Pablo Torre Finds Out - The 2024 Internet Etiquette Draft: Share & Tell with Mina Kimes and Dan Le Batard

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

After a holiday toast from the aged-out gasbag to his favorite creatures of the internet, we end the year with the important questions: Are phones too loud? Is listening on 1.5x speed insane? Should people post more ugly pictures of themselves? Can scammers really fake it ’til they make it? And are teenagers running the New York Jets? Plus: poetry-reading, grief-eating, the murder era of content, the quantum of dishonesty and the inevitable destruction that comes with inflated ego. 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. Instagram. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraff Kings Network. All right. I will be thrilled right now to be a passenger on this joyride as we head into the holidays.

Fast friends and professionally fulfilled. Why are you giving a toast? You're giving a toast at like the holiday party right now. At the end of the year holiday party, Dan, is motivating. Because I'm grateful for you guys, and I'm not going to be able to talk to you again before the end of the year in all likelihood. We're not going to make content together. And if we're not making content together, I'm sure not going to hear from Pablo, maybe from Mina. But if we're not doing something that airs on Pablo's show, I'm not going to hear holiday friendship from him.

Hey, Dan, let's have a toast. Let's connect on a human level as sharers of the human experience. I text with Pablo like every day, so I can't relate to this. No, I understand. You have a real friendship. Here, he's sucking at the metal arc teeth of make my content. Let's follow my curiosities into the abyss, Dan. Let's spend millions of dollars on me to make butter sculptures.

Come on, Dan, more me. That butter sculpture was $3,000, just for the record. Come on. And also, I do communicate with you and Valerie, mostly because Valerie is sending Vyelet a gift that she does every year. That's the other thing. Oh, my God, Violet hasn't fallen far from the tree in terms of being a taker. Oh, oh, my God.

She loves her unicorns. The unicorn lights in the sky. And I'm hearing stories at home. Oh, no, I got her unicorn night last time as a book this year. Spoiler alert, Violet. It's unicorn day to go with unicorn night. Get out of here. That's a great gift.

I'll play here just a bit of, Violet's imploring of Dan Lebitard in terms of him lending her his teed as well. How unicorns fly. I like their couple wings and I like everything about them. Thank you for knowing I love unicorns. Bye. I'm okay with both the visual of me breastfeeding Violet and also a new show. spelling it out, Dan.

And also a new show with Pablo and Violet that is called First Taker. Her father took from me first. The spawn his daughter takes from me now. I do want to start today's episode, though, with a different story. A story that also puts Dan in the role of increasingly ancient person. Because the story is titled, The New Commandments of the Modern Internet. This is on the ringer, by the way. Jody Walker is the author.

There are some things in this, Mina, on this list that are resonant and also completely off. And I want to get your sense as a broad overview as we bring Dan into

the specificity of an article that is subheaded because as technological advancements push the internet to grow and morph into something ever more Byzantine, there are so many more opportunities to be annoying.

It is something that I'm trying to reflect on in our year-end. and sort of looking ahead to the new year capacity. I really enjoyed reading this list because as a creature of the internet, and I guess we all are pretty much at this point, I obviously have opinions about what sort of online behavior bothers me, what I try to avoid, fail to avoid, struggle with.

And I think has some good suggestions and some that I disagree with. We're drafting, I presume, ones we agree with or ones that we have strong feelings about. And so do I go first? Are we snake in this? How do you want to do it? I think you should be able to take whatever you'd like off the big board that is of your own creation. I'll start on book and take one of her suggestions. And it is one that I agree with, one that I have violated once and immediately regretted.

And it's actually her very first suggestion. It's very specific. Dan, while you might not understand, like, this might not make sense to you in specific, I do think there's a broader thing here. So her very first commandment of internet posting or behavior is thou shall not put songs on Instagram posts. And I, so this speaks to me, and this is where I want to bring you and Dan, phones are too loud. generally. I don't like opening things on my phone, not just Instagram, but this is, I think, a good,

it's emblematic of the broader phenomena. Websites, any social media, whatever, group chats, and it blaring noise involuntarily at me. I understand that I blare noise involuntarily at people for a living in some ways. All the time across America. I just, I just want more. silence generally on the internet.

So this is specifically about the IG thing, which was a change that Instagram made about a year ago, right, where people could add songs. Yeah, Dan, Dan didn't realize when you post something now on what is called on main, on your main feed, you can now choose a soundtrack that plays when you basically begin to look at these photo parentheses S. Funny because it harkens back again, Dan, this is a different thing.

