1118: Is Trump Afraid of Bad Bunny? (feat. Pablo Torre)

25:25MMA is such a big part of the story that I think has gotten underrated. in MMA, by the way, you get noted ESPN commentator and the Dean of MMA commentary and analysis, Joe Rogan. Yep. That's where he is. Right. So, okay. Already you're like beginning to piece together what's happening here. The man is fear such as it exists, which is to say a bunch of dudes who are typically apolitical, if not anti-political, which is to say all of these comedians who you'll also see like ringside, who have podcasts, who have these demographics that are heavily male, who basically are anti-authority, who also, frankly, just want to say words that they used to be able to say in high school.

26:09Right. And I went to an all boys Catholic school. I remember exactly what that felt like, how edgy it felt. They just want to say those things. That's the main political platform. I want to watch mixed martial arts and bro out and laugh at things that I'm not supposed to laugh at. and Trump's friendship with Dana White, who spoke at not one RNC and not two RNCs, but at least three, while also claiming to be not political, that's how he is mentally, cognitively threading the needle of like, no, no, no, this is a culture thing. This is like a sports thing. But of course, for Trump, whether he intended it this way or not, it is the ultimate in political image laundering because he's just one of the guys.

26:52He's one of the guys at the fight that you want to hang out with. And Dana White, in terms of what his actual compass is as a businessman, as a human, is abhorrent. And I don't say that because I'm against the UFC or MMA. I'm here for the consensual concussions. I covered boxing, love boxing. I'm here for the violence of football and all that stuff. I'm not fainting onto a couch somewhere because of it. I'm just saying that this is a guy who says that he is a First Amendment absolutist, much like a lot of the names that I've alluded to in this very sort of like answer that I'm giving you. And at the same time, he is somebody who will ardently, ardently regulate the speech of people who dare to speak out against him and also this administration.

27:40It's that perfect hypocrisy of, you know, the Constitution for me, but not for thee. It's the total verifiable dishonesty of a guy who wants to cosplay as I'm here for free speech unless it threatens my business, which is exactly what the UFC has been doing. Yeah. And I just don't think from a political perspective, you can overstate the value of being a candidate like that, walking into an arena, getting universal cheers from the people in the room and the people at home are hearing you get fluffed for 45 seconds by the commentators because you're so great and you're just like them and you just love the fighting.

28:18Like, I just look, I'm very skeptical that Donald Trump goes home at night and watches UFC matches. I think he probably has Fox News on and just watches cable most of the time. But like, they're happy to sell that fiction because it's a symbiotic business relationship. Yeah, I mean, look, you alluded to the FIFA stuff before. This is all the same thing. This is the equivalent of Dana White constructing for him that golden spinning like Pimp My Ride trophy that Gianni Infantino did. And he let him keep it at the White House. There is almost like an Egyptian pharaoh dynamic. It's like here's your gold.

28:54Here's your frankincense. Here is your myrrh. Here are the things you can be buried with. And it's UFC walkouts and gold trophies. And that's why he does it. But the reason they do it is because it's good for business and it's bad, unfortunately, for the rest of us. Yeah. And I think honestly, the biggest business of them all is FIFA and the World Cup. I mean, that will be watched by multi billions of people around the world. One quick thing on FIFA before we get to gambling, though, I wanted to play this because it drove me crazy. So last year, FIFA, they did their World Cup draw ceremony at the Kennedy Center in D.C.

29:32That's when everybody sort of figured out who they're going to be playing when. Trump attended and he said this at that ceremony. When you look at what has happened to football in the United States, again, soccer in the United States, we seem to never call it that because we have a little bit of a conflict with another thing that's called football. But when you think about it, shouldn't it really be called? I mean, this is football. There's no question about it. We have to come up with another name for the NFL. Yeah. It really doesn't make sense when you think about it. It is really football. Pablo, how is that not career ending?

