969 - Pablo Torre Fucks Around and Finds Out feat. Pablo Torre (9/15/25)

All I wanna be is a jungle.

All I wanna be is a jungle.

We're besoles.

All I wanna be is hell

Hello, everybody.

It's Monday, September 15th, and this is your Chopo.

In just a little bit, I will be talking to Pablo Torre of Pablo Torre Finds Out about some of his recent bombshell reporting as it pertains to American sports, the business of sports, and labor relations within those sports.

But before we get to that,

it's me and Felix.

And

just to continue with obviously the biggest story of last week and now with some time to consider or sort of begin to maybe kind of half make sense of the assassination of Charlie Kirk,

I think we should begin there today.

And Felix, and the way I'm thinking about this is like there's essentially sort of two tracks that can be like discussed here.

And one is the actual killing itself and the person who allegedly did it and trying to suss out what, if any, motive can be gleaned from it.

And then the second is like the political fallout and reaction to it.

And I guess like, because that's easier to talk about, let's start there.

And I guess I'm going to begin here with the president and how he's taking this all in.

And

the thing that struck me the most from this weekend, and I know like the Trump administration and their

allies in the media and elsewhere are certainly...

It's very clear what they're trying to do with this, which is to create sort of a martyr that can be used to wave the bloody shirt and advance their cause of, you know, getting rid of freedom of speech and, you know, like criminalizing political dissent or political opposition in this country.

But the thing that I find funny is that, like, once again, Trump, as the leader of this sort of pseudo-fascist movement, can't really seem to be bothered to stick to the script or I don't know, evince like any idea that he cares about any of this, Felix.

And I guess I want to begin with when he was asked at the White House over the weekend, a reporter asked him, Mr.

President, my condolences to you, sir.

My condolences on the loss of your friend, Charlie Kirk.

How are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir?

Trump's response, I think very good.

And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks?

They've just started construction on the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years.

And it's going to be a beauty.

Absolutely magnificent construction.

We just started it.

So it'll get done very nicely.

And it will be one of the best anywhere in the world, actually.

So

even in a moment that like demands it of him, he really cannot even pretend to give a shit about

his friend being murdered.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, he like did it mid-sentence.

He only got through like a few things about it before he immediately launched into...

I mean, it's not even a ballroom.

It's like a bunch of tents

in

an alfresco dining square that's in the backyard of the White House.

I don't know what the fuck he's making there.

I don't think he does either.

I like the clip on Fox and Friends where they were like, How do we fix this country?

And he went, I couldn't care less.

Well, he went on to say, I couldn't care less.

He said, It's going to get me in trouble, but like the extremists on the left are evil because they killed Charlie Kirk.

And the extremists on the right, we have extremists, but they're just very mad about crime and they don't want to see it.

I couldn't care less.

Yeah,

yeah.

I mean, so like, a few days ago, I was looking at like the reaction of the online right, and momentarily, the conventional knowledge among people was like, This is for sure, this is a groiped-up shaudi who did this, you know.

Uh,

and like, I don't blame people for immediately jumping on that or thinking that because

all the all these people who were like,

the Saxon has awakened,

the, the,

the one-eyed guy from Valhalla Rising is here.

All your favorite guys from medieval Europe are back.

All those guys were very quietly backtracking.

Nick Fuentes looked terrified.

And,

you know, a lot of people did not have the tools to differentiate between

a modern griper and

a term that many of us were just, we're not around to see

a meme kid.

And to help us explain what a meme kid is,

we have Spencer, our

the only employee of this podcast, Spencer, here to talk about this.

So this is something I think really starts with my generation, like cusp of the 21st century.

And they're kids that get into memes, but not in the way that everyone is, where you just see like a joke format or whatever, and you're like, this is pretty funny.

Like, it's like a subculture surrounding memes, like kids who dress up as memes for Halloween, like this guy did.

Like, there was a photo going around of him, like, 15 years old in the tracksuit doing a slav squat.

And just immediately, everyone my age was like, oh, I knew this kid.

I knew this fucking kid.

We had one at our school who in like a full year after it happened, he would just be in class and just kind of to himself, he would just be saying, Harumbe, harumbe,

just over and over again, like it just like like almost like kind of stimming on it.

And it was similar type of thing.

It was like kids who like a cracked iPod 5s, they would like pull you aside in class and then like hold it up to you right to your face and then show show you like the grainiest, most artifacted image of a joke that you saw two years ago.

There are kids who like just compulsively talk in internet memes and they're always like three to four years behind for whatever reason.

If this guy like they're gonna put this guy on the chair and he's gonna say like, do you know DeWay or something?

Like they're they're for whatever like they're so into it, but because their like sense of humor and socialization is so stunted, like they can't keep up to date with anything the fbi and we're i really want to talk about the fbi response to that but before we get to that like it's been clear that the fbi and others have been trying to do as work as hard as possible to essentially frame trans people for this killing if what i've seen so far it is almost impossible for anyone on the right or left to like jacket this guy as belonging to either group.

Because like what we are left with, you know, if we were to believe the investigation, is basically like the meme phrases that this guy posted on bullet casings,

which are like, especially people.

I don't see anything here other than evidence of like a totally brain rotted, like hyper irony in which the Hall of Mirrors has now completely closed on itself.

And there is like, there is no more like context, sign, or a signifier.

Nobody even knows what they're supposed to believe.

And that's kind of the point.

But like, what, what did like these sort of meme phrases like notices bulge, O O W O

and Bella Chow?

Like, what are we to make of the, like, what, what message, if any, was being sent with these bullet postings?

So for starters, one of the things he wrote was, if you're, if you're reading this, you're gay.

He wrote it on one of the bullet casings, which is like...

I like to imagine like the cop that picked it up had a touching fentanyl reaction to it.

Like, you know that urban legend?

Five officers were turned gay by looking at this bullet yesterday.

Like, you know that urban legend of that video of Hillary Clinton eating a child's face that made every cop who watched it kill themselves?

Like, I imagine there was something similar with that bullet.

There was just like six cops killing themselves in the area immediately.

That was in the original Philip K.

Dick story that they based minority report on.

That the killer would know that the cop who found it was gay.

So, a lot of these are just like jokes related to like really annoying two online subcultures.

Like Notices Bulge was like a furry joke from like 10 years ago that got just endlessly repeated and copied by increasingly less funny people.

And the one that says, hey, fascist catch, I think that's from Helldivers.

I've never played Helldivers and barely even knew what it was because I've aged out of the following this demographic, but I did do some research on it because this story was making me tweak out a little bit.

And yeah, these are all just like internet jokes.

Like, they're all, I don't know, like your co-worker, your co-worker who is like full volume watching videos that have dubstep blasting out of his iPhone.

No headphones, just like iPhone out in the break room.

And that's the type of person this guy was.

And there's like Belichao.

That's, I mean, that's an Italian anti-fascist song, but it's also popular with groipers, and I think it was in a video game, too.

So, again, there's no discernible ideology at this point that we can gleam other than, like, even if you didn't kill someone, you wouldn't want to be in a room with this guy.

I mean, like, yeah, like, I mean, other than the fact that, like,

he looks like, by all accounts, have, like, a normal middle-class upbringing

in Utah.

Like,

there's just not much to go on here.

And it's also just like the palpable dissatisfaction of political partisans who want to, like I said, jacket their opponents with the motive for this assassination has thus far been like totally just like futile.

Like

I don't I don't discern any motive here other than this like

like I said like

post-reality politics in which like there is really like nothing there is no meaning and there is nothing real save for spectacular acts of violence that then become part of like your screen or then become the meme itself.

Like, I just, I don't know how to conceive of this outside of that.

I guess like the political context in which this is taking place,

I have been struck because like, Felix, obviously like there's now been this like this huge like doxing campaign to like compile lists of like hundreds of thousands of people who were like insufficiently reverential towards a guy who hated them for a living to get people like fired from their jobs.

And plenty of people have already been fired from their jobs in the media for just simply, I don't know, directly quoting Charlie Kirk or just like, like, people, not people who are like, I'm going to jack off on his coffin, as you said last week, but like just quoting him directly.

And, like, I don't know how you feel about this, but like, I think, like, there's so much anger and frustration out there that, like,

that they haven't won the culture war.

That Donald Trump being president means that, like, does not mean that everyone has to instantly like and respect them.

Yeah, I saw, um, did you see that?

Um, they've been doing memorials for Charlie Kirk at like uh most NFL games that have gone on since it happened?

