Pablo Torre Finds Out - Share & Tell with Katie Nolan, Dan & Pablo

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

Are you part of the silent majority of bad sleepers? Try dressing up like Darth Vader already! What ever happened to the steroid police? We are here for a lower moral high ground! And are you, by chance, cinematically in love? Because the hardest things in life make you feel right. Also: centaur portraits, mouth-breathers, A-Rod’s teeth, and holes.Further reading:Why sportspeople are taping over their mouths (Sarah Shephard)https://theathletic.com/4844743/2023/09/11/why-sportspeople-taping-over-mouths/The Biogenesis Files (Mike Fish)https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/36055058/biogenesis-america-tony-bosch-peds-fallout-10-years-later 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 don't like to close off holes that I might need. Right after this ad. You're listening to Draft King's Network. How long has it been? Since what? Since we got together.

Oh, a long time. When's the last time the three of us were hanging out? Would it be the wedding? Would it be the last time that all three of us saw each other? In person, yes. Definitely. But surely we've, well, yeah, no, it's the wedding. I was wearing an N95 the last time I think we did like pandemic HQ together.

Huh. It's good to see you, Dan. Likewise, Katie. I can't wait to get started. Thank you for being on with us. Thank you for doing this. Yeah, of course. Thank you for drinking a nice glass of milk before we got started.

Yeah. It's that bad? It's that bad that I've got so much gray. I love it. on my beard. Oh my God. I love it. An age joke right off the top, Katie. Yeah, you know what it is. You know what it's always been. I think it looks great. You look distinguished. That's not an insult. You look distinguished. Bravitas. Yeah. I respect my elder. You look like you drank a glass of milk. It's never a compliment. At least you don't look like a glass of milk, which is what I'm working with over here. I say my

lighting is different than yours, but I've been assured this is what I look like in real life. I'm here to assure both of you that here at Pablo Torre finds out, we're doing both of your body is good. Thank you so much. Okay, I can go first. Which is good because last time I did this show, I didn't really bring anything. I realized in retrospect that what I brought was my fiancé. And what a great thing to bring, but I didn't really bring any news.

I mean, bringing a human is truly the paragon of share and tell. Yeah. Well, wait a minute, though. She said I didn't really bring any news. and hearing from over here, I brought my fiancé, that is news. Is it? That is not something that you had informed me on. That's my topic.

You didn't know this? This was so long ago, Dan. You definitely knew this. Congratulations. Thank you so much. We're going to save that for my topic, though. Oh, okay, yeah, because we're going to get to it. We're going to talk about, we're going to get real intimate.

Oh, boy. I don't. Can I move over? Really? No. Uncomfortable. Okay. Speaking of uncomfortable,

what I want to talk about is I saw there was an article in the athletic and also a clip from Logan Paul's podcast about people are taping over their mouths when they sleep or when they do exercise. Do we have the clip? Do we want to play it?

Clip, please. Let's play a clip of a Logan Paul Buck. I think sleep is the most important thing in the world. Damn it. Damn it. It's always sleep. So to sleep, good, just simple kind of things, blue blocking glasses, shutting out all the signals and everything. That's what I'm talking about. The bedroom and everything.

I think is really important. What time you put those glasses on? Normally three hours before bed. Oh, my God. Nasha breathing is the way to go when you're doing sports. Then you should try to tape your mouth then. At night. No, now.

Why not? Or when you train? Right now on the podcast? It would be a bit difficult. No, no, no, I've actually done that. I've actually bought tape to help, like, make sure I'm not a mouth-to-be- I have it. I sleep with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the new thing.

Okay, so that's Erling Holland, if you don't know. He's from Manchester City, a soccer player, football player. It doesn't feel like a good idea to me. The taping your mouth while sleeping. The taping of your mouth closed, especially while sleeping, which is a time when you're not really in control of much. It just feels like a factor that could become a problem without you being able to divert it from being so.

You know what I mean? Blocking off an entire way of breathing. How dare you impugn Logan Paul's scientific credibility? I know. I know he is our greatest scientific mind. But the idea, though, that there are a bunch of bros contemplating sleep trying to get their sleep better to me is both funny and also like, resident.

Yeah. Because I know a lot of... I think you guys, I'm curious where you guys land on the sleep spectrum because everybody, including high, high-level athletes like Erling Holland,

and also like, my wife... My wife. My wife. They're figuring out, Dan, like what to do about sleep. And I know that Dan... What weird stuff do you do, Dan? You just heard a clip where there's some weird stuff proposed.

