Pablo Torre Finds Out - Share & Tell with John Skipper and David Samson (or: Rich Guys OnlyFans)

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

Is the NBA's TV bubble about to burst? Is how we consume sports about to change forever? Hear from the man who reshaped the business itself. Plus: Who’s to blame for our misinformation minefield? And what the hell happened to retirement? The jamokes from The Sporting Class explain.PTFO-approved reading: House of Strauss: I'm Not Sure How the NBA Triples Its Rights Fees in a TV Recession https://www.houseofstrauss.com/p/im-not-sure-how-the-nba-triples-itsVanity Fair: Inside the New York Times Debate Over Its Gaza Hospital Bombing Coverage https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/10/new-york-times-gaza-hospital-storyThe Washington Post: Older Americans Are Dominating Like Never Before, but What Comes Next? https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/10/24/older-americans-working-longer-aging-impact/Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GsSzvwXkpLE 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. No, it just feels wrong. It's like, oh, I'm getting my news from the 7-11. That's right. That's where everybody goes to get beer. I might as well get my news there. Right after this ad.

You're listening to Giraff King's Network. So this office, I want to bring people into the world of Pablo Tori finds out, now merging with the sporting class for one special performance this week. This office that John Skipper built has a fridge stocked with two things mostly. One of those things is cold brew.

I have that in my glass here. The other thing is a CBD-infused drink that John guzzles all of the time. It's for mind and body function. And right at the top of my list of things I want is mind and body function. Not necessarily in that order. Oddly enough, it has no effect as anything with CBD I've ever ingested or rubbed or put on my body.

I've never felt any effect from CBD. The pertinent substance is THC, not CBD. Correct. I've already found out more than I need to know. The drink's name, by the way, I enjoy them. The drink's name is vibes with a why. And so there's just a beautiful juxtaposition with John Skipper. drinking vibes with a why.

As I bring in John Skipper and David Samson, my usual co-hosts on the sporting class, the preeminent... So I want to describe it in a way that I haven't described it before. Because on one level, yes, it's the preeminent sports business show that exists in America.

Facts. On another level, on another level, it's sort of like rich guy only fans. I wasn't aware that we had anything. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wasn't aware of that, but I do keep my shoes on. No, we want to see the feet. actually not your feet, literally.

Your feet are disgusting and have terrible... No, my feet are actually very well quaffed. We'll show the picture on the YouTube channel and Draft King's network, despite all of the things that'll do to our audience. But the point is, we get access behind the scenes to what it's actually like to be a rich guy who has worked at the highest levels of sports.

And your points of view, to me, it makes what we do together, my favorite things to do in life. And it's because you guys open kimonos and we get real intimate, whether or not there's CBD oil rubbed all over those specific regions. I'd like to just stipulate that I'm rich with a Y, not an I. R-Y-C-H. And I'm actually going to change my name to S-K-Y-P-E-R.

I would like to stipulate that working with John is a true pleasure because I've gotten to know him in a way that I didn't expect. to when I worked with him in baseball when he was at ESPN, and I didn't enjoy being around him or seeing him because I just felt taking advantage of it all times. And then getting to know him as someone in business fascinates me, especially now you bring up the drink and you're giving free advertising and publicity.

I want to point out what I'm drinking, which is water without a label, because we don't have a water sponsor. So I'm not going to give one ounce of anything to anybody without pain. and it's quite disappointed to be partners with someone who willy-nilly will give out free advertising. Well, you know you are the truest capitalist I've ever known. You're a pure capitalist.

It makes it easy to know me, doesn't it? I'm a capitalist socialist. With a why? Yes. Pablo, you go first. You've got to get this show on track. I know. I know.

This is me losing control. This is what it's like to hang out with John and David in this office. And I want to explain who these men. are for people who aren't familiar with their legends because David Samson, former president of the of the then Florida Marlins, now Miami Marlins, but a guy more than that, John, I think you've noticed this, a guy whose brain is unlike, I think any other brain that I know and I know a lot of weird brains. How would you describe David's weird, weird brain? I don't think his brain is weird or peculiar at all. I think his brain is wired to be a capitalist.

He actually, and I mean that as a compliment. Mr. Samson understands about making money. Me, I'm, you know, I'm giving away dollars on the streetcorn. Here's the thing about my brain versus John's brain, and I've thought about this for quite a long time, as I was thinking, do I want to get under the kimono with someone like John, easy to do with Dan because of the relationship that I, had with Dan. Not so easy to do it, John. And I was thinking, what will Metal Arc be successful?

And it didn't occur to me that there was anything other than a successful end to Metal Arc, whatever the exit strategy is, whenever that happens. Because while John plays the part, he's just an actor, playing the part of the socialist, the communist, John is as about money as I am, except he just likes to act. And what nothing personal is, I don't act. This is, this is, is me, this is how I think, this is what I think, but you never know with John. Well, this is where we come to our first topic today. Because David sees the world through all of these calculations. He sees it as truly like probabilistic, financially rigorous calculuses, calculi.

