“Please Enjoy It Or You Are Fired”: Inside PTFO, with Dan Le Batard

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out What this sound is even if you hit him in the balls and it'll make a memory right after this ad We are rolling now yes Okay, so Dan my one task for Chris Cody who is behind the glass is And dancing immediately is if cool high-letter gets traded you need to tell me I'm on it and if anyone else gets indicted in a gambling scandal Same same deal. I'm your man. Okay, great. Dan. Hi Nice to see you. I feel like this is a perpetual state for you that you say this to your wife You say this at you knows you say this in confession. You say this at the priest you say this everywhere I was talking to David David Samson our friend fellow Pulitzer prize winner and We were morbidly talking about what if the NBA announces its ruling on the aspiration story During the funeral of his daughter, which we were attending yesterday. We're taking this on Monday and So your joke is is it's it's the thing that's in the back of our minds This is a plague for the over preparers among us I don't live in the world that you guys do with this stuff like that is not dark comedy. That's just deeply dark What if Kauai gets traded during my daughter's funeral is not a question that anybody should be asked what if any number of things that are floating in the air Are announced at a time in which we are here to grapple with like what's actually important in life and death It was it's a bit look in the screenplay of what David's life is certainly as I'm here in Miami Which I have not been in with my wife Liz since you Since he got married to Valerie we are here again because of the worst thing that's happened to a friend of mine Since the last worst thing that happened to a friend of mine, which was your brother's death that's how That's how doing this show and being at this company has also felt. I have spent the last nine months during what is David Samson experiencing what I think is about the cruelest thing I've ever seen a human being experience texting him some form of What about the Padre's bullpen? What do you think of the Padre's bullpen today and some of the things that you are covering in sports It sort of makes everything very small. It's made it makes even something as substantive as your ambition and David's Ambition both of them very willful substantive things it makes them shrink and pale in In comparison, but not so much that the two of you aren't thinking at the funeral What happens if quiet? I should say that I was I I cannot speak for David on that I just know that previous conversations had acknowledged what would be the most inconvenient time for us to work That's dark subject by the by the way, so just on that on Being Dad as I am now as David is You know, I just want to say like we want everybody we know to donate to the cure of fund I just want to say that up top here in a totally unambiguous way We'll put in the show notes Kira Samson age 28 and so When I'm here and we're also grappling with like real Like what is what Who gives a f*** like legitimately that's the thought I had sitting at that service was if I Don't put this in perspective I am failing The the all-consuming nature of this job like I need to I need to remind myself of like why these relationships and these friendships and these and these bonds Why they matter so much to me and it's not because we want an award or we might get the thing it's that we got to do this That is the definition for success for this for me is getting to keep doing it and it's Fairly simplistic and it's a lot different than how I've ever looked at some of this stuff because you do get altered by grief and altered by death. I have found ambition can very often be lonely and Is almost always insatiable so the chase never stops being the chase and unless you stop running because you make a conscious Decision to stop running everyone uses the trope of this puts life in perspective But until you've been soaked in the stale sickness of what grief is in your body in your stomach you wake up You can't sleep. It's always sort of there unless you have had that weighted vest on you You don't understand how profound those words are even if it seems simplistic because it's what everyone says when death is around Right, I mean, so the last time I was here again with Liz Liz was pregnant And it was at your wedding and Chris was there. Yeah, that's right. Chris. What did you make of Pablo being the ordained minister a Pablo? Is it the center of a literal love story whether it's me and the Codys or me and my wife or me and him? He's literally the person who married me. What was your experience at the wedding there after you hit Dan Patrick in the balls while Juggling near him. Yeah, that's the big takeaway for me is me juggling. I have that video. We can show here It's me juggling for Dan Patrick and losing one of the balls and I hit him in the midsection It's fine. He was fine. He was still impressed overall But I was impressed with Pablo He didn't use many words that I didn't know and I was kind of expecting that He didn't make it about himself. He