Pablo Torre Finds Out - Revenge & Share & Tell, with Mina Kimes and Dan Le Batard

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

Why do human beings seek vengeance? (And is it really a dish best served cold?) Can you really be friends with the opposite sex while married? (And is single-sex education a good idea?) Does intermittent fasting actually work? (And what does it mean to be hangry?) Also: ruining a real estate guy; canoodling at The Bear; threatening four-year-olds; fiber jealousy; Pout-Pout Fish; and Mina's many impersonations. 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'm the pout pout fish with the pout pout pout face, and I got my grumpy wumpies all over the place. Right after this ad. You're listening to D giraffe King's Network. I did a list earlier on Dan's show of five things I can't believe society hasn't improved upon. I thought I thought one of the five. I thought one of the five was going to be giving birth.

Like just help with the pain of giving birth. Well, we have improved upon that a great deal. But get rid of it. Get rid of all of the pain. Teleport the child out of my body. What were those drugs like? I presume you used an epidural. I did have an epidural.

I didn't, so I'm glad I did it, and I am very pro science and medicine generally, and I will take whatever is offered. But I don't like the feeling of being numb. So I was actually very bothered by it. Do you guys, I'm sure you've all, you both have received local anesthesia at some point in your life. Do you hate the feeling as much as I do? Oh, wow, that's so interesting that you say that. I don't hate that feeling at all, but what does that suggest to you about needing control? needing control over things. Like, I have no problem being sedated until I'm unconscious.

I mean, is like, I'd prefer to feel pain as opposed to feel nothing. Well, I just don't like the feeling of not knowing what's going on with part of my body. Like, if there is something wrong with it, if you're numb, you don't know.

And that bothers me a lot. Yeah. But I generally, the control thing is, we're joking because Dan's doing the armchair therapist thing, is some veracity to that. It's why I hate Las Vegas, for example, because it's the city that you have the

least control over your own mobility and, you know, the ability to go from point A to point B, I despise. This is like, I think, a cousin to why I feel nervous when I'm not near a body of water. I don't know if there's

like an evolutionary explanation for that, but being landlocked just makes me feel like I'm kind of trapped, and I need to feel like I have an out somehow. I can go to the sea for my freedom. What Mina is saying there, though, about pain being the body screaming to tell you something's wrong, the idea of saturating that in medication and then suddenly not being able to get the warnings. And then furthermore, a stranger with a scalpel is in control of everything that's happening to you.

I am sorry to have armchair psychologized you. I'm sorry to have done that to you. That is a reasonable thing to fear. I'd just be like, okay, how many drugs? Let's go. No pain, all right. I think also, like as a woman, not to as a woman, but as a woman, you feel like people constantly don't trust your own assessment of your own pain, which is something that

really becomes an issue during pregnancy and delivery. But so I think for me, it's always like, okay, I need to know how much pain I'm in so that I can communicate it to you because you might not believe me. I don't know. Liz did not use an epidural. And I have lost the high ground in every argument since. I can't say shit.

I cannot say anything because she bore the full conscious pain of birth. It's horribly annoying. That actually cuts to something, though, that I think is unique to people. in marriages, I guess long-term relationships generally, which is whenever I'm going through something, pain, something difficult, whatever, 90% of me is like, this sucks, I'm unhappy,

and 10% of me is thinking, me no one, Nick Zero, I am going to use this bad boy at some point in my life, I cannot wait. Do you have that feeling as well? Oh, God, yes. I mean, it's just like I can't complain. Yeah, like I am, there's a letter. And I'm bad at keeping score also. I just presume I forget.

So I'm like, oh, I woke up with a sore throat and this is my, this is, this is the moneymaker. And Liz is like, I squeezed a baby. Yeah. Fully conscious out of my. Yeah, Pablo, I would say, I can't say this absolutely, okay, because there are many rugged outdoorsmen who are not part of my life. Podcasting is hard. Part of my life. But I would say that just generally, women might not be tougher than men, absolutely,

but they're tougher than all the men I'm friends with. I resemble that. Thinking about the shipping container and silently nodding in agreement. I mean, so much tougher. So much tougher. So I wanted to start the show with the topic that I am fascinated by, because I want to know how you guys experience it. because the topic I want to start the show today with is revenge.

And so ostensibly, this was inspired by an article on Vox.com, titled Why We Seek Revenge and What to Do Instead, a series of explanations about why revenge feels good, why psychologically were drawn to it as a species. Spoiler alert, it's to impose an order, a sense of justice upon others as a way of making sure that we get what we deserve. And also, secondary warning.

it's not good for you. And as I was thinking about whether I feel vengeance and revenge, I was realizing that we work in an industry that is a revenge-based economy. Like, sports is fueled. Everything about sports is made better when revenge and vengeance and hatred in blood feud form is on the table.

