Future Ambitions and Final Thoughts

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So say goodbye to distractions and say hello to more free time because you finished your work faster Complete your setup with savings on select monitors and more must have electronics and accessories, limited time deals and free shipping on PCs and more await you at dell dot com slash deals Dell. com slash deals 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 Kawai Leter gets traded, you need to Tell me I'm on 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 funerals, you say this in confession. You say this to the priest. You say this everywhere I was talking to David David Sampson, our friend, fellow Pulitzer prize winner. 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 Uh, yesterday, we're tapaking this on Monday And so your joke is is it's it's the thing that's in the back of O 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 Kawai gets traded during my daughter's funeral? What not a question anybody ask 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 F. It was it's a bit look in the screenplay of what David's life is certainly As I am 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 Sampson 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 Padres Bullpin? What do you think of the Padres Bullpin today and some of the things that you're covering in sports? It sort of makes everything very small. It 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 comparison, but not so much that the two of you aren't thinking at the funeral. what happens if Kaag I should say that I was 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, man.. by the way, so just on on being Uh, 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 KUa fund I just want to say that up top here in a totally unambiguous way. We'll put in the show notes. Here Sampson, age twenty eight And so when I'm here and we're also grappling with like real Like what is Gives us. Like legitimately, that's the thought I had sitting at that service was If I Don't this in perspective I am failing 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 bonds why they matter so much to me? And it's not because We won 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 was at dretic And Chris was there. Yeah. That's right. Chris. what did you make of Pablo being the ordained minister? Pablo is at the center of a literal love story, whether it's me and the Cies 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 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 onene of the balls and I hit him in the mid section. 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 Great Do you remember Dan crying immediately upon arrival? Yes. I remember him as soon as he saw his beautiful bride Blubberingbroke It was it was so on the nose for anybody. There were 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 twenty nineteen was before I offitially joined metedals. before PTFO was a glimmer in anyone's eye. That was the first reporting that you assigned to me was officiating Uh, your're yourre 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 U the The ability to speak on behalf of both of us and you took the great care of actually reporting interviewing. Yeah 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 end up 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 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 at four AM Ds Yes Early H best work This is the very best stuff If this is as good as it ever gets, it's plenty good Please enjoy it or you are fired. And it made me happy to receive that. I said, I love that so much unspoken part of it is like Eier said than done because the goal is like, If this doesn't get more fun I think we'veed up I don't have the perspective on like, what did we accomplish? What does that free us to do? Does it free us to be present at a funeral then I think we'veed 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, peopleeople 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. you specifically have already done the hardest thing the hardest way. You're at a trough 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 fifty seven, you're barely forty You have done all of the things that I have done in my career that have taken ten and twenty years. You've done it in one and two and three years. I had to write ten years of columns. You wrote five articles. You were on pardon the interruption before me. You now have a similar five for the record, Chris put that down in the trans way more. Five long magazine articles is all he ever did. He went from fact checker, most meticulous of bottom run 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, you know whatever the fuel of insecurities can be to make people great But look gu, I problem with this whole enterprise, insofar as there is a problem, which I want to be self whereabout is that I love making the show so much that it is making me love it less. Is that does 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 forty to sixty. You'll be missing an ass 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 tasteemaker 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 monic a touch 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 break the fourth wall to throw Chris Cody Koolid manan 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 capaptured convention the cardinal sin in the NBA. That is the cardinal sin of podcasting to be lowering the standard. I'm like that that sounds gross. And yet audience, rightight? 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 And what I'm thinking about is bead running through this V 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 has now coalesced around this show at a rate that's beyond my expectation and Less than three years. We launched this in September of twenty twenty three 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 twenty 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 conn 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 twenty 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 Um Are you suggesting that you should fire one of my producers so that I can rehire them be a good look for you. good idea. him gung. but not a terrible idea to make me the man for firing How many how many of your audience members know Chris Tumoneello? How many of them know Matt? How many How many of them know that you have a newsroom that what what do you think the audience knows about how the puppet comes to life? This is I think what this episode is is surprise like I'm up person who has all of these neuroses in case you didn't told that directly by me before in the four hundred episodes we've done. You haven't said that though, right? That N like this The reporting hides the vulnerability, right? When we left the SPN, 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 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. Does? Our audience, the Pabo Tore 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 checkbox. Pulitzer prize Beyond my expectation What does that let me do now? Does that mean that I do this show? in way that I've 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 mododern newsroom 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 The Tastemaker 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 reebird. Pl play the hits, play the You're the musician. Cooli Leonard episode Yeah. I don't think they want a twelfth Kawi Leard episode. No know, man. I've seen the I've seen the metrics. No. and by the way, like to that point Um I think One thing that I have learned and have such faith in is 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 Metadowlark 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? 