10/28/25: Kamala 2028 Run, Trump's 2026 Election Plot, NBA Gambling Scandal

25:12Spanberger, right? You could argue that she could be whatever, like a banner. She's underperforming, though. Yeah, I've got to listen. I'm not sure, right? But it's one of those where you could technically say it. CIA, Democrat. Yeah, they'll definitely say it. But, I mean, we'll move on. This conversation will continue. But I think Zoran is proof point number one. I think the midterms will be proof point number two. We'll see what happens there, what type of candidates are able to come out of primaries. You know, if Graham beats the sitting governor of Maine. It's going to be huge. That would be a huge indication.

25:41You know, Abdul El-Sayed, of course, in Michigan is another one. We're watching closely, you know, what happens with Shoycott. There's a bunch of different candidates like this that are going to be very interesting to watch. So that'll be another test point. But the ultimate test will be, of course, in 2028, picking the next leader of the party. Yeah, it is going to be 2028. By the way, last thing, all eyes, New Jersey. I'm very interested in New Jersey in that governor election. They're tied for one point right now. If a Republican wins in the state of New Jersey, that's actually going to be crazy.

26:08Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated. And Black America was at a breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.

26:53This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Bowen Yang and I'm Matt Rogers during this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games we've been joined by some of our friends Hi Bowen, hi Matt Hey Elmo Hey Matt, hey Bowen Hi Cookie Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears Listen to Two Guys, Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

28:04And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody. There were years, right, where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can, to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of a** to come around here and my wife. Boom, boom. This is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

28:44Well, friends, we have arrived. It is time to fully sound the alarm about the midterm elections and whether voters will actually get to have their say in anything approaching a fair or meaningful way. So, in a recent interview, Steve Bannon understandably got a lot of attention for insisting Trump would be president again in 2020 because he is a, quote, vehicle of divine providence. But in that same interview, Bannon also had something to say about the U.S. Congress, which is, of course, directly relevant for the midterm elections. I think that to avoid actual civil conflict, which I think you're seeing right now, the beginning of the harbinger of it, if you want to stop that, you have to bind together tighter.

29:26We, as a populist nationalist movement, as a MAGA movement, we need to do, like the redistricting fights. We need to get, this is why I was down in Texas, we need to get the House in a situation that is permanently defendable by the MAGA movement, right? So it's a blocking mechanism. And take that, like I said, you move maximalist strategy with a sense of urgency, and you seize the institutions. And that's what we're doing right now. I don't see how that is a recipe for diffusing this crisis. I think that what happens is when people feel shut out of power and interest groups cannot get representation and cannot get an input into the way that policy is made, that's precisely when you end up with civil war.

30:08I disagree. Seize the institutions, get the House in a situation where it is permanently defendable by the MAGA movement. So is Bannon just blowing smoke here? After all, he's not Trump. He's not a Trump official either. In fact, if you look, though, at everything the Trump administration is saying and doing, it is undeniably clear they are in the midst of executing a sophisticated plot in an attempt to rig the midterm elections in favor of Republicans. This plot has several different elements and, of course, no guarantees of success. But we need to grapple with what we are facing right now. So I'm going to take time to go through each of the various elements.

30:45Top line, though, first element is personnel. Federal government divisions dealing with election cybersecurity and civil rights violations been gutted and replaced with 2020 election deniers from the Stop the Steal fraud. Second, executive orders. Trump has signed several executive orders seeking to consolidate control of election mechanics, voter rolls, and even election machines in his hands. A Republican operative, by the way, now owns Dominion Voting. Third, gerrymandering. Trump is pressuring Republican states to redraw maps to block out Democrats and is getting a major assist from the Supreme Court, most likely.

31:16Fourth, threats. Trump is sending election monitors to California and New Jersey, deploying National Guard in blue cities, and threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act. All of this is occurring as he repeatedly insists elections are rigged, undocumented immigrants vote illegally, and mail-in ballots are fraudulent. Taken together, you can see they are serious. They are operating on a variety of fronts. They are unwilling to accept the verdict of voters. So let's start in depth with personnel. According to The New York Times, Trump has installed a number of stop-the-steel wackos in key election-related roles after gutting departments which previously dealt with election integrity and rights.