But there used to be a website called MySpace. And you could put songs on your profile. Yes, this take is my opinion is partially because a lot of my scrolling time is with a baby who I desperately don't want to wake or, you know, and I don't want sound generally. But this is a larger thing with me. I just feel like the internet is too loud. Is there any difference if you actually like the song? No. Great question, Dan.

See, I'm with Dan. I'm with Dan. Sometimes I'm like, this is a great song. This is a well-chosen scoring for this... For a photo? Instagram carousel of someone's last 20 meals. But, Mina, Instagram stories as a concept are a series of pop-up windows you did not ask for,

all blaring noise. So why are you drawing the line? You must be against Instagram stories altogether, if that's your argument. This actually creates real problems. in my life, I don't look at people's Instagram stories almost ever. And so we'll be in a social setting and everybody will have some family. They're like, yes, we all, you had an amazing outing to the Catalina Islands. And I was like, that looked really fun. And I have no what everyone's

talking about. In my own household, my husband will post things on his IG stories. Yeah, Nick prolifically is posting on IG stories. No idea. I barely remember to do it myself. And I just don't look at them that often. And maybe there's like a larger theme here, by the way, Dan, which is control, which is I don't like the internet pushing me look at things and putting sound and video. I like to be able to choose it myself. That is great that you're still a part of that particular stubborn and thoughtful resistance. I have succumbed there. The internet feeds me. It knows what I want and it has tricked this old man into feeding me things that will forever make me chase the curiosities. but one of the things on the commandment here is

thou shall not repost someone's entire Instagram stories. So your husband does that. You would never repost his story because you wouldn't do that. You're saying she's oblivious to him even posting it, which is even crueler. I just don't look at those stories that often. You know, I... Are you a big story guy?

I am a big story guy. You would know that if you ever clicked on my stories. No idea. Zero clue. So Mina does do something, though, the story she posts, which I click on because I'm a good friend, keeping up with my friends. She doesn't do it for her husband, though. Like, I wonder if her husband would be hurt by the fact that she has zero interest in the art he's making. He's a, he is a producer. He is a creator.

He is an artist, and he is making stories about his life that his wife has no interest in. He tells me about them in person, in our house, and plays the music for me, and we have conversations about it. I don't... Our relationship really has very little to do with the internet. We met in like a pre-super social media time and I'm not really public about it

and I don't keep up with him through his internet. That's how... I feel like I'm coming across as supercilious when saying this. I'm just being honest. This is just we just don't are... Pobble, you have a similar dynamic, I feel right? Liz is offline. Liz is largely offline by her own desire. She's also deeply embarrassed by how much of a showboat her husband is,

needing to show his artistic eye in photographs. And she'd prefer not... Valerie has complimented my artistic eye in photo. You have a great eye. You have a great eye. But my guess is that your wife has no interest in your need for whatever internet applause. Valerie is so much more interested in my photographic sensibility than my own wife is. And it does, in fact, feel quite conspicuous.

My second pick is something that actually is involving Dan and Liz because oftentimes, and this has been something that I've come around on. I used to totally disagree with this take. Now I'm all in on it because I've been, my eyes have been opened. So when we drive during the holidays, for instance, it's me and Liz and Violet in a car. And inevitably, I am plugging in. I'm driving. I have on car play, the podcast I listen to, and invariably I'm listening to the Dan Levitart show. And what I am doing is violating this commandment, which is, thou shalt not use 2x speed with an earshot of another human. Oh.

So I tend to catch up on Dan's show. I tend to catch up on lots of shows on 2X speed on Apple Podcasts. And I have been told that it sounds like I am actually psychotic. for wanting to consume anything at this rate. And it turns out that Liz and the author of this piece are in total agreement. And when I heard someone else do it, I was like, yeah, this is stupid.

You guys basically drafted the same thing, which is my computer is just giving me too much noise that's frenetic. It's either too loud or too fast, but it's just too noisy. Well, his is more of a social part, which is I was complaining about the computer doing it to me. He was complaining about his preferences being projected onto other people.

Because I don't think you're saying it's wrong to listen to stuff at ultra-speed. I do it all the time. No, but it sounds, I mean, he's got, I think, you guys correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think that you two have a certain brain power that would be greedy about how it consumes.