And John happens to be the guy who happened to just run the most, I think we've called it numerous times on the sporting class. the best business in the history of media as the president of ESPN. And so when I'm reading in the Wall Street Journal, this article that's headlined how the NBA plans to remake TV deals and net billions of dollars for its stars, I'm reminded that I now work for the guy again who signed those billion-dollar deals in the first place.

This is the map that he drew. And then I read the Ethan Strauss story on his substack, which is a commentary on that journal piece about how, how, quote, I'm not sure how the NBA triples its rights fees in a TV recession, and he is far more skeptical and cynical and doubting of the idea that the cable television model is doing anything but cratering, and the tech money that's supposed to come in is anything but illusory, given the rich checks that John Skipper liked to write once upon a time.

And so, John, this is literally your account, or was once upon a time, What do you make of the idea that NBA season is upon us, and it may never be the same, given the price of what people like to pay for such a sport? The premise of the idea that because of the decline of pay TV, the money's not going to be there for the NBA, the money is going to be there for the NBA. And this does get to the difference in brains in some ways we were talking about. David, and again, I say this with admiration, is a guy who does. does his homework, he does his research, he calculates, he analyzes things. I have a much simpler instinctual style to some extent. I just believe the NBA rights are worth one dollar more than what anyone else will pay for them. That's what they're worth. So I never did a whole lot of calculating

to sort of go, what should we pay? I went into the negotiation believing I needed to win and that I needed to get those rights to maintain ESPN's status as the worldwide leader in sports. So you're saying that your board had no care about ROI. They just said, let's think what John with his vibes is drinking and what he believes the value is and we're good with that. No, I don't think they... No parameters. No financial parameters. Just your feeling of a dollar more. It's not quite that casual. I would like to talk about that.

And I had a CFO who spent time doing the budgets and doing the projections. And we did project. We said, here's what happens. And we pay this amount of money. Here's what happens. We pay this. Why amount of money? I'm simply talking about the sort of idea that there is some intrinsic inherent value that can be calculated.

There's not. It's like buying a house. It's like buying a painting. It's like buying any kind of work of art. I mean, what's the inherent value of a, um, of a Rothko. There's no inherent value other than what somebody else will pay for it. I hear you, but I'm sorry to go deeper, but there are comps for a reason. So there's a market for Rothko. So when you go to the auction house and there's a piece of art for sale, you are aware

when they have an estimate. The estimate doesn't just fall out of John Skipper's brain. There's a reason for an estimate. For a house, there's a value. There's an appraisal. Things are appraised according to the value, not according. There is ego premium with the value of a sports team. Right. And there could be ego premium with the value of certain works of art. Let's say a Van Gogh. Yes. But if you're looking at a Rothko, great example, there's a market for him, like there's a market for a house, like there's a market for the NBA. And we're seeing already the possibility of Turner saying, hey, we're being priced out of this market, which happens. Well, so, John, remind everybody, remind us what you paid for the NBA deal. What was the deal that

you signed that's now up for expiration? The NBA deal was nine years for ESPN. I think it was an average annual of about $1.36 billion. Turner's is 1.24. Remember, this is important for later, average annual. Most people don't actually understand that that doesn't mean that every year you're paying $1.36 billion. It means that year one of a nine-year deal you're paying, I'm making these numbers up, but they're directionally right, 1.2. And by the end of this deal, they're probably paying 1.5.

So to start with the idea that whatever it goes up from is 1.36, but they're already paying $1.5. So they're going to end up paying an average annual of two and a half. That's PR. I mean, what you're saying. Right. And because you do it with player contracts, you do it with employee contracts. If you give someone a raise during the course of an employment deal, whether you're a player

or a media superstar like Pablo, you are taking, you could take his average annual value. except what he's going to do as a talent, and the NBA is the talent here. He's going to look at what his last salary was for the last year of the deal, and he's going to want an increase from that number. So if you went to Pablo as an example and said, we're going to give you a 10% increase from your Aavre after a three-year deal,

he would say, no, no. The way I calculated is I won 10% for my last year. That's good negotiating by David. We're going to do this now. We're going to get my contract done now as well in this conversation. That would be cool. Though I will tell you in any negotiations I ever had, I never heard about anything except we paid one and a half average annual last time. We want to take you up and double that.