And Kyrie Irving, going back to Boston, as we presume, when the NBA finals happens, is just the latest example. It's Michael Jordan inventing a need to seek revenge on a JV basketball coach that probably didn't actually cut him when he was growing up. It's every player, Mina,

who has the ability to recite who got drafted ahead of them. Even if it's 25 people, which isn't just like one guy, seemingly you can give this challenge to any athlete you know and they will be able to tell you all of the ways in which they were wronged.

And I'm just like, oh, right, I love this, but for me, I don't quite feel it. in the same way. I'm not motivated by it in the same way. Yeah, I think that there are layers to this as it pertains to professional athletes playing at revenge on a big stage, which is what we're likely about to see, as you described. There's the viewer side of it, which is, I think, I believe it is fundamentally undeniable that it's more fun to watch teams when you feel like they don't like each other or athletes. I probably did a great piece on this. I remember several years ago with the NBA, right?

You wrote that, right, about how a lot of the NBA players were, like, friendly and the banana boat. And it kind of bothered people. I have no problem on a moral level with, you know, players don't actually need to not like each other, but it is more entertaining when they don't. I firmly believe that when we see Luca making faces at Rudy Gobert, it is a more entertaining basketball product. So there's that aspect of revenge from the viewer's side. And you flag it, by the way, Mina, to come back to it later because now you have a storyline. to track throughout time. It's just we want to believe

that these guys are the gladiators, right? And that they actually care. So there's that side of it. Then there's the thing that you alluded to, which is actual revenge and actual motivation. And I find this really interesting in sports because it can be really hard to parse out. When we talk about an athlete returning to face their former team,

and I think Kyrie, Dan, and Boston are a great example for it. This, to me, is not undeniable. it's actually quite debatable. Who is exacting revenge on who here? Like who is the wrong party? Who is actually mad? Why are they mad? Do they deserve to be mad?

This is always complicated in sports, I think, with revenge. Sometimes not. But like if a player gets cut, that's pretty cut and dry. But most of the time, it's actually pretty hard to parse out the actual revenge dynamic at play. When I look at this article on Vox, because you said, Pablo, as a species, we are drawn to revenge, but chimpanzees and elephants are also drawn to revenge somehow. The idea of this when talking about it with you guys was interesting to me because it made me examine with my wife, when do I ever feel vengeful? Do I have that anywhere in me? I went through

sort of a list of people I've, friendships I've lost, betrayals I've suffered, and tried to find like the times that I felt vengeful. I'm going to offer you the only two I could come up with with my wife after considerable conversation, because I don't think that this is a thing that I am capable of. I don't think it would be, I don't know whether it would be guilt or shame. I don't think it would feel good to me

to make someone else purposely feel bad with intent. No matter what it is had happened between us, I wouldn't want to then exact on that person another kind of hurt to feel better about myself. That doesn't sort of make sense to me. But there was an executive at ESPN who thought he was my boss, who was not my boss, who I enjoyed ignoring his calls for eight months.

Eight months while under contract is that revenge? I feel like he would say that that qualifies. I think that guy would perceive the effect, if not the intent, as absolutely. But what I thought about doing to him that I did not do to him, that would absolutely qualify as revenge. But what I actually did was just not answer calls. That doesn't feel like kill bill to me in terms of vengeance. It's just, it's not answering the phone.

But, okay, so here's a thing from this article that I want to ask about in the context of what you just described there, which is that revenge is described as biologically verifiable, as in our pleasure centers in our brain actually light up. with retaliatory acts of aggression. And so reward, Dan, what you're describing is passive aggression. And the question is, does that cross the threshold into, did you feel your brain, did you get off on this? It felt good. I presume that you did. Yes, but it was the most, it's literally the most passive of aggression.

It's simply not acting on the answering of a phone. I feel like that falls under the revenge category, because in my mind, revenge, like the actual act of revenge, or vengeance is are you retaliating in any way in a way that's really like you're not getting anything out of it? And that's where it's kind of different from sports, right? Where I like, you know, revenge would be Kyrie Irving beating Boston or Boston beating Kyrie Irving in both sides. There's a logic to it. Both sides would be getting something out of it. I think what this article discussed and what Dan's describing is retaliating for no reason other than to activate that

little part of your brain because you got nothing out of it. Oh, no, no, no, it felt good. No, no, no, it felt good. Yeah, that's all you get. I mean, but that's, I mean, that's why people pray to God and take drugs, like, feeling good. Like, that's all you get. What do you mean? Happiness?