So of course, Pablo would want to do it at twice the speed that others are so he could keep getting to more and more of it. And if I were hearing that from nearby, it would make me crazy because that's not how human being speak. I don't even like being near the energy of why do you need to consume information that quickly?

Because you have like a 20-minute walk and you're trying to get through a 40-minute podcast. I do 1.75 personally, Pablo, but I have had the same experience in a car where it's come on and Nixon like, what is this? This is horrible. This is incomprehensible, yes. But don't you guys find interesting

that the stimuli is something that you need so badly that you need it twice as fast and sometimes the computer is yelling at you too loudly and that we're just filling all the silence with a speed and a noisiness. I don't want to, God almighty, I'm complaining about the internet. But what you guys are talking about

is just an energy, an information energy that is too, it is, it is, invasive. I don't want it. I'm not seeking the stimulus. It's a time management issue for me. I would love to have a life where I could

just listen to a 45-minute podcast and entirety on a walk. I just don't have that bandwidth anymore. I think there's an interesting, though, point of differentiation between these two first and second commandments, because one of them, I am choosing

the stimulus that you describe for an informational purpose, there's like a function. The other is more, I don't like having it projected upon me. I don't like having loud noises and things put upon me, especially if it's not work-related, I suppose, or something helpful. So I do want to point out that Dan is onto something, though, because the author of the piece says that such a sound, 2X speed from so close in a way that is insane, she says that sound is merely an oral funhouse,

reflection of humanity's need to consume, and it's terrifying enough to bring down this whole operation. I am guilty of this in this sense. I want to listen to Dan's show. Dan pumps—I don't if guys know this. Dan pumps out a lot of content every day. A lot. And so my desire to keep up with the Dead Lebitard show with Stugats requires me within a certain

compressed time frame to go to X speed. However, the hypocrisy I was trying to allude to before is simply this. If you tell me that you listen to my shit on 1.25, you're dead to me. Really? I, I, because I feel like we are making... I'm flattered. I'm like, wow, you want to get through this thing so badly. You're compressing it.

You're speed running it. I am speed running others, but demand a glacial pace for the arc that I make, is what I'm saying. I make something that is so deliberately precious. and I hate that other people are undoubtedly doing to me what I do to them. You're asking us to see the art in a butter sculpture? That's what you're asking us to do. Don't speed through it. Let it melt slow.

Don't let it melt fast. Does Dan have a draft pick or is Dan just going to sit there? Yes, I have. As I'm going to say, Minut Kimeshow listeners, we spend an hour and 45 minutes, like breaking down Patriots bills, Jags Raiders this week. week. If you want to listen to that at 1.75 speed, more power to you. My kings and queens. I do have a draft pick. My draft pick is thou shalt offer a little insight as a treat so that I don't feel like all I'm doing is consuming things that are empty calories

that when I put down my devices and put everything away, I have nothing to offer the world as learning. Any little bit of insight learning, I would like to. to be a part of if as my empty calorie experience consumes me. There is also, Mina, the subtext of that, which is that sometimes people will like hint at things. They'll be like,

guess what? I got a new job, significant other, whatever else. And then they'll just disappear or stop posting about that. And people will be like, so what happened?

And Dan is crying out for, again, human context around this thing you told me was important, but it is now gone in your life. Whatever happened to that, shouldn't we hold people accountable to the posts that they make in terms of continuity errors is what that commandment is also suggesting. Got it. You want us all to be grief eaters online, just plumbing the depths of each other. If a person that you love has disappeared, tell me why.

Yes, please show. Please, show me all your vulnerabilities here. When we're gathered, let's treat this as a safe space where you can give me your softest things and we can rummage in them. I feel the opposite, man. I don't, listen, if people want to share details or lies, as we often do on this podcast, more power to them. But when they don't, I am intrigued. I'm like, ooh, who's this genius? What do they know that I don't?

That they're living offline. Can I give you guys some of my off-script ones? Yeah, yeah, go off the big board. I just wrote three that I thought, okay, ranging in, I guess depth. One, do not criticize the way other people parent on the internet. Do not share your opinions on just parenting generally on the internet. Just f***ing to keep it off the internet.

It's very controversial, man. Every parent I talk to is like, man, all these parents have all these opinions. Do you realize, Mina, that your take is itself a critique of someone else's parenting? You're telling people to stop parenting by asking. I'm not to, oh, they're not parenting when they're doing that. They're lashing out. Like, the other day, I posted something, this is back when my kid was like nine months. I was like, wow, sleep training crazy.