And

he got booed at a New Orleans Saints game.

And I said, right when people were saying that that's because there are so many

leftists in New Orleans.

Like,

okay,

maybe.

I don't know.

In fact, I would say that like, a lot of the frustration is the fact that like, you know, normals are having a more vociferously annoyed reaction than,

you know, whatever like political commentators or political figures.

The mob that like pre that formed before anyone had even said anything.

I mean, I guess like the line that I'm hearing a lot now is that like this is all like, you know, like the organized attempts to like get anyone who was, like I said, just insufficiently reverential.

of like the the glorious murder fired from their job is just the consequences of cancel culture.

And it's like, you know, don't buy the ticket if you don't want the ride.

We're only playing by your rules.

The left did this to us, you know, for the last five, six, ten years or whatever.

Now we're doing it to you and you can't cry unfair.

Which is like, okay, I guess there's like a certain logic to that, but like, isn't contained in the whole like anti-cancel culture pitch the idea that America got so fucking sick of it that they elected Donald Trump president twice?

So I guess I'm wondering like, how do these people think that like, isn't the country going to get just as sick of this shit just as fast?

Of the new sort of anti-woke, woke speech codes and political correctness?

Right.

I mean, this is not, this is not a novel observation from us.

We've talked about this pretty much since the election.

This idea that we are in the midst of like a long conservative 2017 or 2020 for that matter, right?

It's on a little bit more of a collapsed timeline than that, and not entirely one for one.

But the biggest common thread there is just ignoring the obvious signs of

either

independent or just completely politically unaffiliated, checked-out people getting fucking sick of this.

I think

this entire incident, which like

if you would just describe this on paper, just by the virtue of

it being a low bar to clear, one of your least incendiary megastars in your movement, right?

In Charlie Kirk, gets killed horribly in front of a ton of people,

you would say, okay, that's a, you know, for any political movement, they would be able to wring sympathy out of that.

Right.

They took on that task like...

They fucked it up in the way that like Homer Simpson fucks things up.

They're like, okay, I know what to do.

we're all going to go on tv and say that we need to give stephen colbert aids

and it's like guys

i don't know

i mean like uh i the the the um the nfl thing is so i it's so illustrative of this to me because it just it i don't think that all those people who booed him at the Saints game or any of the other shit they're about, I don't think in a lot of these instances, those are are people who would at least identify themselves as like liberals or left-wing or anything.

I think they're just like, they're fucking sick of this.

Just like how the people who elected Biden on the premise that like, oh, you won't have to look at the news anymore.

Right.

They want to keep politics out of sports.

Similar implicit promise here.

And they, you know, for whatever reason, the conservative project of making conservatism fully like just the default set of values for any randomly chosen American, it hasn't gone far enough to where these people will just blindly accept this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And like,

I think that's getting right to it.

It's the assumption that Charlie Kirk's worldview and his values, like that the election of Donald Trump means that that is now the baseline cultural political assumptions of like everyday Americans.

And like you're seeing that now in like the people who are getting fired because like they are mentioning in their obituary for Charlie Kirk the things he said and did regarding, I don't know, repealing the Civil Rights Act or how black women are too stupid to get any job that they didn't take from a white man, et cetera, et cetera.

And like as evidence of, or like counter evidence for the idea that he was some sort of moderate Republican or he was like, he was basically a liberal until the left went so insane.

You know, like, I've seen people describe him as like a 90s progressive.

And it's like, he wouldn't have described himself like that.

He was like a right-wing kid his entire life.

He was like, you know,

he talked about like he grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh.

Like, if you were listening to Rush Limbaugh in high school, you were not a liberal or a progressive at any point in this country's history.

But what frustrates them is the idea that like,

like I said, like, and you're seeing this a lot in like the kind of the wish casting they're doing about how like you, they may have taken our Charlie, but like they have birthed 100 million new conservatives who are going to like change this country.

And like, look, I don't know what the long-term effects of a murder like this will be on like American political politics or culture, but like there seems something a little bit like trying too hard and like wishcasting already what you think 10 years in the future is going to be like because like they can't get around the fact that like Donald Trump is unpopular and most people don't like him and most people, most Americans, liberal or conservative or whatever, do not associate themselves or don't want to be associated with the idea that like the Civil Rights Act was a disaster or that like black people like don't deserve civil or human rights.

And I think that drives them crazy to encounter the idea that they are, despite their political success, are still not liked, or they haven't achieved that final culture war victory that they're hoping that this will lead to.

Have you seen the post where it's like it's Charlie Kirk's widow, and then

I guess one of the

one of the eternals from the Eastern Orthodox religion?

They have no idea what they have unleashed.

They said, I think they mean unleashed.

They said unleashed.

They said, I don't like this Volvo.

The dealership has to take it back.

They have no idea what they have unleashed.

Same look.

Saint Olga of Kiev.

Look her up.

And it's like, do you really think that?

Do you think that this is...

I don't even know the name of Charlie Kirk's widow, but it's...

I'm pretty sure she's not an eternal from Eastern Orthodox.

It just, this whole, it's such a truism right this idea that like you've made a martyr out of him now that a million people are going to be like him and it's like everyone says that after one of their guys dies you know

we've said it

Like everyone has fucking said it.

If that was true, then no one would ever get like in all of human history.

There would be like no assassinations.

The fact is, it's like, if you are interested in affecting affecting electoral politics, it is generally better to be alive.

That is a hard and fast role.

There are exceptions.

And like, I get, look, I get it.

If tomorrow, who's

if tomorrow, like, our greatest political hero,

who would it be?

Like, like,

who is our remaining unvarnished Jean-Luc Melanchon.

Yeah.

President G.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Claudia Scheinbaum.

I don't know.

And Eduardo Bolsonaro.

If Eduardo Bolsonaro died in a hot air balloon incident, we'd obviously be retweeting things where it's like he's, you know, he inspired so many people, blah, blah, blah.

But in private, we would be like, oh my fucking God, this sucks.

He's not going to be able to go on those hot air balloon rides where he canvassed for votes.

You know, I don't know.

Yeah.

But it seems like, I don't know, it seems like they legitimately think that.

And I got to say, prepare to be disappointed, fellas.

Yeah.

Another aspect of this story that I followed this weekend was like

the FBI response and investigation to this was

astonishing.

And like, this is our boy, Cash Patel in the hot seat, you know, because like when you, when you put someone in charge of the FBI who has no experience whatsoever in, I mean, like, his only experience was being investigated by the FBI.

And then, like, he has to, like, take account for, like, a nationally televised murder that is of extreme importance to the president and his supporters.

And, like, his response to it was just basically like, okay, let me read here from the,

so it says here, On Thursday morning, a day after hastily suggesting the person who gunned down Charlie Kirk was in custody, Cash Patel, the FBI director, convened an online meeting with 200 guests, 200 agents around the country to discuss the manhunt.

It was a tense affair.

Mr.

Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, made it clear they were under intense pressure to catch the killer of Mr.

Kirk.

They expressed themselves with such fierce urgency in the view of some participants, it hinted at another motive, to prove they were up for the task.

The director wasted no time before calling out subordinates that he said had failed to give him timely information and was incensed that agents in Salt Lake City waited nearly 12 hours to show him a photo of the suspected killer.

Mr.

Patel said he would not tolerate any more Mickey Mouse operations.

An official on the call recounted.

It was one of his few utterances without profanity, the person added.

And like, all this is to say, the investigation concluded successfully when the shooter's father turned him in.

And they were just like, yeah, here he is.

That was the fruits of the FBI's extensive investigation, which included like, like I said,

Basically trying to trying as hard as possible to imply that like a trans person did this or that like

any trans connection whatsoever to this shooting, and then the guy, the guy just confesses to his father, and the father calls the feds and turns him in.

Well, I mean, that is the other thing here that I have only seen a few people

state, but

I am starting to think more and more,

what are the chances they actually got the guy?

I don't know.

Yeah, you know, it's just like, like, how

do you think Cash's FBI would know if that, do you think they would give a shit?

Or do you think this is just, oh my God, we have to, we have to look like we're on top of this.

Just whoever calls that tip line first, they win the prize.

You know,

I don't know.

I don't know.

Like, I mean, like, I just get the impression.

Like, this is just another one of these events that occur in American life with increasing regularity that are like, you know, explosions of like, like I said, violent nihilism and murder and cruelty that like just are out there, they're investigated, but like just continue to baffle indefinitely.