But you felt good at the expense of someone who had wronged you. That sounds like pretty classic revenge. Yes. Well, Mina, so beyond the religion of pettiness, the ego boner that Dan clearly experienced, is this question of, How important is it that the recipient of your act acknowledges why it's happening? Right? So justice being served is not merely a one-way communication.

It's two-way. He was calling Stugats. He was calling Stugats and yelling at him. And Stugat's like, what do you want me to do? Sounds like the message was received, even though the message was not actually communicated that. I feel so small right now. I don't have vengeance anywhere in me. Look at this orchestrated plan to extract vengeance.

Well, okay, so the other part of this, right, is and why I love it as a consumer, even though I don't feel my brain light up in that way, I don't think I have a clear analog meaning to what Dan described, is because I say this about boxing, right? The reason I love boxing is because humiliation is on the line, because there are stakes. And so revenge and vengeance and hatred give the viewer of sports is a reason to know that the competitor is invested. And so the banana boat example, for instance, as much as I am in favor of, of course, the friendship between LeBron James and Dwayne Wade, which was that that story was about, which infuriated people because it undercut the juice.

I get why the juice is important. It's because you want people to feel like they are watching athletes who care about this as much as they think they would also care about it. So do you have vengeance in your heart? Mina. So my first reaction was no, because I couldn't think of an example of myself exacting revenge on anyone in the real world. And the reason I don't is not because I'm pure of heart

or a good person who rise above it. It's because I'm terrified of the third phase, which is the retaliation to the retaliation. I feel the angriest I ever get is in my car when people cut me off or... What does that look like? Me clenching the wheel and saying things that the person can't hear, you know, the classic road rate, right?

but I would never then, you know, cut them off because I'm so afraid of things escalating. And that is how I am generally with regards to revenge. Even something like leaving a bad Yelp review, like at a bad restaurant. If I get like bad service, my immediate feeling is like, I really want to punish this person in some way.

But then I don't want to leave the Yelp review because maybe they'll find me or maybe people will like see my name. Like I don't ever carry out or deliver on the bad. feelings I have. But then I thought about it a little bit more, and then I realized that I was totally full of shit, because I do exact revenge a lot every time I quote tweet someone or reply in the internet. What is that, if not a tiny act of revenge? And I do it all the time. So, and that I think is something, by the way, I do sometimes, I'm like, ooh, maybe I shouldn't do this because maybe there will be, I don't want to get into examples, but there are examples of it drives a person to escalate.

Oh, but that's fascinating, though. That is like the Internet almost exists. Like one of the great benefits of the Internet might be all of us being able to extract revenge there. Well, so usually that I do it with the function, which is I can make a joke and then I get a lot of people laugh at the joke or they will also see. I think it's good for sometimes for people to see, hey, it's not just you who's receiving this kind of hate or whatever. You know, I get called DIY all day, whatever. And if I can make a joke at it, that to me is less about revenge and more about, hey, like making funny content in some ways. I did think of a recent example, though, that was purely about revenge and had nothing to do with the broader audience and had nothing to do with me performing or, you know, trying to show other people.

So, and this is really, really petty and sad. But a few months ago, some guy wrote, I posted a picture of my child, me, my child, and you can't. see him or whatever, and I don't even know what the caption was. And some guy wrote, like, yeah, well, you know, too bad that he has a mom who's, like, not taking care of him because she's too busy working and being a piece of shit or something. And I don't know why, but I went to his profile, and it was a professional profile, and it was a realtor. And it was all, like, listings and house stuff. And I must have been, like, 3 a.m. or something. And I whipped out my phone and I wrote, hey, do all these homebuyers know that you're busy leaving angry comments on like a mom's

Instagram or something instead of like advocating for them? And then I went to bed. And when I woke up, he had deleted every, like all the stuff, deleted his comment and then re-commented, you seem like a great mom. That is a perfect act of revenge totally well executed. I thought you were going to say. And when I woke up, I delighted in his business. having been burned to the ground.

No. And I would have felt bad about that. But the idea, right, that like the whole thing here, the reason to not do any of this is because it is akin to that saying about it's like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. Yeah, resentment. Yeah, that's what resentment is. Just being eaten away from the inside at hope, at this hope for bad to happen to someone else.

It made me question, like, so what actually animates me? So the reason why revenge in sports is also entertaining beyond everything we've said, right, is because it gets them into, the athletes, into this peak performance, we understand. Right? Like, they will never care more about doing this thing than they were against somebody who they actually viscerally dislike. And I realized, Dan, I don't know what you're like on this, but like the person that I am worried about, and this is both a cop-out, but more than that, I think it's actually, by definition, a self-evisceration is me.