made it about you guys beautiful ceremony. I remember Dan's blue suit Look great. Do you remember Dan crying immediately upon arrival? Yes I remember him as soon as he saw his beautiful bride. Just a blubbering brook It was it was so on the nose for anybody There are betting lines like when is Dan going to start crying and the answer was as soon as physically possible By the way, like that's really 2019 was before I officially joined metal arc before PTFO was a glimmer in anyone's eye That was the first reporting that you assigned to me was Initiating your your your your union Valerie called our wedding day and her wedding day her special day a party for Dan's friends Because so many of you were at the center of what it is that we were doing there And I will tell you though that whether they be my friends or not my friends Valerie is not very trusting with precious things to others so that she handed you the Ability to speak on behalf of both of us and you took the great care of actually reporting Interviewing both. Yeah, and and and took great care with that she knew you would and it's why it's at least why she chose you in part Why there are many reasons, but that's pretty high up on the list because she knew you would treat it with great care Every time I come to Miami to do something like celebrating or mourning or feeling real feelings. I end up reporting Well, one of the reasons we're here today is not to talk about the specifics of my wedding, but to explain to your audience I hope an understanding of what it is you're doing here, and why it is that you're doing it because in the reporting of details You can hide some of your own personality or vulnerabilities Because you're always telling the stories of others and I sort of wanted to sit down with you here under these Circumstances when we're dealing with life and death stuff on what the mission statement of this project is for you Because I have found it difficult to sort of impress upon you Some form of you have to enjoy all of this by acting somewhat as if you've already arrived Without the laziness that comes with people When they arrive at things and I think you've had some difficulty sort of separating those things you feel Some form of I don't want to speak for you, but some form of no, I've always got a chase once I've arrived then the But the journey and the destination make it so that the chase is over and part of what fuels you is the chase This is where I will cop out by quoting you Because this is a text that like Chris. This is the kind of text that you dream of getting from your boss. Had to be a foream Get the Yes Early is best work. This is the very best stuff Dan wrote If this is as good as it ever gets it's plenty of good. Please enjoy it or you are fired And it made me happy to receive that I said I love that so much But the unspoken part of it it is like easier said than done. Because the goal is like, if this doesn't get more fun, I think we've fucked up. If I don't have the perspective on like, what did we accomplish? What is that free us to do? Does it free us to be present at a fucking funeral? Then I think we've fucked up. - Yeah, it won't be successful the way that I define success this stage of my life. When you say though easier said than done, the people who have had the most success in entertainment make it look easy without you having any earthly idea of how hard it was and it was almost always exceptionally hard. And you specifically have already done the hardest thing the hardest way. You're at a trough where everyone has a microphone now. Everyone has a podcast and on merit, you're making something that is universally seen as the very best of those things. There are not really breakout podcasts anymore in sports. You have one of the biggest and best things that there are in the intimate medium of podcasting and also as your journalistic career has advanced, I'm 57, you're barely 40. You have done all of the things that I have done in my career that have taken 10 and 20 years. You've done it in one and two and three years. I had to write 10 years of columns. You wrote five articles. You were on part in the interruption before me. You now have a similar. - More than five for the record. Chris put that down in the transcript. - Way more yeah. - Five long magazine articles is all he ever did. He went from fact checker, most meticulous of bottom wrong jobs in sports writing to doing something that is following your heart and your curiosities and you've had every success imaginable. They have to start feeling like successes so that you're working from a place of maximum confidence as opposed to using whatever the fuel of insecurities can be to make people great. - Yeah, look, the problem with this whole enterprise and so far as there is a problem, which I want to be self-aware about is that I love making the show so much that it is making me love it less. Is that track? - I mean, I had a lot of trouble with joy before my brother died. It's one of the, like, to the degree that you honor me by telling me that you have learned anything from me. If you don't learn this thing at the same speed that you've