Hour 2: The George Soros of Journalism (feat. his beneficiary, Pablo Torre)

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Speaker 11 This is the Dan Labatar Show with the Stoogats Podcast.

Speaker 13 Zaz had to rush out of here. He's got a flight to catch as part of his college football coverage this weekend.

Speaker 14 You got to watch some movies on that flight.

Speaker 13 And I will tell you as he leaves, he's going to come back with stories because I don't believe he owns clothing for Madison, Wisconsin this time of year.

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 17 I don't believe that he knows what he's headed toward.

Speaker 19 What's the temperature right now in Madison? How terrible?

Speaker 7 Have we gotten to the terrible days of it just feels like nothing but icy cold in your bones?

Speaker 21 Or are we not there yet?

Speaker 19 Because he didn't tell us he was going to Madison.

Speaker 17 I have also in front of me an assortment of gifts that we are not using to celebrate what is supposed to be today before Thanksgiving during the holidays a time of giving.

Speaker 24 Illinois, Wisconsin, really, something they're sending them to?

Speaker 25 44 degrees out there.

Speaker 14 Okay.

Speaker 24 That's actually pleasant.

Speaker 26 That's not so bad. Okay.
Yeah. Wisconsin.

Speaker 22 The bad years yet, or the bad months yet, or the bad weeks.

Speaker 16 GiveMiamiday.org is where you go. You've got till midnight tonight.
If you're listening to this later in the day, if you're running, we know we're in gyms with you.

Speaker 16 We know we're in night jobs with you.

Speaker 15 You've got till midnight, the end of the day today.

Speaker 16 In partnership with the Perez Family Foundation, on behalf of my late brother, they are giving $10,000 to givemiamiday.org an assortment of charities that you can get involved with.

Speaker 16 They've done the vetting for you. So it's not like you have to question where it is that your money is going.

Speaker 17 This is going to be spent in good places that have been meticulously vetted.

Speaker 21 Tony is out at Lone Depot Park.

Speaker 16 They're going to kick him out of there in a second. second.

Speaker 28 They don't want him there anymore, no matter how charitable he is.

Speaker 17 So let's get to Tony's top

Speaker 4 from Lone Depot.

Speaker 16 Put the information, please, on the screen, rolling around and near Tony so people continue to give during what is a one-day telethon on behalf of Giving to Miami.

Speaker 5 And let me remind people: Tony's top five is presented by Smirnoff, the official vodka sponsor of the National Football League. Smirnoff, please drink responsibly.

Speaker 5 The Smirnoff Company, New York, New York, Vodka, 40% alcohol by volume.

Speaker 7 Let's get going, Tony.

Speaker 31 It's great to be with you from Lone Depot Park. Yes, sir.
We are actually $17 million donated right now. I don't know if it's, oh, it's over my shoulder right there.
$17.2 million donated.

Speaker 31 Again, over 1,400 organizations, over 70,000 donations, and 38,000 different donors. So a very cool situation.

Speaker 31 We just had entire programs talking about all the beautiful things that people are donating to, all the causes that are incredible from foster care to people with disabilities playing music and stuff.

Speaker 31 It's a very touching scene. And I will be giving you my top five right now.
No OLIs, because obviously we're late on in the week.

Speaker 31 We've talked through everything there is to talk about regarding the NFL. But a couple of things here.
We'll start off with number five. Dano, that Davis Mills throw.

Speaker 31 I know you know the throw I'm talking about. That was a special throw, Dan.

Speaker 33 I mean, every once in a while he's going to make a special throw.

Speaker 16 The Texans shouldn't be saying no way to trading Davis Mills.

Speaker 31 How many games have they won since he's been the starting quarterback?

Speaker 34 All of them.

Speaker 24 Seems to be doing just fine with that pressure up the middle, man.

Speaker 31 Yep.

Speaker 32 All right.

Speaker 31 Number four, keep an eye on the 49ers. Brock Purdy looks solid against a good Arizona defense.
That NFC West is a, you know what, is a mother.

Speaker 31 And I think that Brock Purdy and the 49ers can sneak into a little something, something if they start getting healthy on the defense.

Speaker 32 Not again.

Speaker 19 We're not going to do this again with the 49ers, are we?