31:53So several of these new officials come from the so-called Election Integrity Network. This is a far-right group at the heart of inventing lies during Trump's effort to steal the election in 2020. Now, in the newly, in the administration, in the newly created election integrity position at the Department of Homeland Security, Trump has installed a woman by the name of Heather Honey. She is a stop the steal nut who immediately jumped on official government calls when she was appointed to spread wild conspiracies about rigged voting machines. Prior to her appointment, she floated invoking a national emergency in order to gain control over state voting.

32:29Another wacko, a guy named Kurt Olson, has also been brought into the Trump administration to investigate the supposedly stolen 2020 election. Just in case you were wondering if they had given up on those old lies. Olson helped cook up MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's 2020 rigged election delusions. In addition to them, you've got the former DeKalb County Georgia Republican chair, Marcy McCarthy is her name. She was appointed to be director of public affairs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. Marcy was at the heart of spreading Georgia voting machine conspiracies back in 2020.

33:03But perhaps even more critically, she was involved in purging thousands of legitimate voters from the rolls in Georgia in 2024 in an effort that resulted in tens of thousands of voters losing their ability to vote in what appeared to be a racially biased manner. Now, that experience of Marcy's might be particularly relevant when you consider the election-related executive orders that Trump has been signing. So back in March, Trump signed an executive order mandating more stringent IDs, recertifications of voting machines under new rules that literally none of the existing machines currently comply with.

33:37And perhaps most troubling, this executive order granted Elon's Doge access to voter rolls for quote-unquote fraud audits. Now, lest you think that with Elon's departure, this aspect would be dropped, the Trump Justice Department is demanding that states provide them with their voter rolls, an action that many, even red states, have actually resisted so far. The Trump DOJ has sent demands to 30 states already with intent to send to all 50. What's more, they have already sued eight different states for refusing to hand over their voter rolls so far. An additional executive order seeks to end mail-in balloting, which of course is used more often at this point by Democrats, and reiterates the commitment to get rid of every existing voting machine.

34:19About those voting machines, by the way, you remember all the furor around Dominion voting machines supposedly rigged in 2020 by the ghost of Hugo Chavez or some such nonsense? Well, that company has now been bought by a Trump ally, the former Republican elections director in St. Louis. And in the announcement of the purchase, this guy made a point of nodding towards that Venezuela conspiracy and of saying he was going to prioritize complying with Trump's executive orders. Dominion is being renamed Liberty Vote now. Now, perhaps this guy is just trying to rebrand, trying to pander to the conspiracy nuts in the nag of base.

34:56But half of the voting machines in the country are Dominion, and they are now under partisan ownership. Next, we've got, of course, the mass gerrymandering push coming directly from the White House. Three states, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas, they've already drawn new maps to more heavily favor Republicans. Five more states are considering following suit. In a sign of what a priority this is for the regime, J.D. Vance has visited Indiana twice to pressure lawmakers to draw new maps. And Trump spoke directly with Indiana Republicans earlier this month. Just yesterday, Governor Brown called an emergency session to consider the president's demand.

35:30In addition, the Supreme Court looks set to deliver a major assist on this front, striking down parts of the Voting Rights Act, which would plausibly allow Republicans to eliminate roughly a dozen seats currently held by Democrats. Let's go ahead and put this chart up on the screen. So Nate Cohn did this analysis, and he found that the upshot of all of this gerrymandering, when you take into account Democratic attempts to retaliate in places like California, is that it could take Democrats winning the popular vote by as much as five points or six points in order to take back the House. Five-point popular vote wins, those are the stuff of modern-day waves.

36:05We're talking the Obama wave in 2008, the Tea Party wave in 2010. This slanted playing field, it doesn't make a House majority impossible for Democrats, but it does make it very, very difficult. And that is, of course, before you consider all the other efforts that I'm tracking here today to shape who can vote and how. Now, the last category of election rigging activities is both the most ominous and the most vague. And that is the threats which are emanating from this White House. Under this category, I place Trump's consistent rhetoric about stolen elections, his use and abuse of the military, and his promise to send election monitors into California and into New Jersey.