learned all of the other things, you won't be enjoying 40 to 60. You'll be missing an assortment of things in the consumption of what it is that's making this thing great and also making it feel the need to always top yourself because now you've placed your standard, which is the very highest thing and your audience appreciates that standard. You are a taste maker now. They are trusting you to tell them what's important, what is good and I'm sort of begging you, please, please, put down your standard a modic, a touch, put down your standard, a touch so that you can enjoy it more because I don't think the two things are conflated. I think that you can make the great work without it suffering the way that it sometimes does. - Well, now this is postmodern, right? Because this episode to break the fourth wall to throw Chris Cody Kool-Aid man style through the fourth wall is the thing that you're describing. This is ostensibly easy on some level to make. It's us sitting down, we're just talking. And on another level, when you say lower the standard, it is that's Salar Capture Coventon, the cardinal sin in the NBA. That is the cardinal sin of podcasting to be lowering the standard. I'm like, I, that's, that sounds f*cking gross. And yet, the audience, right? So why is Chris Cody here? I also am looking at him as a reminder of like a literal human embodiment of an audience. - And lowering the standard. - And also that. (laughing) - And what I'm thinking about is speed running through this very strange business, learning from you lots of things that I enact every day. What I did not get because it took you X number of years and it took me X minus Y number of years is some solidity, some grasp of like, so what is this audience that is now coalesced around this show? At a rate that's beyond my expectation in less than three years. We launched this in September of 2023. What do they want? - You don't know though what your audience wants. It's something that you're grappling with because your audience is relatively new. Like I would say that over the last 20 years, right? They make fun of me because anytime we do something in public, I make sure to spend a lot of time talking to people afterward. And I sort of have a profile because what we do daily, it's really just us in here. And most of the time we've been doing it, we felt like nobody is watching us because we were a radio show for a long time and literally nobody was watching. It wasn't a video product once upon a time. But the strongest of links is the people who are with us because they know for example that when Chris Cody was let go from ESPN that we hired him back the next day and put him on the air as a middle finger to ESPN. And so whatever we're doing that day or that week or that month that might not be good enough or might not live up to whatever it is that they want, they connect with us from there. The connection is more intimate and it's more meaningful because it's from there. And what I'm telling you is you already have that connection with your audience even if you're not out there and you don't have 20 years of data to back up and confirm that you know exactly what they want because a lot of people want a lot of different things and what they want most of all, if they're spending an hour a day with your podcast is for you to show them what they want because they're not quite sure until they've heard it on your show but now they know they like it. That they know. - Are you suggesting that you should fire one of my producers so that I can rehire them? - It'd be a good look for you. It's a good idea. It's been done once, not a terrible idea to make me the man for firing, how many of your audience members know Chris Tuminello? How many of them know Matt Tumine? - He goes. How many of them know that you have a newsroom that what do you think the audience knows about how the puppet comes to life? - I think what this episode is is surprise, like I'm a person who has all of these neuroses in case you didn't get told that directly by me before in the 400 episodes we've done. - You haven't said that though, right? That's like this. - The reporting hides the vulnerability, right? When we left the SBN, you told me, as you've given me very little sort of firm advice but one of the things that you did say is you have to go more vulnerable now. - You must in terms of whatever the growth and transformation is. - Because I know intellectually what the right thing to do is it's just harder to actually enact it. - And does our audience, the public tour eye finds out audience, do they want the rest of me? Because this is a lot of what we're doing here is like the stuff that you and I talk about because I love making the show and I want to keep loving it, which means also, hey, here's a big check box, Pulitzer Prize. Beyond my expectation, what does that let me do now? And does that mean that I do this show in the way that I've dreamed of doing, which is like forever? That's the goal. - I believe that what the audience wants is for you to follow your heart and your curiosities because you've already proven to them that you know what's interesting