We All Have a Number

Speaker 1 Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

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Speaker 1 It's my pleasure now to welcome Pablo Torrey to the stage for our opening keynote conversation. So please join me in welcoming Pablo.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 So if you're already wondering where I am, what's going on, what the hell is happening with this episode, these are fair questions I'd like to explain.

Speaker 1 Last month, I was invited to be a keynote speaker at the University of Connecticut's Dodd Center for Human Rights, which is a truly remarkable organization, at least because not every university has a center for human rights.

Speaker 1 And the Dodd Center's focus for their biennial conference this time around was going to be sports.

Speaker 1 And Professor James Waller, who's the guy interviewing me on stage, this wildly accomplished author and international scholar who invited me, had apparently also been listening to our show, which frequently touches on issues relating to human rights, as you may have noticed.

Speaker 1 But also, we almost never articulate what I consider to be this through line across our many, many episodes. At least, not in one single place.

Speaker 1 So I figured it might be cool if today's episode was that through line.

Speaker 1 If it was that keynote that I gave in Storrs, Connecticut, which is, of course, a hotbed of college sports that I embarrassingly had never visited before, which means I had never visited this auditorium, which I was now truly honored to address.

Speaker 1 We're

Speaker 1 very fortunate that Pablo can be with us here as our opening keynote for the morning.

Speaker 1 As many of you know, Pablo is leading a young generation of journalists following the footsteps of giants like Bill Roden, who moderated last night's conversation, who are astute observers on how sport intersects with cultural, social, and political issues.

Speaker 1 And I've listened to Pablo for a long time in his various media platforms on ESPN,

Speaker 1 MSNBC, and elsewhere, and always been impressed by the lens that he brings to understanding sport as both the reflection of societal, cultural, political issues and also a shaper of those issues as well.

Speaker 1 He is the host and executive editor of Metalark Media's Populatory Finds Out, which won the Edward R. Murrow Award for Sports Reporting in 2024 and was a finalist for the Peabody Award in 2025.

Speaker 1 Most impressively, he holds a record for biggest comeback in celebrity family feud history.

Speaker 1 Well done. That's a fact.

Speaker 1 That's a real verifiable fact. We have video that we're going to play right now, I believe.

Speaker 1 We looked it up.

Speaker 1 The Human Rights Center did not bring my family feud footage. No, no.
That was the only thing on my rider. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 I don't think we could get permission for it. That is the injustice I want to bring attention to.
It was moving.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Last night, many of us had the privilege of hearing Bill Rode moderate a conversation with Tommy Smith and John Carlos, two iconic figures of protest from the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.

Speaker 1 So using that to

Speaker 1 bridge this morning, I wanted to ask, Pablo, how do you think about athlete protests, kneeling, wearing armbands, et cetera? To what degree have they shaped public discussion on human rights?

Speaker 1 Have they not impacted it? How have you seen those protests in terms of advancing discussions on human rights? Yeah, I have so much too much to say, arguably, to that question alone.

Speaker 1 I do want to say thanks for having me. It's incredibly, I am 40.

Speaker 1 So, to be hailed as a young anything anymore in the midst of an early onset midlife crisis is so gratifying.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 It was great to sit next to you at dinner to learn the work that you personally do studying literal genocide, the perpetrators of it.

Speaker 1 I feel like I should be interviewing you and publishing that on my YouTube channel, which you should go and like and subscribe.

Speaker 1 I want to answer your question, though, by just acknowledging transparently that I did consult an athlete source who is familiar with this campus.

Speaker 1 And when I asked Sue Bird what I should be talking about in response to a question like that, she said, quote, all my store's memories include national championships, the dairy bar, and Ted's.

Speaker 1 She then referred to something about how Ted's having a drink called the Beaver.

Speaker 1 And then she winky-emojied me, and I'm like, I don't know what that means.

Speaker 1 Look, the idea of

Speaker 1 athlete protest and getting to sit in one of the early,

Speaker 1 one of the front rows listening to John Carlos and Tommy Smith and feeling overcome by the power of that video reminded me that typically in response to a question like that, I should say that sports is politics.

Speaker 1 That's kind of the position of an institution like this, and that is correct.

Speaker 1 It also reminded me, though, as you hear the booze at the end of that video, which everybody remarked on rightfully, that part of the reason why that protest, why kneeling, why armbands, why what the WNBA players did in flipping a Senate race in which Sue Bird was a key part during the pandemic, is that they are doing something that many people watching sports did not ask for.

Speaker 1 And so sports is politics, but sports crucially is also not.

Speaker 1 You know, there's a metaphor that a friend of mine uses sometimes, and I come from ESPN, of course, and I was there for 13 years. I still do PTI part-time.

Speaker 1 Tony Kornheiser is, in fact, my television grandfather still today.

Speaker 1 But what I learned is that

Speaker 1 when you do, quote-unquote, inject politics into sports, and an audience consumes it that did not come to sports for politics, you get a reaction and you get consequences.

Speaker 1 And what John Carlton, Tommy Smith outlined were personal consequences beyond merely mentions on Twitter, but real-life costs to their families.

Speaker 1 The power, though, and the consequences of what they did, it stems from the fact that they were, in some sense, intruding on a space that, in the minds of many people in their audience, they should not have been.

Speaker 1 They should not have acted that way. The metaphor my friend uses sometimes is: it's like going to a vending machine and getting a chocolate bar only to discover that someone has given you tuna fish.

Speaker 1 That's what it feels like sometimes to protest or to point out political issues in sports.

Speaker 1 And the power in that, the power in the question you just asked, is that that's how you reach people who are not searching for this stuff already.

Speaker 1 So to come here to a campus that is so inspiring in its energy and its investment into the topic of human rights in sports, just know that from my point of view, it has never felt more radical.

Speaker 1 And I say that knowing I just listened to something so moving that took place in 1968, right?