Speaker 23 We're going to do this again with the 49ers.

Speaker 24 Fred Warner's too much. Bosa and Fred Warner.
If he does that, Kyle Shanahan.

Speaker 32 Put that on the poll.

Speaker 20 Put it on the poll at Lebatar Show, Juju.

Speaker 13 Kyle Shanahan, if he does that.

Speaker 21 Woo!

Speaker 31 Number three,

Speaker 31 Jags versus Chargers. We don't know if either team is good.
We don't know if either team is bad.

Speaker 35 on a literally week-to-week basis.

Speaker 31 The Chargers, some days are good.

Speaker 33 The Chargers, some days may be good, some days may be shit.

Speaker 31 And also the Jags. You beat the Chiefs, you beat the Chargers, and then you lose to whoever they've lost to the Texans or whoever, just whatever abysmal loss they've had.
Like, they're so weird.

Speaker 31 They're either good, they're bad, they're not good, they're not like that.

Speaker 5 You were just talking up Davis Mills, and now the Texans is a bad loss.

Speaker 31 Well, but they lost to them with the with the with CJ Stroud at quarterback.

Speaker 30 Oh, we're not doing that for the team.

Speaker 16 Well, really, we're gonna do that now.

Speaker 27 You don't wait a minute.

Speaker 33 They're starter? So, yeah, this is what we're gonna do to CJ Stroud.

Speaker 31 17 million, Dano. 17.284 million.
What an incredible donation here at Give Miami Day. Incredible.

Speaker 31 Please donate if you're listening.

Speaker 11 Number two.

Speaker 20 All right, number two.

Speaker 31 Kneeling with almost three minutes left in the Cowboys Raiders was sickening. There's no room for that in our sport.
Sazzo likes to talk about no punching in our sport.

Speaker 31 How about no kneeling with two and a half minutes left in the game? How about that? How about you go punch it in and score a touchdown? Who cares what the score is? How about that? Sickening.

Speaker 11 And number one,

Speaker 31 probably the biggest news of the entire weekend. The Chiefs, and more so, the shipping container got debuffed.

Speaker 7 Debacled.

Speaker 31 A debuffling happened, Dano.

Speaker 4 Debacled. Okay.
Debockled.

Speaker 24 We got debuffled.

Speaker 4 Debuckled. Thank you.

Speaker 31 That's number one. The Chiefs in the shipping container got absolutely debuffled.

Speaker 4 Debuckled.

Speaker 29 I'm sorry, you guys lost more than $5,000 on a Nick Wright bet. Tony, thank you for the work that you did out there.
Get out of there. It is loud.

Speaker 28 It is loud.

Speaker 16 I don't believe that we celebrated with enough of the goodies that they sent us, but please continue to give throughout the entirety of the day until midnight tonight.

Speaker 17 I have a couple of things, Eagles and Chiefs related, because I've seen the stat floating around.

Speaker 7 The Chiefs offense this year scores more per drive than any of the offenses before it.

Speaker 18 They're 0-5 in close close games.

Speaker 21 All of a sudden, they go from how we talked about them last year when they were 11-0 in one-score games, to they know how to win.

Speaker 28 They're clutch.

Speaker 19 Mahomes is the best.

Speaker 7 This year, they're better offensively per drive scoring, but they lose the one-score games, and now they play at home against the Colts.

Speaker 19 And now they're in danger of being 5-6 and having the same record, same number of wins as the Dolphins, a worse record than the Carolina Panthers. Meanwhile, the Eagles have

Speaker 7 this funny problem.

Speaker 16 When we talk, I mean about how much basketball has changed.

Speaker 38 Football changing in this regard is funny.

Speaker 9 It's a funny thing to watch.

Speaker 38 Jalen Hurts is said to be unpopular with his teammates, primarily his offensive teammates, because they play a conservative, constipated style of football that wins, obviously, in a way that is more than any other team in the sport.

Speaker 36 But the emphasis is, Jalen, we always win when we win the turnover battle.

Speaker 37 So all that matters from the new age quarterback on a champion is don't turn the ball over.

Speaker 20 Don't throw into tight windows and zone.

Speaker 37 Don't do all the things that people are doing in football all over the sport.

Speaker 30 And now what happens?