What are you up to? I have had... No issue sleeping the entirety of my life until the last three years where the stresses rose to such a point that it is very hard now for me to get the kind of restful sleep that I want. And now the place that I am is I have basically gotten to the point where I can sleep straight through from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. But I've got to keep those rhythms going. and obviously this isn't professional athletes or anything like that. But there is no disputing that rest is a hugely important part of recovery

and keeping these guys in optimal shape. I use an apnea machine just to help me with the breathing. Well, what happened there? Was I just apnea shamed? No, no, no, no. No shame. Everybody I know has sleep apnea and uses a machine. Pablo and I were talking about this before we started,

that it seems to be a thing that's, I don't think anybody doesn't know somebody who uses a sleep apnea machine at this point. Which is weird because I need Dan to describe, I mean, both of your Dan and this Dan, this Dan, describe what the sleep apnea machine is like for people who maybe don't have a friend or a loved one that is strapping the Zonat Night.

Yeah, well, I feel totally ridiculous and not attractive at all to my wife because I'm taking something that I'm putting in my nose that goes over my head and then it's a tube to a machine that is plugged into the wall that helps with extra oxygen and make sure that I'm not waking myself up with snoring or getting in the way of the deep sleep that you need to get. I mean, I also wear like a ring that measures how good my REM sleep is just because I really, I think that this, that sleep, if you do not get it right,

can be something that really harms your health. And so at this age, at 54 years old, I want to do as many things as I can to ward off the Grim Reaper. And so you end up looking like a guy who is a sci-fi Grim Reaper. Yeah, plugged into the Matrix. Like a prisoner on the con airplane,

like Darth Vader. Like that's what, but truly like, so, but I don't want to spill your secrets, Katie. But like, but just like you don't wear a sleep apnea. No. But where are you on the sleep spectrum as you sleep next to your own Darth Vader? Who tried with a sleep apnea mask and could not do it. So we're trying other methods for him.

I suck at sleeping, but once I'm there, once I'm out, I can sleep uninterrupted for, I mean, I could go for like 10 hours. I try to wake myself up. The hardest part for me is falling asleep and waking up. Those are the two difficulties for me. Once I'm out, I don't have the problem that my fiancé. has, which is that he's constantly waking up and then trying to fall back to sleep, but he can fall asleep at the drop of a pin.

I keep myself awake running through thoughts. So like sleep sucks for me, but I can hit that deep restorative sleep that I think is important for health. So like I don't worry about it in that way. Mine's more, I think, psychological. How does this work, though? Because I was of the impression.

Are you someone who's just not good at time management? Because I thought that part of the reason that you were late, is because that you would be famously late is because of how you slept because you sleep like a hibernating bear. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, let's just note, I got here before Pablo today. This has been very embarrassing. Well, yes, I am late a lot of the time. Yeah, I'd say for the stuff that we do, it's mostly because you guys completely discount the fact that we have to paint a face on and the world is going to judge us

based on how that face looks. I didn't mean to bring up a sore subject. I just thought that you were late because you slept like a bear. I do sleep a lot. You know how much we sleep? As late as I can all the time. It takes to look like this.

How dare you? Yeah. This too. I mean, this is me putting an effort and it doesn't look like it at all. But yeah, I just drank a bunch of milk. I can't sleep. So did I. I could sleep forever.

And I get it. Like this whole theory of this taping your mouth closed and the things they're saying, which is that like breathing and sleeping are two huge parts of living, it seems when you boil it down, that's very obvious. It seems like we're idiots forever even thinking this was like in. advanced thing to wrap our brains around. Exactly. But, but there is to me this, it seems strange how widely we are spreading this, you tape your mouth closed when you sleep. When we're talking about athletes, like these are athletes looking for an edge for their peak performance. And I get

it. We've seen athletes do weird stuff throughout history, throughout the history of sports to try to be a little bit better than the next guy. But I don't know that like average Joe, should be taping his mouth closed at any point. I mean, these articles, like this Sarah Shepard article in The Athletic, talks about how they do it when they're training, when they're, like, working out to try to retrain your body to go through your nose. Nose breathing is better than, I guess, we've always made fun of mouth breathers, but in this case, it's actually a pejority for people who are suboptimally training,

breathing, living. But aren't they trying to also improve generally their stamina, right? If you're using fewer places where you're getting oxygen from, you're making yourself somebody who can run longer periods of time because you're someone who's trained yourself to breathe just through your nose. I can imagine, though, Katie, if you're sitting here telling us that your thoughts consume you, that some of this just feels claustrophobic,

that, wait a minute, when I'm sleeping, I don't have control of anything. And you're telling me, I'm going to take off a very easy source to breath, which is something I need to live. Now the next step is if Dan gets mad at me, he pinches my nose. I sleep like a bear. What happens after that?

I'm dead. I'm dead. So I don't like to close off holes that I might need. You know what I mean? It just doesn't seem like a safe thing for everyone to try. Clip that. We're going to make that go viral. Quick side note. Aggregate that part.