30:06Imagine if Barack Obama said that. Six years of Fox News coverage, a decade. It really is. It really is. Yeah, Barack would have needed to wear like a Matthew Lesko question mark suit to get that level of just like, Like what I mean, the the I've long said that the most un-American position that you can have is to go against the NFL in 2026. It reveals you ostensibly to be disconnected from the monoculture as a politician and what normal everyday Americans like the most statistically. Right. Trump, in the clip you just played, is this enduring reminder that his performance of what it means to be a dude is unique.

30:54No one else can do that. I dare say that whatever he has in his credibility of like, you know, maybe and maybe here's a theory. Maybe it's just the relentless signaling of abject racism. There's just no doubt that he's really still on the side of like, you know, the real America. But my God, like and he's also like doing a bad Seinfeld unintentionally. Yeah. I think he genuinely had that thought and was like, this is a good take. And it's what's the deal with football? That was the take. You park on a driveway, you drive one. It's just so stupid. Yeah. All right. We're going to take a quick break, but I have an exciting tour announcement.

31:37Love It or Leave It is coming to Washington, D.C. on April 23rd at the Lincoln Theater. We know that you folks in D.C. have been through a lot. You got Trump goons taking over your city. You got snow everywhere that's turning into concrete, apparently. You deserve a night of amazing world-class comedy. And I hope you get that. But in the meantime, go see John Lovett. I'm just kidding. I'm reading this. I didn't write this copy. Tickets are on sale now. Grab them at crooked.com slash events.

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35:05All right, let's talk about gambling. So sports gambling has been around for a long time, right? But until recently, there was friction in the process. Back in the day, you had to have a bookie. You maybe had to drop off and pick up actual cash or you had to be at a casino or a town like somewhere in Vegas or something like where gambling was legal. Then in 2018, the Supreme Court passes. There's a ruling that changes everything. And suddenly a bunch of states are just bum rushing to legalize gambling. And so now in a lot of places, placing a bet is as easy as sending a text. You can instantly place bets on your phone.

35:41You can live bet. You don't have to bet on the outcome of a game. You can bet on like fractional events within the game. I want to get to the event contracts piece of this in a second. But can you help listeners sort of understand the impact of that explosion of sports betting and the kind of like head spinning way that it's been embraced by leagues that once banned it essentially? The first thing, one of the first things that NBA commissioner Adam Silver did when he took over in 2014 as the head of this sport was write a, it was a solo byline in the New York Times, an op-ed that said we should legalize sports gambling.

36:14And it was radical then. And now, in retrospect, it looks like this turning point. And I go back to that because in 2014, up until that point, the cardinal mortal existential sin that you could do in sports was gambling. Pete Rose has been relegated until Trump posthumously pardons him, which is not a joke and an actual thing he has threatened to do. He has been banished to baseball hell. He cannot be in the Hall of Fame. The Black Sox scandal, all of this stuff. It's just obviously a way to compromise the integrity of a product and a cultural heirloom that relies upon us trusting that what we're watching has competitive integrity, that it is not fixed or manipulated.

36:57But when that op-ed was written, and now to fast forward to what you just described, which is the opening of the official floodgates, it went from, I'm going to get my guy, my bookie, to take my bet to, here is a Cheesecake Factory thick menu of items. Right. So it used to be like, you know, who's going to win or lose, the point spread, the outcome of games. And now the institution of the prop bet means that you can bet on things as obscure as unders, which is to say, will obscure Toronto Raptor Jonte Porter hit the under, underperform on the predicted total of rebounds in a given game? Which is a thing that is so specific as a micro bet that it only would be taken by people who are fixing the game and manipulating it in order to profit off of it.

37:49Because why would anyone have interest in it? And of course, that is actually what happened. And that got Jonte Porter banned for life from the NBA and started this whole federal investigation into it. So it's just a radical expansion of what is bettable and therefore a radical expansion of potential conflicts of interest in which players now have the ability or their specific proxies have the ability to profit off of things that don't even require you, Tommy, to throw the game. Just suck for a period of time. It's a remarkable and dangerous thing to institute. Yeah, I mean, you just have to fake an injury, right?