And that, like, of which there are already like, you know, like angles you can take to look at this, like, in a certain light on both sides of the political spectrum.

They're like, suit, I don't know, a narrative about a conspiracy or something larger at play.

You know, I'm not like firmly placing my marker down on any of them.

But what I am certain of is that like this will just be another one of these like meta events that will just sort of like haunt our American psyche and we're like no matter what you believe about it you already have a preordained narrative set ready to go and like there will be nothing that will be revealed about this case about the motivations or about even who did it that is likely to shake free like anything real or conclusive because of just like this like I said this kaleidoscope of

I don't know like reference and content or

just sort of the absence of meaning that exists in all of this.

I did greatly enjoy Cash saying that I'll see you in Valhalla, brother, to Charlie Kirk.

Okay, Cash.

I felt so bad for Varg when that happened.

I know Varg follows like a different thing that isn't like

the Viking religion, but it's close enough, like it's close enough to where that probably stings.

And like, wasn't Charlie Kirk an evangelical Christian?

Wouldn't he be disappointed to find himself in pagan heaven?

Yeah.

I mean, even if both those guys were pagans, wouldn't like actual Vikings see both of them in Valhalla and be like, what the fuck?

Wait,

wait, what were your jobs?

Your media personalities?

Well, anyway, welcome to the halls of Odin.

Hope you have fun here.

Anyway.

Yeah, are you sure you're in the right wall?

Yeah.

We can help you get to, you know, wherever your heaven is supposed to be, but if you're sure you're supposed to be here.

Fox's Greg Gutfeld.

I picture God asking Charlie Kirk for his autograph.

I mean,

wait a second.

Wait a second.

Wait, wait, wait a second.

If you are a sincere believing Christian, doesn't that offend you?

Like, have some dignity.

The idea that God,

creator of the universe,

I mean, you could say, you know, you could do do the classic newspaper cartoonist thing where, like, he's at the Pearly Gates and he's like, come on in, Charlie.

We got, you know, George Washington is waiting to hang out with you.

But to say that God would be like, Charlie, you've impressed me more than any human being since Jesus Christ.

My son and also me.

Oh, yeah.

I think that they need like a new...

I think they need a third testament for American Protestantism.

Well, funny enough, this did happen in Utah, which is,

it did create the Third Testament in a lot of ways.

Do you think there's a Mormon connection here that's yet to be explored?

I mean, insofar as

it's a great way to get a weird son, yeah.

Actually, for me.

In any other way, I don't know.

Yeah.

Well,

another Mormon connection to this, I want to say, like, you know, like, because we've been struggling with, like, the essential meaninglessness of, like, these, like, of the hyper-politics of just like irony and the total divorce of sign and signifier

or meaning from anything.

But I do want to talk about, like, Felix, did you see the video of the Mormon TikTok influencer who was like right there at the shooting going live?

Because that, to me, is the richest text that like conveys what this is all about.

Like, that, that conveys more meaning to me than anything I've seen in the analysis of what this all means or what's going on here.

Did you watch that video, Felix?

Oh, of course.

It's your boy Elder TikTok.

There was just a gunshot at Charlie Kirk.

We're in Utah.

There's a gunfire.

This is not a joke.

Hey, let's go.

Hey, let's go.

Hey, let's go.

It's your boy Elder TikTok.

There was just a gunfire in Utah.

This is not a drill.

There is a gunfire in Utah.

Shots fired.

Shots fired here in Utah.

This is not a joke.

Charlie Clerk, Elder TikTok, Mormon Central, Utah.

There was a gun that just fired off here at Charlie Kirk.

I am not playing with y'all.

Hey, make sure you go to church on Sunday.

Read the Book of Mormon.

This is not a drill.

I'm not playing with y'all.

Hey, Jesus is Lord.

Jesus will protect you.

Jesus is your savior, bro.

I'm not even lying.

Make sure you subscribe to Elder TikTok on Instagram.

He's like, yo, it's your boy.

It's your boy.

The fact that, like, you just saw a man be brutally murdered, like, 10 yards in front of you.

And then you go live and you're like, It's your boy, Elder TikTok here.

They don't want the smoke.

They don't want the smoke.

Yo, like and subscribe.

And there are people like screaming and running, fleeing for cover.

And you just got the front-facing video.

You're holding it above your face, going, It's your boy here.

They don't want the smoke.

Yeah, he he um he fucked up the crime scene by grabbing a bunch of blood-soaked like TT USA merch and they said now he's selling it.

He is awesome.

Like

the The new Shroud of Turin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That guy is incredible.

I'm sure you saw that thing about how Pacific Islanders were arguing over whether he's Tongan or Samoan because neither side wanted to claim him.

Charlie Kirk?

No, no, no, no.

Elder TikTok.

Oh, the TikTok.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, he did have to do a follow-up where he was like, sorry, I'm trying to be a more responsible creator.

But it's just like, it's

got tasty.

It's okay.

It's a long road, Elder TikTok.

You'll get another try soon.

What I mean is, like, what I'm saying is, like, the horrifying thing to me is that, like, the instinct to go live and start upping your brand like five seconds after seeing a brutal murder or assassination is to me like telling as to the motive of the person who pulled the trigger in the first place.

Well, I mean,

just to put the focus on elder TikTok here a little bit, the idea of of promoting your TikTok

through that is hilarious to me because it's like,

are people going to follow you because they think, oh my God, I don't want to miss the next horrible killing.

This guy is just so lucky that he's going to be in all of them.

He's going to get angles that no one else gets.

I don't want Elder TikTok near any public event.

Yeah, yeah.

Lock him down.

It's just in media, you don't want to promise things to your viewers that you can't always deliver.

And that's like a tough act to follow up.

Yeah, we talked about like the

right-wing response to this and their sort of

their playful imaginings about how this will lead to like a final confrontation with liberalism that will like in which they will ascend to be like the new eras of America and like any trace of

lib thought will be wrung out of schools or hollywood or just anything or even what you encounter on the internet but like what just to sort of turn to the other side of like how liberal and so like supposedly neutral or liberal institutions are reacting to this and i like i i think here you see like also

you know if you if one was to believe that this will presage the like ultimate defeat of liberalism in american culture that now replaced by you know like a fascist dictatorship.

I would think like liberals and their reaction to this is like a good indication if you're, if you're inclined to believe that that's where this is going, their complicity in like going along with this is really telling because like it's just like how immediately scared they all are and how immediately like they apologize preemptively for ever disagreeing with Charlie Kirk.

And like there's this like presumption that like if you are murdered, then like,

if you disagreed with him when you were alive or found him distasteful or you know like a bad political actor, that you were somehow complicit in this murder.

That like if you if you die awfully, that like retroactively your views and what you spent your life and career advocating for become sanctified in a way.

And like that that's what I'm seeing from the liberal establishment right now.

And like, and also like, because like this is just an ongoing process.

Like for instance, like their capitulations on like...

protests as it regards to Palestine, the way that they've fired people or just like did away with traditionally liberal norms regarding speech, protest, and political dissent to like pre-capitulate to like threats from the Trump administration.

Is that what you're seeing, Felix?

Yeah, yeah.

No, I mean, I will say that Ezra Klein iPad was just like.

He got torched by the New York Times' own readers over that.

Yeah, I was going to say,

I was a little hardened to see that just like the rank and file libs seem pretty disgusted by it.

I mean, regardless of what you think about it like on an emotional level, it is just

in cold calculation, in just pure practical terms, it is really stupid to act preemptively guilty

after that.

Like to just preemptively be like, no, we're sorry, we killed him.

What the fuck?

Are you fucking stupid?

I like,

you know, other people have made this point, but like the the example of like the flags being like flown at half mast I don't think the state of Minnesota did that when their own two Democratic politicians got murdered just the other month and they're doing it for like I'm sorry like look I don't want to understate like the popularity of Charlie Kirk or how important he is particularly to young conservatives or like

You know, like a certain kind of young person who has like gotten into politics and like found a voice and a home for themselves on the right.

Like just because he isn't popular popular with us doesn't mean that like nobody cares about him.

But like at the end of the day, he is still just like a media figure and a podcaster.

And the fact that like his body is going to be like displayed in state and that like the body itself was flown back to DC on like Air Force 2 without an autopsy taking place was another odd detail to like that accrues when you're trying to like make sense of all of this.

But like, yeah, to preemptively apologize and be like, you're right, it was us, we killed him, sorry, we'll never do it again.

And then also to kind of preemptively like say that, you know what?

He had some points.