Katie keeps her holes open. Yep. Because she might need them. She might need them. She might need them. You never know. But yeah, to your point, they do say that it. I mean, it's the phrase they use to describe this as terrifying to me,

but that when they're training athletes with this closing off your mouth, it's you're, they get you to the point where you feel, I think they call it oxygen hunger, which is when your body is, it reminds me of what they tell you happens when you're drowning, which is that even if you're underwater, what you really die from is the asphyxiation because your body goes, I need air,

and it breathes, and it breathes in water, and then you die. So they say that they try to push your body to the point where it feels really hungry for oxygen, which means that the CO2 in your blood is high, which means that you're adapting your blood to functioning with more CO2, which means you will need, in turn, less oxygen. Which is fine for an athlete. I just don't think, like, my dad needs to try that.

I grew up next to NYU Hospital, so I just, like, don't wake up. I can fall asleep immediately. What I am told is that, according to sources, I am a terrible snorer. I am just always making disgusting, just like something's wrong. Something's wrong in their noises.

Like stopping breathing noises. That's what Liz tells me. You need to get this checked out. I trust her. What kind of journalist are you with sources a second ago and then you just give up the goods a second later? What are you doing?

You're supposed to protect your sources. Damn, don't ever be his source. There's a joke about Watergate that I want to make but I don't want that to go viral at this point in terms of sources. I said the holes thing. Yeah. I just can't go deep throat when I'm talking about my wife. The point being,

in terms of my sources, that I am told that I need to go and get this checked out. Previously, I was sort of reveling in the idea that I had this ultimate privilege. Because there's like a, Dan, there's like a silent majority, I feel like, of people are friends who are really bad at sleeping. And I took this for granted forever. And now I'm realizing that while we're not athletes, not only is your mental health tied to this. Your day-to-day ability to function is something that I never really had. to think about until I realized I might have also lost the lottery in terms of breathing good.

One of the things, if indeed people are sleeping more poorly than they have been, one of the things that they recommend people who know about these things is get the hell out of your devices, man, before you go to sleep. So we should talk about this because we were on his group chat last night trying to figure out like, what do we want to talk about today on Share and Tell this segment? I'm trying to make happen on my show. And Dan was like, sorry, guys, devices unplugged. Talk to you later.

I was very impressed by that. Which I truly know to be a place of, like, is it newfound discipline, Dan? Because you're not somebody, I think, who always did this. I wouldn't say that it's a great discipline. I would just say that a couple of hours before 10 p.m. I need to now, like an old person, start doing some regimented things that I never had to think about before in order to get the proper rest so that I can function proper. the next day. None of these things that I'm saying

were things I ever thought about before I was 50. Like, never had to consider them. Wish I didn't have to consider them now. But the addiction to the devices, the blue screens, what they were talking about where, excuse me, five-dollar fine. The glasses, yes, of shutting out light three hours before so that your body is being told three hours before bed, we are slowly going into a restorative state

where, you know, the science of healing will begin. Yeah. I don't do that at all. Most people don't. No, I know. But they all say they do, and they all go like, you gotta. And during the pandemic, I bought those blue blocker glasses. Dan and I each got a pair.

I didn't. They didn't feel like they were doing anything. It's the thing. If you don't understand what it is anyway, and then you buy it from Amazon, you can't really go like, well, this doesn't, work. So it just felt like it wasn't really working. I was looking at my

hand the other day and noticed I have that pink... What? You don't stare at your hands sometimes? Just like noticing stuff. That's the weed. That is so the weed. I was like... That is so the weed. Dude, I have a shelf on my pinky for my phone. That little bone that like that thing where you rest

where you rest this is just like this thing. Like there's a ridge. That's evolution. But it's the it's the evolution of like an animal that's about to be extinct. Yeah, an animal that's going to turn into a computer. It's the competitive, it's the evolutionary maladaptation. Truly.

Well, so have you read Sapiens? Of course. Because I'm just reading it now. I'm way behind. By of course, I also mean, to be clear, I bought it. Yeah, exactly. Everybody had it, but it's so thick that it's very intimidating. But I have time.

I got nothing but time right now. So I started cracking it open. And what's fascinating to me is that it said that every, throughout history, most things that are evolutionarily successful, which just means that you made more of,

like more DNA copies. So the thing that like chickens are very evolutionarily successful, but their happiness now is way low compared to the way a chicken was when it was wild and like living and doing whatever it wanted as opposed to now like living in masses

in like these huddled, whatever. Same thing with humans. Most things we've done to help us evolution are actually bad for our quality of life and have affected us negatively. So the things are less happy. Pablo is finding shit out. Chickens are less happy, Katie?

And humans definitely are less happy. Well, like the agricultural revolution, which is when we domesticated animals and like wheat, or you could say wheat domesticated us, it actually like made our lives less happy, made our brains smaller, made us change our lives in a way that helped other people profit

but never actually helped farmers. You guys should read sapiens. You should quit your jobs and don't find a new one for a while and read thick books. I like the idea that this entire time I have been numb to the plight of the chicken.