38:28And pull yourself out of a game before you hit eight points or whatever the over was. Yeah, I think what you're just just to double stamp this. It's such an important point, because look, I think most people like have no problem with betting on the outcome of the Super Bowl, right? Like, that's fun. Sure. Do it. I have no problem. I've bet on props. I bet on like the over under on the national anthem. But to your point, like the Cheesecake Factory approach of the number of things you can bet on, and then you can parlay them together to create higher and higher. higher odds. And we are just not the numeracy in the United States is not so great.

39:01And people don't realize that they are just going to get fleeced over and over and over again. And at the same time, like all the addictive kind of like data science used to make us all on our phones all of the time is being applied to these gambling sites. And so it just it feels like we are watching a generation, especially of young men, get addicted to these gambling apps. At the same time, they are like going deeper into debt and having mental health crises. And it's like a massive problem that's sort of, I think, under discussed. Yeah. And I want the science. I want the research. I think about this kind of like how I thought about the concussion crisis in the NFL in a weird way, where it was like, look, I am tempted now to stop watching football.

39:42But if you do the science diligently enough, such that the participants have disclosure and they're told, here are the risks, here are the harms. I think about how in Europe, if you buy cigarettes, they put on the box, like here are the faces of death, right? Do you want this? If you still want to sign up for consensual possible addiction, cool. Go with God, let's federally regulate it and we can make that work. But I think what's happening is that it happened so quickly. The legalization happened so quickly with this internet era, cell phone, casino in your pocket dynamic, that people are still just catching up to what's actually scientifically on the table.

40:26And so I am not saying we should ban federally gambling. I am saying that we need to be very open and transparent about here's what's happening very often to men in America. And we should tell them that this is what they're risking if this is what the science is suggesting. Yeah. Yeah. There needs more disclosure of the harms. And then the more, even more recent iteration of gambling involves something called event contracts. So there are these companies, the Kelsey and Polymarket. And basically, these services now allow you to bet on outcomes, even stuff like will a Venezuelan dictator be deposed by the end of the month, that is the thing that actually happened, someone made a lot of money, that person will probably be investigated, but I guess we'll find out.

41:08So these companies, they're even more lightly regulated by the government, or at least by this administration. And they have hired folks like Donald Trump Jr. to be their advisors. You did an amazing episode on all of this with a guy named James Sirwicki that I highly recommend if folks want to go deeper. But can you just give us like the 101 on what the hell an event contract is and how this new form of gambling has exploded, but is powered again by sports? How dare you call it gambling? These are events contracts. But this is actually the legal question, right? So the CFTC, which ostensibly used to regulate commodity trading, They have now decided that actually under this administration, actually, we have oversight over these event contracts.

41:51And so an event contract in a prediction market like Kalashie, like Polymarket is you can bet, you can, excuse me, buy an event contract, which is basically a yes or no question. Will Caroline Levitt finish her press briefing in under 65 minutes? That was a real event contract. There is also now evidence that you can watch of Caroline Levitt stopping short, like seconds short of 65 minutes exactly. Really weird. And that paid out, right? And so the Donald Trump Jr. part of it is really instructive because Donald Trump Jr. is on the board of both Calci and Polly Market, which are these billion-dollar prediction markets.

42:33Seems like a conflict, but okay. Just how dare you? This is just a guy who loves forecasting in this sort of rigorous data-driven way. But it's interesting because realistically, the prediction market, as Jim Surawicki, Wisdom of Crowds, that was his book in 04, told me, it is an interesting and useful way to predict some things. The election in 2024, prediction markets were all over that. There is value to that as an instrument of forecasting reality. The Donald Trump Jr. thing, though, reminds us that there are networks of people with access to information. And now take the John T. Porter example from before, a hyper specific micro bet that no one would have interest in except for people with inside information.

43:25Now there is not a Cheesecake Factory thick menu. There is an infinite list of bet, truly infinite list of bets. You bet on anything. And in that way, the question that not enough people are asking is, who knows more about this than me? And do they stand to profit if they have a person on the inside? And so that's why Carolyn Levitt is not merely a funny coincidence, but like a deeply disturbing hypothetical example, if she in fact did share this information ahead of time. And it's also something that is, I would say, destructive to the ability that we have as American citizens to trust in anything that we are witnessing.