Well, so, John, this is the... That's what I heard from baseball. I heard from baseball. Gee, you're paying an average annual of I think we're paying $3.50. Because we used to manufacture what the payouts were to owners. And so what owners would look at is how much money did we get this year from the broadcast deal distributed versus how much money we can get next year distributed. Yeah. And when the commissioner manipulates the distributions,

it makes it easy to convince owners, hey, you're getting more money, you're getting X percent more. But, okay, so a lot of kimono opening now, which I love. But the update here for the public is that seemingly, in this journal piece, ESPN and TNT, are unwilling to pay the prices that they paid that they got from John. Why do they, are they reporting that they have said they're unwilling to pay you? I haven't heard anything other than, other than I've only heard one thing. which is there was a moment where David Zaslov said, gee, we're not going to pay an inappropriate price.

Well, you were saying we don't want to lose money. So the price that they're saying, per the Wall Street Journal, that they're unwilling to pay is $2.6 billion a year on MBA rights. This is ESPN and TNT, as the League is seeking deals now with Amazon and Apple and tech companies. Well, that is fairly poor reporting and just misleading. These guys would jump. If you set up an obstacle course 100 yards away and the executives and the board and everybody said, you could pay only $2.6 billion to renew your rights, they would be flying to do that.

So why there is a suggestion that they're not willing to pay the amount they're paying now. First of all, they're already paying more now than $2.6 billion. And nobody... Combined. Yeah, combined. They're paying more than that already. So why is the Wall Street Journal suggesting that they somehow have... have sources suggesting they're not willing to pay what they're paying now.

You know why. You know why leaks happen. It's in the best interest of the bidder to say to the person who has the asset, hey, we're not going to be able to meet your number. Nobody pays any attention to that. Everybody knows that's what's going on. And trust me, the NBA is not even thinking about $2.6 billion from Turner and ESPN. They're thinking about quite a bit more money.

And they don't care with the Wall Street Journal reports that they are willing to pay. that because they have more bidders, that's all it matters. And I'll go back, David. I didn't, when I, you were talking about Rothko, I'm talking about walking into the auction house and going, I'm going to buy this Rothko. I am going to buy it. The mark to market is $60 million, but I'm there holding up a paddle. And when somebody else bid 61, I'm going 62. That's all I'm saying.

That was my attitude. And that was my intention in those deals was to win. and because we needed that content. Turner and ESPN need this content. This is a really, really hard problem. So the context broadly here, though, as we imagine John Skipper, you know, in uncut gems, bidding,

raising the paddle up on the piece of art that he loves, is that there is now this larger concern that the pockets of the bidders, when it comes to cable television, David, are not as deep anymore. Or at least now we see inside, of the pockets in ways that we hadn't before. This has been the biggest news

of the past week or two for me has been finally ESPN, Disney, ABC, whatever you want to call it. Let's say ESPN and forgetting corporate ownership. They had to release, not had. Let me use the better verb. They did for reasons that we can tell you,

which is they're selling. Disney is selling ESPN. They want to. They need to raise cash. There is a lagging stack. stock price and they need to pay down debt. So they want to sell ESPN. So they release the financials that John would never release. He would never tell the truth to leagues.

He would never tell the truth to owners, commissioners, anybody. It would be nothing but a lie. And now... The vibes are getting worse. Now it's all in the public. So what the leagues are doing, whether it's Adam Silver, your buddy, which on a side note, the way you're carrying his water makes me laugh, Adam Silver is bending over backwards. He's rubbing stuff all over every joint.

fixing the All-Star game, doing stuff with load management. What do you think? He's doing that because he wants a better product. He's doing it because he wants the networks to be able to have something to attach to, to offer the money that he wants. Are you even willing to agree with that or not? No, no disagreement with that. But if everyone's willing to pay what he wants, why is he changing things to get more?

His objective is to get more. So he is going to put things in front of people to get them to pay more money. nobody, I don't recall ever being a big negotiation with a big league where they didn't bring some new toys to the table to try to push the prices up, right? More playoff teams. But Adam's looking for a triple. I don't actually know, again, we're all assuming that this reporting actually has first party sources.

I don't think Adam has actually ever said, I'm going to get three times. I don't think either ESPN or TNT has ever said, we can't. can't afford to buy this. Well, what's he told you? If he did tell me anything and he doesn't, because we both understand as friends that he's not going to put me in a position of either lying or revealing things

that he doesn't want revealed, and I wouldn't put him in that position. But what about the ratings here, right? There are toys on the table, and there's also a larger context of the NBA ratings not being, seemingly in the linear television fashion. Of course, the NBA can claim

that we are over-indexing on social and digital video. But the actual business of people watching games, how does this inform this negotiation? Look, you can go around and around the stuff all you want. The fact of the matter is, these are existential rights for ESPN. They have to have the NBA. And it's pretty close to existential T&T. I don't know if they have to have the NBA, but I think they do. Again, there's a lot of stuff here that we're assuming is being correctly reported.