36:42Just yesterday, Trump posted this on True Social. He said, what's worse, the NBA players cheating at cards and probably much else or the Democrats cheating on elections? The 2020 presidential election being rigged and stolen is a far bigger scandal. Look what happened to our country when a crooked moron became our president. We now know everything. I hope the DOJ pursues this with as much gusto as befitting the biggest scandal in American history. If not, it will happen again, including the upcoming midterms. No mail-in or early voting. yes to voter ID. Watch how totally dishonest the California prop vote is.

37:20Millions of ballots being shipped. Get smart Republicans before it is too late. So consistent with this baseless claim that California is rigging the ballot initiative to determine whether they can redistrict, Trump has announced he is sending DOJ election monitors into both California and New Jersey as a blatant intimidation tactic. And of course, as you know, he has sent the National Guard into multiple blue cities and is flirting with invoking the Insurrection Act. And Secretary of War Pete Hegseth won't deny the development of a rapid response military force that could be deployed in all 50 states before the midterms.

37:56Secretary Hegseth, sir, a memo circulating on social media details the establishment of a National Guard response force that's going to be trained in crowd control and civil unrest and deployed in all 50 states by April of 2026. Can you verify the authenticity of that memo and do you have any more information on the operations? I'm not going to answer particulars on something that may be in the planning process, but we definitely do have multiple layers of National Guard response forces, whether it's in each state, whether it's regionally, whether it's Title 10 active duty, whether it's Washington, D.C.

38:34We've got a lot of different ways that constitutionally and legally we can employ Title 10 and Title 32 forces, and we will do so when necessary. So again, just so we're clear, we're talking here about a 50-state rapid response force that just happens to be in place in time for the midterms. Does all of this sound crazy? I don't know, guys. Using national emergencies to do wild stuff is kind of just how this administration operates. That's their whole shit. Not to mention Trump is the guy who literally already tried to steal an election, and they already hired a lady who floated using a national emergency to control elections.

39:04By the way, they've also got a pretty powerful motive. The more crimes they commit, the more backlash they stoke, the more existential it is for them to hold onto power and never let go. You don't think Stephen Miller knows Democrats want him to spend the rest of his life rotting in prison? The Trump administration are engaged in an all-out war against their political adversaries in an attempt to seize long-term control. That's what Bannon means when he says seize the institutions and create a permanent, defendable MAGA majority. and what's to stop them at this point? The Supreme Court, which has handed them 23 on a 28 decisions on the shadow docket.

39:39The media, which is like being all bought up by the Zionist pro-Trump Ellisons or threatened with lawsuits to comply. The Republican House majority. Come on, don't make me laugh. How about the Democratic House minority? That'll make me cry. It is ultimately on us. We need to understand what's happening. We need to track it. We need to educate our fellow citizens who may or may not share our political beliefs. but I hope are at least somewhat interested in continuing the very imperfect experiment that we have here with democracy. Because whatever the public is willing to accept, that is exactly what we are going to get.

40:13And so, Sagar, lengthy and a little tedious. Thank you for bearing with me, but I wanted to put all together. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated, and Black America was at a breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr.

40:52and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Bowen Yang and I'm Matt Rogers during this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games we've been joined by some of our friends Hi Bowen, hi Matt Hey Elmo Hey Matt, hey Bowen Hi Cookie Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears Listen to Two Guys, Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

42:21And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody. There were years right where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can, to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of a** to come around here and my wife. boom, boom, this is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

43:01Joining us now is Pablo Torre. He is a journalist. He is the host of Pablo Torre Finds Out. He is taking the sports world by storm. And for our purposes, he is an expert and one of the few actually doing some deep dives in the sports world. So Pablo, thank you so much for joining us. A lot of respect. Of course, of course. Thanks for having me. I have too much to say probably about all the things you're interested in, but happy to try. Well, we want to hear all of that. I have personally just watched with amazement at the coverage of this NBA gambling scandal. Let's go ahead and put this up here on the screen, some of your own reporting that we can share with our audience.