to the audience. In some ways, it's almost incumbent upon you as the post-modern newsroom to tell the audience what's most important and to trust that your standard on discerning is going to have more care than theirs, not as any insult to them, but because they're passengers. They're signing up for you to tell them what's important. They're signing up to learn. They're signing up to see where your curiosities take them because you've become a tastemaker, it seems like an ugly word, but well, but you are somebody who's deciding what are the things that are most interesting on this platform and the fact that they've gathered around the platform already tells you that that's like the hit rock group or music group getting on stage and saying, well, what do you want? And they're asking, well, play the hits. - They want. You're the musician. - Kauai Leonard episode. - Yeah. - I don't think they want a 12th Kauai Leonard episode. - I don't know, man. - I've seen the metrics. No, and by the way, to that point, I think one thing that I have learned and have such faith in as I'm asked by places like the New York Times and the Athletic and other newspapers, the Financial Times reached out all these places that are like these August institutions. They're turning to me, to us here at Battle Lark and they're saying, can you help us make this fun? We do the journalism. We do the serious, can you help us do whatever it is that your secret sauce is? It's take the work seriously in ways that you will never admit to your audience, except maybe on an episode like this, how much you stress about are they enjoying this? Does this sound right to their ear and make it like you're not doing that? But you don't think that they're. I know how it sounds coming out of my mouth. It's totally counterintuitive to say some form as I've told you a couple of times now. The lowering of the standard almost sounds like an insult to you, but the place that your standard is is so unsustainable, if the goal is to do it forever, you're going to fry and the loosening of your standard, because you're so proud, is never going to be enough to make anything that has your name on it. Bad, you'd just be suffering it less. I'm not even asking you to actually lower the standard. I'm asking you to take some of the suffering out of it, because it's not required. You seem to think it's required, and this was my relationship with writing, and it's why I stopped writing. It's why I chose community and laughter and communal stuff, because writing was so lonely and the obsessive, compulsive perfectionism. I don't think perfectionism is a noble trait. I think humans aren't meant to be perfect. Disagree. Of course, you have a very good point. It's unkind. It's not self-love. It's not forgiving of yourself. It's always not good enough in some respect in a way that you need to care for yourself slightly better than that. Otherwise, you're going to be, when I tell you ambition can be lonely and it's insatiable, you're going to be 15 years from now, fried. Well, I think the perverse order of operations here, which is the blessing and the curse, is that we got the thing, the cosine, from the ultimate journalistic body of taste and judgment. We got it, and now, I, it's like, we got, okay. So then, now what? The end of June, and July can be a really rough period for sports fans, with football still a few months away, and basketball and hockey ended. But this year, we're pretty lucky, because not only is there a World Cup, there's a World Cup in our backyard. And so make sure to check out the Athletic Podcast Network to stay up to date on all things related to the World Cup. You can wake up with the totally football show from LA, then dive deep into the biggest talking point of the day with the Athletic FC podcast. And you can watch the TFO podcast fool around on their daily live streams in the afternoon. All shows are free to watch or listen on your favorite podcast platform. I think about audience a lot. And I think about it because what I was trying to say is not that everything needs to be perfect, because that is, of course, unrealistic. But my way of, of winning over the audience effectively is writing. Like, the secret of my career, journalistically, is not that I gave up writing after writing five articles. It's that I stopped writing for print and started doing it in a format that now, because many people, most people, no one else really tries to write and report and also do what you guys do here in Miami at the same time. It has, it has, that's, that's the secret of the show actually. But how much is this, how much of this has changed since the birth of your daughter and the seismic change of climate in all of journalism that had ESPN erasing a whole bunch of journalistic jobs. ESPN went into the journalism business when they didn't have any responsibility to go into the journalism business. And many sports writers profited greatly off of that. You and I had the conversations where I was telling you pretty forcefully stop writing. You had fallen in love with writing for ESPN, the magazine. It was difficult for you to give that up. And I