They probably do have sources, but including what you just said, Dave, you said that ESPN is for sale. That's not what they've said. They have said what we're looking for is a minority partner to come in and give us some money to pay down the day. That's what we all say. Who can also help us. Everyone starts with, hey, we just would like to bring an unlimited partner. Oh, crikes, we can't get anyone to give us 10x on a limited partnership. All right, we'll give you a path to control.

That's the second step. That sometimes happens. I agree with you. But I don't know. And I did live within that place for 27 years. I don't know that I believe that the board and Bob won't to sell ESPN as a whole. They may be forced to because I'm not sure there is a minority partner. They also said they wanted a minority partner who would help them either grow their content or their distribution.

And again, I'm not quite sure what that does. You then, by the way, I do have to defend myself. I never had a say in whether ESPN's numbers were released or not. That was a board and a CEO decision. When I'd ask you, or anyone would ask you to tell us the truth about your financial model, you go to all your partners right now and say, open your kimono, tell me how you're doing. How are you monetizing nothing personal? You're happy to do it now because you're on the other side.

Absolutely. When we did it to you, you clammed up. Well, first of all, I couldn't do it. I worked for the Walt Disney company. What advantage would I get in telling you how much money we made? We've now reached the point where David no longer believes any of his arguments. No, I mean, I get why he did it. No, of course.

You would do the same thing. Of course I would. But can I give a larger... But I would admit it. Well, but you are right about... What you are right about is the Walt Disney Company did not want to release the ESPN numbers. One, they did not want the leaks to see those numbers because they would have asked for more money. And they did not want the distributors to see how much money ESPN was making.

So they aggregated the... media earnings. They also... This is a big point, what he said. I also actually believe they did not want the rest of the company to know how much of the value of the company was ESPN. And Wall Street tried for years and years to do the calculations of what... They try to back into it.

That's what analysts do, and they got it wrong because they don't have the info. For people who don't know, John, how big of the pie ESPN is, so to speak, how big of the pie is it? Yisbee was bigger during the 10s, the height of the submarket. The height of the submarket. Yisbian was a bigger, more profitable company than the studio and the parks put together. Which is staggering, right? I mean, unsurprising to you guys who've been swimming in these waters, all of this is water to you.

You're not surprised. But from the outside, it connects to the concern now about, here are these tech companies that have more money than God, right? Their pocket depth is not the concern. The concern, though, is that I presume they're seeing again to just reference opening night ratings that just happened, right? Last year, and again, this is just one metric. But last year, 2.984 million people watched Sixers Celtics, 3.55, watched Lakers

Warriors. That was last year. This year, 2.8 for Lakers Nuggets, 2.7 for Suns Warriors. So a decline of some degree. And so the question is, and this is Ethan's skepticism in the piece, is why would a tech company that thinks more like David Sampson, right, looking for every margin, not wanting to overpay by even a dollar, right? I want to mark this to market. Why they would replicate the largesse of the John Skipper regime. So I think you'll, We'll agree here when you were calculating, which you're saying you never calculated, but someone was calculating worth. I'm not sure that ratings actually factored anywhere into the calculation.

It's sexy. There are press releases about where we are. It feels bad when you're down. It feels great when you're up. And you could do it based on a percentage increase, which 100% increase from one is two, and that's still crappy because Marlins, we would do that all the time. Hey, our TV ratings, we're up 69%. Oh, my God, they're the worst in baseball.

baseball. Love a press release, David Sampson does. So do you agree, you didn't do that? You didn't care about ratings? We didn't get paid for ratings other than advertising, right? And if you look at the numbers just released by Walt Disney Company, they had just north of $10 billion in distribution fees. Those don't change a cent based upon ratings. They're going to get paid next year $10. point something billion dollars if nobody watches. My predecessor, who negotiated for rights before I got there, would frequently walk in with a whole bunch of data about ratings and where the leagues were and how many fans had showed up

and would try to convince the other party that the offer they were going to make was more than generous because that's what the numbers showed they deserved. Did you care about that at baseball? It's the same thing. It works both ways. Nobody cared. You never talk anybody into believing that you have the right position. That's one thing I never believed.

I'm never going to talk the guy across the table from me into. I'm actually right. You know, I really should get to pay you $5, not the seven you won't. I win a negotiation. No. The way I negotiate is I try to make everything the other party's idea. And I try to get them to want what I want and have it be that they actually want it when in fact they don't know what they want.

So I love doing that, and it's a great exercise to do. Yeah, the first thing I always ask in any rights meeting was, tell me what matters to you. What can I do for you? Because then I'm going to give them most of what matters of them anyway. They're going to say, oh, we want games on. Because it most of them won't matter to you. Yeah.