43:35I'm sure they've heard a little bit here about the initial indictments in the NBA, Chauncey, and the poker games. A number of former pro athletes played at private poker games organized by those indicted by the DOJ in Operation Royal Flush. One of them was Kevin Garnett in 2019. There are a number of other names who you list. Pablo, why don't you break some of that down and also just tell us how existential this is to the NBA? Yeah, so big picture first, and I'll tell you about some of the names that I've been reporting that haven't been in the indictment for reasons that I think make sense and are also a bit chin-scratching.

44:10The story here to me is that the NBA set up an incentive structure. One of the first things that Adam Silver did as commissioner of the league, and he was hailed, almost welcomed as a savior of the sport, in part because he did two things. Number one, he orchestrated the transfer of power from Donald Sterling, avowed racist, banned for life, to Steve Ballmer, another character I've been investigating in a separate story, which I have too much to say about with Aspiration and the Clippers and the salary capture convention that I've been reporting on. But the other thing Adam Silver did that fall was write an op-ed in the New York Times in which he said gambling should be legalized and regulated.

44:45He was the first commissioner to come out and say that. This was one of his first acts in terms of taking over the sport. And so that incentive structure, which we've seen happen, and you guys have covered it as well as anybody, infiltrating the entirety of sports and sports media has created these incentives in which there is a menu of almost micro bets which now carry legal markets. for prop bets like unders on Terry Rozier, meaning you can bet on the underperformance of an obscure player like Jontae Porter, who has since been banned for life, by the way. And so all of this is fruit from that tree.

45:19All of it is fruit from the Adam Silver op-ed to Jontae Porter group chat and now banned for life scandal into what happens when inside information that could be seemingly microscopic in its scope, will this player play in this game? Will this guy leave this game because he is in coordination with you, perhaps, according to the indictment, trying to also profit off of those incentives? All of this comes together in a way that feels, if not existential, I think the story of the era of money in sports that we live in. And so Kevin Garnett, Ty Lue, the head coach of the Clippers, also a character who's been spotted at these games.

46:03One game in particular, April 2019, where Chauncey Billups was. Antonio Gates, former pro football player, Hall of Fame player. I'm not alleging that those guys were of the Chauncey Billups level in terms of what they knew or did not know, but they were used as whales, face cards, the government calls them, to draw in bettors in the poker world, which happens to be connected deeply with, of course, the world of sports betting. Right. And let's talk a little bit more about the specifics here, because some of the specifics are wild. You say maybe those guys aren't the level of understanding, potentially alleged, of Chauncey Billups, who appears to have had knowledge that the games were rigged.

46:43These games were being set up by some of the sort of like classic New York mafia families. So give us some of the details about what was going on with these games and the way that they had them rigged so that they were, you know, raking in$7 million in the context of these rigged poker games. Yeah, so the connective tissue between these two indictments, and there are terrible puns all over this story, by the way, guys. So it's Operation Royal Flush for the poker stuff. It's Operation Nothing But Bet for the sports betting stuff. But the reason I went back to the Jonte Porter scandal is because the characters who overlap, some of those names you know, and I reported on this in July, because they were on that group chat with Jonte Porter.

47:24These are all poker guys, poker-associated guys, who turn out in one case to be also mob-associated. And so in these poker games, Crystal, we're talking about x-ray machines that are hiding under the tables. We're talking about sunglasses that can read marked cards. We're talking about rigged deck shuffling machines. That is the allegation in particular to Chauncey Billups in that April 2019 game in Las Vegas. We're talking about technology in which people who were conspiring to rig poker games using NBA players as co-conspirators as whales to draw in the competition were also, according to these two indictments, in league with Chauncey Billups, identified as co-conspirator number eight in the sports betting indictment, to also get information around which players on his team that he is the current head coach for the Portland Trailblazers would be playing in a game.

48:18And so organized crime is an ancient story when it comes to secret poker games. You've seen a zillion movies along those lines. What's different is that there is now a legal sports betting market in which those same characters, maybe because according to the indictment and according to my reporting, you have athletes who've always loved gambling and card games, also an ancient non-surprise, might be in debt and or in cooperation with some of the unsavory characters that, you know, Cash Patel referred to as La Cosa Nostra, which is the literal Italian mob. And isn't that what happened with Jontae Porter, that he was in debt to these guys and that's part of how this all goes down?