Yeah. You're not paying enough attention to the chicken, and it knows. We're not paying enough attention to the fact that all of us are addicted to the devices and it's making us unhappier. Like, that seems to be something

we should be paying more. attention to. Wait, I want to, before we get out of the sleep topic, I want to ask about how this all affects your dreams or your nightmares. Is there any relationship? Like, Dan, what's your, what's the thing that that haunts you when it comes to nightmare stuff? And I wonder if this intersects with sleep stuff. I don't do a ton of horror dreaming. When I get to REM sleep, I do find, you know, some dreaming that is unusual and stuff. But, and this is probably less fun than where it is that you want to go with this, but given what my last year has been at the side of the deathbed of my brother,

what has been creeping in now sometimes that wasn't there before, and I'm sorry for this to take a dark turn, but the way my life has been going lately, some of this stuff creeps in just about everywhere, some visions of him the last year when he was in pain and, you know, and crawling through it, some of that stuff has made an appearance, which is obviously deeply embedded in just what my life has been the last year. In my dreams, I can fly.

You are always high. You're high in your dreams. You're high when you're looking at your hand. Everything you do is propelled. by marijuana. My recurring dream is I'm in the backseat of a car, but I need to drive it from the backseat. Oh, that's...

There's nobody in the front seat, and there's a cop coming, and I'm afraid he's going to find out I'm driving it from the back seat, which is impossible. I'm no psychotherapist, but I feel like all of our dreams are pretty f*** on the nose?

Yeah, pretty obvious what we're going through. All right, Dad. What is your topic that you've brought us here today. I enjoyed some work that Mike Fish did for ESPN. He was, I'm going to say, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of

Biogenesis, which is... A Miami story. Well, it's one of my favorite Miami stories because it's so Boka strip mall, orange people, buffoonery, where you see that, like, the golden age of baseball of Manny Ramirez, A. Rod, Ryan Braun, all these people, that it was just unholy boobery at every turn.

And if you seem like Billy Corbyn's documentary Screwball, you know some of this stuff. Baseball was in no way equipped to handle anything happening here. But I just wanted to talk to you guys about performance enhancers because one of the things I'm always mentioning on the show is we were so outraged at Arod. And he does this big show before the year-long suspension of going to New York, lying through his teeth, going on the shows, kicking a briefcase and a meeting with the commissioner, all of it, theatrics.

All of us were pissed off because he lied to us in the betrayal. And all he had to do to erase all the outrage and get every sports broadcasting team to want to employ him is date J-Lo. And he fixed all of it. And so I just, I wanted to talk about performance enhancement 10 years later with one of the most Miami sports candles you will ever see. It's a great, it's a great story. This is like a 10-part series or something. and all of it's pretty juicy. Like, just as a matter of just brief preview,

like LeBron's name is in this because apparently Tony Bosch, the biogenesis PED dealer that Dan was alluding to, the Miami guy, he was sending some stuff to one of LeBron's associates. Now, LeBron has been cleared of all of this, but the point is the tentacles sort of extend everywhere. And I bring that up, not just because, wow,

a salacious headline that is aggregated, but because it makes me wonder whether the outrage on this in general is anywhere close to where it used to be. Like 10 years ago, Dan, I remember being at Sports Illustrated, and there was a beat. Selina Roberts and David Epstein, two great investigative reporters,

were on the A-Rod beat. Like, this was a thing we would crusade about morally. It felt important. And all I can think about now is how we just had a conversation about all of the weird shit we're doing to improve ourselves. And I'm like, I don't know if our tolerance

for this stuff has changed consciously. but it just feels like we care less in general about the weird things we all try to do to get an edge to improve our performance on the field as human beings. I don't know if the morality, if the sheriff policing steroids anymore, is anything but a curiosity when it used to be like an outrage. Yeah, I feel like I also wonder if the younger generations care or if they don't care at all. I mean, I know people who didn't care at all when it was happening who are like, whatever, I want to see as many bombs as I can in a game.

So if you want to take PEDs to get stronger and hit them, then fine. It's always just weird to me. Baseball is an interesting forum to have these kinds of discussions because I feel like baseball is full of people who love to bring up the, like, sanctity of the game and the morality of the game as if like this is a PEDs is a line of demarcation between a clean game and a dirty game, which completely ignores the fact that the game has been dirty. since it became a business.

And so it sort of... Literal filth was used to like grease the ball for the planet. Yeah, exactly. Like it's still, it just is talked about in this way that's like, oh, you've taken a PED, you will never see the Hall of Fame. And people who have that as their stance love to talk about that as their stance. And I just don't, it just all feels phony to me. My issue with PEDs would be like if it's not good for the athlete.