was hitting you pretty hard with the idea of it's not a lack of nobility to grab some of this cotton candy here and make sure that you take care of your career. But that was before you had your daughter. Yes. And before the collapse of journalism jobs. And so how much of this has to do with the fact that your career was in jeopardy. And it was a very real fear as you were bringing a life into the world. A lot, a lot. By the way, the, I don't know, I don't think Chris Cody ever got this. But what Dan is describing Chris is like him showing up in his convertible on South Beach picking me up after you do a show and being like how's writing treating as the wind blows through our hair. Look, man, I a lot of it's from that anxiety. It is like the jobs that I dreamed of, I, which I got senior writer at ESPN, the magazine cohosting a show with Bomanie high noon on ESPN, a daily debate show, even ESPN daily, which was my first like awakening to the format of audio after being like the last guy among my friend group who didn't have a podcast. It's funny that I became this guy, the guy who can't stop podcasting. ESPN daily radicalized me in that way. It showed me, wait a minute, the muscles I had, the writing, reporting, structure, editing, humor, all that stuff that I realized this medium actually is me. If I can bring all of that to it. And then all of that went away. Why can't you separate though the idea of you behaving as if you've arrived doesn't have to become the work becomes less good. It's the person making the work becoming more confident. Yeah, that's that's I think sort of loaded the answer into the question there. But I believe that you should be at maximum strength and confidence that your choices are the right ones because they've been rewarded from the peril and the fear of am I going to be able to sustain a career that feeds my daughter here as journalism collapses. You've proven it the hardest way if that is not to give you the confidence of okay, I can do this and I've been validated by all of the external forces and it's still not good enough because ambition is insatiable. It's a hole that you can never fill if you're the most ambitious. It's always going to be the shovel and the dirt until we're at a literal funeral over the weekend where we're watching somebody buried and you're wondering is my perspective right on the things that I'm caring about because some of the things I'm caring about make me miss some important moments because even when I'm at home, I'm always thinking about what I have to do next because the treadmill of daily making of things never stops. Well, this is where I'll answer sort of the SPN part of your question as well because what we've learned and I'll also broaden this to include all the people who work on the show who won the Pulitzer Prize, right. It was a staff of public tour. I find out what we as a show have discovered after initially fearing that the problem would be we don't have enough story ideas and so we launched with a runway six months ahead of story ideas like that was a lot of the summer of 2023 was me writing down we could do this, this, this and this magazine style evergreen just reported that no one else is touching. We started with the lead. I'm proud that we have not surrendered that lead. I have become almost unsettled by how few people are trying to compete. No one else is going to do it. So maybe it's us. Well, we just never stop doing it. You enjoy the meticulousness of let me put an architect's rigor into the making of these plans. So you're enjoying the doing. You're enjoying the results. You're enjoying the rewards of the result, but all of it is so pressurized that it becomes less than joy when it's joy plus joy plus joy plus joy equals pressure. That should be joy. Yes. Should be joy by my math. Don't you think? Yeah. It seems like by my math too. It seems like that would be the math equation, but it just becomes more and more pressure to top yourself one of your best friends. Okay. And I suffer for him and he just laughs at me like knock it off, but the prison of Ezra Edelman to make the OJ Simpson documentary, one of the greatest documentaries ever made to have to follow that and then to make a better documentary about prints and not be able to show it to the world is a special kind of cruelty. The pressure of following the greatness, taking all of that time, you're in your near that loop near him. It is a portrayal of Ezra's confidence, I suppose, but this is also true to our friendship that I am now about to tell you that one of the first people I got dinner with after winning the Pulitzer was Ezra to talk about. So what do you do? What do you do when you've won the thing that you can't top? I couldn't believe, Pablo, when your first comments to me after winning the Pulitzer were about the dark cloud of expectations. that comes with the Pulitzer, as opposed to what I imagined when it is that we formed this company, which is the joyous moment on stage when you're shaking a trophy at people who didn't believe because you believed in a love story or you believed in something that didn't fit in these cynical times, like to arrive at that moment with you and to have you remind me as I'm calling you to congratulate you that you won a Pulitzer. That's right. You two did. I needed the reminder from you because in coming to tell you, you have to enjoy this. You reminded me and you need to enjoy it too as the person who backed the dream. Which is our friendship, by the way, and also we're literally the guest in one of the episodes we submitted that one. Our friendship is funny that way because you get to tell me the things that you know intellectually and that you are enacting emotionally to me who can do the first part, but not the second. I also agree intellectually a lot harder to enact and also right back at you. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I discussed this in therapy all the time. I speak my feelings more than feeling my feelings. And same, which is why I think we're friends is that we both know better. I've been asked more and it is the thing I obviously take pride in doing. I've been asked more and more to explain why the show works, what's different about it, like just like give us the log line of why this matters now more than ever. This moment in American history. And I say sports illustrated does is zombie. HBO's real sports is dead. The news magazine as a concept. If you look at any given news magazine television show at CBS and otherwise, everything is in trust and media. Trust is dead. And so to me, you know, the thing that I have felt so energized by which you have done for decades here is using sports as the way to talk about everything else. The whole idea that you could earn the trust of an audience of a of a country that is otherwise skeptical of journalism as a concept and has no time to be spoon fed vegetables by the self-serious people. The idea that sports could be the cheesy mouth on the broccoli. Another thing I find myself saying a lot. You love that thing. I do. Two months ago. It works. It keeps on working. I do love cheesy broccoli though. I'd say stop working. But not just like surprise. We've snuck in some human rights into your sports, but also that people will follow you because one of the things you're doing on this show that I have internalized is not taking yourself seriously sports allows that. Yeah, you can tell any story through sports, any story through sports. You really can find them all. One of the things that I have told people over the years when they say you cover sports. Well, I'm always correcting. I cover the people who play sports because the human stories are everywhere. You can do all of this through sports. You take what you do very seriously. I think some people also think you take yourself seriously, although this show shows more of the range. That's been the self-imposed pressure. How do I live up to that? That's what I learned watching you guys here. The thing I'm looking at Chris in the eyes and the thing I'm thinking is Chris is an avatar for. Oh boy, let's be honest a bit of the common man. I'll take it. I believe though that our audience part of the magic is that we treat them like they're pretty smart. Well, more than that though, it's that they trust you and you treasure that trust. And so you keep working the way that you're working to make sure that you don't betray that trust. But I'm promising you that if you enjoy all of this a little more, it is something that will show in sinking into your mistakes instead of editing them out. Sinking into just that we edit our shows. Sinking into the vulnerabilities in a way that show people that they can trust you because for all the reasons that they already trust you because it's even though I keep saying tastemaker all that is is they trust your judgment. That's it. That's what a magazine editor does. It's the hardest thing to come by though with an audience. And it's the greatest job. The idea of I don't know what you're putting in my mailbox but I'm so excited to find out. That's the greatest pleasure I have because now you're following my curiosity and now I get to feel like I'm being more of myself. You know, which I wasn't on ESPN daily, which I wasn't on high noon which I wasn't subbing in on every show that would have me on it. Oh, but I would say that the next growth evolution for you and this is a conversation I've had with with our friend Boog Chambi right wherever it is that my lack of confidence is. They're getting a version of the artist in your art but they're getting a very manicured version of the artist and what I have told Boog is I'd be totally good. You know, getting out of the if what was getting out of the limousine on the red carpet was my work. I don't want to do it. I want the work to do it for me somewhere in here where people get to see more of your personality because you're doing an hour with your friends that has no manicuring that has some of the looseness that doesn't make it a perfectly sculpted thing but makes it all the more human because the audience already knows who you are. And they're in on the journey wherever it is you're taking them and however it is you're taking them. Do you want to do a quick pick up on sculpted you kind of stumbled