I don't know. And what a hell of a tweet that you really had to rush to the internet to get that. Great take. Yeah. I wrote something better than that. I don't remember what I wrote. But all I remember is some guy wrote. really glad that it worked for you and that your child wasn't up all night screaming and terror and like hating you forever and traumatized by the process.

I was like, oh my God, sorry. Okay. This one's a little bit less general. It's an Instagram thing. So, Dan, you probably don't know about this kind of format that people sometimes post. You might as well be speaking Mandarin, right? But you're going to understand what I'm about to say. There's a thing that people do on the internet

where they'll say like Instagram versus reality and it's two photos and they're always hot in both of them. Yeah. Yeah. It's something that's something. It'll be like this.

Instagram versus reality. It's like this is what Instagram versus reality should be. Instagram. reality. Yes.

Yes. That is what it should be. This leads me to, if I can just piggyback off of that proposed commandment, which is people should post more ugly pictures of themselves. Yes, let's do that. We have wrecked the curve

on what normalcy looks like because everybody is like microediting and obviously in the age of filter, it's impossible to know. I assume everybody's using a filter all the time. Let's zig while others are zagging. Let's take a lane no one would dare to occupy. Let's the three of us right now give the internet,

which is forever an ugly photo. This is good audio, I think. Mina likes to talk a big game about our movement that Dan and I are clearly actually aligned on. But meanwhile, Mina will pick a screenshot from anything she does in which she looks great. And I look like I have just vomited up something. Pablo, have you ever turned on sports television

and consider that there might be different standards for different humans? Have you seen the things that we wear and the way that we look? Nope, not familiar with this problem. How many times a day do you get called mid, just out of curiosity? Dan, do you know what mid means? Yes. Look at my mentions and you'll find out. That was insulting.

That was insulting to me. I thought we were going to get to talk about this Aaron Rogers documentary today. But neither of you guys have seen it. Mina does not want to talk about it. Dan wants to, but has not seen the thing. I saw all three episodes, and so I was like, we're not going to get to that today. And then a story dropped, Dan,

that I know you wanted to talk about, that brings us back into the realm of Aaron Rogers, but more broadly, than New York Jets. Yeah, the athletic, Diana Rusini and Mike Silver, and forgive me for not knowing who the third person on that story is, but they have dysfunctioned. Zach Rosenblatt. Thank you.

Uncommon dysfunction. in the organization that includes some details of the owner, Woody Johnson, consulting with his teenage sons about things and consulting with their appraisal of Jerry Judy's madden rating to not trade for Jerry Judy. And it's not surprising that these owners, even though they are very wealthy and powerful, can be super clueless.

Also not surprising that giant businesses would be run poorly by rich people who think they're smarter than everyone else, but actually aren't. I don't know, Mina, if you're looking at organizational dysfunction chronicled in this story and saying, man, this thing is polluted in a way that even MVP Aaron Rogers would have been swallowed by because you cannot succeed in a system that has Woody Johnson doing some of this nonsense that has people calling him. What was it? Mr. Ambassador, he made everyone in the facility call him. Ambassador Johnson, when he got back from his appointment to the UK. Yeah. No, I actually, I disagree with that.

I think if Aaron Rogers is really good, none of this would really matter. It's a lot of stuff around the margins, a lot of goofy stuff. I think the thing that's most troubling, and doesn't seem to get as much as it as his son's coming in and insulting players in the locker room. That, to me, we should return to that. Yes. But as far as whether or not any player can overcome that, I honestly think if this team was good and well-coached, it wouldn't be an issue. The sons thing is so good, like the details about them. So basically what happens is Woody Johnson goes.

Trump appoints him ambassador to the United Kingdom, 2017. His sons were 11 and 9 at the time. Respectively, their names are Brick and Jack. So already I'm like this story. This story rules. Brick Johnson is a character. And so they come back, and again, Christopher Johnson have been running the team basically in Woody's absence

because he's over there, overseas. when Brick and Jack returned, they're teenagers, and they are walking around like they, I guess, do actually run the joint. And so there's one anecdote. There are a couple of them that are just like, I cannot believe Brick is the shadow owner of the New York Jets or maybe just the actual owner at this point, where there's a game in which they win.