44:12Right. So what happened to sports? We can't trust whether this has integrity. Is this person genuinely incompetent or are they fixing a game? This is now true of anything happening in our administration. And the only reason you should feel good about it, I guess, is if you think this administration is a type of administration to be so, so buttoned up on not compromising principle in exchange for money. In that case, then maybe you trust their ability to take care of us in that way. What I think is realistically happening is that they're doing the opposite. And the people who are losing money are the retail investors.

44:49And that is something that we haven't even begun to measure what they are winning and what the rest of us are losing. Yeah, I mean, with these event contracts, like you're not betting against the house. There is another individual on the other side of that event contract. So if the person you're betting against is in the special forces and know they're about to take out Maduro, they have insider information and they're about to clean your clock. It is remarkable, Pablo. I mean, like I was thinking about back to my time in government recently and the number of kind of like sensitive meetings you end up in with like market sensitive information about, you know, the financial crisis or the bank bailout.

45:24And then we see this email from a guy named Peter Mendelsohn, who is then a top aide to Tony Blair, where he is giving readouts of the Eurozone debt crisis response to Jeffrey Epstein before they are public. Right. And you're like, holy shit. When I was in government, the idea of talking about something like that is just unheard of because I'm just like, it's unethical. It's wrong. I'll go to jail. But this guy's just forwarding emails. But now the point you're making is that now that you can just bet on anything with insider information, it creates this whole new avenue of profit making and risk.

45:56And just for folks to know, the CFTC is just far less onerous of a regulator than the SEC or bank regulators. There's more discretion in how you comply. It's smaller. There's fewer staffer than the SEC. There's fewer enforcement actions generally. It's why the crypto people love the CFTC. So it's just sort of like this is where they all want this to be housed, all the industry folks, because they think it'll be the wild, wild west. And at the same time, like social media has decided that in the political space, prediction markets are better than forecasting elections and polling. And like there are some examples, I think, at the presidential level that you mentioned where prediction markets have been on to things.

46:37But there's also instances like, you know, Senate races or lower level elections where you can kind of juice those markets with one or two big bets and kind of change the narrative around an election in a way that I think we just haven't really explored yet. No. And so two things, the CFTC, I was just talking to somebody who used to work there today because I've been trying to understand this, continue to understand this more. And it's very disturbing how so many of the people, not just responsible for enforcement at the CFTC, but we're like the true believers over there in terms of like, let's regulate things civilly and let's make sure that we can deter market manipulation and all that stuff, even if it doesn't rise to the level of criminality.

47:18It seems very clear to a lot of former CFTC employees that this is all happening. And I was just listening to the head of the CFTC now under this administration be so outwardly pro-crypto, pro-prediction market stuff that it seems to be of a piece with the business dealings that we've been describing now this whole episode. So the second thing that which you're just referring to is a prediction market because we are not numerate as humans, right? None of us. We are also people who like to use these heuristics to guide our understanding of what seems normal. And so a prediction market, to your point, an election is a really good example of this.

48:02Like if you spend a lot of money to move a prediction market for any given race, there is now an expectation that has changed. If this applies now, and which, by the way, can be better and more value added than just buying political ads, right? That's why you might do it is to change the narrative of like he's still in it, right? It's not over yet. But the other thing that happens is when everything is bettable like this, you can change the expectations for every governmental action, including foreign invasions, including whether we're going to prosecute an ICE officer. It's just like we are the whole thing of like our perpetual numbness to horror.

48:46Humans are so good at normalizing insane conditions. The pandemic taught us that. Just we all know it. This is that but on for loco. It's just like we are turning to these fixable, manipulatable markets to tell us whether we should expect something. And people with money get to decide in an unregulated way. That is a fucking nightmare. Yep. and a lot of innocent people are going to be the ones who get fleeced.