Like, I am worried, I am neurotic about thinking my own shit sucks. And so I'm constantly trying to defeat the critic that is me, which does feel like a question of a job interview, like what's your biggest weakness? I care too much. Pablo, I also, I want to jump in here. I know you're probably true that your own harshest critics and that is what keeps you up at night and what motivates you.

but you don't like people. And I've seen you delight in other people failing in our texts. Don't act like you're above these people. That's all I have to say. There it is. This should be an honest space. Mina said, look, I'm a piece of shit at times I'm not pure of heart. I volunteered to you.

Look at me saying I'm not a vengeful person. And then I give you an act of passive aggressive vengeance that's obviously delightful to me. You? No, you're not giving us authenticity here. We know you dislike people. We know some of the people you dislike. You will tell us where and how it is you have rooted for them to fail or what acts of vengeance you have taken

and make this a more authentic podcast instead of that fancy dance bullshit you just did. Hold on. I'll do this exercise right now, okay? Sometimes, and I'm not proud of this, sometimes I will go to the Apple podcast reviews of this program and I'll scroll through and I'll be like, okay, here we go. April 22nd, 2024. Left by John's Crazy Life is the handle.

Worst most clickbait podcast online. Not only did Pablo ruin Bomanie's high noon, he also does the worst podcast online, one star. The worst podcast online? And let me tell you, I know a lot about John's crazy life, John. I know how crazy it is. And if you don't apologize to me and leave a five-star rating,

really? Guess who else is going to know? How did you find out, Pablo? Let's just say that something you shouldn't do. A private investigator. Is slander a guy whose podcast is devoted to finding out insane minutia that no one else gives a shit out, John? You get real crazy, buddy. You know who you should get to carry out your revenge?

Who's kind of like an internet hit man, Cortez. Oh, yeah. Oh, by the, Cortez walked in here today and he was like, revenge is great. Literally. The most revenge-filled person I can think of, yeah. No one beefs more easily than Ryan Cortez to the point where we have to apologize for Ryan Cortez perpetually.

It's true. It's a natural state for him. All right. Mina, what did you bring us? What story from the internet did you decide the grace with our... Oh, like so many great think pieces of our time. It's from The Cut, which seems to be a fountain of stories like this. I don't think this one, though, is...

Some of those stories can... Events outrage. I don't think that's the case here. The title is, Where Have All My Guy Friends Gone? It's by Sarah Wheeler. I was thinking about this topic already because I got a text. I think from Sunman Kimes asking me if the two actors and the bear are dating

which is a role I play and my mom's life is just telling her if things are real or not on the internet. It's a good question, by the way. They were seen at a baseball game kind of just like, you know, kind of canoodly. Canoodling? Well, the male star was just kind of rubbing the back

of the female star. Textbook canoodle. And I actually, I remember, you guys all watch the bear, right? Yep. Love it. Someone I saw had a post about how, like, Like, it's a will they, wouldn't they, between Karmie, who is played by Jeremy Allen White and Iota Berry's character.

Sydney, yes. And I saw that and I thought, oh my God, I really hope not, because what I love about the bear is this depiction of male, female friendship and collaboration. When I watch it, I don't see any sexual tension between these people. I see creative and professional tension, which I really enjoy seeing on camera, because it's not something that is explored that often. There's another show I love Halt and Catch Fire, where there is some, there's a lot of relationships,

but there also is a male-female working relationship between these two coders that's at the core of it that I just love because it's so rare, and that's what I think is the best thing about the bear. But it led me to this article, which is basically, to sum it up, it talks about how it's not a, you know, exploration of the age-old,

can men and women really be friends question, although we can talk about that. It's more about the fact that as men and women get older and especially as they get married, they have fewer friendships of the opposite sex and how common that is. And I think that's true. That is common.