And that's what I mean about this attempt to be like, you know,

he was radicalized by liberals, in fact, and he would have just been a moderate Republican.

He would have been a Mitt Romney Republican had we not been so mean to them.

It just shows me that like they don't, like, they have, they're so bereft of dignity that they can't even stand up for themselves.

And they just, like, they cringe before the blow even is landed.

Yeah, yeah.

And it just, I don't know.

Um,

I don't, I, I don't think this is true of like everyone who, you know, their immediate reaction was that this would, this, this would portend something awful, that this is on balance, like

a bad thing

for, in all sectors of American life, right?

Um,

I'm specifically referring to the people like Ezra Klein here.

uh

when I say this but I think for someone like him

to some extent like

he identifies more with Charlie Kirk than like really anyone else you could think of.

If you're, if your entire, if your entire job is predicated on like,

this is the episode of our podcast where we talk about fucking the freeway expansion with Charlie Kirk.

Like, yeah, yeah, then you, you will do anything to try to, in your mind, bring the temperature down so things could be normal enough so you could have these interminable fucking debates with a guy like that.

I mean, in some ways it's kind of like wishful thinking that things are still going to be normal enough, that it's still going to be electoral politics as they existed in the previous like 50, 60 years before this for you to be able to do that.

And like you can decry like culture war politics and like identity politics, you know, like as we have done on this show for being like perhaps not productive or a distraction from other issues.

But the thing is, like the right is heavily invested in this culture war, and they're going to fight it regardless of whether you want to like engage with the enemy or not.

So if you believe things, like, for instance, that the Civil Rights Act was like a good thing and shouldn't be repealed, eventually you are going to have to stand up for yourself.

And you are going to have to like state that like people advocating the opposite are wrong.

And that's where we get to this idea of like debate, because that's what Charlie Kirk made his whole shtick, right?

Debate me, prove me wrong.

And it was basically like him teeing off against these like 18-year-old college students who are like, you know, passionate in their beliefs, but perhaps like, look, there's a reason he debated college students and not college professors.

And what I find offensive about this whole sort of sacralizing of the idea of debate in American culture is that like

Look, we don't really do debate on this show, and that's not because like I'm opposed to the idea that like

controversial or harshly conflicting viewpoints have no business being like I don't know advocated or contested in public between knowledgeable people.

What I take exception with is this the idea that like you know he would like he just wanted to debate people about ideas.

And he just like that's it.

That's all he was doing.

And like my problem with that is that like

you can you can defend the things you believe in, but a part of that is recognizing that there are certain things that I don't think are worthy of debate.

Among them, do black people or minorities or women deserve rights?

Because once you enter into the like a format in which like that is up for debate, I think you've given them what they want already, which is the idea that like this is an idea worth discussing.

I mean, also,

I don't know.

It's just the entire, the, the idea that like,

oh, okay, you just showed us that,

you know,

You're gonna you're gonna wish that there were still people in the conservative movement who cared about debate.

And it's like, yeah, you guys clearly fucking loved that.

You really gave Mahmoud Khalil a chance to debate.

Yeah.

You really gave all everyone you fucking deported for like signing a Google Doc saying that Israel is committing genocide.

You loved giving them a chance to voice their opinions.

Or like, you know, and like, and the way that this is being talked about in like, even in foreign countries, like, didn't Kier Starmer chime up to talk about like,

like, the idea, like the idea that we should never put like, you know, political debate, like, we should never become violent or we should never criminalize it.

You're arresting pensioners for holding up a sign that says, I oppose genocide, support Palestine action.

So, like, like, that ship is fucking sailed.

And, like, Felix, like, I've seen a lot of that, the thing you're talking about, where they're like, yeah, like, you have no idea what you've unleashed.

Like, he was the last conservative to believe in debate.

And what you're going to get after is just like, I don't know, the death squads or whatever.

Like,

his belief in debate or like making a public spectacle of, you know, owning libs or like, you know, moving the ball down the field on like increasingly far-right-wing ideas as it regards like, you know,

the rights of minorities or women or gay people in this country.

And it's just like,

he wasn't, none of these people are legitimately concerned or like invested in the idea of like the public sphere or like the debate of conflicting political ideas.

This is like, this is a show for them.

It's entertainment for their side.

It's like, it's, it's to boost their morale, not to advance any specific idea or cause in American life.

I mean like they're quite clear about their motives.

And like I said, I think falling for this idea that like

that they were like,

you know, like

it's it's entertainment.

You know, it's what we do in a way.

But like I don't hide behind the contention that what we do here is like debate.

I'm taking part in a public debate by like voicing my opinions to an audience of people that like are inclined to agree with me.

But like, I don't really feel the need to

defend them or debate people who feel otherwise because it's just sort of like

everyone knows what they believe in.

And

I personally don't feel the need to debate the idea that

women deserve political and social equality or that

Palestinians deserve to live.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I don't know.

I'm not wholeheartedly against it as a form of content.

I do think that there are people who are very good at it

on our side generally, who I think that they get more out of doing it than we would.

But yeah,

that is not what this guy's career was.

It had way more in common with like fucking,

you know, James Dobson than

what's an example of a big debate guy in history, Socrates.

Yeah, and he was the most annoying guy in human history.

So I rest my case.

The owl and that boy that he time traveled with.

Two of my favorite historical figures.

Like I said,

I don't know where this story is ultimately going to lead.

I mean, like, maybe in the next week, we'll learn some more about the person who allegedly killed him and why he did it.

I mean, we...

We are hearing reports that he is not cooperating with the FBI in their investigation.

And I just like, I wonder what that entails.

Like, Spencer was like, do you think when

they have him in the box and they're interrogating him, like, he's just replying with just memes that they have no idea what he's talking about

he's talking about shrek to them they're like why did you kill like what what is this bullet like what does this mean and he's just like rip her rambe shrek is love

oh my god he's probably he's probably wasted so much like so much uh storage on the uh on the digital surveillance cameras reciting the entire b-movie script

yeah oh my god he's making me remember all my like least favorite things from 2017.

They show him the rifle and it's like, was this the rifle?

And he just points at it and says, big jungis.

We knew he wasn't a fan of Mr.

Kirk and President Trump because he repeatedly upset of them, the cake is a lie.

Wait, do you remember all those like memes that were like of Charlie Kirk and it just said, hey, liberals, pee is stored in the balls or whatever.

Do you think that's why he killed him?

He just saw all those awful lines and was just like, yeah, this is the guy you kill right

there was a taxi driver type scenario where he like almost shot chuck norris and it didn't work so he went to charlie

i mean that really

Utah it seems like it's the same deal with like uh Eastern Europe in the 1990s where it's like 10 years behind everyone else.

Yeah.

Yeah, they just got Niancat there.

Yeah.

Oh, but they're they're going to start subscribing to us soon.

Yeah, we're going to get a huge bump.

Thank God.

Yes.

Thank God.

Crumble cookies are a very like 10 years ago thing.

Like back when like really tacky pastry shops were a thing.

Crumble cookies are very like, I don't know, something that you would be like dragged to 10 years ago on a date.

Yeah, yeah.

Follow the money.

And it just leads you to the crumple cookies.

Yeah, well, we were talking about like, it's like a parallax view type thing happening, but it's the Crumble Cookie Corporation doing it.

They just like they showed him the video that was just a slideshow of memes, of right and left wind memes.

Like that's how they cooked, that's how they cooked him into this.

Yeah, they were just

showing him like, you know, like 4chan memes on one side and then like R slash Chapo Trap House memes on the other side.

Like just just to make sure that like the shooter will have basically like it will be impossible to discern what they believed in or why they did this well we'll see where it goes uh i guess uh we'll leave it there for the first half of the show uh in the second half of the show here is pablo tore

All right, so it is now my pleasure to welcome to the show one of my favorite guys from the TV.

But he's also got a podcast called Pablo Torre Finds Out.

It's welcome to the show, Pablo Torre.

Will, this is a little strange for me because I've heard you from afar for a while.

So to be invited into what it is that you do,

a real pleasure, I gotta say.

Well, this is sort of a cross-pollination, right?

Like, our show usually covers politics, and I'm having you on because you have, in your podcast, broken a number of like bombshell

news stories about uh the nba and the nfl and before you know i i should as you're aware our listeners are mostly gamers nerds you know they don't know ball but before we get into the first story about collusion between the nfl owners and players association i'm just going to like entice our listeners before they tune out that this story is not just about millionaire jocks and billionaire owners and sports ball this story by virtue of the people involved in it will touch on mega government contractor and consulting firm Booz Allen, the Carlisle Group, who you may remember from such events as 9-11 and the Iraq War, and the cover-up of child sex abuse in Hollywood.