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 Do this sound right to their ear and make it like you're not doing that. But you don't think you don't think that there 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 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 that and this was my relationship with writing and it's why I stopped writing.'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 O course, Of course you have a very good point. It's unkind. It's not self love. It's it's not forgiving of yourself. It's always not good enough in some respect in a way that you need to you need to care for yourself slightly better than that. othertherwise you're gonna be when I tell you, ambition can be lonely and it's insatiable, you're gonna be fifteen 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 cosign from the ultimate journalistic body of taste and judgment We got it and now 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 This year, we're pretty lucky Because not only is there a worldorld Cup, there is 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 Ttally 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 TifFO podcast fool around on their daily live streams in the afternoon All shows are free to watch or listen on your favorite podcast platform With each passing year, I realized more and more how important routine is. 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But R right now there's a limited time offer on their site that makes it even easier to get started Go to highpebble. ai before it's gone. That's H I P E B L AI. Terms and conditions apply This episode is brought to you by Gradient FC, the go to soccer rep for player discovery and analysis. If you're somebody who doesn't follow soccer year round, but suddenly gets pulled into the World Cup conversation every four years like the rest of us. 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So whether you're brand new to soccer or already locked in for the World Cup Radiant FC is the app for you this summer. Discover and compare players at gradyenfc. com or download the grradient FC app any app store 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 My way of winning over the audience obively is writing Like The secret of my career journalistically is not that I gave up writing after writing five articles, it's that I 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 ESP in 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 and before 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 What Dan is describing, Chris is like him showing up in his convertible on South Beach picking me up after we 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 writor is for the magazine hosting a show with Bomani High Noon on ESPiana daily deebate show Even USPN daily which was my first like awwakening 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 Hor, all that stuff. 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 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 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 SSPN 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 Polulitzer Prize, right? It was a staff of Pabloa Torere finds 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. off story ideas. like that was a lot of the summer of twenty twenty three 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 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. It shouldould 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. He's 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 Prince 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.'re in you're near that loop near him 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 expectation 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 won a bulletzer. That's right. You are you too 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. whichich 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 discuss this in therapy all the time. I speak my feelings more than feeling my feelings. sameame which is why I think we're friends is that we both know better Um I've been asked more and more and it is 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 logline of why this matters now, more than ever, this moment in American history. And I say It it's illustrated as a zomb HVO's realal spports is dead. The news magazine is a concept. If you look at any given news magazine television show, ats CBS and otherwise Everything is in trust in media. Tust 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. whole idea that you could earn the trust of an audience of a country that is otherwise of journalism as a concept and has no time to be spoon fed vegetables by these self serious people. The idea that sports could be the C cheesyouth on the broccoli.. Another thing I find myself saying You love that saying. I do. Too much, It works. It keeps on working. I love cheesy broccoli though. I'd say it stops working but not just like surprise We've snuck in some human rights into your sports but also that um will follow you because One of the things you're doing on this show that I have internalized is Not taking yourself seriously Oh but 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. And that's and that's that's been the self imposed pressure you know, is How do I live up to that? Like that's what I I learned watching You guys here is like, I need to You know, The thing, again, I'm looking at Chris in the eyes and The thing I am thinking is Chris is an avatar for Let's be honest, a bit of the common man 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 suggest that we edit our shows. Totally clean. 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 trust your judgment. That's it And it's the 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