Speaker 15 His wide receivers hate him because they'd like to make some money and be good at offense because they can be.

Speaker 12 Because they're great.

Speaker 19 What a funny thing to have happen in that risk averse sport where the greatest champion that wins all the time, the receivers are really getting mad at their quarterback, throw into a tight window.

Speaker 19 No, no, I'm going to tuck the ball because we win every time I don't turn the ball over.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 17 It's a funny controversy to have it in the middle of a team that's won 24 of 27 games.

Speaker 14 But Dan, that's the beauty of professional sports, right? Professional team sports. It's the balance of your individual goals within the greater agenda of winning.

Speaker 14 That's what Draymond Green was talking about two weeks ago or whatever it was.

Speaker 14 Like, how do I make myself look good enough to get paid, but also do what the team needs to get wins?

Speaker 30 I'd like to bring in Pablo Torre here because

Speaker 23 the work that he's doing with a team of journalists requires, it's just not a lot of

Speaker 19 work, effort, and caring.

Speaker 21 He's doing a lot of work that other people are not doing,

Speaker 19 even on well-traversed ground where it's difficult to do new work.

Speaker 16 So you're attacking something here that is

Speaker 16 conversationally,

Speaker 16 it looks based on your reporting and collaboration you're doing with Mother Jones magazine, that Riley Gaines with your podcast, it's being shown how it is that she was used and maneuver, how all of this was maneuvered politically.

Speaker 17 And so tell us, Pablo, what it is that you're reporting with Mother Jones here so people can get caught up on whatever it is you think you know about this.

Speaker 30 There's some fact-based reporting here here that will show you that there's been

Speaker 7 what looks like a great deal of maneuvering and manipulation strictly for a very

Speaker 36 easy, profitable grift.

Speaker 42 Yeah, there's a segue here somewhere between Tony's top five and Riley Gaines, the most famous fifth place finisher, I think, college sports history, but I am not here to talk about such jokes.

Speaker 42 The thing that this story is about, though, is the number one politically impactful sports story in America.

Speaker 42 And it's Riley Gaines, who is this former University of Kentucky swimmer, who has become, over time, someone who has become the face of what it means to win elections in America in 2025, just like hammering this issue, keep predators out of women's sports, predators.

Speaker 42 meaning trans people according to her and the MAGA movement, as well as the face and the voice of people who have been victimized by such athletes.

Speaker 42 And so what we did with Mother Jones in collaboration with them and the Center for Investigative Reporting was actually profile Riley Gaines, who is this incredibly important person in politics and now in sports, having been a person who tied for fifth with Leah Thomas, the trans swimmer at the NCAA championships now four years ago.

Speaker 42 And the thing we were studying was like, when did this all escalate to the point where not only can you make money off of this, Dan, but you're actually somebody who has a leadership center named after her?

Speaker 42 You're actually somebody who's appearing dozens upon dozens upon dozens upon dozens of times on Fox News, is praised by name in person by President Trump at the White House as they're banning trans athletes and in the process, declaring victory.

Speaker 42 as they are the people who are arguing this is an 80-20 issue. The 20% of you woke libs are getting it wrong.
We're winning this 80% of the time.

Speaker 42 And so when you go through this, you realize that this was a manufactured story, that Riley Gaines didn't always believe this, that when you talk to her teammates, and we did, they tell you she wasn't anti-trans in college.

Speaker 42 She was not pro-Trump in college. She is somebody who over time got paid to develop an opinion into a weapon.

Speaker 42 And she got paid to develop her experience of tying for fifth place at the NCAA SOME championships into a professional victimhood that not only got exaggerated in terms of the rhetoric around it, but truly in terms of the implications for what it is to be a trans person.

Speaker 42 As in, it became, I was, my colleagues, my friends, fellow female athletes were abused, preyed upon, victimized by these quote-unquote men in sports. And there's a lot.
in that,

Speaker 42 but the things that I found all indicate, oh, wait a minute.

Speaker 42 There was a story of victimization in college involving Riley Gaines' teammates, but it wasn't the one that Leah Thomas had allegedly perpetrated.

Speaker 42 It was something deeper and darker that Riley Gaines has talked about literally once on Twitter while she makes these dozens of appearances all across the country talking about the real problem is over there.