And they're about to give the game ball. Aaron Rogers is about to give the game ball to somebody else. that brick, yeah, brick, before that can even happen, intervenes and gives, what is described as a profanity-laden, like, celebratory toast to, I believe, Garrett Wilson. Yeah. And it's just like this guy is actually interfering with how our team is operating. Like, they are getting in the way of everything. And the maddenrating thing of, like, whatever, Woody Johnson is consulting his sons. and they're citing like Madden ratings on why they shouldn't get a future thousand-yard receiver this season, Jerry Judy,

is both comical and also kind of how super wealthy people also operate in the world. Lots of sons are a focus group for their dads who have lots of power. And this seems to be both a caricature and typical at a certain realm of wealth. I think that's Stan where I come down and like what I find so interesting about this story, is, you know, it's full of hilarious and amazing anecdotes. I really encourage people to read it. But, like, to me, it's less like, I don't read that and say, oh, this is why they failed. It's one reason why.

But what I find most interesting is kind of what Pablo described, which is this all just feels so emblematic of ultra-wealthy people believing they have expertise and mismanaging an organization because of it. Oh, but let's look at this the way that it actually. is if you think rich people have giant toys. And you're describing to me kids, teenagers, spoiled brats coming from impossible wealth where daddy insists on being Mr. Ambassador,

but is an actual clown. And you have these great riches that they've always grown up around. And you guys are telling all of us, they were walking around the facility like they own the place. Because they do. This is their toy. And so, of course, they would act like they own the place. They do.

I am reminded of a quote, Seth Wickersham once told me, which is that NFL teams are billion-dollar lemonade stands. Oh, Mina, the Lakers have been called a family business, like, unironically, for the entirety of their organization, basically, in L.A. There aren't checks and balances with these teams the way they are with, you know, public corporations,

with investors and boards and executives and HR. I mean, they have HR, but ultimately, this is a great example of that small business mentality permeating throughout the organization. Can we go back to the thing about, though, them yelling at the players? Because Donald Sterling is the comparison that comes to my, especially when you read about them being in the locker room. And obviously, they're not being accused of the same stuff that Sterling did here. But the story, there's an anecdote about, like, Woody Johnson just telling Mike White he sucks.

These teenage kids coming in and roasting players, like, that is a wildly inappropriate workplace behavior. I found that much more damning than any of the funny stuff. And I don't think the NFL would, I mean, I doubt anything will happen or whatnot. But, like, that, to me, is really outrageous stuff and maybe being a little bit underplayed here. The reason why it's so off-putting in, the reason why it evokes this, like, insanely imbalanced power dynamic, even though, of course, these players are Mike White,

notwithstanding, perhaps, making money that the normal American, the average American could ever dream of them, of course. It's because you just get in football this clear contrast between people who are in any way sacrificing something. like personal risk. Like it's a dangerous thing to do this. And the people who walk in and are basically acting like

their internet commenters, but also your boss. Like it's just incredibly off-putting. Not that the NFL is a sacred place, but simply that it feels gross that you would not have some level of respect as to what your employees are sacrificing for you. Power dynamic, though, is really interesting, right?

because, and this is something, again, when we think about, I was, I don't laugh, but when people say, wow, nobody's going to take the Jets job or no one's going to take the Jags job, yeah, they will. There's 32 of these jobs, right? A lot of people are going to want to take them. GMs, coaches, this article won't change. Maybe if your guy like Ben Johnson, who has his pick of teams, the Office of Coordinator for Detroit, you'd be deterred by this. But for the most part, they're not going to.

And Pablo is the same thing with the players. Like, there's such a power imbalance here because these jobs are so rare, and they've worked their whole lives for them. And the owners know that, you know? When you say the Lakers' small family business, obviously that's a silly thing to say. But at least in that scenario, it is the one business that family has had and grown up in, and they have no other businesses. In the cases that we're talking about,

the team ownership is the thing on the side from the other wealth. The games are the actual toy. This rich family has a series of players that we can consider human and amazing, but this is the toy as the side business. So when you add the power dynamic to that, spoiled teenage kids could arrive in a place when they think the athletes are like family pets. You can kick the dog if you're coming home to a house

where nobody actually respects the dog and there's the dysfunction in the house where there's anger. Like, this thing is a toy to a Woody Johnson that while he lives in the shadows, I think most of us know to be a clown. Like most of us know, not just because of Jets' ownership, most of the details we know about Woody Johnson

are not flattering to Woody Johnson and not things that say that Woody Johnson is excellent at anything that we know about. It's also a job that it might be, I mean, God, are there any other examples in, like, corporate America, where somebody can be, quote, quote, running something and have zero qualifications, zero. Oh, Mina.