Speaker 1 But why is it feeling especially radical to me now? It's because we should have learned the lessons from 68.

Speaker 1 It seemed like there was a bit of a Eurostep headfake towards those lessons being implemented in 2020, during the Black Lives Matter movement, during the pandemic, during the first Trump administration.

Speaker 1 And for some reason, the shot was never made, so to speak, the torture the basketball metaphor.

Speaker 1 And I think part of it is because people really did, in large part, the audience, the market testing said, we don't want you guys ruining this thing we love, ruining this thing we love.

Speaker 1 Scare quotes around all of it. And so to me, the power of protest in sports in that way, of those gestures.

Speaker 1 And again, it was crazy to watch the video and realize we've been getting almost 60 years out of nine seconds.

Speaker 1 John Carlos and Tommy Smith, that's the math on it.

Speaker 1 The reason it's so impactful is because sports has this almost, I would say not almost, I'll stop qualifying it, it has an unparalleled power to make an impact because you're reaching people that aren't looking for it.

Speaker 1 You're reaching people who aren't trying to seek out what two brilliant men like John Carlos and Tommy Smith at that age, Black Men in America, in 1968 wanted to say to them.

Speaker 1 And so much of what I think about now with sports is that sports has never,

Speaker 1 as an industry, as an economy, as a cultural institution, it has never been more valuable. And I mean that literally.

Speaker 1 So a lot of what I think I see sports through, and this is again me as a reporter. I am somebody who studies this stuff and tries to investigate this stuff and ask the questions like you are asking.

Speaker 1 Why does this matter? Is it important? Was it a moment? Was it a head fake

Speaker 1 the amount of money in sports stems from the fact that its audience in this moment right now is truly unparalleled when it comes to the last remaining big tent left in american life

Speaker 1 i mean i i get to sit here in front of an audience of young people

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 You guys wrecked the sports business economy, the television economy, the media economy, because all of us got addicted to cell phones.

Speaker 1 And the reason I bring that up is because when none of us really watch the same things anymore,

Speaker 1 there's a bit of a, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king kind of dynamic.

Speaker 1 It's the tallest person in a room full of short people.

Speaker 1 Look at what the top 100 highest rated television shows look like every year. And literally, over 90% of them are football games.

Speaker 1 Look at what people gather to watch collectively. There is nothing like the Super Bowl.

Speaker 1 There is nothing like a sporting event in terms of the tonnage of attention from people who, and this is crucial again to go back to the vending machine metaphor, from people who are not seeking out a political gesture.

Speaker 1 They come for the games. We should never forget that they come for the games.

Speaker 1 The power is that you get to tell them something as an athlete that is true to you and meaningful to you, and they have to grapple with that.

Speaker 1 And we're just in a time right now in 2025 when the siloing and the fragmentation of media

Speaker 1 is so terrifying that it's breaking what would be normally referred to as American culture. There really is no mainstream anymore.

Speaker 1 The thing that comes closest are sporting events and Taylor Swift, maybe.

Speaker 1 And I hate to break this news to you, but Taylor Swift and the NFL tend to

Speaker 1 have a strategic partnership going on right now, I dare say, in recognition mutually of perhaps that largesse, that attention, that spotlight.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 I just think what athletes can do,

Speaker 1 which is be in the spotlight. and then control it, however briefly, for nine seconds,

Speaker 1 kneeling on a sideline. The reason we talk about it still today is because there are risks, there are consequences, because people did not ask for it, and yet they have to see it.

Speaker 1 We just don't have many spaces where they,

Speaker 1 where we Americans, have to see that stuff if you scroll past it. Yeah.
No, that's, I want to

Speaker 1 go back to something you said earlier.

Speaker 1 And in our conversations with Bill Rodin as we did the event planning for last night, and Bill mentioned this last night, he really believes that we're living in a time of the death of resistance.

Speaker 1 He just doesn't know where the resistance has gone. He looks at 1968.
It's 57 years ago, and he looks at today, and he just doesn't know where the resistance is.

Speaker 1 And he thinks it's largely because of money. But you work in this space, you interview and talk to athletes often.
Why don't we see the type of resistance that we saw in 1968 with Smith and Carlos?

Speaker 1 Is it a responsibility of an athlete to resist, to use their platform in that way or not?

Speaker 1 I'm going to try to be simple so we can get complicated afterwards.

Speaker 1 My television grandfather, Tony Kornheiser, likes to quote Donald Meyer, who's the former head of NBC Sports.

Speaker 1 The answer to all your questions is money.

Speaker 1 There are nuances there and wrinkles there, but something that I find fascinating, part of the stories that I,

Speaker 1 one of them, an ongoing series, an investigative series on my show that I've been pursuing, has been into the NFLPA, the National Football League's Player Union.

Speaker 1 And I'll use the union microcosm here for a second because I think it's illustrative.

Speaker 1 Unions as a concept,

Speaker 1 They are meant to defend the interests of the employees, labor, the players, in a way that draws, again, Americans broadly into labor relations in a way that they have no interest otherwise.

Speaker 1 But the games get threatened. Are they going to sit out? Will there be a lockout? Who are these spoiled millionaires allegedly?

Speaker 1 People get agitated around labor relations because sports ends up being, in my view, this

Speaker 1 torturous, delightful,

Speaker 1 apparently

Speaker 1 very enriching liberal arts education. in which you can talk about everything, including labor law.

Speaker 1 The reason I bring up the NFLPA though is because there has been, according to the reporting I've been doing, and now I think just obvious observation, a real shift in terms of how the union's leadership wants to approach the NFL.

Speaker 1 So the NFL, for those who would like me to spell this out, I always feel obligated to point out stuff that blows me away, but may feel numbingly obvious.

Speaker 1 It's the biggest and richest and most powerful sport and cultural institution in America. College football is number two.

Speaker 1 The NFL makes so much money.