Speaker 42 She doesn't want to talk about this specific thing, which is, I think, the big part of the story that we reported.

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Speaker 12 Don Lebatard.

Speaker 45 Pablo leads all of podcasting in reading while smiling.

Speaker 2 If you listen to ESPN Daily, he sounds like he's having the time of his life.

Speaker 12 Stugats. Coming up next.

Speaker 46 I'm going to tell you how the Savannah bananas changed. How do you know I'm going to bananas?

Speaker 46 How do you know I'm smiling? That's how I find my vocal range. Sometimes I just say Savannah bananas.

Speaker 46 Savannah bananas.

Speaker 11 This is the Don Lebatar Show with the Stugats.

Speaker 24 Pablo, just the person I wanted to speak with.

Speaker 20 Team A is

Speaker 39 A.

Speaker 4 You can't do this.

Speaker 4 Team A and team B play the football game.

Speaker 13 You can't do this every time, Mike, with this.

Speaker 42 All right, all right. So just based on the fact that Donald Trump credited Raleigh Gaines for his re-election, do you believe that if Raleigh Gaines beat Leah Thomas by a millisecond,

Speaker 42 that Donald Trump is re-elected as president of the United States for a second time.

Speaker 42 I had not phrased it in my head until Roy just put it that way.

Speaker 42 We may be living in a different America.

Speaker 42 That is how insanely important this issue and resonant this issue seems to be.

Speaker 42 And the whole thing, Roy, like why that's a good exercise here is not just because what a crazy sliding doors possibility.

Speaker 42 It's that there is now this entire population of people who claim to really care about women's sports. And their lens to see women's sports through is through the trans issue, right?

Speaker 42 These guys who otherwise could not, who actually actively insulted women's basketball over the years, the WNBA, women's sports in general, who are all making fun of it, are now rebranded as the foremost protectors of it because it is politically useful and because there is the easiest target in America, which is to say the most downtrodden, like attempting suicide at a rate of one in three kind of downtrodden population, which is the trans person in America.

Speaker 42 And so the trans athlete,

Speaker 42 the reason why there's this other story that I've been trying to tell people is because, and this is sort of spoiling the episode, so please go and listen to it in the way the chef intended.

Speaker 42 But the real thing you have to understand is that the University of Kentucky, one of Riley Gaines' best friends, as she calls him in

Speaker 42 her book, somebody who she's called a really really good coach over the years, someone she's been very close to, is the head coach of the UK women's swimming team, the former head coach now, a guy named Lars Jorgensen.

Speaker 42 And Coach Lars

Speaker 42 himself was accused of rape by multiple teammates on that same UK swim team that Riley Gaines comes from.

Speaker 42 And

Speaker 42 that premise of why do you not know the story of an actual male predator inside of the locker rooms that Riley Gaines and Donald Trump are trying to defend, right?

Speaker 42 The sanctity of, the safety of, the protection of these women? Why does no one know about that story? Why does Riley Gaines literally, except for one tweet, never even acknowledge that it happened?

Speaker 42 It speaks to the entire, not just like hypocrisy, but the mutant version of how the safety of women is being used against the interests of women. And it's not just like what about ism.

Speaker 42 It's literally the question of we are always trying to figure out who gets to get the protection and the attention of Americans at a time when that is scarce and very competitive.

Speaker 42 And what Riley Gaines is telling you is, look over at the time that I tied for fifth place at the NCAA swimming championships. That is like sexual assault.

Speaker 42 Remember when she went back and forth with Simone Biles, right? Simone Biles, victim, actual victim of Larry Nasser,

Speaker 42 basically made those things equivalent. She herself has experienced this thing.

Speaker 42 And so, I'll just quote one of Riley's teammates, and forgive me for going on about this because I just need to sort of put this in full context.

Speaker 42 What one of Riley Gaines's teammates told us, Trinity Ward, on tape with her own face, which is incredibly brave to do, is all the time she goes out and people ask her, because she tells them I swam for the University of Kentucky, oh, do you know Riley Gaines?

Speaker 42 And she asks them in response, Do you know about Lars Jorgensen?