So I would walk in and say, what do you want? What matters do you? I need to understand your priorities so I can address them. The first meeting, we never threw out numbers. The first meeting was about finding out what they wanted. and then re-a-prone. Yeah, recapitia to them that, by the way, last meeting you said this matter to you. Here's in my offer to you, here's everything.

Of course, it just gets down to, as it does with an auction for a Rothko. It gets down to a paddle and money, which is why I say, and I don't, I think I come off maybe as more flipping and casual about it. I was very disciplined about it. I just never deluded myself that I was going to talk someone else into believing that what I wanted to pay was what they were going to take, or that they should take my money rather than somebody else's more money. That doesn't happen. Happened one time the Little League World Series

we got the rights when somebody else was prepared to bid more money because they thought it belonged on ESPN. Which I appreciated. Wasn't a lot of money, but I'm a FIFA dream come true. A FIFA dream come true. I was going to say. And Cinemax was never the same as a network for losing out on those rights.

All right, so the spirit of share and tell, I should continually brand what we're doing here, is that we each bring in a story that we love or obsessed with this week. That was a sports business obsession that clearly we continue to have. But I want to expand it so you guys can spread your wings a little bit. So, David, what is rattling around your weird brain? I've had a hard time this past couple weeks, as many of us have, especially being Jewish.

It's been difficult dealing with my kids, dealing with people with whom I work. the rise of anti-Semitism, the fact that I'm quite concerned with where things are in Israel and Gaza. And I'm trying to figure out how to come to grips with how I'm getting my information. And I'm struggling because I work with Coco's, the producer of nothing personal. And he spends half his day telling me that what I'm reading is wrong when I submit something to him, hey, is this really, is this, I've gotten screwed so many times. You're falling for the aggregators and the fake accounts.

Every day. And because I get my news on Twitter on X. And there was an article, there was the bombing, which this is a serious topic, the bombing in Gaza, the hospital bombing, where the thought was it was the IDF. And it turns out that it was a faulty bomb that was by Hamas. And the New York Times got itself involved in this. And they got involved because they reported something that turned out not to be true. And I was sensitive to it. not just as a American Jew.

I'm sensitive to it as a consumer of news, as a consumer of sports. Sports is easy for me to consume. There's a winner and a loser. I don't worry about a box score being incorrect because it's binary. The news is not binary, as much as people want to believe it,

and as much as there's conservatives and liberals, I am far more a centrist where I view that you can look at an issue from many different angles. And I'm trying to teach myself, and educate myself using the news. And what's bothering me greatly is I'm losing my sources. And I don't mean sources as an investigative reporter.

I mean sources who are teaching me and telling me what's happening. Because bad information in is bad information out. Well, so just to clarify, though, what you're, what you have been vexed by is the New York Times now per a vanity fair investigation. They acquired slack messages internally from the Times. What the Times messed up was the, the basic reporting of the truth. What really happened here under time pressure

and the fog of war, of course, but there was, at the very least, per Vanity Fair, like, extensive back and forth, John, about like, we should do this, no, let's do this. There was a squad of people who were deliberating as a newsroom does on how we're going to report this thing. Well, and I'll need to clarify

that I don't think anybody thinks Hamas fired the bomb. It was suggested that the Palestinian authorities, authority, which was a different terrorist group, may have fired the bomb. The U.S. government has investigated and said they believe definitively that Israel did not send the bomb, though they cannot definitively say who did fire the bomb. And, by the way, fire the bomb. It looks as though it was some sort of misfire, right?

Went up and went down. Yeah, went up and went down within Gaza. So it didn't come from somewhere else. The Hamas government was the one that said, this is the IDF. That was the source that they were relying. Correct. And that, of course, is a bad source of information. But to this day, nobody knows exactly what happened.

It clearly was a misfire within Gaza, but I don't think anybody knows. And the U.S., I think it's a CIA, but I'm not sure because my news sources may be a skewed, too. but some, the U.S. government investigated, says they support Israel's claim that they did not fire that bomb. I think that's generally accepted. I don't think people know who did or what happened exactly. It's not, I do blame the times for they should not have used Hamas as a source. That's a bad idea. However, it is a logical first thought that, oh my gosh, Israel is bombing Gaza now. A bomb went off in a hospital. Everybody knew that Hamas was hiding in hospitals and schools and so. it wasn't that surprising,

but it was surprising the times fell for Hamas pointing the finger quickly to try to turn public opinion against. That's the scary thing. So what's scary to me is that I'm not just talking about what's going on in Gaza. I'm talking about what's going on in Maine. I'm talking about what's going on in New York City,

and I have been jarred. I've been rocked to my foundation. You are part of the problem, of course. You're getting your news from Twitter. Why the hell are you getting your news from Twitter? And that's the conversation. David, like so much of, to me, I've been thinking about this a lot as I wrestle with the same things, how much was to follow this mass shooting, this bombing, all of this stuff.