Like if ultimately it's bad for them and that we, the sports viewing public, have pushed these people into a world where they have to, like, alter themselves and push themselves too much, that they end up breaking themselves and hurting themselves. Outside of that, I don't, I don't care. I think a lot of people who watch sports don't totally understand that the people who are playing sports are going through such a meticulous workplace regimen, science. They're doing so many things to be great that you, yourself and me, we don't work in workplaces that are nearly that difficult and disciplined. And what you're watching isn't what you think is Little League, your coach, coach shoe.

It's not that at all. It is obsessive, compulsive work. I'm going to be better than this other guy in a competition for money. To think that those people getting to the top of survival of the fittest on money would choose pharmacies that offer healing and fountains of youth to keep getting to the money is not only not an outrage, it's the most logical thing in the world for human beings to do to keep trying to compete. And so if you can find the science to help you, I lost my Hall of Fame vote because I didn't understand the moral outrage around me that still keeps Barry

Bonds out of the Hall of Fame when all he was trying to do was keep up with Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa, who were never as good as he was. Wait a minute. When Dan says, I lost my Hall of Fame vote. I believe you're kind of yada, yada yadaing over what it is that you did to lose your Hall of Fame vote. Yeah, it wasn't just like a thing. Please recap exactly what happened. I sold my vote to Deadspin, sold in quote marks because they were looking for, what are you laughing about? No, nothing. Keep going. And they were just looking for somebody to do it. They had somebody who was going to do it. I'll say, I sell them. I'll be your backup plan. I'll be your backup plan. And I just wanted to make the moral stand of, you can't keep these. Please.

guys out of the Hall of Fame because you sports writers are suggesting to me that if I gave you the ability to write better and make more money by smearing some cream on your muscles that you wouldn't do it. So I just didn't like the sanctimony. And so I just made a cartoonish exit. And what was one of the funnier things about it to me is ESPN got mad at me. They're like, why didn't you do it on ESPN? And I'm like, because then it wouldn't. work. I had to do it with an entity that was that was, you know, trying to make fun of the whole cathedral of sports. Right. I mean, look, I, so I'm trying to now muster, now that I realize who Dan is in this story, I'd forgotten about this, until he reminded me of it just then.

I'm trying to think about who I should care about, though. Who are the victims in the PED's story? Because if we're going to go moral relativism on this, like, and I get, by the way, the job insecurity, right? It reminds me, tangent, right? It reminds me of like the Tunga Vailoa concussion story. Like, the point is that dude wanted to do it to himself because everybody in sports fears losing their job, right? We can demand things of them to be better, to be more careful, impose rules. Doesn't matter. That guy wants to protect his livelihood in a way that honestly is unrelatable to people outside of that insane ecosystem that Dan described. But in terms of that ecosystem, there are like these critters along the floor of the rainforest who are the, I guess,

are naive and are like, it's the Doug Landvilles. You know, it's the guys who are like, I'm not doing it. I see sports as pure. I'm going to be, and I don't, I wouldn't even call it sanctimonious as much as Dan talked about the cathedral. I would just call it they have principles. And they lose. Those guys who don't lie, who don't do this stuff, they lose. When you're watching, a football game on Sunday. Do you think anybody listening to this understands the amount of sculpting that goes into that wide receiver's route,

the amount of precision and science and discipline and practice and coaching over years that goes into, that guy's not just fast and running. That guy is fast and running eight and a half yards because he's done it a million times and he's got to be this much faster than the guy covering him. And they're all looking for those advantages because this much of an advantage in that sport,

get you more money. I don't think they understand, but I also think a lot of sports and sports viewing and sports fandom is built on this idea that they do. I think we've all worked in sports long enough to know that there are plenty of people out there who think they can do it better than certain people can do it, whether it's our jobs or the jobs of the athletes themselves.

So I feel like that disconnect is there, but it's kind of innate. Would any of them object, if I tell them, hey, you know how hard it was for Peyton Manning, right? to get to be as good as he was. And you know that he won a Super Bowl at the end in a season where he had nine touchdowns and 17 interceptions,

and his neck could barely move. Do you think that if I say to them, hey, a little HGH for the neck? Any issues? Like, are you need Peyton Manning to be moral pizza seller in the commercials? Or he just needs help with the pain? I just think it's the thing that we've, that was an obvious bad

in a world of vague, gray moral ground where it was like PEDs. PEDs are bad. So we love to say athletes should push themselves. And if you're hurt, you should play through the pain. And we love to see a guy who we love at the end of like after the hockey season ends, after the Stanley Cup is won, they go, hey, by the way, Bergeron had three cracked ribs and had separated a disc in his, and everyone goes, oh, that's so great.