I think for me, personally, it's really mitigated because of the industry that I work in, because I work with primarily men, so many men, and I think so many of, you guys, guys I work with end up being my friends outside of work as well. So I'm probably not the best stand in for your average woman purely because of that. Although I will say outside of work, I do have a lot of male friends. I also have a lot of female friends. I have always been someone who's kind of a 50-50 person going back to high school. But I'm very curious to hear,

one, what you guys think of this premise. And two, whether either of you have female friends outside of work because I genuinely have no idea and I'm very interested in finding out. Well, I can't say honestly that in my adult life, I've made a whole lot of friends outside of work just because the commonalities are just so easily baked in to be able to walk into a room and know that you're meeting an assortment of people who are aligned creatively with a ton of your sensibilities. It just sort of fast-forward friendship. I would say that my life has gotten a lot smaller since I've got married sort of purposefully,

and I, outside of work, have not maintained the female friendships that I had the way that I would have liked to. A lot of friendships have sort of, with everything that I've been dealing with over the last five years, it was one of the first things to go. And no, I've not added,

If I'm likely to add female friends, it's most likely through my wife. It's not something that I'm even going to have access to daily, if it's not outside of work or with my wife because of how small my life has gotten. Yeah, for me, so I relate to a bunch of that, the idea that I mostly meet people now through work, and because work is amorphous, and this is work, but also me hanging out with my friends, all the lines are blurred, as we've established. But I went to an all-boys high school. And so something that I felt very self-conscious about

as soon as I got to college, Mina, was that I didn't know how to befriend girls to the point where I called them girls instead of women. Me too, by the way. Everything is exactly the same. All-boys' school, get to college, have no idea what to do. So I was the president of the Lincoln-Douglas debate team in high school, right?

And when I look back on what I cringe at the most, it's that here was an all-boys high school. We wore khakis and blazers and buttoned-down shirts, and we won state championships. I had a protectionist closed borders approach to dealing with other schools. So part of my, if I have a legacy at Regis High School, it's that we were a team that loved each other,

bonded like a locker room in a pseudo-sports way, which is sad, of course. It's not sad. It's not sad. It's okay that your friendships were forged in the fires of debate. And those friendships remain today. They're the oldest friendships that I have today with those other dudes on that team. And we deliberately did not talk to other schools. We were like that. It was not a social activity, which just meant that we were actively ignoring girls at other schools. It didn't start sad. It got sad. I want to put you in just my mindset of like, so I get to college and I'm like, coming from this context and I'm like, oh, what I lost is the ability to actually get reps at being a normal person around girls, around women. And so truly in college, and since then, I have, this also sounds suspect. I've made it a point to just actually get to know women in.

a way that helped me catch up. Like, oh, shit. Because I grew up, Dad. I don't know how you felt about All Boys education. I loved it. And now I regret it. And I want my All Boys High School to go co-ed, not just because I am the father of a daughter, but also because I realize how many blind spots I have. Oh, this is brutal. And so it's just been embarrassing for me, for a long time. I don't know how you guys feel in general about the idea of gender-specific schools. It does, at that age eliminate distractions. It does make you, if you are a committed person, someone who's going to focus on education,

because you're not distracted by the smell of perfume. But it makes you not have any interpersonal skills of any merit. It was bad. It was real bad. So I don't get to my 30s, I'm going to say, just because of an assortment of things, where I was so far behind on what,

should be real learning about an entirely different perspective. Mina, I will tell you this. This is something that I can't believe I've learned in the last five years. I'm ashamed to admit this as someone who's saying he's discovering his blind spot in his 50s. My wife says to me, have you ever getting into a car looked over your shoulder to see if someone's coming up behind you? And I'm like, no.

I had never considered the I this is I'm in my 50s and I have not considered the idea that that I'm not considered the idea that a woman could walk around the earth feeling like prey yeah I think that what you're alluding to which is what this article kind of gets into is like one of the great values of male female friendship at any age is you develop a greater understanding and it goes both ways like we talk about it all right. often in the context of the benefits of men being friends with women, the ability to understand the things that they face, the way they move about the world, it makes you a better man and how you deal with women. But I think it's the same as a woman being friends with men early on. I think you understand the unique challenges and the different worldviews, I guess,

in a way that's really important. So when I think back at, like, what did I miss out on in an all-boys education, is not just that I wound up in college, unable to, like, I don't know, persuasive. I'm so scared of where that sentence was going to end. I'm probably going to stop it, actually.

I'm going to stop the sentence. I'm going to pull the parachute cord and evacuate the sentence. Okay. That's not how we do it as professional broadcasters, generally. Generally, we start a thought and then we finish it.

It was a beyond the obvious late blooming of like, okay, oh, shit. Right, right, right, right, right. Got to catch up. Okay, that was a lot. a real, that was a real fumbling. When you guys talk about work, Mina. Yeah, I didn't really.

Nope. When you get together and start talking about work with Pablo, does he talk about how overpaid he is for the way he finished that thought? I will say, it's all fun in games until your kid turns four. And suddenly you're picking your up from school. And there's this other kid, this other four-year-old boy who is super interested in your daughter. And he's...