On this place where also I know, per Elon Musk's directives almost, it's just harder to find truth. And it's the place where we do silly, unsurious things. And at the same time, we're at that same trough, we're shooting where we're eating. You know? Like, we, why? Well, that was kind of my point about getting your news. from Twitter.

But I do the same. I want to be clear, Twitter, this is the portal into which I have got in news for a decade. Now, 15 years I've been on this stupid platform. So Twitter, I want to point out, and I don't know that you're on, because when I tag you, you ignore me, and maybe that's just me. Twitter does not report news. Twitter is the platform, but I go to the New York Times website on Twitter.

It's the New York Times byline or CNN or it's Fox. The New York Times to David is effectively, and to me, often is a Twitter account. I still get the paper delivered. However, I'm a dinosaur in that way, but yes, on your phone. No, no, I actually get the hard copy. No, no, no, but I mean you're reading in practice on your phone as we all are. Everybody. And so it's that, John, that Marshall McLuhan quote, right, like the medium is the message. The medium of Twitter slash X slash whatever the it is, it's, it's an embodiment of how we are getting shorter. faster, faster, more attention, clickbaity, and in effect, dumber?

Well, everybody... Misled. More misled. I'm not sure it's dumber. I would say it's more misled. I think that's right. But we're all making the stake of assuming because of a lifetime of practice that things that are put in front of us are true.

Because for a long time, there weren't really mechanisms to effectively spread false information. You could lie to somebody, I assume you could read. write an op-ed piece to somebody. Now you can lie all the time, say whatever you want to say, and there's no consequence. And that's because these social media platforms have arisen, and they had hidden behind, I forget what it was called, the act in which they say, I'm not responsible for, I'm not a publisher. You can hold a paper accountable, right? You can hold a physical newspaper accountable for printing lies. Section 230. You cannot hold

Twitter accountable. We spend all of our time trying to convince them. You should have standards. You should have fact-checking. But of course, there is a large constituency that doesn't want that because they want to use these platforms to send misinformation. And you should not be getting your news on Twitter. But I used to view it differently, which is even in a newspaper like the New York Times,

they have an editorial section. That is opinion. It states it. This is not reporting the news. This is reporting the opinion. of the author. And now they are being combined in a way that makes it so I can't tell the difference.

Well, the flattening of all of it onto the same platform, essentially it's just harder to tell opinion from reporting, truth, from fact. And I wanna point out that we started this conversation, David, what's been rattling around your brain is the New York Times' error. So in deference to the internet, which I'm sure as a side of this argument,

is yelling, the New York Times just fucked up. And you're blaming Twitter? So I want to get to that part, right? I didn't blame Twitter, nor should you. It is the New York Times. I'm not going to ever blame. So this is where I'm in the minority for where I stand politically. I'm not blaming Elon Musk. I'm not blaming Twitter for my issues in figuring out what's real and what's not real. I'm blaming myself. And I'm blaming the fact that I rely on the New York Times as an example, as a source of information. And I expect them to go through this practice of vetting. But, John, I just want to point out to you because you're not on Twitter.

I'm not on Twitter, so I'm not ostracizing you personally. I am ostracizing the platform because I don't find any value to it. But The New York Times, I want to be careful here because, David, I just want to make sure you're not throwing out the baby with the bathwater, right? The idea that the New York Times, that any journalistic institution, John, has messed up. They mess up all of the time. The problem with being a media organization premised on delivering truth is that, When you mess up, it is very easy for someone to point out, you lied and you are a liar.

And you're no different from the people who lie like the aggregators and everything else. There's a big mistake between a mental error and a physical error in sports, right? What I didn't mean to say right, that's a terrible verbal tick. I do it all the time. Three, two, one. There's a big difference between a mental error and a physical error. Right. What you're describing the New York Times, there's corrections all the time.

Those are just things that happen where you have a year wrong. There's a problem. what we learned in the Vanity Fair article is process. That's not correction. That's process. But we want process. John, as a guy who funded a journalistic enterprise at ESPN, the result is bad and the process in this case specifically was also bad,

but the process writ large of standards, newsroom, fact checking, editing, reporting, that's the only way forward to me is we need to save that. Yes, we do. And the problem is you have a large constituency right now, which actually doesn't want to tell the truth. We just, we have a new speaker of the House who doesn't believe Joe Biden won in 2020. Doesn't believe that there's climate change.

It doesn't believe burning fossil fuels causes any damage to anything. You're missing the biggest one that he doesn't believe it, that women's bodies are their own. Yeah, I want to go back and actually defend the New York Times a tiny bit. They made a mistake. but it's generally a credible news source. I believe that 95% of what I read in the New York Times is accurately reported.