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50:45Finally, I'm jumping around a little bit here, but yeah, the listeners of this show are probably well aware of how Republicans, you know, led by Trump, have just demagogued the issue of trans athletes in sports. The leading spokesperson for that effort has been a woman named Riley Gaines. She was a swimmer at the University of Kentucky. And then in 2022, she tied for fifth place against another transgender swimmer named Leah Thomas. And so ever since Riley Gaines has made advocating against trans athletes her life's work. And you did a bunch of reporting on Riley Gaines that I think provides really important context that you don't hear very often because it shows kind of the evolution of her rhetoric and also how these attacks that she is making have become about much, much more than sports fairness and have gone to a really cruel, dishonest, gross place.

51:36So can you just kind of walk us through what your episode on this was about? Yeah, so the trans athlete issue has been one of the biggest political winners for this administration. And it is rooted, again, in a lack of let alone numeracy, but certainly honesty and reality. And I say that because in general, to zoom out quickly for a second, there are so few trans athletes that exist. So the president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker, was asked in Congress how many of them are there, and he said there are less than 10. OK, so the odds of you having a near fatal run in with ICE is greater than your daughter competing in a meaningfully concerning way with a trans person.

52:22But this issue was, of course, ran on. It was advertised and it worked. But I've been hearing the term all over the place that this is an 80-20 issue. We win this 80 % of the time. The libs lose it. And I would say that that is not inaccurate because no one really knows how to talk about this stuff because there is like this competitive equity concern. And there is a scientific argument there, which we should have. Again, we should have a scientific argument. Are there advantages by going through male puberty? Yes. Can they be regulated through hormone suppression? Yes. Yes, but. And in that yes, but there is a useful debate about rules.

53:02The Riley Gaines story is not a debate about rules. She would like you to think it is. The Republicans, the Trump administration, which has her front and center dressed in all white as they're banning trans athletes by the president's pen, would love you to think that this is about protecting women and girls. It isn't. This is a story, if you go through the evolution of Riley Gaines, the character of somebody who had to tie for fifth place with a trans female swimmer, Leah Thomas, who is really good at swimming. And the issue is that Riley Gaines objections went from I have problems with the rules, but I don't blame Leah to a series of interviews on Fox News with the Daily Wire with Clay Travis in which she was and you can hear this happen on tape.

53:56I'm not just saying this as a matter of editorial interpretation. You can hear her be prodded into taking a harder line on how mad she should be. And so it's ramping up. It's ramping up. And what she ends up doing is alleging that Leah Thomas, this swimmer she competed against, is actually a predator who is committing a version of sexual assault. This is a criminal concern is what Riley Gaines is arguing. And parallel to the rhetoric being radicalized are, according to the reporting we did with Mother Jones, Madison Pauly, an excellent reporter who helped us tell the story with documents, are payments coming in from a range of conservative activists that are creating the Riley Gaines Leadership Center.

54:48And they're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for her to be front and center on this winning political issue because it's working. And it's getting so divorced from where it started and from what the evidence has ever suggested that Riley Gaines is arguing with Simone Biles, who was, I mean, and I cannot stress this enough, an actual victim of sexual violence, sexual assault by Larry Nassar, who committed the largest sexual assault scandal in American sports history. This was the doctor of the USA Women's Gymnastics Team, Michigan State. And Riley Gaines is telling on Twitter, Simone Biles, basically, how dare you talk about your issue, your trauma, but dismiss mine?

55:33And she posts parallel photos of Leah Thomas and Larry Nassar and the testimonies and stuff. It's abhorrent. And the kicker, Tommy, I'll speed it up because I'm just doing the whole episode for you now. No, no, no. It's really important context. It really is. The kicker is this entire time Riley Gaines, his teammates at the University of Kentucky are watching this happen. And we spoke to several of them on tape. In fact, in the episode, we have one particular teammate who went on tape. And the thing that Riley Gaines almost never talks about, has never spoken words with her mouth about on camera, despite all these interviews, is the fact that the person she has called in her book her best friend, the person who was the head coach of their swim team at Kentucky, this guy Lars Jurgensen, was himself somebody who sexually assaulted several of her teammates, allegedly.

56:32These are court cases. These are documented. These are alleged by those women. And so not only is it the dishonesty of the rhetoric, it's the actual substitution of real event happening over here. let's get that out of here and replace it with this trumped up fake thing while ignoring the actual victims who i was on this team with and so one of the quotes from one of her teammates is basically how can i give a shit about riley gains i'm paraphrasing here how can i give a shit about riley gains talking about trans athletes when our head coach raped one of our teammates jesus like that's how on the nose some of this stuff is and that's the story that fox news does not want you to know about.