Maybe they just want to be friends, Pablo. Mina, what did I tell you about the first... What did I tell you about what I learned? It has to be. At four years old, you can't be that protective, Pablo. Come on. Let me tell you something. If you're listening.

No. No, again. If you're listening, just know that I'm watching your crazy life too, buddy. He's telling her he loves her. He's holding hands and saying I love. I'm just like, I'm not. Is there a more four-year-old... New York private school boy named than

by the way. F*** a f*** a f***. Is he drinking his green juice? Glass bottle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll bleep that name, by the way, for various legal reasons. Dan's your turn, buddy. The article I have brought to you guys is from the Atlantic.

It is the fad diet to end all fad diets. There isn't much evidence. This article reports that intermittent fasting leads to lasting weight loss. Why is it still so popular? There are many kinds of things that are viewed as popular, like stretching, for example, that you can hear debunked by people saying there is no value to stretching. Hey, really?

Yeah. I mean, there are any number of things like that that you can read that science will tell you something is overrated that is popular. In this case, it's intermittent fasting. Have you guys had any experience with this? I've struggled with my weight all my life. I have done an assortment of things. will is never a problem for me. Results usually are, and then it gets dispiriting. Over the last few years,

when my cortisol levels inflated because of the amount of stress that I was under, even though my diet had not changed, the one change I did make was intermittent fasting. I stopped eating at 4 o'clock, and I didn't eat again until 8 a.m. And I have gone from being very close to diabetic to now all of my numbers are right. It's been a lot of doctors, a lot of things, a lot of acupuncture, a million different things. But in terms of diet, the only thing that has ever worked for me is intermittent fasting, which seems easy enough. Just stop eating for long periods of time.

I don't even know how many people listening to this know that the word breakfast isn't two words, that it's not break fast. Like, it seems easy to understand. You eat within the windows of eight to four. You don't eat for 16 hours. You make that your schedule and your body. gets the relief from the digestive system not working for 16 hours, or more than that, 24 hours, 36 hours, whatever you end up doing.

But you guys think what? I'm talking to you a personal experience. This article is saying something different than what my body is feeling. Yeah, my reaction to this article, as well as the phenomenon of intermittent fasting, becoming a trend, is that I realize that I have been inadvertently part of this trend. And so I am not someone who consciously sets out, I'm going to have this diet plan and all this stuff, although I am perilously close to pre-diabetic.

I've been informed reliably by sources close to my bloodstream. The reality is that I just end up, two things are true about me. Number one, I love dinner, I love a meal, I love food in a way that is, I sound like an Instagram influencer who loves to post photos of their meals. I am also that guy. But I am also somebody who can just forget to eat. and that's because I am, again, my brain, as aforementioned before, is consumed mostly with work. And so if I am passionately invested in something, I will forget to eat.

And so it took me a long time, actually, to realize that, whoa, okay, this counts as intermittent fasting because I've not eaten in 16 hours, because I'm not eating breakfast until sometimes 5 p.m., aka skipping breakfast, skipping lunch. Mina's eyes are widening. I'm also somebody, Mina, and this is another thing I've learned about not just the opposite sex, but my wife is that being hungry, being angry as a result of not eating is an actual biological thing that afflicts many people. I maybe foolishly believe that I do not suffer from this condition. I have no proof that I do. No one's indicated that I do.

But that blind spot made me realize that, oh, not everybody is operating this way. And so I feel like I'm benefiting from a trend diet without really intention. to because I'm just not wired the same way as maybe a person whose eyes widened when I mention that I haven't eaten until 5 p.m. some days. I have not skipped a meal in probably 20 years. I can't do it. I guess you could say maybe like there's been times when I've been flights and I've had to cobble together, you know, kind bar meals. But the idea of purposely skipping any of the three major meals is an ethema to me, My brain is incapable of doing it.

Dan, you mentioned that it has been working for you. And this article I thought was really interesting because, yes, it says it doesn't work. But it also, when the article says it doesn't work, they're talking about like broad samples of people sticking over time. Undeniably, for some people within those big samples, it does work. And I thought the article was really interesting because it sort of explored why it's appealing to people, which is the simplicity of it, as opposed to, you know, counting your fiber and your calories and this, I'm eating from these food groups. It's like, nope, you can eat here and you can't eat

there. And there's quite some variance. Is that why it's stuck with you? Is that it's just easier to understand or to kind of stick with? I have tried, as I've told you, just about everything over the course of my life. I have a bad relationship with food. I'm not likely to be so consumed by work that I don't think about eating for 24 hours. And it's one of the things in therapy that I haven't actually been able to sort of solve and unlock the roots of. I'm not real sure why I have a bad relationship with food. And I'm not even sure that it matters.