You're right, David. They have a lot of stuff that they say, this is an opinion. I'm Gail Collins, and here's what I think about the new speaker. That's opinion. But most of what they report, I believe they reported pretty accurately and that they care and that they want to tell the truth.

It's a liberal slant. It's no question that they have a predisposed point of view. They do. Everybody does. The sort of notion that it's possible, in journalism to be completely and utterly objective and only tell the truth. It is, this is not your goal. But this is, it is your goal.

But this speaks to, and a striving towards a goal with the transparency of how that goal is being achieved, which is to say, with the disclosure of bias whenever possible, with the disclosure of how your process works, right? Like, to me, the big catch-22 for media organizations is that they're, sales pitch is so grand. It's we deliver the truth. And that itself is a false advertisement. It's really, we do our best as an organization full of fallible, biased people to deliver the closest thing to the truth in the fog of war and confusion on incredibly complicated subjects. Not as catchy as democracy dies in darkness, admittedly. But it's kind of

what we need. Not kind of, it's outright what we need. We have it. We just don't, people don't accept it. There are organizations which are trying. I believe, I believe NBC News is trying to report just

the way you just said it. There are credible sources and there are non-credible sources. And smart people can pick and choose among them and find places where they believe they're getting better reporting. It's reporting. It's not It's not even, it is news to a certain extent, but it's also just reporting.

Except when Brian Williams makes it up. So, but this is where it's, the false advertisement is a problem. When you can point to any, when anybody can point to examples of you lying, when your premise is complicated monologue about delivering truth, then you become a liar. And you need, it's, it's almost like being, um, it's like a closer who can't blow a safe. It's like a goalkeeper who can't allow a goal. Like the standard a news organization is held to, because of its own standards, is always higher than the person they're directly competing with, which now in sports, for instance, can be literally ball sack sports, which fools David all over the time, apparently. Pilots can't crash a plane.

You don't get one strike. You don't get a blown save. You don't get a goal. But what if that plane is the thing we need to carry us to our next location, that same plane? It is, and we still don't accept anything other than perfection. The thing about the truth is that there's nothing to agree on. It's just true. But give us a body, David, that has existed where there is consensus around...

The day of the week. There's certain things that we all accept, no matter where we stand, that are just true. And we don't question them. But it's eroded over time where now the line, the bar of what we were willing to agree as true, is bottoming out. It's 12.47 p.m. Eastern right now. What time is it in Tokyo? 147 a.m.

What day? It is... The next day. Tomorrow. Yeah. I think the plane has crashed. All right, so I promised a lighter subject. And so, John, what have you brought us to bring lightness and mirth?

Well, as an elderly American, a patriotic American, I have seen in the Washington Post, a story that says, as older Americans push retirement age, what's next for younger workers? And this purports to explain that our country is now looking out of COVID for mature, older leaders. And it cites, you know, Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and et cetera, et cetera. It's not right to start with Mitch McConnell. Yeah, Biden, Trump, undermining the argument itself. Terrible.

But this to be is a whole much ado about nothing. Really? Yeah. Look, at the turn of the 20th century, the median age for a human being was 40 years old. That's how long people lived. That was a lifespan. It's 80 years when you start the 21st century, the average life expectancy is about 80. It's about doubled.

It's not doubled because science and technology have helped us figure out how to live longer. it's because science and technology and medicine have helped to solve some of the things that killed us early. Right? In the Bible, it says you're going to live to be three score and ten. You've already cited that, or maybe that was Abraham Lincoln, but maybe it's him quoting the Bible. Often confused.

Yeah. Never. But it's mostly about people just living longer and living longer, healthier lives and deciding that it's more fun to keep working than it is to quit. Now, this is a luxury that lots of working class people don't have. right you're working construction you're not deciding to push off your retirement age after we're operating a jackhammer for 30 for 30 years but you're doing something fun like we're doing here right now you just keep doing I'm 67 uh I don't think about retiring I it's a little personal for me as well my dad retired at 55 and he was never happy or not working than he was working

and so I learned so many negatives so what was that he was never happy or not working he's upset he retired at 55 yeah he was He regretted retiring at 55. Well, we look at Hollywood now, by the way, in terms of people with the luxury of choosing, do I continue to work, quote-unquote, work. Robert De Niro is 80, right? Harrison Ford is 81. He's Indiana Jones still.

There is this research group, the National Research Group in the Washington Post story, which pointed out, man, the average age of the actors in the top 20 actors that people say they want to see in a theater, the average age is 58.2. And are they all male? Because I don't think... Only three women made the top 20.

Julie Roberts, 55, Sandra Bullock, 59, Angelina Jolie, 48. So, of course, also a male bias when it comes to this specific category. Big time. By the way, I did count. In this article,

there are 27 mentions of older men and two mentions of older women. So, yeah, this may just be about older guys like me, not wanting to give up power and status. I didn't take it as people are loving working and they want to keep working. There's a whole group of people who are forced to keep working.

