruin Or is this like a real actual first step towards the The world that we see in movies when we think about the future That now resembles in no way anything that we have like we have like we? We have been building cities the same way since we figured out how to build cities for the most part.

So this is now I want to be, I want to be the guy. I want to be the realtor selling Neum properties. Great. And Dan, I'll do this. I'll do this to you, to you, right? So the premise of this, the sales pitch, you'll notice is that, whoa, this is sustainable. Like, we are going to use nature. So it's, well, let's distinct.

Let me do a quick distinction. The line is the main thing everybody's talking about. is one part of this, the section of Saudi Arabia that it's in is about the size of Belgium would be Neum, which I learned is a lot closer to the size of Massachusetts

than I would have guessed. I think it's like the size of Maryland, which is just crazy. It's like Massachusetts, but with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Sure, yeah, there's a lot of other things that make it nothing like Massachusetts. But so the line is the main one

that's kind of getting everybody to be like, what in the world is this? Because the concept is that it's these two buildings that are a little bit taller than the Empire State Building that run about 100 miles. So I guess the distance of, if you were at the beginning of Long Island, like where it is at Manhattan to the end of Long Island, it's basically that. Just two straight lines that house 9 million people. It would be in these modules, 140 modules in this entire thing.

Each one is 200 meters wide by 800 meters long, by 500 meters high, 80K people per module that live in this. renewable energy, sustainable environment where everything you need is within a five-minute walk of where you live. Right, no cars, no carbon emissions. If you need to get by, there's some not invented yet type of transportation underground that can take you from one end of, again, the beginning of Long Island to the end of Long Island, in 20 minutes, which to me doesn't make any sense because it's like, aren't there stops? The outside would be covered in mirrors, which also seems like a huge difficulty, given that it's going to be in the hot, hot desert, and the sun will shine on it and reflect off of. It just doesn't feel to me like that's going to be good for the flora and or fauna. But it does feel like the branding of this has been along the line, pun intended, of, hey, you there, Dan Lebitard, you're friends with that guy Adam McKay, who's a client. climate change profit, doomsday profit.

If you guys are worried about that, we got you. We're building a thing that is prepared to not just minimize the effect we'll have on our planet, but we'll be prepared for the apocalypse. Just coming to our very long bunker. Not, not. We're going to give you state-of-the-art security, aka monitoring you 24-7. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but there are four-seven monitors in there. You saw in the video, there are lots of plants, fauna and flora.

We will ignore that Dave Grohl had a performance in Abu Dhabi this week where he had to remind himself on stage with a piece of paper, no cursing, because he would end up in prison for a year if he cursed on a public stage. We will not talk about some of the other elements here that might cause people fear. Let's just talk specifically about the idea that because I was listening to this and all I was hearing was that phrase again and again, relatively close to the rest of the world as if it's a hiding place safe from when the zombies start fighting over food, water, guns, and money. Like that here's this city where you could live in a capsule somewhere if you're a rich person away from all the peril of the rest of the world fighting for survival. It does feel like the snowpiercer train, but a building. It also just feels completely impractical. It's built along a coast in a straight line, completely sequestered. from the coast in any way.

Have tech trillionaires ever gotten to something like that wrong? Use the line that was given to you, the coast of it. Don't force a line across. It doesn't make... What about an animal who needs to get to the other side of the line? It has to walk down 100 miles to get around it. There's like migration patterns that cities have to take into consideration when they build them.

You guys are hearing it the same way I am, though, right? That basically what is being built? out there is something with oil money to protect you in an environment. Keep in mind, I've read some stuff about how difficult it is to get natural water in some of those places and how much the environment takes a beating by how they get natural water to those places. This is going to be a city that is funded by wealth to protect itself relatively near the rest of the world from the rest of the world. What it does speak to is this large, and I think this is a real concern that certainly rich people have. I suspect that at a certain point, if you have enough money, you are on like some sort of email list where you get sold an apocalypse bunker.