There is that.

This story has many, many, many sort of tendrils to unravel.

But at its heart, the story that you're calling Collusion Gate is fascinating to me because it really is a story that upends what you would expect from a players' union and ownership, right?

Like, this story really subverts what you would sort of expect to believe about how a players' union would represent the interests of its members in contract negotiations with the ownership of these NFL teams.

So, like, there's

a lot to unpack here, but like so many catastrophes in American life, this story begins with the Cleveland Browns.

Could you talk about how, first of all, who Deshaun Watson is and why his contract with the Cleveland Browns sort of violated this kind of like cardinal sin or omuerta among NFL owners.

Yeah, so I should be clear that my show is a technically sports show that is kind of like sports.

I call it like sports as a, I don't know how your mileage varies on the premise of liberal arts education, but to me, sports has always been that.

And so the idea that we're going to get to all the things you mentioned, as well as some really, really strange and even darker other things potentially, it's by design.

Like my show is not really for,

I don't know, the standard ESPN consumer.

It's for people who like have a larger view on why, frankly, child molestation might be a thing we should be talking about in the context of very famous people who don't want you to know about it.

And I mean that in a sincere way.

There's been a lot of that going around the news lately.

I dare say that

in this case,

Some people have a point.

Not all the people, but some of the people have a point.

Deshaun Watson, to bring us back to sexual misconduct.

So Deshaun Watson is the guy who is most famous for having dozens of lawsuits, civil suits filed against him because he loved getting massages.

And the masuses subsequently, dozens of them reported that he was effectively

sexually terrorizing them.

And so in that regard, Deshaun Watson is a headline that came across in that police blotter sort of a way.

But in this story specifically, he is also the guy who was given a contract that was truly unprecedented and unique in the modern NFL because he got more money guaranteed, hundreds of millions of dollars by the Cleveland Browns.

Which is a violation of what teams like the Cleveland Browns and every other NFL organization wants to do.

Because the NFL is a league, and this is the power dynamic between management and labor already sort of coming to the foreground here.

It's a league that has been built on the premise that, yes, NBA players can have fully guaranteed contracts, which means whatever.

Something happens, they still got to get paid.

Baseball, likewise.

The Mets still paying Bobby Bonilla to this day.

Precisely.

There are teams, billionaires haunted by the terrible decisions they made.

And in the NFL, there are these outs.

And basically, you just don't guarantee the contract.

And suddenly that power dynamic is just pretty singular in American professional sports.

All of which is to say that the Cleveland fucking Browns gave that guy, as F where mentioned,

starting quarterback, star quarterback, a fully guaranteed contract.

And the reason this set off alarm bells everywhere was first on the level of like, okay, this seems like the most cynical transaction in the history of professional sports.

Fair, but also behind closed doors with these, again, the NFL is nothing but a wildly exclusive country club

with all of those teams representing these factions that are ostensibly competitors, but as this story will reveal, are cooperators, somewhat alleged colluders.

They all had the same reaction, which is, apparently,

this can never happen again.

Not because of the moral reprehensibility, but because he got a fully guaranteed contract.

Or that he's a bad player that was a bust anyway.

No, it's because.

Correct.

Yeah, like in the NFL, because of because like there are so many injuries to players, you know, from their perspective, ownership never wants to guarantee money in a contract and end up paying tens of millions of dollars to someone who doesn't play a single game because they get hurt because the NFL is just so much more violent than other professional sports.

And also they're cheap.

Yeah.

There's a desire to not want to have to do it, not having to do it.

And then logically, yes, their argument is, by the way, like this is a, again, it's a meat grinder in very real ways.

But the point being that this takes us to what's happening behind closed doors, in which this is not merely a thing that you would think is so obvious that you don't need to reiterate it in any sort of like paperwork, because, of course, all the owners already feel this way.

What happens, it turns out, is that it is written down on various emails and pieces of paper in ways that become relevant later.

And now, like,

your story and your reporting begins with your

basically disclosure of a 60-page legal document that was basically from like the NFL owners like meeting in March of 2022.

And like, what is what is in that legal document?

And like, what is that?

What is what do those documents show?

Yeah.

So the reason I became fascinated with this document is because there was a bit of a, for those NFL like legal heads, those nerds,

there was this question of like, whatever happened to the time when the NFLPA sued the NFL

for collusion against guaranteed contracts.

So the NFLPA, the Players Association, had this attempt to hold the NFL accountable for things that will be very explicitly spelled out in this document.

But the point is, this arbitration, and that's how it's settled in the NFL, arbitration,

the ruling never got leaked.

No one ever heard about it, which is conspicuous in a sport that loves leaks and typically in a management-labor squabble, right?

Like one side will trumpet that they won and vice versa.

So, in this case, it was just dead silent in a way that became deafeningly loud.

And so, a couple people, Mike Florio, a pro football talk, notably, was like, can anyone help me find this document?

And I said, I think I might be able to.

I love finding out shit.

And so, this PDF, the 61-page arbitration ruling,

what it revealed was what was described to me as the holy grail of NFL PA

legal actions, which is to say that it turns out that in this arbitration proceeding, the NFL had to bring eight of its owners, Roger Goodell, the commissioner,

top executives in the league, as well as Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson and Russell Wilson and Kyler Murray and all these other NFL front office executives, and they had to testify.

And not only that, they had to turn over their cell phones.

So expedited discovery, the most terrifying.

Discovery, yeah.

The thing everyone dreads in any sort of legal proceeding.

Yes, all of these billionaires whose entire like task for the league office is prevent us from having to give our cell phones to

any sort of like legal process, they all had to do it.

And so you get these transcripts, these emails, these slideshow presentations with notes written in the side, in which it becomes very clear that what Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, in communication with the NFL Management Council, and all you got to know about that is that it's sort of like the, Mike Florio calls it, a group that only exists to collude, but they're the group that is sort of like the nexus point on like best practices for all of the teams.

They ostensibly exist to advise ownership on what is the best practices for things like contract negotiations.

But like, as you're reporting and like lays out, it's not really advice that you can just sort of

consider.

Like they, they, like, this management council, what they say really goes.

Yeah.

And like to an example of the collusion that I wasn't aware of, or like, what would be like at least circumstantial evidence of a case for collusion involves Lamar Jackson when he wasn't happy with his contract with the Ravens in 2022 and tested the open market and didn't get a single callback from any teams.

Like, wait, what?

This guy is a two-time MVP.

And like, and what with the tech show is that they're basically like owners talking to each other being like, hey, great job covering our ass on these contracts.

Like, you like, you really made it easier for us.

And it's like, the fact that the owner of the Atlanta Falcons would not reach out to Lamar Jackson about possibly him being a starting QP for the Falcons is insane.

No, they needed to have Desmond Ritter be the starting quarter.

So the reason this case was filed was because Lamar Jackson wanted a fully guaranteed contract after Deshaun Watson.

Kyler Murray wanted a fully guaranteed contract after Deshaun Watson.

Russell Wilson wanted a fully guaranteed contract after Deshaun Watson and none of them got it.

And the NFL Players Association had heard through its own networks that there were conversations among owners about how there was an effort to not give it out.

Because it was like, oh, wait a minute, is the damn breaking?

And so in these text messages, what you see and hear is that, yes, Lamar Jackson, multiple-time MVP,

arguably one of the three greatest quarterbacks of his time.

There is no offer coming in for that guy.

And the linkage here, the dot to connect is it is because all of the owners are hearing that they shouldn't make offers that are fully guaranteed anymore, and he's demanding it.

And what it shows is that the solidarity among the ownership of the NFL supersedes even their desire to win games or compete compete against each other on the football team.

Yes.

Yes.

This is part of why I love this story, is that it reveals what they actually care about.

Because on the one hand, you might think that these guys are hyper-competitive championship trophy fetishists who will do anything like sign serial sexual misconductor Deshaun Watson to a deal.

And in fact, the irony of how this all played out was that arbitration ruling revealed that no one even wanted to bid on the best quarterback available because more important was something that the NFL PA longs for and cannot seemingly have, which is

organized

and truly,

I would say, staggering solidarity among the billionaires against the players.

You described the NFL ownership as like it's all one big country club.

And I think that's like a good thing.

These guys know each other socially.