57:20Yeah. And I think it's such important context because like a lot of your reporting, I mean, you're following the money here. You are playing receipts and the evolution of her commentary on these issues. And then you are getting at where, look, a lot of attacks on the LGBT community over decades have ended in this place, which is the not remotely subtle suggestion that all gay, lesbian or trans people are actually predators or after children or want to do harm to people in some way, right? This is like, it always ends in a place that is not about fairness on the playing field. It ends in a place that is a totally dishonest, gross attack that is alleging that a crime was committed where there is actually zero evidence.

58:02And as you just said, in fact, it seems like Riley Gaines has been ignoring the crime committed by one of her own friends. Well, and you put it in those ways And it makes me also want to clarify, there is a problem in locker rooms all across America when it comes to female athletes. And the problem is the men who are around them. It's not the trans athletes, though, that they say, oh, these biological men. It's the dudes who are coaching. Yeah. That is a concern very often. And this is real and it should be reported on. And it's very telling that that's not of a concern at all to the same people who are truly profiting off of a minority group that is so vanishingly small that no one wants to stand up for them.

58:53Yeah, well said. Final question, a dumb one, a short one. This has nothing to do with politics. It's just something I saw. The Athletic has reported that ski jumpers at the Olympics are injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid to fly farther. The World Anti-Doping Agency is investigating. Is that real? How does that work? Why would injecting your penis with something make you fly farther if you're a ski jumper? This makes no sense to me. how dare you question the wisdom of once again, men, uh, this is real. Oh, no, no, no. Like, so we did a whole episode in investigation. You, you Tommy have been traumatized by spy gate, deflate gate, all the ways in which your Patriots have obviously been exposed as rank cheaters.

59:36That should not be rooted for by anybody in America with a conscience. Uh, many are saying, uh, God damn it. The, the gate that we reported on was crotch gate because in ski jumping, which is an Olympic sport that is happening now. And we did a whole deep dive into this. Part of the physics of ski jumping is you emphasize how big your penis is for this reason. They 3D scan you in order to measure what your suit can be allowed to be, how big your suit can be. And because the edges are so small and therefore big, people who have more fabric on the suit have a performance advantage. And so it used to be back in my day, the scandal was people were so there's a literal video we obtained of like people with a sewing machine creating a bigger crotch.

1:00:28But these guys are like, what if I told you that we could make the measurements actually reflect the size of our temporarily enormous penises? And I got to say, I did not see that one coming. Pablo, this is why everyone should listen to your show. public Torrey finds out nobody has range like you. You cover the waterfront. It is. You don't have to like sports to enjoy the show. It's amazing stories that come from sports. It's deep dive investigations. It's really fun romps about my former coach, Bill Belichick, who is 73 and is 24, maybe 25 year old girlfriend now. But who's counting? But who's counting?

1:01:07Not Bill. Not Bill. That's for God damn sure. So I highly recommend the show. I highly I'm so grateful for you spending this hour with me to release on Super Bowl Sunday, this feels like the perfect way to lead into it. So thank you again. Anytime I can be your sports correspondent whenever you need, I have a feeling that there'll be more penis related issues. Amen. Amen. Aren't they all? Thanks, buddy. Thanks, dude. Thank you for listening to this episode and spending maybe part of your Super Bowl Sunday with me and Pablo. Quick programming note. So we're going to be back on Tuesday, but it'll be out a little bit later than normal because we are going to be in Australia, or New Zealand or somewhere where the time zone is so different, it breaks my brain.

1:01:49So things will be a little bit off, but not that much off, but a little bit off. I just can't do math, so I can't really explain it to you. But just don't freak out if you don't see it in the morning. It'll come out. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review. That helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked. Pod Save America is a Kruget Media production. Our producer is Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farrah Safari.

1:02:21Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reid Churlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Ben Hefcoat, We'll see you next time.