Speaker 42 And what Trinity Ward said to us is: it's, and this is me paraphrasing, it's really hard hard for me to care about Riley Gaines tying for fifth place when our head coach was accused of raping our teammates.

Speaker 42 And like, that is not abstract. That is the reality of the locker room that has become this social experiment for American politics to fight it out over.

Speaker 42 And somehow the biggest story about the predation of... our actual young women in sports gets entirely ignored until you get a former teammate like this speaking out about it.

Speaker 19 As I have mentioned a number of times now, Pablo Torrey finds out it's very difficult work to do.

Speaker 17 It's a special collaboration with Mother Jones magazine.

Speaker 13 It requires a great deal of vetting, a great deal of lawyering.

Speaker 19 All of this work is mostly work that other people are not willing to do.

Speaker 17 So I salute you for doing it.

Speaker 13 But when you think of the most important things that you're trying to do with this particular episode and the storytelling, I'm assuming from what it is that you're saying that the macro here that you're, for all of the revelations, what they are,

Speaker 41 the

Speaker 13 disgust that one must have at the idea of politics being used this way

Speaker 30 when

Speaker 17 you have to ask the largest question of

Speaker 38 who are we protecting here if you're going to allow a rapist to roam the locker room while

Speaker 27 allegedly, right? No, yes, thank you for that.

Speaker 30 But

Speaker 9 when in front of you, the most famous story involving Riley Gaines doesn't have anything to do with protecting women.

Speaker 42 It's crazy, man. And there is like a dark comedy in this.
Like, the thing you think you should be paying attention to is over here.

Speaker 42 The actual crisis in women's sports, which any female athlete can tell you, which largely involves, by the way, men in positions of power, like the irony, Dan, the sheer irony, right?

Speaker 42 And the reason I have to say alleged is because all of this, of course, is very carefully legally vetted. And I want to be very careful about all of this.

Speaker 42 But the question of what about men in female locker rooms in college? It's like they already exist. They're called the coaches.

Speaker 42 And they are Larry Nasser. They are allegedly Lars Jorgensen.
They are the people who have the power who are actually men.

Speaker 42 Like, we're not disagreeing that there are men who prey upon women, young women in sports. The question is, which ones allegedly should you care about?

Speaker 42 And so what's crazy also is that over time, like Riley Gaines has given so many interviews to various podcasts, conservative outlets, TV networks over time that you see the rhetoric damn.

Speaker 42 You see it evolve to be weaponized. It didn't start off as trans inclusion is the same as sexual assault, is the same as welcoming predators into female locker rooms.

Speaker 42 It didn't start off like that, but you see over time how they workshop.

Speaker 42 We play the clips year to year, month to month, you see the rhetoric change to to become more and more criminal and violent in the nature of its allegations.

Speaker 42 And it becomes something that many people, many parents, again, like again, as the father of a daughter, right?

Speaker 42 I hear from people now in my mentions who are like, how dare you betray your daughter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're an embarrassed, blah, blah, blah.
Whatever.

Speaker 42 The point is, if you care about...

Speaker 42 Girls and women in sports, there are issues to care about. It's just that we're being manipulated through money, by the way, that originates in a key form here.

Speaker 42 And you alluded to this this before, Dan, and I've only gotten to this now, from the owners of the Orlando Magic. The DeVos family has put six figures behind Riley Gaines as this figure.

Speaker 42 Like, they're funding her work, her activism, which gets it all backwards to the profit, again, I ask everybody to think of who? Who profits from this?

Speaker 42 I would dare say that it's not actually the women and girls that Donald Trump has as these props as he's signing executive orders to ban trans athletes from women's sports.

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Speaker 32 Don Lebatard.

Speaker 47 Everybody froggs here live from Metalock Media Studios here in Miami.

Speaker 12 Stugats.

Speaker 47 The Germans are advancing on France in World War II.

Speaker 11 This is the Don Lebatar Show with the Stugats.

Speaker 2 Pablo, I found it fascinating the way that you guys laid everything out in terms of how this grift began and how Riley seemingly learned at each stop on the radio or podcast from Clay Travis to then Charlie Kirk and beyond

Speaker 1 how to

Speaker 2 phrase all of this and turn it into a bigger boogeyman. But what you really eventually lay out is how this becomes an ability to provide the framework to keep people not just out of sports.