Can I, can I, so. Never climbed the ladder to get there. And some owners recognize that. I want to be, like, I've heard stories about owners. They're like, cool, I don't know anything. Hands off. Here's my money. Which is the dream.

That is, by the way, every GM you talk to will say, they love nothing more than an owner who actually does. Yes. Very few, though. Very few, though. They are the exception. They are the exception. And then there's a lot in the middle.

This appears to be at the extreme end of interference. But like, again, this cuts back to the audacity, the unearned sense of expertise and the entitlement. You don't, like, what gives you the right to believe you can even make these calls? You know what it reminds me of, though? So there's a story recently about Succession. And again, Succession, it's sort of like, look, I'm a savvy person who knows about business on some level. I'm a journalist. Like, I know that Succession is taking creative liberties.

Like, it's not actually as absurd. And there's a story that is seemingly soundly reported about how actually the Murdoch family was watching Succession. And they said, oh, we should figure out our estate planning. Because they were watching a show that was a parody. of their own family, in which they did not actually take the hint of, like, we should figure this out until they watched the parody version. Stories like this, they're just so on the nose sometimes where you're like, I can't believe that this is what it's like to win the game.

The game of life is that you're actually deeply clownish in a way that, by the way, is surprising because I thought, again, that the story we were going to talk about was how much Aaron Rogers and this documentary was itself shambolic. And instead, Mena, like, and if you're to power rank, like, the winners of this story. Like, Rogers is up there. Here we have actually some reporting relative

to the previous news cycles all year that Rogers was being not as powerful as we had thought on some level. And then, of course, like, the real winner, reading between the lines, the GM of the Jets, Joe Douglas, who just comes off being like, oh, well, okay, that guy maybe was,

was, per this reporting, not actually the decision maker, maybe conveniently. Well, he was, though. I would just, again, to go back to what I said at the beginning, like all the major decisions that really have led the Jets to this point were not once that, I said from firing Sala, not that the season was headed in, you know, particularly glorious direction, were once that the GM made. So, yeah, I think everyone involved in the Jets who's not the owner comes out better here because you're placing a lot of deservent blame at the owner's first.

Who were the sources? Who were the sources? Whenever I read a story like this, I'm like, who benefits? Who benefits? Yeah, who wins? Literally everybody but the owner comes across better here. I named the two. I do love the idea, though, that Aaron Rogers was like, man, this Netflix stock is not

the thing that I thought it was going to be. He's like, time to talk to three different reporters who I, one of whom I publicly insulted as someone who should never talk to me. By the way, I did. So as somebody who watched the thing, I was can I just give you my one conclusion from the Aaron Rogers three-part documentary so that you don't have to watch it Because beyond the fact that it's bad and beyond the fact that even like this culturally Politically ascendant figure is not really

Engaged with on the terms of why he is controversial It's a lot of just like Aaron Rogers says a woman at the Tahoe celebrity golf tournament Thank you for protection my civil liberties and there's like music underneath and it's like very inspirational Beyond that I have a profile of Aaron Rogers that is very clear to me Number one, he grew up in a religious household. Number two, he grew up with a father who was emotionally repressed.

He says that his dad cried only once. Number three, he's a perfectionist always teetering on self-loathing. Number four, he's always wanted to transcend sports. Number five, he's always rebelled against authority by asking uncomfortable questions. Number seven, he says stuff like, quote, the feeling you get when you can be raw and vulnerable with men is special. People just want to be seen and understood. And number seven, the last thing is...

He saw that, Dan. And Danny had fireworks when he said that line about men. And the last bullet point, Mina, is that he has said stuff in Spanish while on drugs. So I'm just saying that I think I'm working for Aaron Rogers. I was going to say the same thing. The fireworks that went on around me was me realizing, oh my God, I've looked in the mirror and Aaron Rogers is me. I'm an enigma. Mina, what is your story?

There's been a few articles about this. The one that I sent to you guys was the wizard of Ozzy. Is how you say it? Yeah, I believe so. I was just about to ask you guys that because I was going to call it Ozzy. But Ozzy is the way to go for now. It is sort of like, wait a minute, what is this? Where is this coming from?