49:02Yeah, the reporting that I've been doing suggests that Jontae Porter got into debt with a man named Amar Awade, who is identified in these indictments as a guy named Flapper Poker or Flappy, aka a mob associate. And the question of, and again, this is ancient, what happens when you get in debt to someone like that? They don't just want the repayment of the money. They say, I have another way that you can help us out. And Jonte Porter, a truly obscure backup that no one would have known otherwise, ended up, according to exhaustive group chat records, he ended up taking himself out of games, letting them know ahead of time, Sagar, and that ended up being this thing that blew up the NBA last year.

49:43Yes. Pablo, what I want to focus on is to zoom out on the system because, and let's put this up here on the screen from Politico, Adam Silver is now facing calls to come before Congress. By the way, he should, because one of the things that you and I talked about previously, Pablo, is that the NBA cleared Terry Regier of all wrongdoing. They did an internal investigation. They allowed him to play and they said, hey, we did an investigation. He did nothing wrong. When the Department of Justice now comes out and says, actually, that's completely false. How can we ever have any faith in the word of the NBA, of the NFL, of these private sports leagues, which are directly in league with the betting companies?

50:21What does this tell us about Adam Silver's credibility at this point? The conflict of interest here seems very obvious. And for anybody who's not a sports fan, keep that lens of what should a normal business do here if they're faced with any scandal. In this case, in sports, in the NBA, it turns out you investigate yourself and you therefore have the ability to turn the dial on how big of a public scandal is this. And of course, the NBA has seen under Adam Silver. I mean, look, they have taken the money on the table at the expense of what I would call various risks to its brand. And I'll just keep it at that level because I want to speak the language of what these corporations and sports and commissioners speak.

51:03They want to minimize the scandal and damage to their brand. The bet that Adam Silver has made is that by getting into business with legalized gambling, in fact, advocating for it, he could make the cost benefit analysis work such that the benefits, the money on the table are worth that roll of the dice, so to speak. And so when it comes to what did they know and when did they know it, the NBA, I talked to Terry Rozier's lawyer who told us they cleared us. The NBA cleared Terry Rozier. It's why he was able to play and get traded to the Miami Heat, by the way, in a transaction that did result in an eight-figure salary, payout from the Miami Heat, and a first-round pick, which is, for those not in sports, a big deal.

51:45And then the question is, so why didn't you, the NBA, the heater complaining, why didn't you tell us what you were looking into? Why didn't you keep the investigation going if, in fact, the federal government was going to continue it? And according to my sources, never cleared Rozier, as is obvious based on the indictments. And so you have, in this case uniquely, I would say, a body with subpoena power in the government that has the ability to, by virtue of their interest in the story, hold the NBA to account when it comes to what did they want to know and when did they know it. In most cases in sports, Sagar, as you know, there isn't that level of check.

52:26There are journalists, right? So that's what ostensibly I am trying to do. But in the public perception, when you have federal indictments, it puts with a real strong underline what is actually the conflict of interest at play. Yeah. And so just for people who, you know, maybe don't know the incidence of the case, what Terry Rozier is accused of is basically like faking a foot injury in the middle of a game coming out early and then, you know, people who bet that he would underperform his normal statistics. To the tune of, I think, hundreds of thousands of dollars were able to cash in because he planned to go out early and planned to sort of, like, not throw the game, but throw his own statistics, which raises the question, you know, how much of the problem here is with these prop bets, right, with the ability to bet on these very specific outcomes?

53:12Because then a player doesn't have to throw a whole game. They just have to underperform a little bit or just have to do, you know, know, something that, you know, like whatever it is that you're able to bet on. How much of the problem is just those prop bets? And also, like, what's your sense of how widespread this does? Are we talking a few bad apples or is this just like, you know, during the Barry Bonds era of baseball where it's just like, oh, yeah, everybody's juicing. That's just how the game is at this point. Yeah, that's why I framed it in terms of incentives, because what is happening is that the legal betting market and the scandals that crop up have all been around prop bets hitting on unders.

