What Pablo Torre Is Finding Out

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2:59Okay, on with the show.

3:07Pablo, it is so nice to see you without so much makeup on. I know. Every now and again, when I go on cable TV, Pablo Torre is a guy I run into across the table. I've been wanting to have him on for a while. I just have these like oil blotting wipes because I get shiny and that's all I will confess to you. That's all I got today. Oh, OK. OK. That's how we're doing. Yeah, I know. I'm all natural when I'm on TV, too.

3:41Pablo talks sports on his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out. He investigates everything from football coach Bill Belichick's very controversial girlfriend to how private equity is warping team ownership. Why sports? I lead with sports because I have made peace over time with the fact that as much as it is the toy department that is the realm of silliness and childlike things, we are a nation full of adult children. I've come to think of Pablo as someone who can put a candy coating on a bitter pill of American life. The fact that money seems to be tainting everything. Have you always seen sports as like a business reporter or were you a fan first?

4:25I was a fan first. And by virtue, though, of me being a fan of the New York Yankees, you do realize how fun it is to flex your wealth. How fun it is to follow the money when you have all the money. Like the Yankees are. You sound like a guilty Yankees fan. I'm a Catholic Yankees fan. I was an altar server growing up. The priest at my parish was literally the team chaplain of the New York Yankees. What? And so these are not metaphors, Mary. It's just my life, says Pablo. This is my childhood, weighted by what it means to be guilty. Thing is, while rich people seem to be getting away with so much right now, in the White House, most notoriously.

5:10The rich folks running the world of sports, they are paying attention to Pablo. I don't know if I'd say they are running scared, but his reporting has led some folks to feel the sting of accountability just a bit. Yeah, I mean, I wanted to have you on because I feel like you are laser focused on this idea of sports being entwined with money in this way that's very hard to pull apart. Also, sports is kind of like you've talked about it a little bit as a scammer's paradise because you just have all these like plays going on with money behind the scenes. And here's the thing, though, like a lot of people say that, but you've actually forced a kind of reckoning about it.

5:52You did this reporting about the L.A. Clippers and the outrageous lengths that they went to in order to skirt a salary cap for one of their players. And it resulted in actual punishment for the team. and I'm thinking of you in this moment because I feel like so many people are hungry for accountability in other places and I want you to tell me the secret. Oh, wow. We're going to get deep, Pablo. Look, the secret is not so secret. It's I'm going to bring you a plate full of broccoli but across it is so much cheese.

6:35So can Pablo and I find a way to serve up his secret sauce, his cheesy sauce, to bad actors in Washington? Today on the show, I try to get him to share the recipe. I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next. Stick around.

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8:56I wonder if we should start out by you just telling the Los Angeles Clippers story from the beginning, because my listeners are going to be politics sickos. They may not know anything about basketball. And I want you to just like, where would you even start the story? Because this story is so huge at this point. You won the Pulitzer Prize for it. There has been a big investigation by the NBA with like real, real accountability. but like at the beginning, what was this story to you? Yeah, it was a tip. The story was a tip that you should look into this weird, I call it a tree planting startup. What it is really, as I translate all of this for the most general audience possible, is a carbon credits company, a sustainability fintech startup called Aspiration.

9:45This sounds good. Right? We're good guys doing good guy stuff. We're zeroing out your carbon footprint. You got a private jet, you got a sports team, you got to make sure that you make your peace with Mother Earth herself. This was during the pandemic. This was the ESG movement. The era of corporations could also be good guys. And so Aspiration is started by two Dems, two prominent Dems, two left-leaning people, both with political ambitions, who both went to Harvard. and part of the story here is that there was something weird that's what i was told there's something weird about this company and when you get a tip like that you don't really know what to do with that what i do is i google stuff and then i think to myself i don't immediately see this but it's going to go in the maybe pile inside of my brain fast forward you printed a lot of documents too.

10:40Well, so how does the maybe pile become a pile of paper in which I am committing various sins against Mother Earth herself? How many trees had to die, Pablo? So many. I am a mass murderer of trees, unfortunately. But the reason is because I got a bankruptcy filing once aspiration collapsed in a pile of financial insolvency. And I saw that one of the top creditors was this LLC by the name of KL2 Aspire LLC. And your audience may not recognize why any of that is a clue or interesting, except you should simply know that there is a player, a superstar on the Los Angeles Clippers called Kawhi Leonard with the jersey number two.