We love that he does that. But then the opposite side of that is like, hey, something that could have helped them play through that would be if they took a little bit of this recovery drug. And then it's like, PED? No, bad. And so it's like sort of a little bit of reveling in playing through the pain and hating that they can alleviate it. I think if we're all being honest,

like sports fans in general, you want sports to be a place where guys are desperate to do this stuff. You want them to feel maxed out on every sort of ethical compromise because you want... Because the number one thing, Dan, about the relationship between fans and athletes is

a fan demands that an athlete care about this more than they do. which is really hard because it's the most irrational thing how much we love sports. And so what does that mean? It means that at the end of the day, you want someone to go home and inject, have cousin Uri, Arod's, you know, Lucy Goosey cousin, yeah, inject some stuff into his ass. You want that, even if you're saying to yourself intellectually, I'm against this. In fact, you would be mad if the part of Arod that wanted to compete didn't want to compete

in a way that jeopardized his health, the ethics, the sport itself. I would love that press conference where the person gets caught cheating and comes out with just PR people and is like, do you realize this is a symbol for just how much I care? I care more.

I care so much more than you fans whose bodies don't hurt the way mine does. I care so much that I compromised principles that I didn't want to compromise because I want to win for you, the sports fan, who thinks he cares more than I do. I would much rather that.

That's how, A-Rod could get me to like him. It's just that. Come out and say that. To not be a total liar at every turn? No, I would never do that. And then we find out later like, oh, you were queen for a day and you told everybody how you did that. We should admit.

I mean, we don't have to admit it. A-Rod admitted it now. Like, A-Rod's a snitch. Like, we can laugh at that too, by the way. Dan, it's ridiculous. What are your favorite details in all of the reporting? Because, yeah, A-Rod turning over everybody while, again, I will remind you, getting the longest suspension in the sport and kicking over a briefcase theatrically in a conference room where he was

obviously lying about everything just for show. Arod being a guy who is starring in a movie about Arod, who is bad at acting, playing the role of Arod is endlessly funny to me. I like that he was illegally getting Cialis in Viagra. It's like you could probably just get that through legal channels. I guess it makes sense if you're getting drugs from somebody to be like, hey, while we're doing this. Can you toss in something for my to enhance all my performance while we're at it?

Yeah, it just feels like, man, I don't know. I know that at the time he wasn't sleeping with J-Lo, but to know that a guy who went on to sleep with J-Lo needed help in that department is just a, it's a funny. We're going to clip out Katie also saying, hey, while you're at this, can you throw in something for my

shit? Yeah. You're welcome for the clip. Shame, A-Rod. Don't do that. I'm not, I'm not. But you ask what the funniest detail is and it's that. Why are we? You should absolutely. shaming him. I am told... Sports fans, man,

I don't know who you guys think are the most popular, but whether it's Marshawn Lynch or people who occupy a space on the authenticity where they're themselves and you're like, yeah, I like that. One of the things they really don't like is inauthentic, but A-Rod is such a learner.

I remember specifically he would ask everybody thousands of thousands of questions and I don't think it's a coincidence that he gravitated over to dating Madonna and asking her all the questions about how do you keep reinventing yourself? Because say what you will about, Arod, everybody still wants him to work as a broadcaster.

He's not good as a broadcaster. He's just teeth. He's just smiling teeth, but people like him. People like him on the broadcast anyway. I don't get it. I don't get it. I just like to think that somewhere the portrait that Alex Rodriguez

allegedly has of himself as half a horse. Deny. I don't care. By who? A centaur. He's a centaur. But who's denied it, I'm saying. I think he's denied it.

Then what is that? What does that mean? What is his word worth? While kicking over a briefcase, he denied it. I don't have that. That makes me think he does have it. He definitely does have it. Kicking over a briefcase.

with his fucking horse legs. I walked into this studio today, and not only was I also blown away by Dan's milk mustache beard, but also by the glow. The glow of just being around both of you, motherfuckers. What the hell's happening? Who just seem, on some level, despite the despair, despite hard things in life,

just seem existentially happier because you have found your person. And this is not a story. an article that I brought in, it's just a recognition of how things might be different for you both now and how it is that you think of yourself before it is that Dan, you met Valerie, and Katie, you met Dan Soder, and you guys found love. I just think this is the big change in our meeting today. It's that. And people say this all the time, so I hate to sound trite, but like I thought I understood what love was until I was like fully in it.

And now I see it as this this thing that like he I, he helps me see me in a way that makes me feel powerful, if that makes sense. We're like I, there are times where I, I mean, as a person who struggles with depression, I've talked about this many times

and we do not have to dwell on it, please. But like there are, there's ability he has without doing anything to make me see who I am in a light that feels, almost more authentic than the light I see myself in. And it's a weird comparison, but it makes me think of the Matrix, where, like, Neo does not think he's Neo until Trinity says that he's, like, she believes in it.