Speaker 1 So much money that the leadership strategy from the players union in the last couple administrations,

Speaker 1 their approach has been,

Speaker 1 why should we be so adversarial? There's so much money to go around.

Speaker 1 And a union is a useful case study in this regard, I think, because its premise is almost definitionally to be adversarial.

Speaker 1 You are at a bargaining table sitting across from billionaires, the richest richest people in sports, Roger Goodell, the commissioner, and your job is to understand that they are coming to curb stomp you.

Speaker 1 They are following the money. They want more of it.
And you are the thing that stands in the way.

Speaker 1 And when you think about labor, of course, you think of so many quotes, I think of so many quotes throughout the history of sports.

Speaker 1 I think it was Donald Sterling, perhaps on one of the leaked audio tapes, in which he said,

Speaker 1 in a moment of, again, sort of insane lucidity,

Speaker 1 who makes the game?

Speaker 1 We make the game. The owners make the game.
The players don't make the game. Players come and go.
The revolving door in the NFL is the shortest contracts on average in American sports.

Speaker 1 The owners, the billionaires, keep it, pass it along to their children. And on it goes forever.
And so there is inherently this power imbalance at any CBA collective bargaining agreement negotiation.

Speaker 1 Why am I going on about CBA negotiations?

Speaker 1 It's because when your attitude to run the NFLPA, the body tasked with counterbalancing that fundamental economic pressure, when your approach is we can all get rich if we don't fight,

Speaker 1 why would anyone in a lesser individualized position have a different logic?

Speaker 1 An individual. I mean, look, I think one of the most fascinating and really depressing conversations has been,

Speaker 1 I get to be at an event here where last night at the bar, I'm talking to some folks

Speaker 1 from Human Rights Watch, and I was talking about the Riyadh Comedy Festival. And if you remember that conversation, at least the conversation that I heard, there is now this acknowledgement.

Speaker 1 that we all have a number.

Speaker 1 We all have a number. You would go perform.
We would do this talk, you and me, in Riyadh if they paid us enough. That's the implication.
And for comedians and for anyone, what a relatable premise.

Speaker 1 I think if you were to, each of us should do that exercise right now.

Speaker 1 This sample here at the literal human rights symposium, ask yourself, what would you need to be paid to attend this event in Saudi Arabia?

Speaker 1 I'm guessing all of us, if we're being honest with ourselves, we contemplate that.

Speaker 1 I say that merely to say that

Speaker 1 in a far less conspicuous and far less dramatic fashion, that's the calculus that everybody in America is making. That's the calculus that every athlete is making.

Speaker 1 That's the calculus in the aftermath of Colin Kaepernick that LeBron James on some level is making.

Speaker 1 Why was I campaigning for Hillary Clinton in 2016? Again, nuances and caveats there. That didn't go great for lots of reasons.

Speaker 1 Why am I more silent now than I was then?

Speaker 1 Why are the most famous athletes with the biggest platforms less vocal now as this administration is more autocratic than it's ever been, than maybe any administration in America has ever been?

Speaker 1 Why are athletes all of the time going overseas to places like Saudi Arabia?

Speaker 1 Why is literally Tom Brady standing next to Turkey Al-Sheikh, the guy who's running Saudi Arabia's sports and entertainment program for promo videos?

Speaker 1 Everybody has a number. It turns out that the number might not be as high as we would have hoped.
No, that's fascinating. It's the economics piece that you're talking about, the money piece,

Speaker 1 one of the human rights that we work on here at the Human Rights Institute are economic rights. I know one of your

Speaker 1 big reporting that made a lot of news led to the documentary Broke and how,

Speaker 1 which struck me that in some ways this is a violation of athletes' economic rights, the ways in which they're used, as you said, in the NFL for very short-term contracts.

Speaker 1 There's no long-term stability provided there. Have you thought about that as a human rights issue for athletes who seem to be

Speaker 1 almost used in this way, exploited in this way, in such a short-term benefit?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the reason why I try to always frame it in the context of ownership and labor is that the athletes are not the people who are putting the economic pressure that reshapes American culture through sports.

Speaker 1 They're not. What they are, though, are the people that

Speaker 1 you recognize. They're the people you might pay attention to.
They're the names you know, the things that may stop your infinite scroll on your phone for a second.

Speaker 1 That's why all of this is redounding to athletes. But it's also true that the scare quotes I put around spoiled millionaires is, of course, farcical.

Speaker 1 Part of the difficulty of organizing in the NFLPA is that you have

Speaker 1 a truly vast body in which, by the way, the leadership, I believe it's certainly

Speaker 1 on the metal stand in terms of how well paid union leadership can be in America. Top three, the NFLPA.
They have a billion-dollar war chest to manage.

Speaker 1 But their constituency has the aforementioned Tom Brady, and it has the guy who has zero economic security,

Speaker 1 whose dream is to make six figures for five years.

Speaker 1 So that's the difficulty of organizing. That's the reality of athlete economic welfare.

Speaker 1 We should relate more to the athletes.

Speaker 1 than the owners.

Speaker 1 And we're living at a time when the American attitude, part of the the reason why this is happening, in my view, is that we all have been conditioned to be aspirational billionaires,

Speaker 1 thinking that we should all have the opportunity to be like the people at the very top.

Speaker 1 The same people who are rigging the system such that you can never join them.

Speaker 1 And the athletes, yes, they win on some level, some mixture of a genetic lottery,

Speaker 1 and or

Speaker 1 they are simply some of the hardest workers you've ever met.

Speaker 1 But their particular status is absolutely,

Speaker 1 intentionally and inadvertently suppressed financially by people who have no interest in letting them accumulate power and leverage and the ability, for instance, to sit out some games.

Speaker 1 Financial education is so clearly a solution, one of them. It's not the entire solution.
It's not going to dispositively answer the question of why is there a power imbalance, why is it so up?