11:23And so when you got a LLC called KL2 Aspire LLC, you might then put the dots together that I did and say this seems like a vehicle dedicated to receiving something from Aspiration, the carbon credit startup by Kawhi Leonard personally. Yeah. I mean, you discovered that the Clippers owner and executives like enabled the star player Kawhi Leonard to sign a series of endorsement deals that basically boosted a salary above a salary cap. So it's like there were rules. Rules didn't apply. Yes. And the rule here is simply to translate it that the richest person in sports cannot buy whatever it is that they want the most.

12:03You can't just pay a gazillion dollars. There's a cap on what you're allowed to pay any individual athlete. And so within those rules, Steve Ballmer's problem was not what most other owners you might imagine would be concerned with, which is how are we going to come up with all of the money? It was how can I spend my almost endless amounts of it in ways that circumvent that rule? And this rule is known in the NBA as the cardinal rule because that's how important superstar athletes are this is the thing this is the entity the human being that all owners all these billionaires in this country club of 30 this is the thing they all are competing for and so steve balmer cheated by offering him a series of almost sopranos adjacent no-show jobs in which he didn't have to do anything but got paid, according to now the latest accounting, a total value of$66 million beyond what he was supposed to get by rule.

13:04Damn, I want that job. Me too. I mean, here's where the accountability piece comes in. Your reporting comes out and it arguably led directly to the NBA itself hiring a third party law firm to investigate the deals. That investigation just in September led to the Clippers owners and others being suspended from the game. Team was fined. Teams were reportedly under investigation by the Department of Justice at this point could lead to criminal charges. Do you think criminal charges are warranted here? I think that the investigation is absolutely warranted. I don't get paid enough to make the assessment that you've just asked me for.

13:45I do need to start billing people. You know, it's funny. Wachtell Lipton is one of the finest white shoe law firms in the world, they were hired by the NBA to do their, quote unquote, independent investigation. They're an outside counsel, in other words. Balmer paid for the bill. Balmer has claimed now that he's paid$50 million in legal fees on top of the$30 million in fines. I have seen, my staff has seen no percentage of those billable hours. But we are confident that when you get to the story of fake jobs and effectively things that should have been disclosed that were not, including in the reporting that we've done most recently, that isn't showing up in ways that you might imagine on SEC filings.

14:36The question becomes for the federal government, is there a conspiracy to commit securities violations? And who knew what and when did they know it? When it comes to the end goal being, we got to get the LA Clippers star player paid, but the mechanism is we're going to use a raft of companies, some of which were public at the time, to effectively hide what the actual goal of any of this was. Yeah. I mean, the NBA could have ignored the outcry, right? Like, why do you think that they weren't able to do that? I think there are two reasons. One reason is that the scope of their investigation was narrow enough to try and focus what might be the fallout.

15:29What do you mean when you say that? So they didn't say the NBA, they didn't say, we're going to look at everything. If you read their report, they actually focus entirely on a very particular window that stops in 2022. And I don't want to get so in the weeds here, but our reporting goes well beyond that. And so the question for the NBA was, what do we need to look at? And they started with a constrained window. and inside of that window they found four companies doing this same thing with the clippers it's funny it sounds like you're saying almost like they tried to limit it she's like we're just gonna look at this little thing over there and then they turned it over they're like yeah no there's a lot of bad things under here and the other thing the second reason i think they had to do this was because frankly my podcast started annoying them and we relentlessly we you know we're in part 17 as we speak today.

16:29Like it's just it's over 17 hours of reporting in podcast form. And what we made clear was that we're not going to stop investigating. And so there was this sort of check on the NBA's investigation, which was started by ours because ours wasn't ever going to end. I think that's a really good point because I do think reporters sometimes get tired and they're like, I've seen this before. Do you know what I mean? Like, oh, do we really need to do this again? So why didn't you have that moment? We certainly contemplated whether we were over, over focusing on, on this story. I mean, we do three episodes a week.

17:16This was not all of the episodes. We went weeks at times between episodes. I want to also just give a shout out to all the episodes we did that are not this. Yeah. But it was so much of our mental real estate, in part because we thought that we were onto something, in part because we thought that the public wasn't being told the truth, and in part because it's a really fun story. it's also reporting as lore do you know i mean it's like very internet native where um which is just very different than like how a newspaper would work and i think that's important i think the other thing that the nba couldn't avoid is that you're a fan like you legitimately love sports and that's where the investigation was coming from um and it's just different than And I don't know.