53:51So just for people who don't know how it used to be, if you ever watched a mob movie, right, like back in the day, you would need to fix a game by fixing the outcome of the game, meaning you need five players on one team to sort of coordinate in some fashion such that you actually impacted who won or lost. That's what typically bookies, the guy on your corner in your neighborhood in a dark alley. That's what they would allow you to bet on in this era, because there's this exhaustive, almost like cheesecake factory length menu of like, wait a minute, I can bet on pretty much anything. There are a zillion pages here for every player.

54:24You can bet on what color dildo gets thrown on the floor at a WNBA game. I've been sounding the alarm on this forever, Pablo. And you know, one of the things that kind of gets to me is you just talked about journalism. This is a main thing I really wanted to talk to you about. You spent your life at Sports Illustrated and at ESPN, now you're independent. You are more famous than ever before. I see your name dropped on every major sports podcast in the country, Pat McAfee, everybody else. But there seems to always be a hesitance. And it seems to me, you can tell me your observation, that they are desperate to preserve their relationship to the league, to the NBA.

55:00They're afraid of platforming or emphasizing what you're saying, even though you're one of the few doing actually revelatory journalism in sports. So I'm curious if you could talk about that dynamic, like how difficult it is for an ESPN or people connected fundamentally to a private organization that has no obligation to give you anything to some of the work that you're putting out there and why you found so much success in a short period of time. Yeah, again, I point to incentives, right? So I worked at ESPN. I was familiar in that era with a company in which There was literal billion-dollar business dealing with the leagues directly, but at the same time, an attempt to fund a newsroom that had some sort of firewall in between, right?

55:42Any media organization of a certain scale is familiar with that dynamic. What is so different now is that the pretense of needing to support journalism, and again, I'll use brand equity as the motive for any company who wants to consider this, that branding priority, the whole idea of we need to plausibly be a newsroom, an actual news gathering operation that has sharply declined as the sources of money have shifted in this case to the legalized gambling operators. And so what I found is that I didn't set out to do investigative adversarial journalism that would take me to the stories that are most directly in conflict with commissioners of the sports that I otherwise cover and love and enjoy as a fan.

56:26I did not set out to be the turd in some commissioner's punch bowl, frankly. But the race that I am apparently competing in is almost devoid of other competitors. And so what's happened is that I'm the guy who's just willing to do it. And I am obsessive about like wanting to get it right. I come again from a fact checking background and a journalistic background. And we request comment and everybody gets a chance to weigh in. We provide all of those opportunities as a quote unquote mainstream news organization would. But the fact is I'm willing to get on bad terms when it comes to the access that otherwise gets granted and the partnerships that are in play.

57:05If you're a sports talking head and your goal in life is to be on a set in which you talk about any of these sports, you should be aware that the people who ultimately have to green light your inclusion at that table sit in the league office, which is to say they don't want people who are going to actually jeopardize their business involved in their business. And likewise, if you're covering, for instance, Los Angeles Clippers and your day-to-day livelihood is access to games, you're signing up for a way harder life if you decide to stick a toe into the stuff that I'm doing. And so I'm not naive and I don't blame other journalists, reporters, whatever the term is you want to use to describe the different jobs that we do, I get the incentives, again, at play.

57:51I just think we're living in this desert, especially in sports media, but certainly broadly, you can speak to every facet of journalism across America now. But there's a desert when it comes to the quote unquote toy department, in which huge stories that reflect our national priorities and our national conflicts of interest are coming home to roost and there are not enough people covering it. Yeah. Well, I mean, I have to think that the, you know, the corporate ad dollars are an important part of that story too. I mean, even us being outside of the sports media sphere, you know, many of our competitors take tons of money from these gambling properties.

58:27They just have an endless amount of money, it seems like, to throw at, you know, different personalities. And so I would think that if you're going directly, if you were taking that money and you see something untoward, you're maybe going to, you know, keep it to yourself rather than risk that cash into your operation. Yeah, look, I am somebody who believes, again, I worked at ESPN. I worked at Sports Illustrated. I'm familiar with all the media companies in the world who have to make some level of internal firewall between business and news. I get that ancient attempt to do that. All I would say is if you are taking money from any of the parties that you are also covering, you do at some point need to show through journalism that holds those parties to account that the firewall is plausible.