And it makes him realize who, and then he becomes Neo through being loved by her. And so it just feels like, I just... It feels like you know Kung Fu. Yes. And I can dodge bullets, which has become very useful in my life. Valerie thinks that wishes that she could see herself the way that I see her and I would love to be as forgiving on myself as she is when she meets me with acceptance and understanding in some of the places that other partners have tried to change. I won't say to you guys that I thought I knew what love was. I was always sort of searching and had convinced myself that I was a fundamentally even person. But what I have learned now through marrying Valerie, and through the death of my brother,

which is open sort of a portal for me, a lifelong repressed person, I am willing now to feel the high end of love because I also now know what the loss is of feeling the low end. I was always risk averse on committing the ways that I needed to, you know, eternally and vulnerably to somebody and completely because risking, that kind of love risks the kind of loss that I have with my brother.

And so to have Valerie during this time as someone I am leaning on, I just can't imagine going through the grief that consumes me now alone or with someone I was mismatched with because it is almost too much to bear by itself. So to be in the healing powers of love just makes me feel. more deeply, deeply than I ever thought possible, deeply than I could ever know, right? I was always trying to convince myself I was in love. I remember telling some friends about a woman that I, you know, I was dating seriously in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles. I was trying to explain to them why I was in love and I watched their faces and I'm like, I am unconvincing right now. I am not, I am not,

I am not, this is not working. They are not buying what, because I was trying to articulate myself into love instead of just feeling it. And it does, the hardest things become easy when they're, you know, when they feel right. What, what a, I mean, so I should say that I think about this all the time with Liz, my wife, but also with Violet, our daughter, like the most profound love makes you feel like a cliche. Yeah, it's very hard to talk about because you just say things that you've heard other people say, but you maybe didn't feel them and internalize them until it happened to you. And you think you're being unique and interesting.

And then you listen back and you're like, I said what everybody always. Right. No, and truly, like, as somebody who is, we all professionally use words, like, I'm always trying to get to something that feels original about it. And I always land at a place of, I am exactly what the greeting card says. Love to me, and this is, you know, maybe even I feel this way to a fault, but love to me is the, is why we're here. Again, this sounds like, love will cure all. No, but it feels like it's the, In a world where we're talking about, like, are we going to upload our consciousness into AI? The thing that separates us from a machine is the capability to love. That's the only real thing we have to me that sets us apart.

But was there like the cinematic? Did you guys have cinematic moments where it's like the one and you hear the music swell? And Katie is kind of smiling in a way that makes me think that maybe there was something like that. I'm trying to find it in my mind. I say that because I don't have that. That's the part where the cliche is not real, is that the cliche is felt as a product of mundane stuff that accumulates that makes me grateful, like endlessly grateful for a partner who makes my life better, who makes me feel fulfilled and matches me and fills holes in that way. That you like to keep open. That I still need to keep open.

In case you need them. Don't tape them closed. That should be what Pablo finds out today. Don't tape your holes closed. Leave them open. But what are you guys, but Dan, what do you have on that? The whole thing of, is there cinema in your falling in love? This is what I would say to you because I have not been a person who would have ever believed

in the spiritual sappiness of what I'm about to tell you, if not having lived it and felt it myself. I'm in a cabin in Jacksonville at a music festival, all of it well outside. of my comfort zone, lured there by my brother who lived life bigger and more joyously and more expressively than I did, and my now wife who wanted to go see music and be one with nature in the woods. And I can't explain to you or articulate to you. I don't have the time to do it here on all of the things that I felt there. But one of the very powerful images that I had while they're feeling something like love slash spiritual enlightenment, this is as happy as you can be. And furthermore, if you do not believe in God, this is the greatest thing human beings can feel

inside themselves and have you be a one with God or whatever it is you think is God. I was in a dreamlike state, and this is not drugs talking or anything else, spiritually running through what looked like a forest toward a light, chasing after my brother and my wife who were, you know, little kid joyful, and I was trying to keep up while running toward a light with them. All of that is crystal clear to me as an articulation of a feeling that I'd, I'd argue with you guys, I don't think all of love can be articulated the same way in a greeting card. I think something like that. What I just said to you doesn't necessarily resonate with others,

but for me, that one is forever because it's a feeling that I'd never known before. I didn't know it was possible. It's not something that I thought could be so. I couldn't even imagine it. So to feel it and have it inside of me is something that feels eternal. I do remember the moment that I went, it was kind of like in Clueless when she's like, do I love whatever Paul Rudd's character was named? And then like the fountain goes off. I was in hair and makeup at ESPN.

And I was like talking to the girl who did my hair at the time about like, oh, it was like on Raya or something like going on these dates. But I was raving about this guest who was coming in and how much they were going to love him. It was this guy, Dan Soder. And she was like, well, why don't you date him then? And I was like, well, but he's, I. but I couldn't, but he's, wait, why don't I date him?

And then we did the segment and I was not myself. If you watch it back the whole time, the whole time I'm like, it's Dan Soder. You may know our next guest from sitting beside me right now. His role is Maffee on Billions or the series, the standups on Netflix, but however you know him, you absolutely love him. Give it up for my buddy, Dan Soder. Like, I was so uncomfortable because this moment that we had had, like, all of a sudden I was looking at him differently, and I did not know how to act like myself. But yeah, he's just, God, I love that guy.