18:09It's like if a sports radio host, someone like you who's done like sports stuff is investigating, it's just different than like cover of The New York Times to me, I think. This was not like a weird accounting story that someone outside of sports was trying to impose upon the NBA because this was about the competitive balance of so many people's favorite thing. It was urgent in a way that lots of quote unquote serious stories about very serious real world issues, frankly, don't get paid attention to. And so it was about the game, but it was about so much beyond it. And that, again, is part of that recipe for why the NBA needed to deal with it.

18:52It was relevant to the very thing that a league, a commissioner exists to regulate. Right. You said this thing to the New York Times that I thought was so interesting and kind of gets into your approach and how it's different. When the NBA's report came out, you had this conversation with a reporter over there and you said, my show, it's called Pablo Torre finds out. Not, you know, Pablo Torre is right. And that's my whole approach, essentially. it's not meant to be 100 % perfect and therefore you must trust us. And that stood out to me because I think journalists for a long time have sought to be credible by making sure they are as buttoned up and correct as possible.

19:39It's like almost a lawyerly approach, right? Making a document or an article that's totally unimpeachable. Copying to something being a work in progress is just not something I think a traditional journalist, you know, from journalism school 20 years ago would be ready to do. Like, do you ever worry someone's going to come at you and be like, dude, got it wrong? Oh, I mean, but that that is all a function of that anxiety. I mean, part of what we did here on this story. I guess it's sports radio. People do that all the time. They come at you and say, dude's got it wrong. You got to have it in your mind.

20:15You do need to make peace with being in the dunk tank every once in a while, uh, if you work in sports, but with this story in particular, I think it's, it's a point of pride that we investigated this story for more than a year. And while the NBA's investigation was going on, which took 364 days, exactly very coincidentally, I'm sure, um, there was every opportunity for a guy with 150 plus billion dollars to fact check, correct, sue, litigate, do anything, prove us wrong. And they never did. And I don't say that again to say, look at how right I was. I say that because it was the product of two things.

21:00One was this incredible corpus of sourcing that relied on humans, former employees of these companies, all these human beings that were brave enough to speak to me, the journalist, as well as the documentation that they helped me acquire if it wasn't already in some federal filing system somewhere. But the second thing that made me want to say, hey, the show is not going to be 100 % perfect is because I exist, unfortunately, at this moment when media needs to figure out how they're going to win back the trust of the public. And the omniscience of the mainstream institutions that I grew up both subscribing to and then working for, I was at Sports Illustrated, then ESPN, have been a journalism nerd my whole life.

21:52The omniscience, the view from nowhere of we are correct. We are the truth, in fact. In fact, some may even claim that democracy dies in darkness, right? The grandiosity of what we're promising has led to, I think, a loss of faith because we are also incredibly fallible. And we are exposing ourselves to the charges of hypocrisy. If our mandate is without us, democracy dies and you can trust us, but not them. And then one of us, maybe not even the person saying those things, ends up being wrong, however inadvertently or intentionally. Have your facts, but be humble. And it's just a recognition of like, I'm trying my best.

22:44I'm going to show you the work. I'm going to bring you the pile of documents. I'm going to bring you sources on tape. I'm going to do old ass, ancient journalism stuff that you may have seen in other formats. Perhaps in this one, it'll feel new. But really what it is, is me explaining why I think I found something out. And there is some lawyering, I guess, in that. I am both the promoter and the advocate of my own reporting. But I also need to be able to say to myself as much as anybody that I'm not over promising. And so the pickle, frankly, Mary, that I'm finding myself in is that people are not coming to me because I'm the guy who's right.

23:23and now I have the opportunity to be like, well, is it time to pivot? Is it time to pivot to being the guy who's right? Because I got this big outcome and I always am reminded at how fragile all of this is and most prominently the trust the public has in us.

23:46We'll be right back. But before I go anywhere, just a note, it is pledge drive season over here. The way to join us and support all of our conversations with all kinds of folks is to go on over to slate.com slash whatnextplus and use our offer code whatnext50, that's whatnext50, for 50 % off your membership to Slate Plus. Do it now. It would mean so much.