Speaker 7 What is sort of the most dangerous precedent that's being set here?

Speaker 2 And where can it continue to sort of exclude trans people, not just from sports, but from society?

Speaker 42 Yeah, I think it's important to realize that sports is like this gateway drug for lots of cultural issues.

Speaker 42 It's also the legal framework via these Supreme Court cases working their way through the system now to actually strip the rights

Speaker 42 from trans people to be just included or allowed in these spaces. And I think there is an enormous sort of paradox of like, how can this problem, which is vanishingly small in real life, right?

Speaker 42 So again, the numbers per the president of the NCAA is at their at last check were fewer than 10 varsity D1 level trans athletes, right? So that's less than 0.02%.

Speaker 42 That's the moral panic that swings elections.

Speaker 42 That these legislations, these bills, these legislative efforts that are spreading across America and state houses where they can't find the trans athletes to justify the actual legislation, can't find the people, the offenders, to like parade in front of courthouses.

Speaker 42 None of that matters because the rhetoric has been so persuasive around how dangerous they are, how predatory they are.

Speaker 42 And so sports being the place where you can officially ban them from public, or at the very least, from sports spaces, leads to then,

Speaker 42 what about in the rest of American life?

Speaker 42 And it's nuts, man. It's all like you can have a debate, a rightful debate about scientific advantage, right?

Speaker 42 What advantage did Leah Thomas have physiologically, even after testosterone suppression therapy? We've done episodes about that. This is not an episode about whether

Speaker 42 an athlete who went through male puberty is better

Speaker 42 in the abstract than a female athlete who didn't go through male puberty. That is not the debate.

Speaker 42 The debate is, what are people spending their money on that they don't want you to realize that will fundamentally strip the rights of the most

Speaker 42 actually victimized population of people in America to benefit an administration that's using it to just gain more power and enrich themselves.

Speaker 42 Like that's the real mind of all of it is that they are winning. They're actually winning.
And they're running the same play over and over and over again, like an NFL team that's just running the ball

Speaker 42 50 times in a row.

Speaker 24 Or like the SEC when it comes to the college football playoff.

Speaker 4 What has the Utah Utes done to deserve the number 12 ranking

Speaker 39 in Canada?

Speaker 13 I'm sorry to do this to you, Mike.

Speaker 19 I just.

Speaker 32 minor penalty, two minutes for verbal diarrhea.

Speaker 19 The thing that I have failed to get to with Pablo is him and his team getting nominated one of the 10 best podcast episodes, according to Apple of the year.

Speaker 21 The only one in the sports category, because you can't count Travis and Jason interviewing

Speaker 13 a relative about, you can't, that, no, we're not doing that.

Speaker 21 We're not doing Taylor Swift gets to be in the sports category.

Speaker 13 Be respectful.

Speaker 14 What? Be respectful, my good friends, the Kelse brothers.

Speaker 13 The Kelse brothers.

Speaker 16 I mean, but that doesn't put that in the sports category. That was an interview with Taylor Swift.

Speaker 9 The only thing in sports that was deemed worthy of best episode in podcasting over the last year was Pablo Torre.

Speaker 16 But before we get to that, Can you explain to me the new reporting that you did and Mother Jones did on where the money was coming from on the Orlando Magic and this very rich family that does things like this easily with money that's easy for it to spend.

Speaker 42 Yeah, Betsy DeVos, man. Like, she is

Speaker 42 the family, the DeVos family is crazy, right? There's Eric Prince, the guy behind Blackwater, which is like the paramilitary private defense contractor. He's like in the picture.

Speaker 42 He's in the family tree. But she herself is someone who is not merely like very

Speaker 42 intertwined, I would say, with the Trump administration. She is also, her family is, alongside Rich DeVos.

Speaker 42 Yeah, they own the Orlando Magic.

Speaker 42 And I think if people cared more about the magic, maybe Kevin Clark is like the only person I know who even vaguely cares about the Orlando Magic.

Speaker 42 Maybe that would be a thing people really thought about more, but it's coming from NBA owners.

Speaker 42 And look, I'm not even asking anybody to pick a side on like the whole, like, again, should trans athletes be allowed to play a women's sports thing.