He's just the greatest. And I'm so grateful to have him in my life and to, you know, just have somebody that, like, no matter what. Like, I had a breakdown, you know, one of those really ugly ones. Like, early in the pandemic when I kind of realized that I was losing control of this thing. I'd been working on my whole life. And I was budding up against it so much. And I just had this moment where he and I were still early in dating. and I was trying to hide that I was hurting

and I was trying to hide how frustrated I was and I was trying to seem like I had it all together and I just kind of lost it and was sobbing in a way that like I don't even like thinking about a lot of that and I remember Dan came into the room and when I like finally brought myself to look up because I was so afraid of like seeing what his face was going to be

I looked up and he was smiling and I immediately felt like more calm and he just said like finally like finally you're letting me see it and he and it just made me I was like and then he just had this conversation yeah and I had we had this conversation I put it in my calendar as like this was the day you had the best conversation of your life with the person that you are going to be with forever where they basically were like it's you should feel this he reflected what I felt and also was like it makes perfect sense and just like completely put me at ease in a way that if you had told me

was what was going to make me feel better, I would have been like, no. If I'm sobbing and someone smiling at me, it's going to make me very mad. No, but Katie, Katie, you've got the cinematic thing down there because you go from, you go from when you're thinking about it in Clueless and you're like, I'm not myself, to being most yourself and showing him all of it and it being met with something that soothes, God, I mean, that's pretty cool. Like that's, that is what love should look like where here it is, here I am and all my broken me. This is me.

Will you love it anyway? And when the answer's a smile and yes, like, yeah, of course that's soothing. We don't have a perfect relationship. I don't want anybody watching this who like, especially if you're single and you're like, oh, my God, enough about this. No, but Katie, nobody does. No, no, but nobody's got, it's, it doesn't have to be perfect for you to be the dreamer who's in the backseat trying to grab at the steering wheel and he just, no, and he sees who you

are and knows that, and wants to be in the car. Wants to be in the car with that. Exactly. That's, I see him for who he is and I see the things that are, are his faults or his shortcomings as he sees mine. And I accept them and, um, and I, and I, and I love them because I love him. Let me explain something to you. Valerie lives with two cats, a dog, and an ape on a farm.

Okay. She has married someone who learned very, very much. very little other than to work in his entire life. And I will tell you that I will never lose her as long as she knows I'm always trying. As long, and it doesn't make it a perfect relationship, but she loves me from a place that as long as I'm present and trying, I'm not going to lose her and I don't want to ever lose her, so I'm going to always be present and try. Yeah.

That's a big one. That's a big part of it. Yeah. I think, well, I think this means that we need to throw our phones into the ocean. Like, that's the enemy. That's the enemy. That is the thing. How do I fail to be present?

How am I consumed with work? How do I fail to reflect an understanding that I know what she is feeling? It's because my fucking pinky is cradling a phone. We're addicted. You're the chicken. You're an unhappy chicken. evolutionarily successful, but sad on the inside. That is what we found out today.

What we found out today, we spent a lot of time doing this, but what we found out is the chickens used to be happier. What did you find out today? I found out, you know, some interesting perspectives on PEDs, love, and whatever mine was, sleeping. You know, I don't think I found out anything specific, except that, because it's not called Katie finds out. It's called Pablo finds out.

I brought you learn. What I found out today is that Katie Nolan refuses to respect the game that I built. I love the game. I brought a thing. You barely brought a thing, love? That wasn't an article. I didn't read that anywhere. That's not a thing.

I brought the thickest book, the book of love. Sapiens, the sapiens of love. The sapiens book, you initially said that you had read and then revealed your lies slowly. Which I really appreciated. Because everybody said they read it and I looked at it and I was like, you've all read this? As soon as I could sense Dan, as soon as Katie started saying details, I was like, I better pull the fuck parachute court. And it's good. It was the right thing to do.

I cannot hang with her analysis of evolutionary biology. Dan doesn't have to say what he found out. We don't make Dan say? Well, I found out that you were engaged and I found out that chickens. There's no chance. I did not know. Congratulations. I'm not making that up.

Congratulations. You know our third date was your wedding? You deserve love and laughter, and I'm glad that you found it at my wedding. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Dad. Take care, guys. This has been Pablo Torre finds out,

a Metal Arc Media production that will never stop finding stuff out. I want David Samson. Yes, I'm speaking directly to you to know this. We're never going to fucking stop finding out, dude. And it's because we have Michael Antonucci, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywick, Patrick, Neely Lohman, Rachel Miller-Hawr, Carl Scott, Ethan Schreier, Matt Sullivan, Chris Tuminello,

studio engineering by Viridian Tech, post production by NGW Post, a theme song by Gianne Bravo. And we're going to talk to you fucking next week, Samson. Get ready.