over sculpted three to one sculpted there is nailed it just put that in and post. Okay, so here's the thing like what what what do we do now right and so what I come into the studio carrying is this confidence a true confidence of. We get to do the thing that very few other independent journalistic outlets are doing successfully which is challenging power from a position of resources. Yes, but such disadvantage financially when it comes to who we are investigating and why we are investigating them and we are earning trust in an era in which trust has dried up in this desert because wealth has meant that you can manicure reality. I love that we got to somehow be the show that does that while also doing a show in which we had a comedian whose catchphrases the word hamburger. You know, I love that we are in fact all of these things we hired a which the curse artificial intelligence on Halloween we did a whole episode which I could not have been more excited to tell you about in which we revealed for the first time a video of Harambe the viral gorilla eating its own poop. How much did you spend on that soap that was your head. But I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, $3,000 ridiculous. So we are all of this but the question of like now that we have this benediction from like the priests of journalism. What do we do now? I mean, frankly, like I want to do. Order bigger more ambitiously. The question becomes how do we do that while also obeying all the lessons which I intellectually you can't do those two you can't do both of those things you can't you you have no there's a way there's got to be a way meeting opus a good start. She did touch my chest. Talk to me in France just to common people. It's not just France. Is it the sweater I have tied around my shoulder. It's but it's con. It's not it's not France. It's on a mammals. It's the height of food. The idea that we did a live show at the Sloan Conference in which we reveal this federal whistleblower complaint that is key to the aspiration story. And we did it as a parody of Oprah in which we stuck it underneath people's chairs and said and you get a whistleblower complaint and you get a whistleblower complaint only for me to meet Oprah. And for her to have genuinely I believe no idea who she was shaking hands with touching the chest of she looks like she knows you like that she looks like she's thrilled to meet you there. How absurd is that fan in the background by the way like how over my right shoulder how con is that right there somebody just fanning their face. The sweater over the shoulders too much isn't it Chris that's that's called blending somehow too much and too little that's not someone who's saying I don't to take myself seriously. - But look, I also ought to acknowledge that part of what my curiosity is has always been, like I felt this at Harvard, I felt this. Certainly in Khan, I feel this in every interview I do with a billionaire, it's, I do wanna know, like what's behind that door? And the fact that I could bring our audience along as we open it, as we unlock it, the door that no one else is like breaking open, that's the greatest feeling to me, is that we can be both behind the door, but also the people who are like telling everyone else, this is what's back here. That to me is what I wanna do more of. I was hesitant at first to say it, but really, like the question I have near the end here, I guess, is like, what if we keep doing the same thing instead of listening to your advice? Like, because I think that might be what we're gonna do. - Well, you're gonna burn out, you're not going to grow, and you're gonna continue to let the work speak for you, and it will speak well and eloquently for you, but I'd argue that the greatest connections made in entertainment, real connections, where you're willing to seek someone out when there's more competition than ever, it's personality driven. You can keep doing it with the work, it's the hardest way. You're doing it and have done it the hardest way, but ultimately they're here for your tastes, your sensibilities, your curiosities, and you following your heart. So you can make it hide behind the work, it speaks well for you, but they won't see the complete you, they'll just see the artist's renderings, they won't see the artist. - Look what you got, Chris. - The moral of the story is juggle in front of Dan Patrick. Take the chance. Even if you hit him in the balls, it'll make a memory. - He did, at my wedding, that's what Chris Cody did. He was juggling for some reason, I don't know why. - And you know what my production brain is saying, is like, let's call Dan Patrick up, let's insert his view of that memory in post. Let's make that into a little documentary style feature at inside of this episode, that'll be a great kicker. - More work instead, instead. - It's not good enough the way it is. - No, I'm like, I think we can elevate it. - I think we can elevate this, let me call Dan Patrick. (laughing) (upbeat music) - This has been Pablo Tore finds out, a metal arc media production. And I'll talk to you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)