Speaker 1 But the reality that it hasn't been instituted, I think, owes to the lack of incentives for those who could pay for it, who could do that, and don't.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 1 look, a lot of what I think about now is in the context of the billionaire as a concept.

Speaker 1 Because sports, I have come to realize is added

Speaker 1 in my Rolodex, my mental Rolodex, it has added a a deep familiarity with the richest people in the world.

Speaker 1 Not because I went out to crusade against the richest people in the world, but simply because the story that I've been trying to tell here with you about why sports are so valuable is a function of literally the richest people in the world seeing the power of it.

Speaker 1 And it's not merely the power of profit. It's the power to launder an image.

Speaker 1 It's the power to control culture.

Speaker 1 And so when I study someone like Steve Ballmer, who's the owner of the Clippers, the richest owner in all of sports, the guy who reset the marketplace, the price for what it costs to buy an NBA team, $2 billion,

Speaker 1 buying the team as a good guy, saving the Los Angeles Clippers from the aforementioned Donald Sterling,

Speaker 1 that was the beginning,

Speaker 1 now 10 years ago, the beginning of a movement in which people from Silicon Valley, who made billions in tech, came over.

Speaker 1 And a lot of these people genuinely, all you got to do is look at Steve Ballmer's armpit sweat to know how much he loves basketball, right? This is a yes-and story.

Speaker 1 Loves basketball, but also sees the power in what it can do to make a guy who, according to very public record, was an instrumental character. In one of the foremost case studies in

Speaker 1 monopolistic behavior in American capitalism, when he was the CEO of Microsoft, he can be the sweaty, good guy who cheers courtside, who loves basketball, and he does.

Speaker 1 But look at what's happened since.

Speaker 1 The number of owners coming into professional sports, as that market is reset, as the price goes up, right?

Speaker 1 So for those who are not like drowning in media stock charts like I am, both because I'm trying to send my daughter to college and because I'm fascinated by it, this stuff is only getting more expensive.

Speaker 1 It's a giant green arrow.

Speaker 1 And so, when you have a fragmented media economy and you have these things that are accumulating in value because the richest people in the world are jumping into the pool more often than ever, and you have $10 billion being paid for the Lakers, $6 billion for the Celtics, right?

Speaker 1 Multiples, multiples, multiples, multiples over the last 10 years. The NFL, Major League Baseball, we're all seeing this stuff.

Speaker 1 And so, Silicon Valley is in there, private equity is in there, right? And the multiples are going up. But simultaneously, what we're seeing is that

Speaker 1 part of what these billionaires want

Speaker 1 is to normalize

Speaker 1 extreme wealth,

Speaker 1 their businesses, and they want to also make it clear that if we are one of the people that you know, whose names you recognize, whose voices you've heard before,

Speaker 1 you begin even to like us.

Speaker 1 You begin to root for us.

Speaker 1 And you begin to think that because you're in sports, someone else has vetted us.

Speaker 1 Someone else has diligenced our backgrounds, our resumes, what we've done, and they have approved of us as safe for broad American consumption.

Speaker 1 What I'm here to tell you, after investigating Steve Ballmer and the Clippers, is that that, generally speaking, according to my reporting, insert many legal disclaimers here, as a general legal process is not happening.

Speaker 1 Two things:

Speaker 1 when your five-year-old daughter wants to go to college, we can cut a deal for her to come to Yukon.

Speaker 1 So we can be

Speaker 1 offering a five-year-old an NIL deal. Yeah, we can do it.

Speaker 1 Second thing, for those keeping score, Pablo has said three times. The acting director of HRI has said it none.
So thank you.

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Speaker 1 Last night we at dinner we talked a bit about sports washing and what you said earlier about how to launder an image through sport.

Speaker 1 When you think about the work you do and sport, where do you see some of the biggest human rights challenges today for sport?

Speaker 1 So I'll use, and there's so many people I got to meet last night who are eminently overqualified to answer this question. And I'm the guy who likes to interview those people.
So

Speaker 1 boulder of salt.

Speaker 1 In my view, and I can just keep using these case studies because they occur to me immediately because my brain is broken by my own reporting.

Speaker 1 I think it's fascinating when you look at the clippers. So the story of aspiration, which

Speaker 1 like and subscribe again.

Speaker 1 It's an ongoing investigation into the question of how much vetting do you do around something as profound in its branding as the first founding sponsor of the most expensive arena ever built in sports.

Speaker 1 The Intuit Dome, Steve Ballmer's baby, the thing he literally measured the distances between the toilets for.

Speaker 1 Wearing a hard hat, sweating, proud of everything, the biggest jumbotron in sports history, the halo board, down to the studs. He's planning this.

Speaker 1 Aspiration was their first first founding sponsor. They were the company that was on the Clipper, was set to be on the Clippers jersey, their jersey patch.

Speaker 1 So for those not familiar, the NBA now sells real estate on the jerseys. Again, how do you get eyeballs to see brands? How can you monetize those eyeballs? Jersey patches.

Speaker 1 Everything is kind of NASCAR now.

Speaker 1 You know, a zillion ads everywhere. The NBA has put patches on the jersey that companies can buy.

Speaker 1 Aspiration, that deal, it was a $300 million plus 23-year sponsorship deal that the league office had to approve. And Adam Silver has asked

Speaker 1 after the news breaks, and I should probably speed run some of this. It was a company that was a pro-climate change company.

Speaker 1 It was a company that sought to zero out the carbon footprints of businesses and celebrities. Drake was an endorser.
Leonardo Caprio was an endorser. Robert Downey Jr.
was an endorser.

Speaker 1 Orlando Bloom was an endorser. Kawhi Leonard was an endorser.
Kawhi Leonard, who you may recall from such

Speaker 1 general characteristics as him hating speaking in public,

Speaker 1 he was paid as a sponsor

Speaker 1 more than,

Speaker 1 let me get the math here, more than four times as much as all those Hollywood A-listers combined in a secret deal that never got announced. And I'm not here to impose upon a human rights symposium.