They sort of roll in the same circles and they get to decide who gets and who gets accepted into the country club in terms of buying an NFL team or having an ownership stake in it.

The fact that they would collude among each other is to

basically get rid of guaranteed money in the NFL contracts for their players.

That to me is a newsworthy story, but it's not exactly a shocking or groundbreaking story.

Pablo, where this story gets really fascinating is why would the NFL Players Association, who are been vindicated by this legal arbitration arbitration and have like smoking gun evidence of leadership colluding against their members, against players in their contract negotiations, why would they then seek to keep this document secret and then basically everybody shut up about it?

Like then we get into this idea of the leadership of the NFL Players Association being essentially controlled opposition for ownership.

It's the thing that was most eyebrow raising was like, wait a minute, this was in here the whole time.

Why did no one ever know about it?

And the way it happened was the NFLPA's leadership and the NFL's leadership agreed via confidentiality agreement to never talk about it.

There was an everyone involved in this meeting signed an NDA.

So the leaders of the NFL and the NFLPA both agreed, yes, via legal agreement, we're not gonna publicize this.

And in fact, the people who were on some level, the plaintiffs, right, the players in that arbitration case, they never saw the outcome.

They never saw what happened when the arbitrator ruled in a partial victory in favor of the NFLPA with evidence that we've never seen before.

That would be the number one thing you dream of if you are an NFL PA executive, a union official, trying to convince America the way that I talk about those owners is actually rooted in reality, as opposed to what they claim is like the fantastical hysterical whining of these spoiled millionaires.

Like, actually, there's the proof, but it was never, of course, disclosed.

And so the question of why gets to the controlled opposition point, which I think you can safely cut to the chase on at this point.

Okay, well, it involves two people: JC Treder and a man named Lloyd Howell, because at the exact time that this ownership meeting was taking place, the NFL PA had a turnover in their leadership.

And I think one of the most interesting aspects of your story, or eyebrow-raising to me, was the way in which the NFLPA went about sourcing new leadership for that NFL Players Association president position or head of the Players Association position.

Yeah, so the regime that had filed the arbitration case, alleging all the things that resulted in that hidden ruling,

they were ousted.

So that was DeMorris Smith, was a former prosecutor, adversarial was his reputation among all of the people around the league and the union.

And so the new regime that is installed, and J.C.

Treddor was the outgoing president, the player president of the NFL PA, and he had a hand in figuring out who should replace DeMorris Smith, the executive director.

And the executive director job, for those not familiar, is like a forever job.

Like a handful of guys have ever done it.

You have the job for decades typically.

And your job is to be the counterweight to the most powerful sports executive in America, the commissioner of the NFL.

And in this case, what J.C.

Tredder did was he engineered a process that was cloaked in an amount of secrecy that is comical, which we can talk about.

But the basic philosophy that he had was, and this is something that I think is not uncommon, frankly, among various sectors of union leadership, depending on the industry and how much money is flowing through it.

There is so much money in the business of football, which is accurate, that this is the next step, we should just be partners as opposed to antagonists.

We don't need to be adversarial with the league.

We're all going to make more money than we did before.

Why shouldn't we just go along to get along and all get rich together?

And so that philosophy was key to what happens next and like i i i'm thinking about that reflected in lloyd howell's statements in like in first in an edited video clip and then you uncovered the unedited video clip from his comments where you talked about how like today's players are different than in like back in the day because like today's players are they're entrepreneurially minded and they're interested in capital and making their money work for them And like, okay, so like, could you talk about who Lloyd Howell is?

And just the unbelievably like bizarre Star Chamber process by which he was elected head of the NFLPA?

So JC Treder, who is, by the way, a Browns offensive lineman, outgoing, one of his final acts in his position is to orchestrate a process via amendments to the Union Constitution, which require you.

typically with 30 days notice to tell the voters and the board of the NFLPA or the 32 player representatives who decide in a Democratic election who should be the new executive director?

The Constitution used to require that you had 30 days to tell them who the candidates were.

So J.C.

Treder and the executive committee, again, forgive the political sort of like

org chart here, but J.C.

Tredor and his inner circle of executive committee members vet and decide who the finalists for this job are going to be.

And this job, by the way,

you know, it's multi-millions of dollars.

This is one of the, it's arguably the highest profile, best paid labor leader job in America.

So, just as a context, like there's money in this job.

You oversee a billion-dollar war chest.

This is like not something you do as a volunteer.

Ooh, who are the good guys?

I mean, typically you want the good guys, but this is something that you could do for incentives having to do with money.

So they pick two people, two finalists, one of whom is Lloyd Howell.

And Lloyd Howell, because of this amendment to the Constitution, gets to walk into the room at which he's about to be voted on, and the voters will have no idea who he is until he says, Hello, I'm Lloyd Howell, and I am a candidate, and this is what I do.

What he is, and what unites the two finalists that J.C.

Treder selected for vote, is that he's a businessman.

He had no union representative experience.

He had no labor organizing experience at all.

He had no sports experience.

He wasn't a lawyer.

He was, in fact, the former CFO of Booz Allen.

And he happens to be, and this is something that would have been helpful to be told to the voters, you could argue, before they had to enter this room together,

he was a character in what turns out to be one of the largest fraud settlements that a company has ever paid to the U.S.

government.

Because under Booz Allen, according to a whistleblower who testified to this, Lloyd Howell was the guy she went to and did nothing.

So that's the guy they ended up selecting.

The fraud settlement case,

the fraud case that was brought against Booz Allen that they settled for something like $377 million

involved there are numerous contracts with the government of Saudi Arabia, which were all losing money for Booz Allen.

And in fact, was making the company itself in the red.

And essentially, what the whistleblower showed is that they were then taking money from contracts with the U.S.

government,

using them to backstop and make whole the contracts that they were losing money with Saudi Arabia.

You know, just standard NFLPA stuff.

You know, everybody does that.

Okay.

But like,

weird enough that this guy has no background in unions or sports or anything like that.

And like he's the basically like the top line on his CV was CFO at Booz Allen while it presided over one of the largest fraud cases in U.S.

history.

But it gets even more insane when it turns out that he had an undisclosed conflict of interest involving the Carlisle group and their attempts to get an ownership stake in NFL teams.

Yeah, the NFL did this thing as sports is doing in general where they give

a short list of

suitors permission to buy shares, to seek shares in NFL teams as owners.

And this is new to sports, but Carlisle, private equity, They are on the list.

And wouldn't you know it, but Lloyd Howell had a side gig as a consultant to the Carlisle Group while also seeking and receiving the job of being, as I said, the foremost counterweight and antagonist, ostensibly, to the owners who he is simultaneously working with through this arrangement at the Carlisle Group.

So on its face,

I mean, just patently ridiculous, but yet it also was not an issue until it was reported by me and Don Van Atta at ESPN.

So like in this election process with like JC Treddor, the former player who created this like amendments to like essentially like be like, I guess the equivalent would be like on election day, you walk into the voting booth and you're like, here are the candidates you're voting for.

Decide now.

You have five minutes.

The question raises is like, why?

Like, why is the NFL Players Association creating a situation in which like their their leadership and the people representing them in negotiations with management where ownership is someone who is like a house creature of ownership?

Does it benefit them individually?

Or is this part of, like you said, like a larger shift away in sports and American culture in general, away from this idea that there is an adversary relationship between management and employees?

It's both.

I mean, individually for JC Tredor, like he wanted to be, this is in my reporting, he wanted to be eventually the executive director long term, could not because of the way the timeline shook out.

And so the theory was Lloyd Howell is a bridge candidate, a bridge quarterback on the way to getting the real starter in there long term, which would have been JC Treddor himself.

And so he is, by the way,

the possessor of one of the most invented titles in NFL PA history, which was chief strategy officer, which Lloyd Howell gave him,

making one of the highest paid executives and also the guy who actually knew about the union that Lloyd leaned on for all of his decisions, I am told.

And so there is just that thing of the Game of Thrones that JC Tredder is trying to install himself long term.

And then broadly, there is that trend in which, as you put it before, and as Lloyd Howell put it, like, we're all CEOs.

We're all businessmen.

CEO at me.

Yeah.

I mean, like, truly, like, everybody knows what it's like to be an owner now.

So why don't we all treat ourselves like we're all on the same team?

And that fundamental misunderstanding of like, A, not just like the history of labor relations, but like B, sort of like the general rapaciousness of the people that they are specifically needing to counterbalance, because all of this, of course, is a negotiation, is just one of the more, I mean, this is just my now editorial position, having now studied this for whatever, the last year, it's just one of the more naive understandings of what the NFL is willing to do for you because they're not going to do anything and they don't have to.