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26:08When we started out talking, I was asking you about how do we apply the lessons you learned here about accountability to a place like politics. where I see some of the same weaknesses that you're talking about in sports when it comes to money, investment. I mean, you look at Donald Trump. The corruption is everywhere. The corruption is out in the open. And it feels almost impossible to get accountability for it. But, but, but, but, but I think what you've done actually like gives just important lessons. Like, OK, first thing. you start releasing your reporting about the Clippers you got tremendous pushback powerful pushback from like Mark Cuban yeah and you just rolled with it and it was so interesting recently like Cuban when everything came out with the NBA investigation he was like congratulations Pablo and I thought that was just such a funny moment like you had rolled with it enough and just been solid in what you were doing and just kept on keeping on.

27:13And then you were like, well, maybe Mark Cuban will do an interview with me now. Do you know what I mean? Like, it was just a kind of brush your shoulders off response. I think that's so important. I think embedded in that Frost-Nixon-ing I did of Mark Cuban on the show, he came on twice and we debated each other about my reporting. There's also a lesson in we are living at this time in which billionaires are astride everything. And I just think it's really important to both study and report on them, while also maintaining a confidence that could only be bolstered by meeting them whenever possible so that you understand that they can be just as stupid as everybody else there's there's a whole thing of i i just think it's important to i want to say this without seeming super like arrogant or condescending um i have found that someone's intelligence or their uh ability is not necessarily correlated to how much money they have maybe that is the most arrogant thing i've ever said in my life um but i just have reported enough about people with so much money and they do stuff that is cinematically tragicomic at times well you're lucky you have access you know what i mean like you can float between the worlds and have you know the chance to you know confront mark cuban because a lot of people feel like they don't have those chances but they have something to say oh yeah and that's why i think the reception I've received is is freighted with a lot more than just good story.

28:56I think it is freighted with something like the relief that. Wait a minute, these people are listening to you and they might even punish themselves because of it. And that's why I think sports as the laboratory, the laboratory of democracy that I don't think Alexis de Tocqueville envisioned when he did his grand study of our nation, but perhaps would be updated in the paperback version. It is one in which sports ends up being this connective tissue that accountability can travel along, shockingly. Yeah, I mean, I do think that sports and politics is different in that there is an expectation of fairness in sports that I think has gone away in politics.

29:49People are actively rigging things. Like you look at gerrymandering, just as one example, right? And we have an active debate about what is fair there. There aren't rules like you talk about the salary cap rule, like gentlemen have all agreed. We have the salary cap. Let us move forward. Like we aren't agreed on these things. And that worries me. that's it. I mean, really at bottom of this story is there are a lot of people who still care about the rules enough to act upon them and to get mad about it. And it turns out that cuts across the demographic spectrum. That is true of Steve Ballmer's fellow owners.

30:29It's true of the NBA commissioner. It's true of everybody that I am reading on the subreddit for the NBA. It is in my mentions. And I do think that's a reminder that if people, perhaps democratically, coalesce around the idea that this stuff is to be respected and must be defended, even if it's going to expose any number of us to legal liability, you know, myself first and foremost included, I guess. if we all agree that that stuff is worth protecting then there can be consequences and now i sound like an after-school special but you know what i think about all the time i think about the fact that with sports there is a way for regular people to access it and have an experience with it in their local community like a very low stakes way you can buy a ticket to a game you can show up and you can be like i participated in that and now i'm invested in that in a way that you can't do with politics, which I think is part of the trouble.

31:38Like when I look at, for instance, Turning Point USA, I see them creating a space for people to access something that's important to them and like be part of something. When I look at the DSA, when they're doing like book clubs and things like that and like, let's all go out and, you know, doorstop or whatever, I'm like, oh, this is a way to access. And to me, it's very sports adjacent. Oh, I think that the lesson of sports also is that why is it this age of scams, particularly in sports? It's because people realize that sports can be used to access demographics that they wouldn't otherwise be able to reach.