Speaker 1 salary capture convention is one of the great crimes against humanity. I am not.
What I'm here to say is that that deal and all of its tentacles,

Speaker 1 my reporting explains in more depth why I'm so fascinated, that deal, when Adam Silver is asked about all of this,

Speaker 1 had you ever heard of aspiration before? He very clearly says, no, had never heard of it. So forth and so on.

Speaker 1 I obtained paperwork for that contract, and the paperwork says explicitly explicitly this deal must be reviewed explicitly, approved explicitly.

Speaker 1 Expressly approved is the actual, again, legal language being very important. For those who may be listening in my podcast feed, who may represent such leagues, expressly approved is the language.

Speaker 1 That was part of the condition of the deal. Adam Silver is then asked later, about this paperwork.

Speaker 1 And I tweeted this out because internet addiction requires me to also be on Twitter where I do some reporting.

Speaker 1 And he backtracks and says, Actually, I've heard about Aspiration, but I blah, blah, blah. It doesn't track.
So when I say that they're not really vetting this stuff, that's part of what I mean.

Speaker 1 Aspiration fell apart in a giant, flaming garbage heap of fraud. Its co-founder has pled guilty to wire fraud to counts.
It went to default. It was bankrupt.
Ballmer kept putting in money.

Speaker 1 Kawhi Lander kept getting paid. All that stuff was happening.
Aspiration can't pay its bills. The partnership with the Clippers, of course, collapses.
It is explosively public.

Speaker 1 And they got to figure out what do we put on the Jersey Patch?

Speaker 1 They were going to be the Jersey Patch. By 2023, they weren't going to be the Jersey Patch.

Speaker 1 So last month, I believe it was, I lose track of time, a couple weeks ago,

Speaker 1 I am infinitely scrolling and I see an announcement. The Jersey Patch sponsor for the Los Angeles Clippers Clippers is, does anyone know,

Speaker 1 visit Rwanda?

Speaker 1 I am told I have friends who've gone and seen the guerrillas in Rwanda. I know you have yourself.

Speaker 1 Maybe

Speaker 1 in another bout of me talking to people who know more than me about stuff, you know quite a bit about the country.

Speaker 1 It's also a country that is currently, of course, almost globally famously embroiled

Speaker 1 in the story of the genocide in the Congo.

Speaker 1 Are you vetting this stuff? Are you reviewing this stuff? Are you taking a pile of money on the table and saying, we got some more money?

Speaker 1 That's like the one story.

Speaker 1 The New York Knicks, they have a jersey patch too.

Speaker 1 Anybody know what their jersey patch is?

Speaker 1 Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi.

Speaker 1 What is Abu Dhabi? We're looking for the Jeopardy-style answer.

Speaker 1 The capital of the United Arab Emirates.

Speaker 1 So, all of this happening truly, like the NBA season just started, right?

Speaker 1 Everyone's seeing these jersey patches. Everyone's seeing, oh, I know these brands.
I know these people. I recognize that name.
I'm normalizing

Speaker 1 all of this into my sports fandom.

Speaker 1 And this is also when we're seeing so many

Speaker 1 comedians, influencers. I mean, Saudi Arabia, they're doing a flag football tournament

Speaker 1 that Tom Brady is apparently involved in.

Speaker 1 It kind of pains me as I think about young people and what they pay attention to, how eager someone who I think is very charismatic and watch all the time, this streamer, Speed, I show Speed,

Speaker 1 dude, is doing backflips in Saudi Arabia, literally. It's not just the Middle East, and it's not just Africa.

Speaker 1 FTX.

Speaker 1 So, FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, you may recall from such things as his giant fraud that he perpetrated, and the videos, by the way, that he failed next to Tom Brady, who keeps on coming up truly unintentionally today, but I'm realizing probably due to the Tom Brady episode.

Speaker 1 He would film these selfies with Tom Brady and with Steph Curry. Steph Curry was an FTX endorser.

Speaker 1 The name of the Miami Heats Arena

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 FTX Arena.

Speaker 1 According to my reporting, the Miami Heat and the NBA didn't do a ton of vetting

Speaker 1 when they agreed to that.

Speaker 1 These are things that are not accidental. It's not accidental that Enron,

Speaker 1 a couple years before they became a publicly known scandal,

Speaker 1 bought the naming rights to the Houston Astros ballpark.

Speaker 1 It's not a coincidence that FTX spent some of their money not just on Tom Brady and Steph Curry and the Miami Heat, but they did one of the most poetic things I've seen in what I will gladly and confidently call sports washing.

Speaker 1 There was a fraud being perpetrated. There was a need to make this normalized.
The brand, the people, that weird ass dude, Sam Bankman-Freed,

Speaker 1 knew, knew, and we, I've talked to so many people who have talked to Sam Bankman-Freed, who interviewed him actually at Miami Heat Games.

Speaker 1 He was put on the Jumbotron in Arena camera with a giant oversized shirt that said FTX on it. And they interviewed him, and he was this like delightful, weird nerd.

Speaker 1 He became normalized. He was targeting sports.
He was targeting,

Speaker 1 he knew the difference fascinatingly between between Tom Brady and Dak Prescott.

Speaker 1 He wanted Tom Brady,

Speaker 1 didn't want a lesser quarterback. He knew where the marketplace was pointing him.

Speaker 1 The favorite example that I have, though, was that FTX poetically

Speaker 1 bought the ad space, which I didn't even know was ad space available to buy,

Speaker 1 on the chest plate of the umpires in major league baseball games. So for a while you may have seen it.
It said FTX right there.

Speaker 1 And part of me just can't help but think, again, I see sports as

Speaker 1 so important that I can't help but think of like, what if a Supreme Court justice's robe had like

Speaker 1 NASCAR patches on it?