And all of this is actually actually quite amusing to the people who you actually helped by burying the thing in the first place.

Have you noticed or like, what do you make of like since this story has broken, I have maybe I'm wrong, but like I have not seen too much reaction from current or former NFL players expressing any kind of outrage or even any opinion whatsoever on

the collusion between their players association and the ownership of the NFL.

Yeah, and that's the third thing that's really important to mention, which is that the reason this can happen with one guy politically, strategically as per his title, shaping an electorate and informing or under-informing them is because the NFL Players Association has one of the hardest jobs when it comes to organizing in labor relations in America.

You have a union where ostensibly, by the way, you know, Tom Brady is on the one hand and on the other.

end of the spectrum is like a practice squad guy who's just trying to hang on.

The, of course, revolving door of employment.

And the average career length, you know, is famously the shortest of all the major sports.

And you have these guys who just don't actually share the same incentives.

If you're thinking about organizing as employees buying in such that self-sacrifice can bolster a long-term strength.

In the NFL, almost uniquely among sports, there is really no ability to think long-term.

It's always because of the injury risk and the meat grinder.

It's always about the immediate near term.

And so you have this body of players who just

don't care nearly as much as

you would hope they would from the perspective of what's it like to be the leader of their union.

Contrast that with the Major League Baseball Players Union, which is one of the most powerful, probably the most powerful in American professional sports.

What accounts for that discrepancy?

Because, like, I remember the other week there was a story about,

shoot, what's his name on the Phillies threatening to strangle Brody Martin?

Yeah.

Bryce Harper of the Phillies, basically, like, if you come in our locker room talking about a salary cap in the Major League Baseball, I'm going to, we're going to, we're going to hit, we're going to beat you up with bats right now.

We're going to do bat crackers on your knees.

The commissioner of baseball.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So like, yeah, he, like, that was Bryce Harper, our big time Major League.

He was basically threatening the commissioner of Major League Baseball if they even broached the idea of a salary cap.

What accounts for this discrepancy in the bargaining power or like relative union power of a sport like baseball to football?

It's a little too convenient for me to say guaranteed contracts, but it's not far off in terms of just the emblematic difference, right?

So in baseball, you have long-term guaranteed contracts in which guys have some amount of security.

Of course, you have the differences in terms of like lifespan of careers.

You also have, as a matter of just like, I don't know, the lack of turnover in terms of just like changing of teams that is different.

But also, it's the history of the union.

Like, if you go back to like Marvin Miller, who is like the lion of sort of like sports organizing, the MLB PA's former executive director, the late, great Marvin Miller, who wrote books literally about this,

there is sort of like an original sin of

how.

the perspective is inherited over the generations between players.

And baseball has a really strong history.

I should say now, by the way, despite Bryce Harper's

unilateral strength and desire to organize, to reorganize the face of Rob Manfred.

He has his strong negotiating position.

Yes.

Despite that, I mean, they're also, they have their own issues relative to the days of Marvin Miller.

So, broadly, also, like, labor unions in sports, I would say, are just weak right now.

And it's because of the larger thing: like, we're all getting rich.

Why do we really care as much as these crotchety old, uh you know former ghosts want us to

and also like if if you are like a superstar athlete like the money you make on your contract negotiated with the owner of your team is really like just that's like a little bit extra when the money you're really making is on endorsements advertisements like

uh

but like okay like

Since these stories have broken, like, I mean, there has been movement here.

Lloyd Howell has resigned.

I mean, like, his position became untenable.

What can you tell us about his resignation and then like the subsequent,

how weird the story gets even after that?

Yeah.

So Lloyd Howell, who should have resigned for any number of reasons that already have been made clear to you and your, and your, and you're

just going to bring up one more time.

The

edited video that you have that you played on Pablo Terry finds out where you like you found, was it like the Florida Sentinel post or something?

It had like, I have four views, and it contained his unedited comments in which he said, said, quote, there are some, quote, of investing in the NFL, quote, there are some very reputable firms in the mix.

Do you think the Carlisle group was among the ones he was thinking about?

Just a totally, totally uncompromised opinion for a guy to have in that role.

Look,

the thing about Lloyd Howell was you can point to the fraud settlement at Booze.

You can point to the side gig with Carlisle.

You could point to the fact that he, again, suppressed via confidentiality agreement the holy grail for his union in an ultimate go-along to get along move.

You could point to any number of ways in which he was rank incompetent.

And yet the thing that was the straw that broke his back was the fact that there were now, in the

sort of like chase for more Lloyd Howell details,

documented receipts at Tootsie's, which you may recall as the largest strip club in America in South Florida, where Lloyd Howell, by the way, Lloyd Howell was living.

He was living in Miami and kind of in D.C.

where the union actually is based, but he was living in a luxury apartment in Miami.

And there are these receipts, and ESPN's Don Vanetta got them, where it was proven that the dude expensed the Players Association for like a seven-hour long,

I will editorially call it a bender.

He might dispute that, but an odyssey at Pixie.

You're spending seven hours in a strip club.

I mean, like, I don't know, the buffet, maybe.

Yeah, but that was expense.

The car was waiting.

It took him right.

It was airport Tootsie's home in the course of like eight hours in the receipts.

And so that seemed to be what was the last straw.

But really, it was the accumulated pressure and finally the exposure of like, so what's going on over there?

And then shortly thereafter, JC Tredor, the aforementioned chief strategy officer, who was, by the way, positioning himself to take over for Lloyd Howell in that resignation.

Once it happened, he also resigned because of pressure that was effectively put on him by the reporting I was doing, in which it was very clear that he was actually, if anything, the real brains behind how the union was making decisions around its behavior with the NFL.

So they were like, okay, Lloyd Howell resigns.

That's embarrassing.

You know, it was a screw-up.

He wasn't vetted properly.

So then they're like, well, let's make sure the guy that comes in after him just has a spotless record.

And there's nothing there that could become potentially controversial or a problem for us.

So that brings us to David White.

The runner-up.

This is the other finalist that we teased earlier.

The guy who didn't get the job.

He was sort of like

the Judas goat that was put in there to be like the obvious wrong choice.

You're sort of like push everyone to

the pre-concluded outcome.

It's Lloyd Howell.

It's funny in the post-mortem to see all these people leaking.

Like, no, at first it was, no, we wanted, we wanted the other guy, not Lloyd Howell.

And now it's revealed that David White, the former head of SAG AFTRA, himself, by the way, and there's so much.

Well, at least he has union experience.

So has union experience.

And I think the key part, which we report exhaustively too exhaustively for me to summarize here with you, probably,

his reputation entirely at SAG was as the pro-business candidate whose mentor was the guy who went from SAG to go run the studios who in fact hired David White as a lawyer as the counsel for SAG to defend him when he personally this guy his mentor was in his own scandal around guess what having a quiet secret side gig on the board of Netflix while being the head of SAG so like that's David White and that doesn't even get to the fact that he also effectively covered up a child molestation scandal that was exposed in a documentary called An Open Secret that pointed out with interviews on camera that Sag's, effectively, the face and the leader of their young performers committee, which was for child actors, was himself a child predator with an admission on tape.

And David White sent lawyers saying, you can't mention SAG at all in this documentary, effectively trying to whitewash the reality of the organization that he was in charge of, which is to say, in many ways,

we've buried the lead, but that's David White.

Well, I mean,

is he currently in this position?

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

So

no changes there.

By the way, the reason I'm glad to talk about this is because I feel like I'm going insane.

Like David White is still in charge of the union.

The players, there are a couple now players who have sort of like raised their hand and said, what's going on?

Like Darrell Rivas has been like, what's going on here?

And I'm getting DMs from some players and stuff.

But genuinely speaking, like it's the season.

Guys are busy.

They're trying to stay employed.

Revolting against yet another executive director doesn't seem to be high on their list.

I would say that

if they got a ride in the car sometime, they should listen to the episode because it's not great for your union.

Well, I mean, like, yeah, this gets into like, I guess why I wanted to have you on because, like, we see in this story, like, so many, so many of the ways in which the world of sports and entertainment and politics, like, seem to kind of follow the same rules.

There seems to be this bleed over in terms of how money and power really operates.

And, you know, surprise, surprise, it also touches on, you know, child sexual predators.