59:15And I think what's increasingly obvious is the implausibility of that firewall. And maybe it's because, again, the public demand for this stuff has been characterized in these boardrooms as so low, like journalism, that's not going to make you money. And therefore, let's just go all in on the business of favoring our partners. But I think what you guys have experienced that what I've experienced as an independent journalist, as an independent newsroom, is that there is such a demand for people who actually want to know the truth. People who actually want to know what am I not being told and why am I not being told it about these institutions that I love, that I'm giving my money to.

59:55And so the pendulum has just swung in such a way that I think there's actually now a business case, obviously, to get into a real journalistic operation. I just think that there are not enough places that are actively considering it along a profit motive as opposed to just a obligation morally or otherwise. You're totally right. And I see it everywhere. I mean, you know, the most successful sports journalists are basically just people who tweet press releases from the NFL and from their agent, from the players' agents. If a guy is really injured, you're going to be the last to know, right? And they're going to be the last to tell you.

1:00:32You find things that, I mean, I found out this morning, Carson Wentz has been injured like weeks ago and is going under certain, nobody said anything about that. And there's no incentive for the people who cover it to actually tell everybody the truth. So my last thing I do want to let you expound on is that salary cap story, in my opinion. Massive, massive scandal with IRS implications, league implications, player implications. Same thing, touched on, very little acknowledged by much of the sports media. I do want to let you get some of the details out there because I want our audience to know how crazy and corrupt this is.

1:01:04Yeah. So this is a story that is also being investigated, scare quotes around that, I suppose, by the NBA and by Wachtell, the law firm that they hired as their outside counsel to look into this. And so it's funny as I've been covering two stories, the betting scandal and the Aspiration Clippers Kawhi Leonard capture convention scandal that the NBA has been tracking in parallel as well, basically listening to the pod, trying to figure out like, what is the one guy here to make our life messy going to report next? And I say that not merely because I'm proud of the work, but just because I have an insight into the question of investigation.

1:01:34And in this story, it is the richest owner in American sports, Steve Ballmer, one of the 10 richest people in the world who we report got into business with a guy who ended up defrauding him, which is unfortunate because that same guy, Joe Sandberg, the co-founder of a climate change company called Aspiration, he had trusted, Steve Ballmer had trusted, according to our reporting, to help him deceive the NBA. We're talking about$50 million into Aspiration from Steve Ballmer. We're talking about$48 million guaranteed from Aspiration to Kawhi Leonard in what amounts to the most unprecedented in scope and in mess at this point, cap circumvention scandal in American sports history.

1:02:17And the reason this matters is because from a pure big picture perspective, let's say you don't care about sports, just understand sports ownership in America has never belonged more clearly to the richer and richer individuals that you might otherwise see all across Silicon Valley. And now, of course, into the Middle East and private equity, Sports teams go up and up and up. The media economy that we spoke about is fragmented. Sports teams continue to appreciate in value. It's all green arrows. The richest people in the world want to buy them. And when they want to buy them, it turns out, according to my reporting, they get frustrated that there are actually some caps on their spending.

1:02:57So the things that the richest people in the world want more than anything else at this phasing their lives often, an NBA title or a star player for their team, they just can't buy. There are rules around fair play they need to abide by. And so that is the story of Steve Ballmer trying to get money to Kawhi Leonard. And the question around these 3000 plus pages of documents that I acquired and the now nine anonymous sources who worked at Aspiration, who have testified to me that this was for caps or convention. It speaks to what the NBA once again is willing to find in an investigation in which the check is not, for now, the federal government when it comes to Steve Ballmer, but a dude with a podcast.

1:03:41And that's sort of the other thing that I'm working on too. Well, you know, keep it up, man. Yeah. Yeah, if you're out there, if you're listening, you have something to leak, send it to Pop-Lock. I would love to see you. I'd appreciate it. My podcast would, in fact, appreciate that. Thank you, guys. I appreciate you too. Thanks for coming on, man. Thanks, Paolo. Great to meet you. Anytime. Anytime.

1:04:27including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bowen. Hi, Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt. Hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.

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