Speaker 1 I don't think it's a coincidence that FTX wanted that real estate too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Let's, we're going to have time at the end for questions from the audience, but I want to ask Pablo just two more questions, both of which take us a little bit, start to veer away from sports into the political sphere.

Speaker 1 The first one has to do with transgender athletes.

Speaker 1 You won the Murray Award for your episode with Ember Zelch, a transgender athlete.

Speaker 1 Obviously, today we're seeing a rollback in terms of federal policies related to transgender athletes and LGBTQ communities in general.

Speaker 1 What do you see as the threats there? I mean, how far is this going to be rolled back? What are the things we can do in response to it?

Speaker 1 We've talked about resistance of athletes, but it's resistance of all of us to these type of policies. How have you been understanding those?

Speaker 1 Is Red here?

Speaker 1 I bring up Red because Red is an excellent fencer.

Speaker 1 Red is somebody who has been the target of Fox News coverage.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I just wanted to point out Red because this is a story that I started with Ember Zelch that more recently came to Red. Can you just say hello?

Speaker 1 And can you just, is it okay if Red just gets to say, if you could give a quick summary of what your experience was? Because I think it's interesting. And I did not plan this.
So

Speaker 1 technologically. Red, if you want to step over to the microphone.
We have a microphone. Oh, sorry.
So

Speaker 1 here's the back story. I do this reporting on trans athletes.
I think it's, spoiler alert, one of the most, perhaps the most overblown moral panic in American politics.

Speaker 1 And Ember Zelch is a person I want to tell you about after I introduce you to Red, because Red messaged me on LinkedIn after I did an episode in which Red was a character.

Speaker 1 We interviewed Red for the episode.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, a LinkedIn message came, hey, you're going to be at this place that I go to school at now.

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 20 So one of the things with talking about trans athletes is vaguely there's an understanding, at least in more liberal spaces, that this is an absurd thing that

Speaker 20 we

Speaker 20 acknowledge is a way for right-wing media to cop out of talking about more important political things. Like, well, when my thing was going viral, Trump announced his tariffs and everything was in red.

Speaker 20 The Dow Jones was looking like a skyscraper that stockbrokers were probably going to jump off of.

Speaker 20 Damn, thought that was going to be funnier.

Speaker 20 Anyways, so one of the things with it is it's talked about as something that

Speaker 20 is

Speaker 20 absurd and

Speaker 20 a

Speaker 20 political thing that

Speaker 20 is just a culture war.

Speaker 20 But I think that one of the things that we need to do when talking about this more broadly is understand it as a vehicle for right-wing radicalization, which is what it has become.

Speaker 20 I and other trans athletes are used as an indication of our culture being in decline. And it's one thing to talk about how it's used by Republicans to win elections, but it also is used to

Speaker 20 more broadly dispel rhetoric that targets minorities. And it's not just trans athletes and transgender people, but

Speaker 20 oppression and bigotry is

Speaker 20 very all-encompassing. It's very rare that you'll find something or find someone, but you will because America and American politics is completely nonsensical.

Speaker 20 But you're not going to find someone that just says, man, I hate trans people,

Speaker 20 but every other minority is cool.

Speaker 20 And a lot of the rhetoric surrounding transphobia and trans athletes and sports is used as a way to then talk about other issues and say, well, well, it's also the gay people, or they're doing to the kids.

Speaker 20 And the they then becomes, as

Speaker 20 you know, and we know when we study genocide and especially in more Eurocentric cultures,

Speaker 20 it becomes the Jews, or it becomes this mythological they,

Speaker 20 or in other cases, it'll be

Speaker 20 other aspects of bodily autonomy. And so when we talk about bodily autonomy for trans people,

Speaker 20 it's never just in the vacuum of whether it be

Speaker 20 some middle schooler that wants to play badminton or be a third string backup softball catcher or me.

Speaker 20 These movements that are talking about trans athletes are also talking about

Speaker 20 incredible aspects of bodily autonomy that you cannot divorce from the other things that these people say.

Speaker 20 So, on that,

Speaker 20 oppression is intersectional, and it's all cut from the same cloth.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Thanks, Chris.

Speaker 1 You guys got smart kids here. The reason why Red

Speaker 1 and Ember Zelch are characters, are people that I want people to know about is not because

Speaker 1 they are

Speaker 1 these sort of like exotic characters that you should learn about.

Speaker 1 It's because,

Speaker 1 like Dare and Red, I don't want to offend your athletic scouting report. I've gotten better.

Speaker 1 Red is saying for those listening,

Speaker 1 I've gotten better.

Speaker 1 I don't want to do fencing first take with you, Red, from on this stage. I'm debating.
No, the

Speaker 1 Ember Zelch is the third string backup catcher that Red mentioned who let me into her home with her mom when Ohio was passing, was attempting to pass its anti-trans legislation.

Speaker 1 One of the things that's so fascinating when you talk to the people who research this stuff is how hard it's been for legislatures, for governors, to find enough trans athletes to identify as the impetus for such legislation.

Speaker 1 In Ohio, there was one varsity athlete in the entire state at this time who was

Speaker 1 known on the record, and it was Embers Elch,

Speaker 1 who had never hit a home run.

Speaker 1 And according to my reporting, still has not.

Speaker 1 Third-string backup catcher whose mom on tape with us gladly laughed when we asked questions about her statistics.

Speaker 1 These are the boogeymen

Speaker 1 that Fox News does not want you to know about.

Speaker 1 Trans athletes are coming for your trophies. They're coming for your scholarships, for your safety, for your whole way of life.
The same athlete who said that facing red was this trauma had

Speaker 1 not so long before literally competed in a mixed fencing tournament fencing against

Speaker 1 dudes without any question

Speaker 1 without

Speaker 1 co-opting even what colin kafernick had done which was kneel red's opponent in withdrawing from their match kneeled

Speaker 1 like that was the injustice to bring attention to

Speaker 1 When the president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker, was interviewed in DC in front of a congressional hearing.