But, Pablo, I guess, like, one of the reasons sports fascinates me outside, you know, the competition and, you know, regional antagonisms and just talking shit to your friends is that, like, I think it's like a canvas on which Americans can project and see reflected back to them their attitudes and anxieties about so much of American life, like race, gender, culture, as we talk about labor relations and class.

But it's also like a universe of entertainment in which like people invest in it because the conflict that they that they see and the characters that they follow are governed by a set of rules that make sense and everyone understands by them and plays by them.

And like the universe in between the lines is like

knowable to a certain degree.

But like what you're reporting seems to imply here is that like in like much of the rest of American life, money and power operate in ways that are different than we are all sort of encouraged to believe.

So like, Pablo, what do you think that this story says more broadly about the state of labor relations, but also just American culture in general?

Yeah.

So sports has never been more

important

given the fragmentation of everything in 2025

in American life.

It is the lone monoculture we got.

It's the last shared monoculture that we have.

It's the only place, plausibly, by the way, where people who consume nothing else in common might find each other rooting for the same thing and palpably experiencing an in-person thing that is,

frankly, rejuvenating given post-pandemic attitudes and all of that, right?

So that's the promise of sports.

The reality of sports, though, is that sports, for that same reason, has never had more money sloshing around it.

And so the whole idea of, you know, who also loves Saudi investment?

Sports.

You know, who also loves a way to, I don't know, compromise the rules of what you would assume would be strictly enforced fair play.

But the billionaires who in every other sector of their profession, of their day jobs, compromise that.

And yet they do it, of course, as well in sports.

And so for me, like the whole thing is never been more popular, never been richer.

And for those same reasons, these owners, right, this new class of billionaire owner, I would say, even looking ahead, you have a bunch of guys who really do like sports, but they also are reckoning with the ways in which sports is governed by these ostensibly meritocratic rules and regulations that prevent them from simply buying.

the thing they want the most.

They want to win.

They want adoration.

But there are these rules, salary caps and union regulations and elsewhere that prevent them from truly using their money in the way that they think they should.

And so that tension of humiliation is on the line if you lose, and yet they can't quite use their money in the way that they thought, it provides this like beautiful, fucked up Petri dish for all of these big picture themes about what it's like to be in the United States right now.

Well, I often think like, you know, it's football season now and like Sunday, Sunday NFL football is like the secular church of America.

When I think about everyone watching the games on Sunday, you're watching the games, you're enjoying them, but for like most people, in the back of their mind, it's that Monday morning rolling around where you go back to work and you go back to working for your boss or having to earn a living.

Through sports, how do you think that the American sports fan views the relationships between players and owners?

Do you think that they see that as analogous to the relationship that they have to their boss and their working life?

Or do they see it as like a sort of an as like people who have escaped that pressure of having to work for someone for a living?

You know, I think it's changed over time because one of the big movements in sports and just like American life again has been like the rise of big data, the rise of like the moneyballization of everything, the rise of the front office in fantasy sports.

And so I think it's interesting, right?

Like you used to grow up back in my day, you grew up wanting to be like a shortstop for the Yankees or whatever, a quarterback.

And now, I think people are fantasizing.

Being an owner, yeah, man, they're fantasizing about being a CEO, an owner, most ideally.

By the way, LeBron James himself, every player wants to be an owner in an unironic way, and every fan feels the same.

And so, in that regard, I think there's also just the historic, and this is a long-standing complication, right?

Where if you're a fan, um, the owner stays, the players change, and

these players, they seem to get all the girls, they're so rich.

The idea that they would have complaints in any way makes them seemingly alien from a solidarity perspective as a worker.

And of course, the larger context, put it in a graph and see how much now you've learned something.

I think if you don't care about sports at all, about like the relative power imbalance between even the most famous players and the worst owner,

you realize that they're not on the same side of the actual economic aisle.

It's quite different.

And that, so sports in that provides this window into caring and thinking about American labor relations, but through this funhouse mirror where the question is, can you see yourself in these guys?

And because we are fans rooting for laundry, And that laundry is embodied by this old motherfucker who's owned the team for 80 years, in which you seem to have aligned your desire to do this forever and the players don't as they move around and change teams and player empowerment and scare quotes becomes a thing.

It all is colliding right now in a way that, again, is

messy.

It's very messy.

And it's like, it's that people underestimate the gap between even hundred millionaire and billionaire.

And I remember like a long time ago, we had Bomani Jones on the show.

And one thing he said that stuck with me is that given the value that he is worth, LeBron James is probably the most underpaid human being in world history.

And it doesn't seem that way.

And like, he's not even complaining about because of all the endorsements or whatever, but like the value that he creates for the ownership of a team with his labor, what he can do on the court, the attention he brings, the excitement, the fandom.

He is

like...

blasphemously underpaid in terms of what his NBA contract actually is.

Oh, there's the convenient pro-billionaire socialism, which is of course reflected reflected throughout politics now, that is clearly essential to how every collective bargaining agreement has been struck.

And so, by the way, this extends to other stories that I'm currently like swimming in with salary capture convention and why should you care about that and who's doing it.

Spoiler alive.

Barbara, you've been snitching.

You've been snitching.

Let's be honest.

I've been accused of being a snitch,

which is something that

I genuinely think it's it's delightful for people to be so unfamiliar with investigative journalism that they just think that I am a snitch.

And in that regard, like I just, and by the way, to that point, like, so this episode, which I won't even begin to get into because it's too long, but trust me, there's just like a ton there if you're interested in the thing we just talked about.

The story of Kawhi Leonard and Steve Ballmer, the richest owner in all of sports, former guy who ran Microsoft, obviously.

You may remember him from the famous Start Me Up Windows 98 video.

Yes, from the various pit stains and yeah, just like truly unhinged sort of enthusiasms.

I'm that guy.

The fact that I have been investigating how he has been circumventing the salary cap to pay Kawhi Leonard more and more and more money in a way that's unprecedented in pro sports.

I understand if it may read in that five-second summary, like I am trying to get Kawhi Leonard paid less.

I assure you, that is not my intent.

What I am doing is showing how the richest owner in all of sports is himself a character study in all of the psychologies I've mentioned, in which that guy will do seemingly anything to get the thing that he cannot buy for himself.

And what does it say that that guy has been orchestrating, allegedly, per my reporting, the most unprecedented scheme to deceive the NBA in the modern era of sports?

It all kind of fits together.

Just real quick, it's paying Kawhi Leonard $21 million under the table to plant trees.

Am I getting that right?

$28 million.

$28 million, but also $20 million in equity in the tree brokerage.

So $48 total on top of the max contract he signed.

And my point being, though, I'm not snitching on Kawhi.

I'm literally investigating the richest owner in all of sports.

Like, if that's actually why I'm interested in this, and I think that might now be clear based on the conversation we've had, but that's that's

the person I'm actually afraid afraid of in terms of like, how am I delicately reporting the story?

Um, you know, uh, given that the story we talked about, uh, does touch on, you know, Booz Allen, the Carlisle group, you know, run by former presidents and former heads of the CIA.

You know, are you going to be like the Michael Hastings of sports journalism?

Oh my god, is someone going to tackle you, Pablo?

Am I?

Listen, uh, tell the world my story.

I am very happy.

I have no thoughts that would indicate anything but a total contentment with my lot in life.

I just ordered food that I plan to eat.

You know, my belts are all, you know, I don't even wear them anymore, frankly.

So.

Well, I mean, you reference it.

I know you got to go.

We don't have enough time to get into this Steve Ballmer Kawhi Leonard to be a good player.

We could come back once I survive or not.

And you can

access it.

It is, again,

very funny and fascinating about, yeah, like the richest owner in all of American professional sports circumventing the NBA salary cap to

pay Kawhi Leonard to plant trees.

There's too much there to get into.

But Pablo Torre, I really want to thank you for your time today hanging out with us.

Thank you for making me feel like the things I'm doing that may not be necessarily resonant with the sportsiest of sports people

are things that you might be interested in.

That really does mean a lot, man.

Thank you.

And please, everyone, check out Pablo Torre Finds Out for this story and many others and just a good podcast and some great investigative journalism.

So, Pablo Torrey once again, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you guys.

And I'll always look back

after that last

unholy wow.

I never

ever played that's good for now

Where it joins the list of things I'll miss

Like fencing falls and lovely girls I'll never kiss

Leave it behind on an overcrowded desk Where the entry is hiding me out ever will be

Before the tea rooms filled with flirting couples call

remember to call

and go,

it skips like a river.