This feels like a high-grade apocalypse bunker of a civilization. Are there nine million people who would want an apocalypse bunker? I'm totally calling and seeing how much their pinocalados are. And if that resort community is someplace I can retire, as soon as we're done here. I'm going to do my own research and have a team of research and find out how I can go live in one of these capsules somewhere in the sky and sand that protect me from other people

who are less luxurious that I am. Not the line, but in, what's it called? What's the name of this place? Neum. I always want to say like Nome. It's just too short. Neum. It means a new future. Guys, it's an epicone. It's a treasure of tomorrow. Epicon is like the hotel.

Oh. Sindala is a resort. Trojana, Trojana is a mountain ski resort with a man-made lake. So it gives you the best of all the climates. I will tell you this. I don't know how. Yes. I have no idea how.

But the Asian Winter Games of 2029 have been given to Trojana. That is where those will be happening. Oil money. Yes. Can't wait. Already just giving an unexit, non-exemptive. The distant city, the future sporting event. That's perfect.

That's on the up and up. I'm glad this is squarely a sports story. I'm glad that the IOC or whatever organizing committee in this case was like, you know what, this really does seem like, quote, a perfect union of majestic nature, extraordinary experiences, and architectural ingenuity. It does really feel like Epiccon will be the starting point of great adventures. I bet. There is a lot of that, by the way. If you try to find out information on this, there's a lot of videos of people. people acting like they're like, what's up with this new Neum?

And then you're like, oh, this person is clearly being given money by the, oh, look, the Crown Prince has decided to participate in the interview. Interesting. I'm sure this will be very critical of the ideas and technology behind this. Pay no attention to the Bonesaw. The blood money. Epicon. They're putting con right in the title.

Epicon. The con is within Neum is the name of, I think it's the, it's a, it's a, Wait, hold on, hold on. Dan has cut to the core of this. Epic con. The literal name of it is, Dan, it's not just con. It's epic. That's right.

It's not a small con. You just saw those videos. Like, there's nothing small about that con. It does feel like we're being punked now that I think about it. What if, though? Is this real? This is real. It has, they have started building it.

There is at least videos. I'm going to get, I'm going to go, make the phone call right now. Of extractors digging out the line. You guys can get a sanctuary bubble. Dan's like, I just got to make. sure they're okay with me wearing shorts. They're not, I called, I asked. Neither are we.

Dan is on his phone. The luxury suite, please. I'd like the luxury suite in 2030. The best room you've got, concierge service, please, near nature and somewhere near the ski slopes, if you don't mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With a wall that would keep out the Pablo's of the world who are trying to get in on Hornin on my vacation. Yeah, if you could get me a room away from the migrant laborers. Oh, yeah.

We weren't going to get dark, but there's already, they're displacing tribes and allegedly people are dying. I don't believe you. This seems on the other note. I wasn't getting, but I should mention it's not. Let's do this at the end of the show, as we always do, where we go around the table and say what we found out today. Katie Nolan. I have to go first. No, you don't have to go first.

Dan Levittard gets to go first. I am very happy that Katie did all of that reason. I wish we'd started with that following her curiosities. I frankly learned that it should have been Katie Nolan finds out instead of Pablo Tori finds out. We should have followed her curiosities wherever it is that they go. How dare you? I love Katie's curiosities, but how dare you? So division in this locker room.

I had an AI white Hispanic man do this for me. I did not do any of this research. Clay Ortiz rising in Metal Arc Media. Exactly. There's no stopping Clay Ortiz. I don't know. I found out. I've got complicated feelings about addiction I should spend some time thinking about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, same. Also, I feel like the complaint that we used to make about, like, where are our flying cars? This isn't the future. Guys, we got this f***ing Neon thing. We're living in the future. That's right. Beyond all complaints. We are in the Jetsons, except instead of George Jetson, it's crown prince Mohammed bin Salva.

Somewhere there said it was going to be an artificial moon. What's that about? Somebody tell me what that's an artificial moon in Neum. What did you find out, Pablo? I'd love to, I found out that I'd love to attend the Summer Olympics on an artificial moon. What's happening? Why is everything so scary? By 2029, everything is so scary now.

I was just trying to watch Eagles bills. They just wanted to watch the internet for Pugia. Are the Steelers for real, is what I said. Thank you, you, not. This has been Pablo Torre finds out a metal art media production. And I'll talk to you next time.