Speaker 1 He was asked how many trans athletes are there.

Speaker 1 And he said there are less than 10 in the NCAA that they know of.

Speaker 1 So less than 0.02%

Speaker 1 is causing what has been framed by Fox News as

Speaker 1 an 80-20 issue.

Speaker 1 80% of the country says, get these people out of sports.

Speaker 1 20%

Speaker 1 say well maybe we should reconsider why we are talking with bloodlust about people who statistically speaking like any class of human largely and overwhelmingly and with apologies to red aren't that good at sports

Speaker 1 and so i believe firmly that we should talk to scientists around hormones and regulations, the rules and how we draw them, the lines and how we draw them, reconciling those rules, which, by the way, have existed this entire time.

Speaker 1 The Wild West of whoa, whoa, whoa, everyone's just dressing up like Juwana Man, if you remember that movie, which I feel very old referencing, which has become a common reference point in all political effectiveness for what it is that trans athletes are doing, wearing disguises and stealing trophies, spying on your daughters,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 1 The reality is, not only is that not happening, the reality is that there is a conversation that is nuanced and difficult around the performance of gender, how gender is in fact theater on some really objective level.

Speaker 1 And also, if we want to enforce competitive equity, we can have conversations about that too.

Speaker 1 What is missing is numeracy.

Speaker 1 When I say that this is a moral panic, I mean that it is effective.

Speaker 1 And I mean that it is illiterate.

Speaker 1 It does not reflect the level of attention given. And I love focusing on dumb sh ⁇ .

Speaker 1 I love making mountains out of molehills. I like it less when, as Red astutely put it, it is being used as a gateway to exterminate a class of people who could not be more at risk.

Speaker 1 The statistics are clear. Dave Chappelle going to Saudi Arabia, by the way, after making his late-stage career on the backs, on the throats of trans people

Speaker 1 is abominable.

Speaker 1 Not to sound like someone at a congressional hearing right now, it's abominable.

Speaker 1 Punching down does not adequately summarize what is happening to a class of people that, from a purely American principle, we should seek to protect because they are vulnerable, because all they want to do is be included in the American project in the ways that they were sold, which is through the last mainstream venue for participation in American life, which is sports.

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Speaker 1 I want to make sure we have time to take a couple of questions from the audience.

Speaker 1 So if you have a question for Pablo, please just make it direct, a question, not a statement, something like, Pablo, is it true you only went to Harvard because you couldn't get into Yukon?

Speaker 1 That's great. It's a direct question.

Speaker 1 You can do it.

Speaker 1 So please raise your hand. We'll make sure you get a microphone.
Time for just a couple of questions. Please, please.

Speaker 20 Hey, Pablo, nice talk. Thank you so much.
I remember your first around the horn. Oh, God.
You were nervous.

Speaker 1 But I'm just remembering how nervous I was.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 20 So I've been thinking a lot, like, as I have an hour commute here. So I've been a lot of thoughts.

Speaker 20 And I've been noticing a lot that politics has almost becoming like sports, where it's like people who think this political thing will never change your opinions.

Speaker 20 Like I'm a Giants fan, and we saw what happened last Sunday.

Speaker 20 And I will never change my stance on being a Giants fan.

Speaker 20 Would you agree that there's been, there's something like that, where it's almost like people are cheering for a sports team rather than a political party, which has to do with health and people's livelihoods.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I

Speaker 1 agree with and resemble the premise of your question. So you referenced Around the Horn, which I love and adore.
I referenced Tony Kornheiser throughout this talk, who I love and adore.

Speaker 1 PTI, for those not familiar, is a show where two people argue. It was pioneering.
There was a clock, there's a rundown. It's still the highest-rated show, I believe, on the daytime lineup of ESPN.

Speaker 1 What happened when PTI got super popular is that political cable news copied it.

Speaker 1 And all of political cable news became some form of short attention span theater argumentation,

Speaker 1 in which you had various arguments that were conducted not on the basis of trying to find resolution, which I'd argue is very helpful in real world political programming, or

Speaker 1 conducted on the level of

Speaker 1 even good faith argumentation. It was done for the sake of argumentation.

Speaker 1 And so sports contains multitudes, right? It's a yes-and-story. There are nuances.
Sports can be politics. One of the first things I think I tried to say.

Speaker 1 It also, unfortunately, can be politics.

Speaker 1 Literally.

Speaker 1 The tribalism of everything. the way in which we are identifying with parties because that's our inheritance culturally in the way that you inherit your clear trauma

Speaker 20 as a

Speaker 20 I went to a Super Bowl. It's not that bad.

Speaker 1 The more that Daniel Jones wins games, I think that premise might change.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I think that's it's terrifying. And sports can have it.
Sports, I like to think, is one of the rare places where you can have your cake and eat it too. You can be silly, you can be serious.

Speaker 1 I do worry about the serious, though, trying to wear the costume of silly.

Speaker 1 Because when shame is no longer a guardrail,

Speaker 1 when shame is a, in fact, shamelessness is a market inefficiency. I mean,

Speaker 1 something I think about all the time is how

Speaker 1 a fact-based conversation,

Speaker 1 again, forgive me for being on so many,

Speaker 1 a Russian nesting doll of soapboxes.

Speaker 1 But shamelessness

Speaker 1 is a competitive advantage. And the problem is that everybody's using it.

Speaker 1 And so how do you put a guardrail around that?

Speaker 1 In sports, it's okay.

Speaker 1 Because all that matters is your psychological well-being as a Giants fan.

Speaker 1 When it comes to

Speaker 1 literal human rights,

Speaker 1 it's bad.