Speaker 42 I just think it's fascinating that there has been in the league, in the NBA this entire time, this multi-billionaire family that is actively using its money and laundering its own image using like, what's the Orlando magic mascot called?

Speaker 42 What's his name? Stuff.

Speaker 12 Stuff the magic dragon.

Speaker 42 They are using stuff the magic dragon as this political beard behind which they're like puppeteering, I think, a corruption of certainly women's sports, but also politics itself.

Speaker 42 It is

Speaker 42 some pretty bad stuff.

Speaker 18 You did that on purpose?

Speaker 4 That's all I had at the end.

Speaker 42 I'm trying to just sprinkle in stuff because I know Peter's audience is like mad at me for getting the vegetables all up and stuff.

Speaker 23 He's promoting his episode. He comes on here, and I should have kept it to five minutes.
And instead, we talked to 20 minutes.

Speaker 42 What's the chat like on YouTube right now? Are they happy with me?

Speaker 4 We're live.

Speaker 4 We know better.

Speaker 38 Look, you can imagine,

Speaker 21 I don't need to explain to you how it is that you are presently being blamed for ruining everything that we do around here with your journalism, with your mother jonesing.

Speaker 23 But you did, this is how you become a top 10 episode for Apple.

Speaker 38 And I will tell you, I don't know if you know this or not, Amin has been taking credit for all of the success of that episode.

Speaker 14 And Amin believes for all your journalistic team and everything you're doing, it wasn't until you saddled up on Amin and David Sampson that you actually brought home something that's a worthy trophy because you were nominated for whatever all that shit was you were doing on the west coast but here you actually got a trophy to be fair dan to be fair i'd laid the groundwork for quite a while before i did the haunted house i did the chicken misses from uh from yeah

Speaker 14 right like all that we did he's been working you pablo has been working you but this this this quiet story this is the the pinnacle of our journalistic integrity and i've one pablo if i may speak for you we're humbled by this award and by this recognition by not only Apple Pocket.

Speaker 42 I'm not going to speak for me just for the record. Whatever comes out of me's mouth next is not for me.

Speaker 4 We're humble.

Speaker 4 Are you not humbled?

Speaker 4 Pablo, you're not humble.

Speaker 42 I'm very,

Speaker 42 I would say that it's almost impossible to be humble if you say I'm humble, but

Speaker 14 I mean, give it a try. Just say, I'm humbled.
I'm humbled by the recognition.

Speaker 36 Say it.

Speaker 42 I am humbled. Don't say it like that.
Why am I listening to you?

Speaker 42 Why am I listening to a meme?

Speaker 14 Why are you saying it like a kid who's told to say, I'm sorry for breaking your stupid voice?

Speaker 19 He doesn't want to say he's been humbled by

Speaker 19 me.

Speaker 42 You know what I've been?

Speaker 42 I've been emboldened. I have been emboldened, I mean.

Speaker 42 I'm emboldened. And the thing that's happening as we speak right now is that a lot of people are mad at me on the internet.
And I don't think humility is going to get me anywhere.

Speaker 42 I've been told that in 2026, I need to

Speaker 42 somehow be even less humble. So I'm going to try and do that, actually.

Speaker 14 It's funny.

Speaker 14 I went to a game recently and I had a team representative say, Pablo, he's good. Arrogant son of a though.

Speaker 38 Oh, but you can you imagine what who was it?

Speaker 42 Who said it?

Speaker 13 I mean, look, if you guys want to talk about the process, Pablo Torrey's career started with trying to dissect what Daryl Maury was trying to reinvent in Philadelphia.

Speaker 42 This is where Sam Hinky but all looks same.

Speaker 5 And also, that's not where it started.

Speaker 14 His career started with the money thing, how the guys all blew their money, right? Wasn't that your big first story?

Speaker 42 Some people have alleged that it started there. Billy Corbin

Speaker 42 would maybe agree, giving that, I don't want to get into a beef with Billy. I love Billy.
What am I doing?

Speaker 13 Okay, regardless, his career,

Speaker 16 what's happened over the last year of Pablo, if you believe that some of the things that he has won, that any of the things that he's added to his resume are humble, are humble, you are not paying attention to what he wants as a destination.

