A New Roadmap for Actual Human Connection, with Roy Wood Jr.
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What is the promise of the internet and how has it failed us?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
If you were a man, and that AutoZone employee came out there behind you to do anything to your car, you's a b****. You's a b****.
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Do you know this one friend who just comes out of bed in the morning and then doesn't come out of his grin? Who is even in front of the first coffee, shamelessly well-groomed and shines around the bed with the morning sun? Terrible. Disgusting. How can you just be so... Restless? Very simple. Train your sleep and become a morning person. With the Galaxy Watch 7 or the Galaxy Ring and the Samsung Health App.
The first nine years of my career, I drove half a million miles. God. Between two different cars, two odometers, total odometers, half a million. And now I'm like, bro, I used to be whiteout conditions in Aspen, drafting 18 wheelers like NASCAR. drafting an 18-wheeler. Drafting an 18-wheeler in a snowstorm.
Waiting for those Mario Kart, what is it like when you see, when you're right nearby, you get a special boost to pass them.
Yeah, yeah, shake and bake, engaged. Because in my brain, in slushy conditions, I would rather be closer on an 18-wheeler because it's throwing the water in the air, so it's not under my tires. The wipers can handle visibility. Just don't get too close if he jackknives that you don't have range. But, like, that's the calculations I used to make. And now I'm the dude in the right lane. I'm doing five under the limit. I got a podcast going. I'm chilling.
So the reason that Roy Wood Jr. is back in our podcast studio in New York, chilling with me, is not simply because he is the author of a stand-up special that I love called Lonely Flowers over on Hulu, and also the host of Have I Got News For You on CNN. Roy is here because, like me, he finds himself trying to safely navigate the wreckage that is 2025, a year in which every institution in our country, from our economy to our politics to our media, is not simply changing human behavior, but also just crashing into each other all of the time, which has the effect of disconnecting us and breaking us apart. But to stop going fast and furious on the freeway, behind the wheel, is also a massive change in personal behavior for Roy Wood Jr. Because Roy, who was an Alabama native, had a way of life as a prolific road comic that obeyed one urgent iron law. If you don't make it, you don't get paid. I've always thought of you as a guy who is, you're a master of the road.
Like you are, there's a journalistic sensibility to you and your comedy, but it is born of you seeing the country. And now what you're saying is you don't want to see it in the way that you used to see it, at least when it comes to the driving aspect of it.
I'll give you a perfect example. I'm doing a project with MLB Network that'll come out later during baseball season. And so we needed to get to Point St. Lucie to shoot some stuff with spring training and ****. Well, the closest airport is West Palm, and that's a rental car plus 45 minutes. The easier flight is Orlando, but Orlando's a two-hour drive to Port St. Lucie. I said, man, just fly me to West Palm so I can drive 45 minutes and I'll figure it out. The old me... would have flown to Jacksonville, say what up to two of my homeboys who I ain't seen in a while, ran over to Tallahassee, yo, what's up, man? All right, I got to go. I got to go down to Port St. Louis. And then driven, I'd have had a six-hour day before, and then shot.
Now I'm just, all right, I'll end at nine. Cameras roll at two. There's two contingency flights after the 9 a.m. flight. I'll still make the shoot on time. All right, let's do it.
What accounts for that difference in desire? Is it energy? Is it actually fearing the mortality rates of being on the road this often?
Why are you different? It's a little bit of that. It's more mortality. But then there's also just I'm 46 and I'm not 26. So there's a little bit of that as well. But I...
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Chapters
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