I agree with that, but this is about Martin Scorsesey Harrison Ford. It's about the gerontocracy. It's about the gerontocracy. Yes, but I was telling you how I took the article. I'm thinking about people working older for a different reason. You probably read it on Twitter, and consequently it was just what... It's behind a paywall. I didn't read it at all. You read it aggregated by Dove Kleiman.

It was just what some Jumoke fault was all it was. I don't know that word, but I just think I shouldn't say it. It's a word that a 67-year-old man. loves. It's a great word, jamoke. Just means a knucklehead. Jimoke. Okay. But the gerontocracy, right, the idea. And I remember, I was on, this is a real look at me, Louis moment, but I was on MSNBC the day after Diane Feinstein died, right, working at age 90-something. And I felt rude pointing out that it feels insane that anybody would be working at age 90, let alone the people in charge of our country. And so the gerontocracy, right? How do we feel about it as just the trend line? I get the

actuarial tables have changed for humanity, for the species. But in terms of like who we are turning to for the leadership, I guess literally the leadership here, that's a little worrisome. Though you could argue we're not turning to them. They're refusing to go away. Yes. Wait a minute. They're elected. Hold on. Are they elected? I must have it wrong. They must not be elected. Some of them. They are elected, but as you know, being reelected in safe seats, which is what most of them are now, is a foregone conclusion if you're in the right party.

And that's what happened with the fact that our political leadership is this old, I'll actually separate. I don't care that our action heroes are old. It doesn't matter. Agreed. Because it doesn't really have any consequences. But it does matter that the people running our country are too old. And while I am the oldest person here,

easily. I do think there should be mandatory retirement age for justices and for representatives, and even for the presidency, right? And while we're getting to choose them, we're going to be choosing between an 81-year-old and a 78-year-old. Only if we make that our choice. They're primaries. Well, you and I, but to be fair, while we can pretend that there may be democracy in action and somebody, a bunch of people might go to the polls and vote for Nikki Haley instead of Trump or vote for Pete Bodie instead of Joe Biden, they're not going to.

What's the mandatory retirement age of metal arc? None. My intention here is to stay in front of everybody's career else's to be a blocker for everyone else's career aspirations for at least 20 more years. You're a dream come trail. So that's the cackling of a guy. I noticed this in the middle of the show.

You're taking a photo of that. Because I couldn't believe it. It says Skipper slash mid-guest. That's right. Like he has his own name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's mid-guests, mediocre guests, and then the greatest guest. I'm not only blocking other people from moving up in their career.

I'm staking a claim to this chair right here. I'm guest one. You're Skipper. Or mid-guest. No, you're not mid-guest. Okay. We're going, let's go. Well, this is how we end the show, as we say what we found.

out today and David Samson has found out that the labels next to our chairs remind him, shockingly, of the hierarchy of this company in which he feels incredibly devalued. But what did you actually find out today, David? Wait, are we going to edit that? Because that is actually what I found out. I thought that was the whole point of what I found out because I sure didn't find that anything about him. So what I found out is the retirement and the hierarchy and the ego.

is definitely making me examine my future. Well, I'm definitely in your way, career-wise. No question about that. John, what did you find out today on popular, what I found out today is that David Sampson, a very, very bright man, is busy getting his news from Twitter. Guilty is charged. No, it just feels wrong.

It's like, oh, I'm getting my news from the 7-11. That's right. Because that's where everybody goes to get beer. I might as well get my news there. So, sh-h, everybody's going to that Twitter, and they're putting in what they think. I bet I could get some news out of this. That must make me a pom-oke. Is it pom-oque?

Jum-Oke. It's a J-M-Oke. Is that the definition when you get your news from 7-Eleven? 7-Eleven. Hey, buddy, can I get a pack of cigarettes, and can it get a scratch-off? And tell me, what's happening with the speaker? John Skipper's Jamoke Southern voice is an unbelievable thing that I cannot

Hey buddy, how about that Mark Mike Jackson? I cannot believe we've waited this long to get to that to get to John's Jamok voice What I found out is that deep inside this kimono Next to these two older rich men We're skinny man It's not a very deep kimono No, I was going to say there's a lot of room

What kind of depth have you got the kimono? You know, it's a pretty surface-level deal. Not even 250 combined. Together, though, there is a lot of room for love. No question. Is that what you learned today? Yeah, I was trying to make a heartwarming thing, and David is vomiting up all of his vibes.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out, a show that has way more producers than David Sampson's show. And they are Michael Antonucci, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rachel Miller-Hawood, Ethan Shrier, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tuminello, studio engineering by RG Systems, post-production by NGW Post, and our theme song, of course, by John Bravo. We will talk to all of you next week.