Speaker 15 He wants to be able to show the entirety of the internet, my facts are so strong, I'm impenetrable.

Speaker 21 And he's done so.

Speaker 16 And now he's come to this story because this one's hard to do.

Speaker 13 Like this, what happened?

Speaker 4 What?

Speaker 42 You know what's happening to me actually is that, and I do want to credit him in for being a leg of the tripod.

Speaker 42 What is happening in my mentions actually

Speaker 42 is that Dan is turning into the George Soros of journalism. People are saying, who is funding Pablo Torre finds out? Who's the dark money source? And I'm like,

Speaker 42 you could watch him on YouTube every day. He's sitting in that chair over there,

Speaker 42 sweating about how much money he's doing.

Speaker 30 Worried about the billionaires coming after us when you get one of these facts wrong.

Speaker 14 Pablo, how did you feel about Jordan hitting you with a you're welcome? Yeah.

Speaker 42 I just want her to come on the show.

Speaker 42 Can we get that?

Speaker 42 I mean,

Speaker 42 can you be my more charming proxy and convince Jordan Hudson to come on the show? That's how you can add value to the enterprise here because that's where this whole thing is going.

Speaker 12 He's already added value.

Speaker 42 Come on. I'm saying more value.

Speaker 5 More value. More value.
That's right.

Speaker 42 That's right. Added value.

Speaker 4 What do I do?

Speaker 14 How do I do this?

Speaker 14 Do you just DM these people?

Speaker 12 How do you do it?

Speaker 14 Well, I don't know how you do it.

Speaker 42 I'm saying how does someone who's once you're in the middle of the- I think we got to assign Amin to like an adult co-ed cheerleading contest, and you have to cover it and you have to embed.

Speaker 42 I think Amin needs to actually join an adult co-ed cheerleading team and then befriend Jordan Hudson.

Speaker 20 Ask him about the quality loss.

Speaker 32 No, stop. Get away, Lou.

Speaker 4 Quality losses.

Speaker 40 We're not talking about this anymore.

Speaker 12 We've had it in him.

Speaker 13 See you later, Pablo.

Speaker 9 Good seeing you.

Speaker 16 Good talking to you.

Speaker 9 And keep up the good work.

Speaker 26 Pablo Torrey finds out. I will tell you

Speaker 32 that.

Speaker 42 Thank you for the money and for saving journalism, Dan. Couldn't do without you.
Not a joke.

Speaker 4 You're welcome.

Speaker 16 This,

Speaker 26 I know I keep saying that the work that he's doing is difficult to do, but if anyone has been sort of built for these fights because he's going to try and win them with facts, he's not getting more humble, though.

Speaker 26 He's out of control. His head, like, you don't understand what getting the universal applause of what used to be the blue check marks for Pablo, great, you're better at journalism than anybody.

Speaker 17 Like, there's no greater applause you can give Pablo.

Speaker 14 Called him an arrogant son of a bitch.

Speaker 16 But humble isn't going to be one of the things.

Speaker 38 He's winning all the awards.

Speaker 37 Like, he's not going to get more humble from here.

Speaker 9 He would have to be humbled by making a mistake, by tripping and getting something wrong.

Speaker 14 I don't think he really cares about the awards. I think he cares that he's getting stories that nobody else is getting, though, and that they're getting traction.

Speaker 16 Well, they get traction because it's hard.

Speaker 28 Look, he's doing the hardest thing the hardest way.

Speaker 30 Be at the trough where everyone else is and do the hardest things better than anyone else is doing them.

Speaker 28 Like, that's not a lane anybody else wanted the challenge of taking.

Speaker 37 It's a very hard lane to take.

Speaker 25 This story is a perfect example.

Speaker 25 Like, I've been pretty locked in on this story as it's evolved over the last several years, and there were several things in here that I had never heard and learned because of the work that Pablo does with this other journalist.

Speaker 5 It's spectacular.

Speaker 23 He's trying, what he is attempting to do with that podcast is the highest degree of difficulty, which is, can I exceed the standard of being at the thing everyone else is talking about and still consistently surprise you with fact-based reporting that makes even the people who feel the most informed be like, holy shit, I didn't know it was like that.

Speaker 32 Talking like this.

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