32:15And it's not the only passport you can use to get to those places, but it's the most popular one. And so the question then to your point becomes, what else can we use to connect with our fellow person that does not make them immediately go on their heels like they're tasting vegetables that's that have been airplaneed into their mouth by their mom you know like how can this be plausibly something you might enjoy talking about and that's that that is as big a lesson for me as anything which is make sure that you're enjoying the thing you're doing make sure that the thing you're telling your audience about is itself um both funny and hopefully i don't know meaningful um but it's it's a yes and thing it's it's not one or the other this gets flattened to like politicians need to be more on tiktok or like doing front-facing videos or something but what you're saying is actually more important which is like they actually just need to look like they're having fun like actually that's actually aoc superpower you found something you enjoyed and other people enjoyed it too.

33:25And you didn't have to perform the theater of it. You didn't have to, by the way, and I should say this is a warning label across all of this, right? We are also familiar with a politician who just wears sports like a skin suit, like there are men in black alien. And it's not convincing. And in fact, has the opposite effect. This is a failure of strategy because you don't actually care about this. But I promise everybody, as I continue my afterschool special, that there is something out there that you care about that other people do as well. And you just got to find it. One accountability lesson I learned from your reporting that I'm not sure anyone, not anyone, not sure some people will love, is that accountability for bad actors doesn't necessarily look like people behind bars.

34:10It looks like fines. It looks like civil penalties. It looks like a really long process, potentially, and that you got to have some patience with and maybe do 17 episodes about. You know what I mean? Like, it's just, it's longer than you think. It requires more of you than you think. And it may not end with someone in a stripy suit. No, but it might end in something evasive as well, which is a real sensation that someone is ashamed. and if that is what we got not prison time should that be warranted at any level of this but just the idea of someone tried to get away with something and now everybody knows that they didn't do you think steve balmer's ashamed i think he is you do according to my reporting i think that he has spent the last year of his life feeling a pressure point that nothing in his career has made him feel he is.

35:13Look, I'm not saying that the metric on shame is the back page of the New York Post, but I will point out that we here in New York City had a back page after the NBA punishment came out that simply said Los Angeles cheaters. And it was Balmer's face and it was the team's logo with cheaters instead of where Clippers should be. And this is something that is going to trail him for a while because the real rub here for Steve Ballmer is that he also loves basketball. He is a super fan. And of all the punishments beyond the$30 million that he owes to the NBA, beyond the$50 million legal bill that he's also footing, it's the fact that he is banned from his own gleaming$2 billion arena that he built to watch his team play basketball games.

36:05It's the fact that he is banned from that arena for one year that is going to, I think, haunt him more than anything else. It's that reminder that once again, you can't just buy the thing that you want the most. Yeah. I mean, I look at our political situation right now, Donald Trump in office and whether accountability might come. And I feel like part of the issue is that his corruption is so open, like he brags about it. And it denies someone like you one of your superpowers, which is uncovering something hidden, creating a world full of lore. You know what I mean? Revealing something to the rest of us, making us all lean in.

36:51Do you think that's a real problem? I think I mean, you know, there's that line from the big short that I think about a lot, which is at some point someone goes from confessing to bragging. You know, why are they confessing? No, they're bragging. That is how I feel about this administration, which embodies the age of corruption, the golden age of corruption, you might say more than anything else. And yeah, at the point at which they're not even operating like it's a secret. I think the suspense, I mean, this is now, we're now providing the opposite playbook. If you're trying to avoid being investigated by an investigative journalist whose entire theory of the case rests upon telling a story that has stakes, stakes informed by the fact that you don't want them to know it.

37:40If you simply on some level operate as if you're proud of it. Yep. That's a pretty good hack, I guess. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're saying that really for you, your answer on accountability is just embarrass the crap out of people. Just embarrass them. Find something that they did not want you to know that means something to them such that when you know it, they feel it. That would be the clinical diagnosis of why I think Steve Ballmer fought this for a year until he couldn't anymore. It might also explain why Donald Trump naturally is made for the era of shamelessness when every other institution is also, by the way, feeling something that he biologically, perhaps at this point, never will.

38:40But you're giving me faith that we can pierce the immunity. Maybe. Maybe. We just have to find the thing and keep at it. I think it's worth trying. I think it's... Let me put it this way. But I don't think we have many other choices left, Mary. I think we might as well try to do this one.

39:02Pablo, I'm so grateful for your time and your reporting. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for asking. Pablo Torre is the Pulitzer Prize winning host of Pablo Torre Finds Out. And that's our show. What Next is produced by Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharm, and Patrick Fort. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD. Milo Bell is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is our senior director of podcast operations. And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky. I'm at Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time.

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