But this one thing was very easy to remember. Just stop eating at 4 o'clock. Now, it's hard to do because it's going to make your social life and dinner not really possible. and you're eating like a 90-year-old couple waiting to die in Delaware, because who wants to have dinner at 4 o'clock? But I will tell you, Mina, that physiologically, some of the doctors that I've worked with say, this is something that is much easier for men than women.

It is much easier just that it's not, and it's just the way that the body works in ways that I don't understand. They're telling me this, and so when they recommended this to me, it sounded like something that would be fairly easy to execute. And then once you start getting results with it, and this article sort of talks about the idea that maybe later on you'll gain the way back, this hasn't been hard to do

just because once I get the results for something on something I've been trying to solve forever, I'm going to keep doing it. The story also hits on the other reason why it's popular, other than the simplicity, which is, you know, our society sort of valorizes the difficulty nature of it.

And it might be why it's appealing to men in particular, which is, it's funny to go off at the beginning of this podcast, it's like toughness as opposed to calorie counting or eating a certain kind of food.

It's like, no, I'm not eating these six hours a day. I am better than you, which is, you know, it's a bummer because the flip side of it is that obesity or having problems with eating a lot signify weakness

when we know that a lot of it is chemical. Right. No, on that note of like, what does all of this feel like in your head when you're doing it, the article points out something fascinating that I did not realize about historical solutions

to medical problems, right? So there's this line that I flagged, which is that there was this era of quote-unquote heroic medicine and that held that a treatment had to match the severity of the illness. And so that's how you got bloodletting. That's how you got bloodletting.

purging, it's I got leaching, these sort of medieval solutions because if something is a problem, you must meet it with something that feels proportionate in its harshness, in its effort. And that sort of still persists today, whether we realize that or not. I guess what I'm getting at is I wonder how much all of this just has to do with a highly individualized solution that, you know, Anytime I read, we do a lot of these pieces because I think we're all searching for actual research. When Dan mentioned stretching doesn't work, I immediately Googled. And I was like, oh, my God. Some people think resistance exercises is better.

I hesitate to ever feel like we are definitively investigating the medical reality of something that feels so individualized. And, you know, the number one thing, and Dan, the number one thing I've realized about all of this is that your brain, like, what's my summary of the complexity of human nature? is that the placebo effect is real. And so if your brain is bought into something and it works, keep at it. If it's giving you the result that you need with all the healthfulness accounted for, yeah, I think keep at it.

I mean, when Pablo introduced this topic, I told you guys, this is the first time in my life in my adult life, rather, so in the last 18 years or so, where I've been, like, willfully trying to lose weight post-pregnancy. probably the last like three or four months combination of diet and exercise. And I find for me what works is much more moderate cutting back saying,

okay, I'm only going to drink on the weekends. I'm going to eat smaller dessert, pretty small changes like that. And it's very slow and it's frustrating as someone who has been very lucky to not have to deal with that for a long time. But I could not do this. Like, I physically am incapable of doing what you're describing. It would not work for me because I mentally, it would make me so upset all the time. I just could not do it and go about my day and be a functioning person.

That part, Dan, of like, that's, I mean, to me, this is an episode now, a through line about all the ways I just haven't thought about what it's like for other people. But food being responsible for a fundamental happiness is something that I just haven't. really considered. Well, Mina's talking about, she wouldn't be able, she's saying she can't function in general, but she couldn't do this job. Functionality, happiness, right, all of it. I could not skip breakfast.

Could not. I'd be, it's game over. You need the fuel. I can make it to maybe 11. You need the fuel. I absolutely need the fuel. And I'm sure there's like a psychological thing. Like for me, I look forward to it.

It gets me out of a bed in the morning. Yeah, I just, I just, I spend a lot of time thinking about my next. meal when I'm not eating it. How has dieting, not the results, but how has it gone for you in terms of your emotional state, the idea that you are now more regularly thinking about things you weren't thinking about before? Yeah.

I am experiencing like a much smaller version, I think, of the frustration that a lot of people have experienced for a really, really long time, which is setbacks. it goes out the window when I go out to eat. So then the next day I'm like, damn, you know, things like that. It's been my life for 40 years. It's been since I was grilling too many hamburgers in sophomore year of high school on the grill. I've been thinking about, oh, yeah, I really enjoyed that meal. Had way too much.