It was a thing that was very broadly advertised me, you know, like for a period of time on all sorts of podcasts and buses in New York City and commercials and all that stuff. So this was a media company that was founded by a guy named Carlos Watson who has a very interesting and compelling life story. This article, which is by a former employee, and there's a lot of layers to this that I think are really interesting. But it gets into his backstory. The son of a black American mother and a Jamaican immigrant father, he attended Harvard, Stanford Law, or from McKinsey, Goldman, founded a college prep company, sold it. All of this is on the level.

And then he starts a media company. And it's really founded on this idea of diverse voices, telling diverse stories. And that's the starting point. What happened, and the reason why this is in the news again, is Carlos was just sentenced to 10 years in prison for basically defrauding investors. And there's been a lot of reporting on this about this company, but it was basically a house of cards. It was a media company that had festivals and advertising in a show built around him that

misled people about, misled investors, crucially, for the purpose of the crime, about how many people were actually watching any of this, engaging with it, how many actual readers, listeners, viewers, what not they had. And he had an really fascinating ability to just convince famous people to buy into him. Investors, I think Lorraine Powell Jobs was one of his early investors. He had Mark Lazary,

like big names, right? And then people who came on his shows. Bill Gates, Priyanka Chopra, Ilhan Omar, Sean Spicer randomly. of Jamel Hill. Anyways, Ava Doverna, whatever. Lots of people. When I heard, when I realized, and by the way, I'm now being told it is in fact Ozzy. Ozzie. Of course, sure, why not? When I was told that Mina was a guest on the Carlos Watson show, I audibly guffod. Today, I actually feel like there is a broadening of the sports broadcaster role. Gender is one of the dimensions in which it's true, but I also see that racially, that it feels like it's gone beyond. non-white and black, and you see more indifferent in a variety of ways.

I also feel like people are coming from different backgrounds. You know, you talked about being an investigative journalist and business reporter, and I see more people who are coming maybe from unusual places. That must have been 2020, by the way, because that was like slapped together backdrop from early HQ days before I even painted the wall behind me. So, yeah. So that, so this was, I think that's actually. pretty important to this story, the fact that this was all happening in the pandemic,

because this whole story is basically about fake until you make it, right? This guy who con, not just investors, but people to bureau as programs and whatnot. And in some ways, kind of as we shifted to like remote program, I think that probably made it easier for him as everything became digital, because that is such a fundamental part of the story, too, the ability to fake things in media in the digital age. But the story of how I went on that was a PR, ESPN PR person, send it to me. I'm not going to name who it is.

And I wrote back, I looked and found the email thread. I don't know who this is, right? I was like, I mean, I guess. I had a lot of time. It was 2020. And this person was like, well, all these people have done it, right? Like some of the people that I mentioned to you, famous athletes and whatnot.

So I was like, all right, sure, I'll do it. Yeah, good investigative journalism, by the way. I spent zero seconds looking into this, right? But my point is, like, in an age where so much media, so much of what we do is about internet presence and social media and basically being vouched for by who you know and who's on your, who you engage with on the internet, and who's on your programming as opposed to earned credibility,

it kind of makes sense that a guy like this who was really good at convincing people and then kind of building almost a ponsie of, names thrived in this moment. And that's without even giving to a lot of the stuff this slate piece gets into about the diversity and DIY aspect of it. Part of what he did by Carlos Watson, who again was not a media figure until he decided to make himself one. And therefore, the audience, of course, was largely boosted by paid things and scammerish sort of strategies. But part of the thing that he got in trouble for was there was a fundraising call in 2021.

in which the guy he was working with, one of his right-hand men who pled guilty ultimately, in his own trial, misled Goldman Sachs by impersonating a YouTube executive, according to the New York Times. And prosecutors contended that Mr. Watson had helped set up the call had orchestrated this thing

where they were raising money with Goldman Sachs for this large media company by just literally doing an impression of a YouTube executive for a big bank. And it was, quote, egregious perjury, according to the judge. The quantum of dishonesty in this case was exceptional. Quantum of dishonesty. Which is like as if Stugats was James Bond, you would call it a quantum of dishonesty.

That would be the album. That would be the album that Stugats would put out as a musical selection, the quantum of dishonesty. It's a lot, Dan. There's just a lot of scammerish behavior here. Well, let's talk about some of this, right? because there's one form of consumption that I have not enjoyed in entertainment or partaken in when it comes to watching things.