Speaker 1 It's real bad.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Another question.
We have one here in the middle, Nishi, Nishi, and then we'll do one back there. So, oh, thank you.

Speaker 20 Thanks.

Speaker 24 Thanks, Pablo. So you mentioned you're

Speaker 24 planning on sending your daughter to college. Would you want your daughter to play sports, knowing what you know about the athlete's journey?

Speaker 24 Jim asked the question about the types of human rights violations they can face, and we've seen a lot of coverage. There's been really interesting stuff about all the stalking.

Speaker 24 So when you know that athletes are, you know, they face a lot of risks, would you encourage your daughter to do it?

Speaker 1 It's hard to deny my daughter the genetic gifts I have passed off.

Speaker 1 It's really tough to say that and everyone laugh.

Speaker 1 My daughter is in soccer class already.

Speaker 1 Scare quotes around class. She very carefully dribbles the ball.
She's the slowest person, but the most careful dribbler.

Speaker 1 A good lesson for any journalist, I would say.

Speaker 1 Take your time, be accurate.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I would, and I would do so enthusiastically.

Speaker 1 And it reminds me that part of the conversation, again, to pick up the thread from before about trans athletes, when they're claiming trans athletes to be predators in locker rooms,

Speaker 1 we have

Speaker 1 an endless litany of examples of legal cases of men, coaches,

Speaker 1 actively preying on female athletes, trainers,

Speaker 1 all of the time, Olympians, gymnasts,

Speaker 1 every sport virtually.

Speaker 1 So, pure just like a counting of

Speaker 1 danger.

Speaker 1 It's a great question for that reason.

Speaker 1 I am, though,

Speaker 1 as a dad,

Speaker 1 I'm a trench coat full of cliches.

Speaker 1 I am a guy who believes more than ever that sports is invaluable, despite all of its sins.

Speaker 1 The integrity of the premise is different from the integrity of the execution. The theory of sports.
Why is it important that trans athletes get to participate?

Speaker 1 It's because belonging, because learning lessons around healthy competition, how to take coaching from someone older than you, how to deal with failure, how to deal all. I mean, again,

Speaker 1 full of cliches.

Speaker 1 I am now a series of bad sports movie motivational speeches. I believe in that more than ever.

Speaker 1 And that's despite the fact that there are bodily and real and documented threats, especially to girls who choose to play it.

Speaker 1 That said,

Speaker 1 I've been at this for five years, so my investigation continues.

Speaker 1 Thank you. We have time for one final question.

Speaker 1 I saw a hand that, please just hear. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Hi.

Speaker 20 I don't know if I really need this. I'm a teacher.
I can talk loudly if I need to.

Speaker 20 But as one of the seemingly, you know, last investigative sports journalists that are out there, I know you've received backlash for your reporting and things in the past.

Speaker 20 I wonder if you could discuss that and kind of leaping off of the Giants, fellow Giants fan question.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 20 How does that reflect, you know, the current climate?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I didn't get into

Speaker 1 this phase of my career in order to investigate serious stories.

Speaker 1 I got into it because I believed that, again, testament to the power of sports, that there are really good stories that journalism is best equipped to tell.

Speaker 1 We live in, again, this media economy where the algorithm is giving us constantly stuff we've already expressed that we want.

Speaker 1 And so, what does that kill?

Speaker 1 One of the things it kills is, I think, the element of the most ancient storytelling technique, which is something you did not know before.

Speaker 1 Surprise, as a concept, has been so undervalued to the point where I get to be, again, to borrow a metaphor from earlier, feeling like

Speaker 1 a one-eyed man in the land of the blind sometimes.

Speaker 1 I'm running a race that very few people are running. The business of media has changed.
The supporting of such work is ever more difficult. I know why people don't do it.
It's really hard.

Speaker 1 You get people mad at you. I cannot walk into the Intuit Dome,

Speaker 1 I believe, without looking over a couple of shoulders.

Speaker 1 Such things are

Speaker 1 not

Speaker 1 for those who don't want to lean into them.

Speaker 1 But I do think that sports, to go back to the Steve Ballmer thing, sports is so important because in that guardrail, less political landscape,

Speaker 1 in sports, there is the ability for the richest people on earth to feel something like accountability. Because sports, still,

Speaker 1 as of 2025,

Speaker 1 mid-October-ish,

Speaker 1 sports has to pretend to care about rules.

Speaker 1 That is

Speaker 1 such a special,

Speaker 1 rare concept where shame can be visited upon someone who is the rich $150 billion

Speaker 1 has to answer questions

Speaker 1 about fair play,

Speaker 1 about competitive balance, about these things that he has evaded, literally,

Speaker 1 or can evade,

Speaker 1 generally speaking,

Speaker 1 in American life otherwise, man. It's a pressure point.

Speaker 1 It's a pressure point. And part of it is because, owe to the pit stains of C-Balmer and of myself at this point, as I continue to gas bag,

Speaker 1 what they want in sports, they cannot simply buy.

Speaker 1 It's a rare thing. You got to earn and win a title.
You got to get players within the rules. You got to trust other people.

Speaker 1 You got to work your ass off.

Speaker 1 You have to be, again, a bundle of clichés that have never felt more like radical suggestions for what the rest of America should maybe think about.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Please join me in thanking Pablo for.

Speaker 1 As I'm sure many of you know, Pablo's career is blowing up in the best sense of the word.

Speaker 1 He is a busy, busy man doing great work, and yet he still took the time to be with us here both last evening and today as well. So, Pablo, thank you for the gift of your time and your expertise.

Speaker 1 The pleasure is literally, truly, truly, truly all mine. It's incredible to be at a place that also feels more radical and necessary in 2025, as I tried to start this thing with than ever.

Speaker 1 So, legitimately, what a fantastic thing to be a part of thank you thank you

Speaker 1 this has been pablo tore finds out a metallark media production

Speaker 1 and i'll talk to you next time

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