I shouldn't have done that. I feel like a shithead complaining about my much smaller version of this and the fact that I'm dealing with this now. I have metabolism privilege, I guess. I don't know. So as Dan, as someone who is unprivileged in the world of metabolism with his single-sex hamburgers and that grill, I do want to propose another thing the article gets to, which is that now the reason why intermittent fasting, which is a great, just branding on this, by the way, intermittent fasting is just a clever sort of formalization of, again, not eating.

But when it comes to what Silicon Valley is into here, it fits into this larger metric optimization of everything. And so, Dan, I'm curious about this, me and I'm curious about this. Have you guys been increasingly metric in how you are approaching this? How much of this is like analytics to you in terms of keeping track of what you want to achieve? Well, what I will tell you about what I have learned over the last year. years. I'm talking about aggressive, aggressive stuff that I am doing. So it's not just that I'm eating between eight and four. What I'm having at eight o'clock in the morning is a smoothie with like 17 different things in it that are supposed to be nutrients instead of calories, that I don't need

the calories. It's just stuff meant to feed me emotionally, spiritually through morning. Like, it's just a bunch of stuff meant to optimize what it is that my body is getting in terms of nutrients. And then dinner at 4 o'clock is just a protein and a ton of vegetables, just a giant stew of vegetables. And it's aggressive. Like, it's the most boring thing, but it's working. And my metabolism is slow, and I've done damage to it because of the last 40 years of not ever doing the right thing here. And so when you talk about the patients, it requires me, because it's not happening quickly enough. It's still not. not happening quickly enough for me.

Like I, anybody else who is doing all the things that I'm doing would have lost 100 pounds in three months. Like, but I've screwed up my body and I've got to do a lot of fixing. Yeah, I'll tell you my revelation. Fiber. Super important. Yeah. That's, for all the doctors I'm seeing, Mina, for all the doctors I'm seeing,

the question I get most often, how's the poop? How's the poop? My man. I talk poop. You talk poop. Mina's been waiting. Mina, Mina's been collecting eight months of poop knowledge. I literally, the number one topic in our house is, is he pooping enough?

Did he poop? What does the poop look like? Mina, where I am in that journey is being jealous of my daughter's poop. Pablo, I don't know if you're going to ask us what we learned, but I know I missed an opportunity there. learned that Mina has a voice that accompanies, I'm tougher than you. She's got a character. I don't know if you remember. It was a real good impression of an all-voice Catholic-educated man. Yes, I don't know. I want to replay it for you. I wish I had the ability. I wanted to comment on it, but I didn't want to interrupt you. You went deep into Daniel Day-Lewis character,

and you were a tough guy and you summoned a voice, and I was going to ask you, who is that? Like, what's his name? Tell me more about that person. It's generic football guy voice. And what does he say? What kind of things does he say about his toughness? Football's played in the trenches in January. Oh, that will appear it into my Yoda voice. I don't know. I'm self-conscious.

I'm sorry. Wait a minute. Is Mina just learning that all her voices are the same? It's taken Cookie Monster, Elmo, that Southern guy, she sometimes does. I've been doing voices now when I read these books to, to, you know, like, about different animals, and I'm like, okay, I got to give, like, the, I don't know if you've read the pout-fow fish, classic. A little problematic, but classic.

You can read that, though. I tried in different voices for all the different fishes and sea creatures, and at the end, they all just become the same voice. And I'm like, damn, how do I, I got to get better at doing different voices. Good night, Moon. No, Mina, yours has a little bit of that. You mock him, but that was Pablo doing Yoda, doing Mina, doing tough football guy telling the moon good night.

I'm the pout pout fish with the pout pout face and I got my grumpy wumpies all over the place. It's also her DMX. Oh, wait a minute. Always remember that. It's also DMX. Hold on. Please give me more of that. Please give me more of the character that you do to put the offensive linemen to sleep.

I need more of this character. What do you want to know? Some of the things that you've memorized because you're, you get into character and he liked some of the characters better than the others. Does he have a favorite? He really likes it when I do the pout pout fish and I also make the face of the pout pout fish and I do this. Can you see me?

Yeah. I'm not on the camera. I'm the pout pout palt pils and I'm going to walkie wunkie wunkies hard over the prince. What I found out today is that my journey of evolution since going to an all-boyishoree an all-boys Catholic school has not prepared me for what I want to say in response to seeing me

and a doing that. The pout, pout fish. But as for the men and women who keep this motorboat afloat, Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Michael Antonucci, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim,

Neely Lohman, Rachel Miller-Howard, Ethan Shrier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tumenello, and Juliet Warren. Our studio engineering by RG Systems, our post production by NGWPost, our theme song, as always, by John Bravo. I gotta go protect my daughter from a four-year-old.

I'll talk to you next time.