The murder era of content that we are in where so many people are consuming murder stuff I've not partaken in. But if you give me cults and you give me scams, I'm all in. I will find the Bernie Madoff documentary. I will find the bad actor. documentary on Hulu. You guys got to watch that one just because a guy who was a fool and a terrible actor ended up getting hundreds of millions of dollars to support his acting and to end up in films. And I don't understand how a fool could fool so many people for hundreds of millions

of dollars because he had people believing things that weren't true. We are in the era of the scam. We are in the era of being so shameless that you can continue to break. the rules and hope to be above them because look at what's happening all around you. Are you willing to take the risk for the things you want and the shortcuts you want? Miami is built upon that as a infrastructure. Just fake it until you make it. You guys are interested in which parts of this, the brazenness of it? Because the scam in general is always interesting to me.

I don't know how these people sleep at night. I don't know how they don't feel like they're always being chased because they've got so many lies and how they have the pathology that allows them the delusion that they'll always be smarter than everyone else and they will not caught. I've got to think that they don't have a fear of consequences. I've got to think that there's some sort of blind spot that makes the pleasure not be something that makes them consider the pain. The fact that this is a media-specific scam that seems so easy to pull off, I think is really interesting, right? Because no one really knows these days how many people watch and consume anything. There's so much

bull-h-out there. I've benefited from it. I'm not saying that the things that I make are actually real humans watching and all of our numbers are on. I'm just saying I am constantly seeing numbers being thrown around, viewers, whatever. It feels like this moment in media more than any in the past, nobody knows what's actually clicking and working and how real any of these internet numbers are. A quantum of dishonesty. It is a quantum of dishonesty. So I do think it's very notable that this man picked this industry in this moment, Pablo. Yeah, I think that right now, for people who don't know, like, you see arguments all the time.

Like, look, this X broadcast has X times. as many viewers as the nightly news or whatever, the entirety of the New York Times. And you're like, what are the variables? What are you measuring? And they're all different, right? So just not to bore you with like a Nielsen household versus an X view versus a YouTube view versus an impression versus a podcast download versus a podcast listen versus they're just a million different ways to measure and can be spun however you want by and

large. The reason why all of this is especially interesting to me is because it's a media company in the era now of what is now an era that's over, which is the DEI diversity sort of push for people who are not traditionally represented in media to finally be so. And so there's, again, among the like awful statistics about, Dan, you're sort of like wondering about how can a guy sleep at night, like 90% of the staff, according to his own team and testimony,

where people of color and or women. And so this was a diversity-plated scam in which the premise was we're going to do, we're going to be the change you want to see in the world at a time when actually there's money flowing into that for the first time to this degree. And instead, it was a con that helped give ammunition to everybody who wanted to see a larger push for evolution as itself a broad scam. Nobody knows these days what real consumption is on the internet. Circa 2020, all of these corporations saying, we need to check a box in diversity and say we put this amount of money into a diversity initiative. He saw that, took advantage of it. And that is heartbreaking.

This story in Slate is by one of those employees, and it is really beautifully written. And he talks about how upsetting it was to buy into this idea and realize that it was being exploited. And as Pablo has said, now it can be point. pointed to as an example of what was a great idea and something that companies should be investing in, but it's a scam. And it's just, to me, like the most devastating part about all of this. That's it. Like for potentially my show, at least for this year, for lots of other things, institutions we hold dear. What do we find out today, guys, at the end of the year 2024, and also this episode, as you guys get the hell of the hell of.

out of here. I found out that Violet, and I did not know this, because I thought the Tori family was something that could be trusted, I found out

that the lovely Violet who is bankrupting all my accounts by having my wife buy her gifts is every bit the taker her father is. And I did not know

that before today. She looks like an innocent, sweet child, but she is somebody who is selfish and greedy and almost as insatiable as her father. Found out that Pablo's feelings are hurt,

that I don't look at his Instagram stories. So I guess, no, I'm not going to look at them. I'm not going to look at. Great, great. I found out that I probably should get better friends at some point. Good luck with that. And also, and also...

How much better are you going to do than the one that you and your daughter take from? What I found out today is that I got to get a teeth that's a little less hairy. It's gross. It's gross. have to do for money. Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Ryan Cortez, Sam Daywig, Juan Galindo,

Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Rachel Miller Howard, Carl Scott, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, Chris Tuminello, and Juliet Warren. Our studio engineering by RG Systems, our sound designed by NGW Post. Our theme song, as always, is by John Bravo, and we will talk to you next time.